Healing A Fragment Of The Holocaust

On Holocaust Memorial Day in Israel, Danny Cohen shares a personal story of how collective processes can start to touch even the deepest wounds.

Apr 18, 2023

Danny Cohen. Credit: Amir Ganun, courtesy of Or HaLev.

Resonant World #25

As soon as I met Danny Cohen, I sensed he had something unique to offer.

We’re fellow students in Thomas Hübl’s Timeless Wisdom Training, an intensive two-year immersion in healing individual, ancestral and collective trauma.

During three retreats together in Germany, I’ve learned to appreciate the depth of Danny’s sensitivity and insight, and the great skill and care with which he handles communication on the most difficult topics.

So when he dropped the below essay into a Whatsapp group this morning (Resonant World #13), I opened it immediately.

I hadn’t been planning to write Resonant World today. But there was something so powerful in the energy behind Danny’s words, and the timing of his message — it’s Holocaust Memorial Day, or Yom HaShoah, in Israel — that I asked Danny if I could repost his reflection below.

“Radical Honesty”

The timing is apt for another reason: I’ve since learned that tonight Danny is launching a new course in the art of Nonviolent Communication, or NVC, running from April to June.

Danny writes:

“NVC is a simple and powerful tool, rooted in radical honesty and a deep quality of empathy, which aims to connect human beings to their common humanity. It provides clear and accessible tools for connecting with ourselves and relating to each other with compassion, paving the way for generative dialogue and integrative solutions that transcend the familiar options of win, lose, and compromise. It teaches us to connect to the true and loveable essence behind another’s message (no matter how it is expressed), and to express ourselves honestly, beyond our judgments of ourselves or others.”

Details on the course here. (For Danny’s full bio, see below). And here is an episode of the the Denizen podcast where Danny discusses Nonviolent Communication as a path of liberation from power-over and patriarchal conditioning.

A personal experience healing German-Jewish relations in the shadow of the Holocaust.

By Daniel Yoel Cohen

For Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day), I’d like to share a personal experience of the Holocaust.

A personal experience?

After all, I was born in 1986 and the Holocaust ended in 1945, didn’t it?

No.

What do I mean?

Most of us are used to thinking of time in a linear way. We think of a “timeline” where the past stretches behind us, and the future lies ahead. But there are other understandings of time. Indeed, there is no Jewish word for history, only for memory — the past as it lives in the present.

Remembrance can also be understood as re-membering: putting back together, or integrating, what has become fragmented.

For the past few years I’ve been engaged with the Pocket Project, a nonprofit dedicated to the healing of individual, ancestral and collective trauma, co-founded by contemporary mystic Thomas Hübl, whose work I am also actively following.

I appreciate the way Thomas has deepened my understanding of trauma by offering a new perspective on time: What we call “past” is that which has not yet been fully integrated; while “future” is our higher potential. Unintegrated past will repeat itself, almost as if what you’re watching in the rearview mirror flips around and becomes the road you’re driving down.

In that sense, the year 1944 is not yet part of the past. “Nineteen-forty-four,” Thomas explains, is an energetic frequency whose ripple effects can be discerned in people and cultural fields to this day. It’s just like when you have an upsetting conversation, or an accident, and though the event seems to have finished, it lives on in you until there is full resolution, deactivation, and integration. The same dynamics occur on a larger scale with massive collective traumas.

Energetic Wave

In 2018, I was sitting in a room in Israel with more than 120 people from 39 countries participating in a workshop facilitated by Thomas Hübl and his team. When we were asked how many of us feel personally impacted by the Holocaust, some 80 percent of us raised our hands. The Holocaust lives in our genes epigenetically (FKBP5) and affects us in many, largely unconscious ways — such as by shaping how safe one feels in the world.

In the collective trauma integration work, we explore how we can develop the competencies and coherence on both the individual and group levels needed to allow that residual traumatic material to be processed and integrated, freeing up energy for life, creativity, and the restoration of what I would call “aligned relationality” — for instance between Germans and Jews.

As Thomas explains so lucidly in his book Healing Collective Trauma, as the degree of coherence within a group increases, the unintegrated “past” will start to show up in the present — perhaps as images, memories, feelings, sensations, and an energetic wave. Absent an adequate container, such material is otherwise unconsciously repressed — which causes distortions in our ways of thinking, behaving and relating that become so common that they crystallize as culture, and define what we consider “normal” ways of living and interacting.

Clues that such material is exerting this hidden influence can, for example, include any experience of scarcity or “not enoughness” — particularly around food, time, space, attention, care, belonging and so on. It can also show up in many of our habitual ways of communicating, when we experience a lack of congruence between our body, emotions, thoughts, and words. And we experience the influence of this undigested traumatic material in our disconnection from, cultural disregard for, and compartmentalization of Spirit — among many other symptoms.

Voice of the Collective

So here’s how my personal experience unfolded in that group and how the voice of the collective came through me. We were exploring something in triads (Ed: groups of three) and I found myself sitting with an American Jewish woman and a German woman. We were taking turns sharing and reflecting and the German woman shared that prior to our workshop, she had been on a tour in the West Bank and witnessed what was happening at a checkpoint. She shared how seeing this interaction, she recognized (as I recall it):

“That was what we did to you.”

I noticed quite a strong reaction inside myself hearing those words. While I take serious issue with the way Palestinians are treated at checkpoints, it was a serious distortion in my mind to equate checkpoints with the genocidal and unilateral Holocaust of the Jews by Nazi Germany. I watched as a powerful voice arose in my consciousness saying:

"You killed us!”

I had a very clear and strong impulse that this voice needed to be heard but didn’t sense that that was the space where it could be received. Nor did I feel that I could simply go to the lunch break and leave it unattended.

Fortunately, I found two members of the team of assistants supporting the workshop (people with a great degree of skill and personal capacity) who sat with me to continue the process. Both were German men.

In this kind of process work, we don’t sit and analyze or reflect in a disconnected way. We attune to what is presenting and, especially, what is the intelligence that is also showing up — the organic and emergent resources that can integrate the trauma.

Both Thomas and Steven Hoskinson (Ed: the founder of Organic Intelligence) have taught me well to recognize the intelligence of how living systems respond. As Steve says:

"Trauma is unintegrated resource.”

You'll see shortly why this is so important.

Pure Innocence

Our job, therefore, is to support the conditions that generate greater coherence, and cultivate the precision in our relating that allow life to unfold, to heal and integrate — and not just to repeat the past. As Thomas often says:

“Precision is love.”

So I sat down with the two German men and I shared what had just happened in the triad, and the voice that had arose inside me saying: “You killed us.”

The field was then open, each of us there as an individual, and also as a channel for the collective field we each represented. As the two men stayed present, the next voice arose in me, a pure innocence saying:

“Why did you hurt us?”

Each man responded differently and unhurriedly, allowing the weight and rawness of what I had shared its appropriate regard.

One, meeting the innocence with earnestness, internal clarity, and openness of presence, simply acknowledged the truth:

“Yes, we did that.”

He acknowledged the depth of that violation, and betrayal of safety and “right relation,” by saying that there was no reason, nothing that could justify it.

This was already a modicum of healing: an acknowledgment from the line of the perpetrators that there was no good reason, no justification. It had been offered as the man stayed open and present to the hurt and wound that was unfolding before him, allowing himself to be touched, and for us to be in touch as human beings.

“Enemy” Image

The second man took the question of “Why?” quite seriously and reflected the following (as I recall it). He said that he sees us Jews as having a mission of bringing God into the world. He noted also that when he sees Jews acting out of line with that, it angers him, and also that there can be jealousy (as I understood it, stemming from a desire to also be a part of that sacred work. [NB I think all people can be a part of that]).

Then all three of us brought very patient and precise attention to what happened. He noted the great vulnerability he felt, and connected to the anger that came up to take him out of that vulnerability, since it was too much to stay with it.

I’ve learned that anger arises as a defensive, self-protective mechanism — but that the way people are socialized to make themselves “right” and others “wrong” can easily create an “enemy” image, and establish a conviction that the “enemy” is “bad” and therefore deserving of violent punishment.

The three of us held a potent space as he tracked what was unfolding, and connected to that Nazi German energy. He felt vulnerability rising from up from his belly into a violent energy of:

“I could kill you.”

There was no physical danger in the moment. The strength and coherence of the individual and group container allowed this energy to arise without the man becoming identified and controlled by it.

Organic Intelligence

This is where the attention to the organic intelligence came in.

We knew that this was a self-protective energy, so instead of focusing on the story or belief, we held space for the man to notice the sense of strength and protection his anger evoked on the energetic and somatic level.

Bringing attention to these layers potentiated the energy, and allowed his system to integrate it more fully. He gradually shifted out of a defensive response to a perceived threat, and the accompanying violent posture, and established a fuller and more heart-centered connection to himself, and us.

To describe what happened through the lens of Stephen Porges’ polyvagal theory, he had shifted from the “fight” state caused by the arousal of his sympathetic nervous system, to the “social engagement” mode of his ventral vagal nervous system.

Again, without rushing this process, he gradually found his way back into the heart and, very organically and in an emergent, spontaneous and uncontrived way, then shared:

“I want you to live.”

I could feel how that energetic transmission — not simply the words — shifted something in my energy, in my sense of safety, and my ability as a Jew to have a space.

He continued:

“And to live well.”

And then he continued to integrate by saying:

“And I respect you.”

This elicited a whole new level of energetic liberation and unfolding in and through me, like finally my field and being could come out of hiding and really take and fill space unabashedly.

We sat the three of us with the sense that we were coming toward completion of that arc.

Restoration

I had the sense that the voice and energy I had spoken had been received and that the process had been a significant restoration.

As Thomas cautions, we were not overly quick to rush into a new relation, taking time for the process to complete and integrate, and allowing the new relationality to emerge from that.

This was, for me, an important remembering of a piece of the Holocaust, and of the possibility of deep healing and restoration through the very precise honoring of Life and relational process.

I want to point out how crucial it is that this couldn’t have happened through vilifying my German companion — making him bad, wrong, evil, or inhuman for his feelings, and his process. That would have alienated him further from his love and tenderness.

If we can continue to hold that perspective AND develop the competencies to integrate violent tendencies, and hearken to the voices that beckon for re-membrance, then I believe we can do the healing that’s so deeply necessary, and create a world that chooses Life.

"Healing occurs only when we look at the other face-to-face.” — The Zohar.

More About Danny

“Danny brings a rare integration of contemplative spiritual practice and wisdom traditions with trauma-informed therapeutics and practical tools for cultivating authentic human connection, potentiating deep healing, and catalyzing cultural evolution. His unique style opens people to radical change and transformation in everyday life and an embodied sense of new possibilities of being alive together. His work is heavily influenced by Marshall Rosenberg, the founder of NVC, by Yoram Mosenzon, his primary NVC teacher, and by contemporary mystic, Thomas Hübl. Danny also has extensive psychotherapeutic training from both the Israel Hakomi Institute and Organic Intelligence™. A graduate of The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, Danny was the founding director of Or HaLev Center for Jewish Spirituality and Meditation and a Guiding Teacher at Mindful Schools from 2016 to 2019. He has guided thousands of people around the world in both mindfulness practices and conscious communication skills. He currently lives in Israel and is a member of the Evolve Foundation core faculty.”

I write Resonant World in my spare time from my editing role at DeSmog, a nonprofit news service focused on investigating the vested interests blocking action on climate change. Support from readers is a huge boost — and that includes reading, sharing, or commenting in response to my posts. Any variety of coffee gratefully accepted. Thank you.

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