Resonant World #90
Having spent last week at a retreat with Thomas Hübl and team in the Netherlands, deepening my immersion in the psychological and mystical principles of trauma integration, I felt inspired to offer some reflections on the quality of “collective intelligence” that so often arises in the work.
I share this exploration both to deepen my own understanding, and invite responses from anyone who’d like to share their own experience of collective intelligence, or related aspects of collective healing work.
There is a 10-minute audio version available above, and a partial transcript here:
“In my understanding, [collective intelligence] is a quality that arises spontaneously when we gather in intentional ways, adopt certain relational practices that help us connect at a deeper level and allow ourselves to establish a sense of safety, a sense of relationship, in the group that naturally allows suppressed material in our own psyche and the collective unconscious to begin to rise to the surface.
“Now this can sometimes be a rather rocky process and one of the signs, or indicators, that I take to show collective intelligence at work is when — often out of a seeming clear blue sky — I’m involved in a conversation or a sharing, speaking myself or witnessing somebody else, that suddenly triggers a very strong response in me.
“And that can be waves of emotion — subtle, but also powerful feelings arising, often accompanied by tears, and sometimes real full-body sobs, as something starts to literally physically unwind from deep within my system.
“And what I’ve noticed is that this process — although it might seem like it’s happening almost at random — has a quality of orchestration, has a quality of teleology. Almost as if there’s an organizing principle that is very carefully helping me to connect with pockets of unresolved emotion that I’m carrying in my system from my own life, and from the uncried tears of my ancestors, in several cases, that are ready now — when conditions of sufficient safety are established — to be fully felt, and in the feeling, unfrozen, and allowed to release and let go.
“And this process never fails to surprise — and although it can be quite challenging in the moment to ride these waves — it also delights.
“Because this is what healing really feels like.
“It’s contacting trauma fragments, as I like to call them — pieces of the past that have been split off, pushed down into the unconscious, and are creating a kind of a glitch in the system.
“It’s as if the past is reaching forward into the present, placing filters around my perception, or scripting my reactions in ways that are beyond my conscious control.
“But when I trace these reactions back to their roots, touch into these feelings that never had room and space to be experienced at the moment the trauma occurred, I can unwind the tension, I can feel my whole system recalibrating.
“And the reason that there’s a collective dimension in all this, is that when we gather in a group and adopt certain protocols, and follow the flow of the meeting, or the gathering, follow the prompts to explore whether it’s ancestral or individual or collective material, what I’m seeing in other people is reflected in me, and vice-versa.
“And before long, there’s an incredibly intricate set of data flows establishing themselves within the group, with an incredible level of refinement.
“So simultaneously, we can all be learning from each other, very different lessons.
“We can have very different material touched.
“We can be working with very diverse histories.
“And yet, there are certain signatures — there’s like a certain language, or an operating system — that we’re starting to connect with, that titrates what is ready to emerge, what our system is ready to release, with incredible precision.
“And that is something that is, I believe, much harder to do on your own — probably impossible.
“And although certain forms of one-on-one therapy can be incredibly helpful, there is something about the way this process unfolds in a large group that exponentially accelerates the progress.
“And I think Thomas Hübl sometimes uses the analogy of parallel processors in a computer speeding up operations that processors simply operating by their own would take far longer to complete.
“So there’s an element in which we are all able to support one another to resolve, or at least connect with, layers of trauma that might otherwise remain forever out of our conscious awareness.
“And the beautiful part of that, is that as the process unfolds over days, or a week, by the end of it we’re sensing a level of relationality, a level of attunement, that feels to me like our birthright.
“It feels to me like this is how humans are supposed to connect, and relate to one another, with this level of presence and care, that our traumatized cultures have simply denied us.
“And re-establishing that sense of the “We-space”, the sense that I’m part of a group, and yet also an individual, has another revelation attached to it, which is that far from flattening our individual identities, far from homogenizing us, being in a group with that level of coherence, in my experience, makes me feel more like myself.
“It makes me feel both more uniquely me, and more able to express my uniqueness, but also more connected to the people that I’m with, so there’s a beautiful gift in that — that by coming into relationship with this collective intelligence, we actually become more of who we really are.
“There’s maybe a few paradoxes remaining in some of what I’ve said, and there’s plenty more that could be added, but I'll rest it there.
“And I’d love to hear if any of that is resonant with anyone else’s experience, or if anyone else would like to articulate this concept of ‘collective intelligence’ in their own words, and in their own way and together we can help ground this beautiful phenomenon more deeply.
“Thank you for listening.”
Note from the Editor: A labour of love, Resonant World is written in the gaps between work I get paid to do, notably editing investigations at nonprofit climate news service DeSmog. It’s a huge boost when people become paid subscribers, and support of any amount affirms that my mission to support the global community of practitioners engaged in supporting people to integrate individual, inter-generational and collective trauma has value. Thank you!
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