Harvesting Two Years of Transformation

What I learned in a two-year program with Thomas Hübl and 400 fellow participants

A crisp November morning in Oberlethe

Claude’s Exploration #13

Lire cet article en français.

In January 2022, I met with 400 hundred participants online, for the first of 11 retreats that constitute the Timeless Wisdom Training.

Every two or three months, we would meet online for 4 days, and twice a year, we would gather for a full week in person retreat, either in North Carolina for the US based participants, or in Oberlethe in the North of Germany for us European cohort.

I had discovered Thomas and his work through MIT Theory U programs, and had felt a deep traction towards his work on collective Trauma.

The Timeless Wisdom Training, a two-year program that Thomas runs with his team, was an amazing opportunity to deep dive in inner and collective work.

Signing up had already been a huge leap of faith on my part. Thomas is not known in France, and when I decided to join I actually knew no one that had studied with him before.

First of all, I was quite scared of the Guru effect.

It’s a question I actually asked to the person interviewing me for my application process. The answer was “the field doesn’t require it.” 

What did I make of it ? I took it to mean that even if some people might project on Thomas as a Guru, that’s not how he himself shows up. I decided that I could trust myself, and that if I would feel something dodgy at some point, I would detect it in the field and leave. I am responsible for myself.

But mainly, what was very scary for me was leaving the all-rational view of the world, and choosing to open up to what I can sense but which doesn’t make sense.

I am a scientist by training, born and raised in Descartes’ country, where reason rules the world.

I would discover in this 2 year journey why it was that I was so afraid of trusting my guts and my emotions. 

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves here.

Here is my account of my key learnings and transformation during these 2 years.

January 2022 - October 2023

My cup is bigger

As the program started, we were all asked to take a picture, so we could all have a facebook of Before and After pictures at the end.

This past month, as the program was ending, I could see other participants proudly sharing their Before / After picture. 

I hated taking both pictures, and avoided looking at them.

Part of my motivation to write this article was to own up to these pictures of myself, and look at the transformation that happened in me in two years, and how it shows up.

(And yes, I know, when you see what I write in these articles, sharing a simple picture shouldn’t be that scary. But who said this is rational?)

To be honest, the first thing that strikes me is my hair!

In the two year time lapse, I have learned to use an Afro comb to raise my hair on the top of my head, instead of having it hang flat and low (thanks mainly to my daughter who has been claiming her identity with an afro haircut the like of Angela Davis)

It may seem like a detail, but it’s highly revelatory. I see how it shows that I embody more fully and seamlessly my black heritage.

I came to Thomas’ work mainly because I am mixed race from the French West Indies, and I feel collective trauma is the air we breathe there, due to the unprocessed slavery legacy. Working on reconciling my mixed heritage has been a huge topic for me throughout the two years, feeling the split in me and learning to hold all pieces together.

What the pictures show me, is how much bigger my cup is. I can hold so much more and be more present to myself and the world.

My before picture is still uncomfortable for me to look at, though. It is so representative of how I ran a big part of my life at the time : feeling overwhelmed, and  plastering a “It’s ok, I can deal with this” look on my face. This is me pretending I’m alright, even to myself, especially to myself, when really I am not.

At the time, I was barely out of burn out, having stopped running the company I had founded and was still in the middle of the procedure to get out as a corporate officer and shareholder. I was learning to shed my old identity as an innovative startup founder to make space for something new. 

To put it in a nutshell, I was disoriented. I was leaping into the unknown, trusting my gut and learning to let go of my mental representations of what I should be.

I remember this first retreat as alternating between a deep feeling of resonance and connection, and switching off when I couldn’t take it anymore, not even aware of what had triggered my need to disconnect, only that I couldn’t stay present any longer.

Then two years later, in October this year, we were asked to send a new picture during the last in person retreat.

I was very scared of taking that last picture. I waited until the last moment.

That last retreat is when we worked specifically with trans generational and collective trauma. If you read my account of it, “Working with Collective Trauma”, you might remember that I went through a very deep process, facing acute fear and shame, as I was feeling into the collective resistance to witnessing colonial and slavery trauma. 

I remember that I was waiting for a moment when I would feel less overwhelmed to take the picture.

That moment never came, or more accurately, it only came way after the deadline for sending the picture. So when time went off, I asked a fellow participant to take the pic for me, not feeling at my best.

When I see the picture, I am amazed. What I see in it now, is how much more I can stay present in the face of what feels overwhelming. 

I can see light in my eyes that wasn’t there before, albeit dimmed by the charge I was holding in that moment.

This is the major shift : how my capacity to be with life has increased.

That Love is all there is,
Is all we know of Love;
It is enough, the freight should be
Proportioned to the groove.

Emily Dickinson

i am learning to trust that my capacity can be proportioned to what life brings on my path.

Dawn in Oberlethe

I don’t feel safe feeling safe

This widening of my capacity to welcome what life presents me with has been a slow and continuous process, like a river carves its bed through time.

There were highlights, moments where I harvested deep insights on my inner processes, as a first step to regain more freedom from them.

One of these insights was that I don’t feel safe feeling safe.

I remember clearly when it dawned on me. 

I was in a session with one of the extremely skilled and experienced therapists that form the support team, working on something which was overwhelming me at the time. 

I suddenly realized that the moment I feel safe, I tense up again immediately. 

Because feeling safe means lowering one’s guard. And lowering one’s guard means danger can happen again.

It helped me make sense of why I could never satisfactorily answer the question : “what resources you?”

It’s no wonder I could never come up with ideas of activities that would recharge my batteries in a very effective manner. A part of my energy is always used to sustain this hyper vigilance.

Some months later, I sat down with that same therapist to ground after another deep process. I reached a point when I started to feel calmer. And I realized that in the past, I would have stopped there, thinking I was grounded enough. 

But now I could see I had only reached what would be a “normal” level of stress for me previously. I could share that realization with the therapist, and I could choose not to stop there, and work for a few more moments towards deeper relaxation.

The game changer has been, and still is, having compassion towards myself.

When I am triggered, my usual and mostly unconscious reaction is to judge myself.

Whenever I start feeling shame now, I try and stop to wonder if I could be more compassionate towards myself. Blaming myself is a survival strategy that works very well to avoid getting into deeper (and more painful) contact with a situation.

When I allow myself to accept that there is a good reason for my behavior instead of judging myself for reacting, then I can look deeper into what is happening.

I can start making sense of it, and eventually get unstuck further down the path.

Spring flowers in Oberlethe’s garden

Connection

One hugely transformative part of the program has been my experience of deep connection.

I have never had in my life so many people telling me so often that they love me.

All this time, we practiced listening to each other, fully, without judgment. Listening to the other, and being listened, makes it possible to ‘see’ the other one in her full beauty, and in my turn to feel seen, deeply.

I had experienced this feeling of connection and belonging to a group in the past, in seminars with other company leaders, and in my own company as we did deep collective work. 

These experiences are exactly what drew me to this work with Thomas in the first place.

Yet the power of the feeling of connection I experienced during TWT reached another level of unknown depth. Vertical depth, through a more profound connection to myself, and horizontal depth, as we experienced it in such a large body of people. 

Experiencing this, knowing in my bones it is possible, is deeply transformative.

And it also brought me closer to my own limitations in that direction. 

Love hurts (me). Not in the expected sense, that if you love, you will be hurt at some point.

I came to see how a part of me doesn’t trust that it’s possible to be fully loved. It’s hard for me to believe it can be true, that I can rely on it. I experienced that to some degree, taking the risk to let love in is almost physically painful for me.

Opening myself up, time after time, feeling fully seen by the people with me, seeing them fully in return, I have been growing my capacity everyday a little more.

I used to feel jealous of people that open up to receiving love so easily, so trustfully.

I have come to accept that this is my way, this is my path, and that there is a reason for it.

Snowed pond, Oberlethe

A playground for relational awareness

As I experienced connection at a deep level, I also got more conscious of what is playing for me in relationships, like clouds between me and the sun. 

When I arrived in this group I met exceptional people.

People from all around the world, who committed to this deep inner and outer exploration for 2 whole years.

Some have become dear friends.

Some were my biggest triggers.

The first in person retreat was a full week dedicated to exploring our attachments, and shedding light on our relational patterns from the family environment we grew up in.

I revisited my experience as a child, going through emotions that I hadn’t fully processed at the time. And I started to see how my reactions as an adult were often repetitions of strategies I had learned as a kid to stay in relation and survive, even though they were no longer required.

I realized that relationships are often a mere mirror for my projections. My reactions, as for most of us, have usually more to do with what I expect from the other person based on my unconscious representation from past experience, than with the reality of what is happening between us and the other person’s experience. 

The whole week felt like having been put inside a washing machine with 200 people.

The fact that we were all committed to this deep work with good intentions did not prevent relational tensions to manifest at some point with some.

I decided to play it fully; like a game, and let myself enter into these relationships and explore each as a learning and growth opportunity. 

My fellow participants were my best teachers.

Each time there seemed to be a bump on the road, instead of discarding small symptoms of tension as I would normally have, I chose to turn the magnifying lens of my attention to the process. And many times, it led to a deeper awareness of old patterns playing, and more and more freedom down the road for myself and in relation.

I learned to see more and more clearly what was my part in a situation, and what was the other person’s, or the collective’s.

I find I am getting better and better at using this awareness process to each new or repetitive situation I find myself in in the “real” world. When I am triggered by something, I simply stay still and own up the energy and emotions that arise in me, sorting out past patterns from rightful responses to the present moment. 

It is leading me to let go of what does not depend on me, especially the other person's level of awareness and readiness to face a situation, that part being still quite challenging for me.

I wrote a couple of articles on some of my deep relational processes that you can read here (No one Wants to be a Perpetrator)  and here (Restoration - a Friendship Lost and Found).

Sunset in the trees, Oberlethe

Feeling the layers

During the first year we mainly processed individual trauma. Things that happened to me and shaped my way of relating to the world.

As time went by, and as our capacity and awareness of our inner processes grew, we included trans generational and ancestral work.

This is when I started to feel in me how things that I thought had been individual responses were actually transmitted through family and ancestral survival strategies, themselves embedded into larger collective patterns.

Here is how I came to realize that. On one of the last online retreats of the second year, we started working on restoration and transgression ownership.

It makes sense that we can only do collective trauma work if we can also own up to our own ethical transgressions.

Resolution only becomes possible when we collectively can hold the full story, including both polarities from victim and perpetrator. And including the perpetrator's story is only possible is I can see where I myself have perpetrated an ethical transgression, and own up to consequences of my actions.

That concept in itself would require a full article at least. As a starter, you can read my exploration of restoration in my article Restoration - a Friendship Lost and Found.

During the retreat, people could raise their hand and share their awareness of having perpetrated transgressions.

One that resonated deeply for me was a participant* sharing how she could see she had deeply hurt one of her sisters, teasing her that she “didn’t belong”, and the rupture in relationship it had caused. 

*Sharings are confidential. I was granted permission by her to refer to it here.

Working with Thomas, she could bring more awareness on how it was actually a family mechanism that she had learned from her parents and extended family. In a way, for herself to belong, she had had to replicate the excluding behavior towards another.

This participant was Afro American. And what came to me was that this pattern was not in her family by chance. That they “don”t belong”, is what a white America has been telling black people in words and in actions for centuries.

I saw in it an internalized collective pattern, and I could start discerning my own similar patterns, feeling in me the layers of individual, trans generational and collective reactions interplaying.

You can read here my account of my own personal exploration of these layers : “Working with Collective”.

I am grateful for what stays hidden

In the silence of my heart, I hear thy name
In the beauty of the world, I see your face.

I am grateful for what I see,
And I am grateful for what stays hidden.

For that is thy will,
And this is why I’m here.

Thomas Hübl

I wrote here a handful of my learnings that I tried to put into words. Many more are still unfolding in me, and I am curious what will grow from it with time.

I am staying with these words that Thomas often shared during our journey, like a compass to this work.

It’s easy for me to be grateful for what I see. I love seeing things, getting a deep insight, making sense of things, knowing where to go. I love clarity.

That’s exactly what drives me to write these articles, to turn my experience into a meaningful story.

But many times, what I experience is confusion. Not knowing. Feeling lost.

I have come to accept that confusion is part of the process. It is the process.

“All I know is that I know nothing”, as Socrate reportedly said.

Being grateful for what I can see, and grateful for what I don’t see (yet).

One of my biggest questions, though, that is staying with me at the end of this journey, is “What do I do with things I see, but that are hidden for others ?”

I am guessing that you will hear from that one in articles still to be written.

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