This is an integrative writing piece from a retreat I just completed with Thomas Hübl. It’s important for me to note that this is mostly my interpretation of the ideas and concepts he used. This is my attempt at putting the pieces together.

You were once purely a potential. Brought into this world by two people who were also pure potential, once upon a time. There are several steps in going from potential to manifestation in the physical form, and the following development into a mature adult. The latter is still happening for most of us. In other words, we are still children in many areas of our life.

From my understanding, a mature human being is someone who has aligned with their nature. Meaning, they are in the flow of life, which allows a unique expression of it to arise through them. An effortless movement because it’s not they who are living life, but life who is living them. This may be an obvious statement, but why doesn’t life seem to be so effortless? It’s because, in our development process, this organic flow was often inhibited like a giant boulder in a river. So, life feels less seamless, peaceful, or whole and more like an uphill battle.

When we are born, light is funneled into a matrix, which includes millions of years of life. We inherit the innovation, transformation, and evolution of our ancestors, but also the suffering, challenges, and atrocities. As energy becomes form, spirit becomes manifest, we are imprinted with all of the achievements and challenges of humanity. However, we still arrive in this world very much so malleable by the conditions of our environment, in which we begin our attachment process.

So, the embodiment of light, or potential, is not only influenced by millions of years of life but also heavily reliant on the capacity our parents had to witness our development. Witnessing is a confirmation of existence by which life is enabled to move organically. Where this capacity was insufficient, we were driven to create a witnessing capacity within ourselves. This often looked like a coping mechanism to keep ourselves safe. Inevitably, the light was unable to settle in the body and our development process was frozen in time. These are the areas where the body is closed off to light. Where our life seems to flow less or we get into repetitive processes that we have no control over.

From what I understand, the process of living is a constant uncovering of the potential that we started as, but we are discovering it within the framework and structure of our individual experience. Therefore, the process is specified in terms of the individual circumstances that walk our life. At the same time, this contains the universal principle of embodying light. In other words, everyone’s process of embodiment is deeply personal, but the process itself is a fundamental part of life.

The Attachment Process

According to Thomas, these five elements of the attachment process are essential in the development of a mature citizen of the world.

1. Physical Safety- Did you feel protected by your parents? Did they keep you from harm?

2. Continuity of Relationship- Did the relationship with your parents feel like a continuous stream or was it on and off?

3. Recognition of Needs- As a child you sent out signals to your parents, expressing what you needed. Were these signals received at all? Or did they come back distorted? Was the response you received back accurate?

4. Orientation- Did your parents show you the world? Did they help you understand your direction, aim, and intention? Did they equip you well to navigate the world?

5. Recognition of Potential and/or Blessing- Did your parents give you their blessing? Did they see what potentials you carry and foster their expression? Did they support your creative expression?

In essence, these elements can be narrowed down to the dance between fear and curiosity. If we were held in our fear and had the freedom to explore our curiosity as a child, our future, as potential, could land in us. We could embody the light of our soul and choose to live in alignment with it.

However, there were most likely many times when this did not happen in our development process. If fear wasn’t acknowledged by our parents- maybe “you don’t have to be scared” rings a bell- we had to deal with it ourselves. We had to hold ourselves to stay true to our development, otherwise, we wouldn’t have been able to live up to cultural demands. Where we held ourselves in childhood, is still a closed-off area in our nervous system. This means, that we can’t choose to respond from our creative expression in this area of our life, but we continue to live the choice of the past until the fear is integrated.

If we gave up the right to be for the right to do, i.e. our energy became more mature than our parents at times, we were most likely not given the space for curiosity and creativity. We likely had to step out of ourselves to serve the attachment relation by carrying more than we could handle at that age.

These are just examples of how the dance of fear and curiosity may have played out. The point is that when we digest fear, we become curious and joy-filled. Once we feel safe enough, we become bored with the norm and are intrigued with what’s beyond the edge of our experience. Curiosity and joy are the “fuel of abundance” in our lives, in which flow and ease come through. The evolutionary tension between belonging and becoming helps us to acknowledge and integrate the past so that we may embody the future.

How do we Integrate the Past?

One of the underlying conditions of our trauma is that it is something that we hold on our own. So, bringing fragmentation into a relationship to co-regulate it back into harmony is a promising path. But first, “we need to become aware of where relation was not appropriate.” There was a reason we held the fear on our own and we also created an intelligent function to deal with it. That function may be outdated and cause difficulties in our lives, but we cannot simply get rid of it. Trying to get rid of it, funny enough, is a symptom of what we are trying to get rid of. The trauma is the split energy. Why would we try to get rid of something that is a part of us?

Therefore, we approach it with softness and allow curiosity to emerge. We don’t hurry to find a solution or resolve the problem. We’re looking for something deeper. An emergent power in the process that we created to keep ourselves safe under threatening circumstances. We precisely follow the movement in the body and emotions to see the intelligence of how energy became substance. A meticulous reverse engineering process that integrates the fragmented part into the one who is looking. We attend to that which is unspoken just as much as that which is spoken. Numbness has a voice, too. We listen.

And through our relatedness to someone who has trust in our natural intelligence and holds the awareness of it, we can bring what was once hidden into relationship. So we are no longer on our own. We get to honor this process as a part of our life process. It was never in the way, it was the way. We are no longer split into a past and a future that needs to be resolved, but a timeless presence that can own the intelligence of this fragmentation.

Through that, through owning the process of split-off energy, we create space for light to flow through what was stuck. The natural condition is restored as an update to the nervous system that transforms this pattern completely or upgrades it to the age of development we currently rest in.

Our future and past become one as an effortless stream of energy, so “that which creates the world becomes the source.” From here, anything is possible, but we consciously choose to live in the flow of the river, the river made uniquely for us, until it dissolves in the ocean.