A Narrative of Love conversation hosted by Dr Scherto Gill
▶ Watch this conversation on YouTube
Thomas Hüebl is a renowned teacher, author and international facilitator whose lifelong work integrates the core insights of the great wisdom traditions and mysticism with the discoveries of modern science. For nearly two decades he has taught and facilitated collective healing programmes worldwide, and is the author of Healing Collective Trauma: A Process for Integrating Our Intergenerational and Cultural Wounds.
The conversation opens with the question of how Hüebl found his way through the mystical traditions — Daoism, Kabbalah, Tibetan Buddhism — and his answer centres on inner resonance rather than intellectual choice. At the core of each tradition, beneath its cultural clothing, he found the same essential wisdom. His four-year meditation retreat deepened this sense of inner guidance, and it was out of that practice that his distinctive understanding of love began to emerge.
On love: specificity and presence
For Hüebl, love comes with a few essential ingredients: space, feeling and care. To love someone is first to make space for them inside oneself — not just to perceive them as an object out there, but to let oneself be genuinely informed and shaped by them. This relational quality he calls resonance, and he offers a striking formulation: specificity is love. The most universal force in the universe — what the mystical traditions understand as the source of all being — is always expressed in the most specific, most particular, most present encounter. Love that is not specific is not yet fully love.
He draws on the scene at Mount Sinai in the Hebrew Bible, where God speaks to all Israel and yet each person reports that the divine voice spoke to them personally. The universal and the specific are not two. And care — genuine attention to the particular other — is the relational expression of this truth in everyday life.
On collective trauma: the normalisation of numbness
The deeper movement of the conversation turns to collective trauma — the hidden inheritance that shapes human societies without being recognised. Hüebl grew up in post-war Vienna, surrounded by the aftermath of World War Two, and as a child sensed a pervasive numbness in the social fabric without knowing what it was. Nobody handed out a manual for a traumatised world. He simply experienced it as how things were.
This normalisation, he argues, is one of trauma’s most dangerous features. Trauma freezes. It doesn’t adapt or develop. And because we cannot see what we are absent from — because absence, by definition, doesn’t arise in consciousness — we mistake the symptoms of collective trauma for the normal structures of life. Our collective fog of indifference, our inability to respond adequately to racism, to climate change, to the suffering of others — these are not moral failings in the ordinary sense. They are the signature of unintegrated history operating through us.
The nervous system, Hüebl insists, is not merely personal. It carries ancestral and collective dimensions: the personal, ancestral and collective are an interdependent system, not separate entities. When working with groups in Germany, he began to witness how group coherence — mutual listening, relational safety, enough trust — induces a kind of collective detox: stored trauma information begins to surface and can, with care, be integrated. Presence, relation and healing are profoundly connected.
On responsibility without guilt
Scherto raises the question of transatlantic slavery and its enduring after-effects, and Hüebl offers a distinction that clarifies without minimising: you are not responsible for the crimes of your grandparents, but you are responsible for the after-effects you create by turning away from them. Responsibility means the ability to respond — and if you remain unconscious of how ancestral trauma operates through you, you become its unwitting conduit, re-enacting its patterns through indifference, through participation in oppressive systems you cannot even see. The structural violence is not only out there. It is also internally wired in every citizen of a society shaped by that history.
This is not a counsel of guilt, but of inquiry: the painful, necessary recognition that none of us stands cleanly outside the systems we have inherited.
On time, healing and the future
The conversation closes on one of Hüebl’s most subtle ideas: retro-causality, or the possibility that healing in the present reaches back and touches the past. He distinguishes between integrated history — experience that has been processed and woven into the living fabric of a person or culture — and split history: trauma that has not yet been integrated, information stored in the collective nervous system but inaccessible, dissociated, turned off.
When healing work integrates a split past, something shifts not only in the present but retroactively. I am the future of my grandparents, he says. How my healing work today affects the moment of their trauma is a question worth holding open.
He closes with the vision that animates his work: that we cannot build a new world as old versions of ourselves. The update of humanity is not optional — it is what the complexity of our global challenges requires. And it begins with the capacity to be present: to let the past find a home in the now, and to let the future be born from the quality of attention we bring to this moment.
This is one of eleven conversations in the A Narrative of Love series, hosted by Dr Scherto Gill in preparation for the 5th Spirit of Humanity Forum, June 2021. The series was sponsored by the Pureland Foundation and the Guerrand-Hermès Foundation for Peace (GHFP).
