Speaker 1: It's a radical act of citizen ing to change our story,
Speaker 1: to change the narrative that we're living within and our
Speaker 1: relationship to ourselves and others in the world of like.
Speaker 1: I won't participate in the authorizing, the dehumanizing, the fighting,
Speaker 1: the oppression.
Speaker 2: I won't.
Speaker 1: I'm not going to do that to me. I'm not
Speaker 1: going to do that to you. I am going to
Speaker 1: stand for love. I will stand for love, and in
Speaker 1: that being, this change my world.
Speaker 2: Welcome to How to Citizen with Baratunde, a podcast that
Speaker 2: reimagined citizen as a verb, not a legal status. This
Speaker 2: season is all about how we practice democracy, what can
Speaker 2: we get rid of, what can we invent, and how
Speaker 2: do we change the culture of democracy itself. We're leaving
Speaker 2: the theoretical clouds and hitting the ground with inspiring examples
Speaker 2: of people and institutions that are showing us new ways
Speaker 2: to govern ourselves. I can't believe this is the final
Speaker 2: episode of our fourth season of How to Citizen. I'm
Speaker 2: so glad you're here now. If you've been with us
Speaker 2: from the start, thank you, and I hope we've given
Speaker 2: you new perspectives, solutions and practices to get inspired by
Speaker 2: and to try. If you're new to the show, thank
Speaker 2: you as well. It is never too late to start citizen.
Speaker 2: We kicked off this season with Adrian Marie Brown. It
Speaker 2: was a beautiful, expansive conversation about the importance of getting
Speaker 2: into right relationship with each other and seeing democracy is
Speaker 2: something we create at the micro level at home and
Speaker 2: in our communities, not just at the macro level via
Speaker 2: the ballot box. Adrian shared this idea that I'm still
Speaker 2: playing with in my mind. The idea that the external
Speaker 2: systems were fighting so hard against also exists inside of us.
Speaker 2: The inequality, racism, extreme capitalism, all the isms don't just
Speaker 2: exist out there, they take root in here. So as
Speaker 2: much as we need to citizen externally to make our
Speaker 2: communities and our country better by participating, investing in relationships,
Speaker 2: understanding power, and valuing the collective, we also need to
Speaker 2: citizen internally. And that brings me to our second pillar,
Speaker 2: invest in relationships. We have mostly focused on using that
Speaker 2: as a way to connect to the people around us
Speaker 2: and to the planet, but the full line is invest
Speaker 2: in relationships with yourself, with others, and with the planet.
Speaker 2: And it's so important that we take that first piece
Speaker 2: that relationship with ourselves as equal to the relationship with
Speaker 2: others in the planet. Today, doctor Sam Raider is helping
Speaker 2: us go deeper so that we can understand what it
Speaker 2: takes to create a culture within ourselves that supports creating
Speaker 2: a culture of democracy for all of us. I was
Speaker 2: introduced to Sam through my wife Elizabeth, who you should
Speaker 2: know by now is executive producer of this show. And
Speaker 2: if I'm being honest, when I first met Sam, I
Speaker 2: thought she was a bit out there. She was always
Speaker 2: talking about alternative approaches to healing and what we could
Speaker 2: learn from quantum physics, and what we could learn from
Speaker 2: psychedelics and how to undo our internal wirings from childhood
Speaker 2: and blah blah blah. It was a lot okay, But
Speaker 2: over time, Sam and the way she sees the world,
Speaker 2: they started to click for me. In her eighteen years
Speaker 2: of practicing psychology, Sam couldn't ignore these patterns she saw
Speaker 2: her clients living through and realized she needed to step
Speaker 2: outside of that traditional practice and try something new. So
Speaker 2: she developed an approach called source Code, which she says
Speaker 2: focuses on the speed theirritual dimension of healing. Sam believes
Speaker 2: that our early childhood experiences write a code in our
Speaker 2: unconscious which then determines the way our story unfolds. And
Speaker 2: she's committed to helping people rewrite their code. And I
Speaker 2: want to be clear, this isn't talk therapy, and I'm
Speaker 2: not going to ask you to lay back on your couch,
Speaker 2: but it is deeply vulnerable. What Sam asks people to
Speaker 2: do is get honest about the role we cast for
Speaker 2: ourselves in our lives and the responses we think we're
Speaker 2: hardwired to have. If you have any exposure to the
Speaker 2: modern world of wellness or healing or Instagram spirituality, then
Speaker 2: you know it can feel completely divorced from and even
Speaker 2: in denial of reality. I have found that Sam has
Speaker 2: a foot in both worlds, the internal and external. She
Speaker 2: protests signed petitions, her money where her mouth is. I
Speaker 2: literally depend on her for my LA voting guide every
Speaker 2: time we have to vote, which feels like every other month.
Speaker 2: Sam is so dedicated to this inner work because she
Speaker 2: believes that our personal healing is what's going to help
Speaker 2: us create collective healing. After the break, Doctor Sam Raider
Speaker 2: on the source code running our lives and how turning
Speaker 2: inward can help us create a culture of democracy that
Speaker 2: supports a just and loving world. We are so excited
Speaker 2: to have you here to explore this belief that I've
Speaker 2: had for a while now, based some on my own experience,
Speaker 2: based some on your work about the importance of healing
Speaker 2: ourselves before we can heal the world, and how we
Speaker 2: can sit as in better. So that's the crux of
Speaker 2: why you're here, and I want to start with just
Speaker 2: asking you, how did you come to make this connection
Speaker 2: that our internal worlds directly link to our experience of
Speaker 2: the external one. Did it happen in a moment a
Speaker 2: series of moments with some of your discovery of this link.
Speaker 1: I was a psychologist for eighteen years in private practice,
Speaker 1: starting with my practic and going through, you know, having
Speaker 1: my own business, and I started to see that there
Speaker 1: were these patterns that people were coming in and saying
Speaker 1: the same things to me, even across all different walks
Speaker 1: of life, all different socioeconomic status, race, gender, you know,
Speaker 1: it didn't really matter. There were these universal patterns. And
Speaker 1: when I started relating with the patterns instead of the
Speaker 1: specifics of what the person was bringing in, I noticed
Speaker 1: that there were these radical shifts not only in how
Speaker 1: the person showed up in the world, how they felt,
Speaker 1: how they behaved, but also how the world showed up
Speaker 1: for them in an almost mystical way. Things change in
Speaker 1: their external environment to now reflect their new internal environment.
Speaker 1: And it started happening so many times that I couldn't
Speaker 1: unsee it. And that's why I guess I walk this
Speaker 1: divine paradox, like, yes, I create the voter guide every vote.
Speaker 2: I believe in.
Speaker 1: Citizen ing deeply, and I believe it's all an illusion,
Speaker 1: kind of how the Hindus have been saying for thousands
Speaker 1: of years. It's all you know, everything we're experiencing is
Speaker 1: a part of ourselves.
Speaker 2: The idea that everything we're experiencing is a part of
Speaker 2: ourselves links to some of my in field experience is
Speaker 2: making America outdoors and the idea that we are a
Speaker 2: part of nature, not apart from nature, and so we
Speaker 2: see ourselves in the external in these patterns that you
Speaker 2: were seeing in your patience, your clients in the psychology
Speaker 2: realm you described, you know, a shift in them that
Speaker 2: would then shift some of the world around them. What's
Speaker 2: an example of what you were noticing and what changed
Speaker 2: after you called attention to or intervened in some way.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so I was thinking in preparation for this interview
Speaker 1: about this client of mine whose political beliefs were those
Speaker 1: that are sort of associated with oppression. And when we
Speaker 1: explored his internal landscape and the sort of symbols that
Speaker 1: run him, we found that he experienced his father as
Speaker 1: oppressive as a little one, and actually said sometimes when
Speaker 1: his father would get really angry, it felt like a
Speaker 1: silver back gorilla. And so we started talking about the
Speaker 1: silver back gorilla, this part that's so big and so
Speaker 1: scary and gets to have all the power, and that
Speaker 1: that part is paired with this other part that feels
Speaker 1: so powerless. So in his symbolic landscape, there was this
Speaker 1: big thing and this little thing and they went together
Speaker 1: in such a scary, disturbing way. And so if you're
Speaker 1: living in a universe where there's big guys and little
Speaker 1: guys and the little guys always lose, of course you're
Speaker 1: going to want to be a big guy.
Speaker 2: Logical' that's just that.
Speaker 1: So you know, I never spoke to him about his
Speaker 1: political beliefs, and all we did was work on the
Speaker 1: symbols that run him, this awful split in power, these
Speaker 1: symbols of bigness and smallness, and oppression, and we started
Speaker 1: to alchemize those symbols and replace them with new symbols
Speaker 1: of togetherness, connection, empowerment, equality, equity, and we started shifting
Speaker 1: things down, down, down at that symbolic layer. And then
Speaker 1: he comes in and says to me, you know, I've
Speaker 1: been thinking about the way that I vote. I think
Speaker 1: there's something off here, like I'm realizing it doesn't actually
Speaker 1: honor the human beings in the world. And then a
Speaker 1: few weeks later he comes in and says, it doesn't
Speaker 1: feel right anymore to have a gun yet a gun,
Speaker 1: and it's like, yeah, well, if we're living in the
Speaker 1: big guys and little guys paradigm of dominance, it makes
Speaker 1: a lot of sense to have a gun, right, Yeah.
Speaker 1: But this is someone who would find himself regularly these
Speaker 1: pickles in life. You know, people on the road would
Speaker 1: cut them off and they'd get in these battles or
Speaker 1: just odd problems would be coming into his life in
Speaker 1: various social settings where there was a lot of conflict
Speaker 1: and shows of dominance, and as he shifted his internal landscape,
Speaker 1: those things just didn't show up in his world anymore.
Speaker 1: He wasn't being beckoned into that fight because he wasn't
Speaker 1: organized around fight.
Speaker 2: Thank you for the silverback gorilla tail. I've been on
Speaker 2: a tour over the past few years doing a lot
Speaker 2: of talking and connecting, and one of the stories I've
Speaker 2: been trying to shift with the audience I connect with
Speaker 2: is like, I'm not here to take anything from you.
Speaker 2: You know, there is so many of us wired to
Speaker 2: believe in what Heather McGee, another previous guest on our show,
Speaker 2: calls the zero sum game. If you get something, it's
Speaker 2: got to come at my expense. And it's like, that's
Speaker 2: a possible interpretation, or we could get more together, which.
Speaker 1: Is how nature has worked for time immemorial. Everything springs
Speaker 1: up interdependent with one another.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 1: It's just this ecosystem of life that supports itself and
Speaker 1: each other, and everyone wins and everything keeps each other
Speaker 1: in checks and balances and thriving. Something about the way
Speaker 1: we've started to organize ourselves in the last couple thousand years.
Speaker 1: We're getting away from that, but we can also return
Speaker 1: to that.
Speaker 2: I keep thinking back to the first conversation this season
Speaker 2: with Adrian Marie Brown. We spent some time on fractals.
Speaker 2: We talked about how fractals you represent these patterns that
Speaker 2: replicate at the small medium at every scale. The implication
Speaker 2: being if we change something at the small scale, it
Speaker 2: will replicate, it will ripple to the larger scale. And
Speaker 2: I know you're a big fan of fractals, and even
Speaker 2: the story you shared has you know it hints at this.
Speaker 2: But where do fractals fit into your worldview when you
Speaker 2: think about the connection between shifting our internal world to
Speaker 2: shift the external world.
Speaker 1: So, for those of you who don't know, a fractal
Speaker 1: is a pattern that keeps repeating at every scale. So
Speaker 1: if you zoom in, it's the same pattern. Zoom all
Speaker 1: the way out, same pattern. Turn to the left, same pattern,
Speaker 1: turn to the right, same pattern. It's infinite. Fractals are
Speaker 1: everywhere in our universe. The branching in our lungs mirrors
Speaker 1: the branching in nature in trees and so on and
Speaker 1: so forth. So there are certain patterns that keep repeating. Now,
Speaker 1: source code is based on the idea that in our
Speaker 1: first five years of life, our early experience encodes into
Speaker 1: us some patterning. What we learn explicitly by what we're
Speaker 1: taught and also implicitly from how we're treated in our environment,
Speaker 1: creates this deep patterning inside of us, and that pattern
Speaker 1: keeps repeating. So for that client, it was that pattern
Speaker 1: of dominance and oppression, and that pattern keeps repeating like
Speaker 1: a fractal. There's actually this really beautiful book called You
Speaker 1: Matter more Than You Think. It's written by Karen O'Brien
Speaker 1: who's a professor of human geography at OSLO in Norway,
Speaker 1: and she talks about that this is a fractal universe.
Speaker 1: You know, quantum physics and mathematics is bringing us closer
Speaker 1: to this, knowing that we really do live in this
Speaker 1: place where it's all just patterns that keep repeating. And
Speaker 1: for us at the societal scale, how we're citizening. It's
Speaker 1: the idea of paradigms. So the paradigm of dominance has
Speaker 1: become really big, but it's become really big because as children,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of children who experience that dominance thing
Speaker 1: in their family system, so then it's encoded into them,
Speaker 1: then they embody it, and then our collective embodiment creates
Speaker 1: these larger macrosystems that mirror like a fractal. So the
Speaker 1: cool part from that book You Matter More Than You Think,
Speaker 1: is she says, you know, every point is the center
Speaker 1: point in a fractal universe. So what each of us embody,
Speaker 1: how we show up up, what we believe, how we
Speaker 1: citizen is the beginning of a new world. Every moment
Speaker 1: can bur the new world of how we want to
Speaker 1: show up.
Speaker 2: All right? So I literally got like slightly emotional slash
Speaker 2: chills because I don't think I speak just for myself
Speaker 2: when I say that the world can feel very frustrating,
Speaker 2: can feel very overwhelming. In terms of the challenges, I
Speaker 2: could list off a litany of isms and ologies, yes,
Speaker 2: which are impeding our growth and our evolution, and patterns
Speaker 2: and stories and systems that we were born into, sometimes
Speaker 2: literally in our families, sometimes more metaphorically as a society.
Speaker 2: And if I want to counter that, right, if I
Speaker 2: want to change that, I'm like, I got to join
Speaker 2: the right organization, I got to fund the right politician.
Speaker 2: Oh everything they said was a lie. And what I'm
Speaker 2: hearing in this you matter more than you think. And
Speaker 2: the center is actually everywhere, is that the front line
Speaker 2: is also in here. And so if I just start
Speaker 2: right the place, the space matters a little less than
Speaker 2: just the commencement. And maybe I could start with me
Speaker 2: and have that be my own front line.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, Oh my god, I feel you know, tiriy I
Speaker 1: just hearing you talk about it. And in twenty sixteen,
Speaker 1: when Trump was elected, I wrote this cheeky article entitled
Speaker 1: why Trump's presidency might promise more hope and change than Obama's.
Speaker 2: What Okay, hold on, I'm with you, I'm with you,
Speaker 2: But I mean that's the very clickbaity great clickbaby. My
Speaker 2: emotions are moving now because nobody speaks against my man,
Speaker 2: old I loved you. Would you talking about doctor Stale?
Speaker 1: Well, when we go looking out there and absolutely keep
Speaker 1: citizen ing, keep contributing, keep funding, keep going, keep protesting,
Speaker 1: and when we're only looking out there, we forget that
Speaker 1: power that every point is the center point in the fractal.
Speaker 1: So the way I see Trump is that he's kind
Speaker 1: of a caricature of our collective wound in this nation
Speaker 1: of otherizing. So he does this big thing about let's
Speaker 1: build a wall, and these people are bad, and you know,
Speaker 1: I'm the greatest, and then we liberals say no, you're
Speaker 1: bad and we're good. It's just a mirror image. It's
Speaker 1: Malkovich Malkovich. So the dehumanizing that's festering at the core
Speaker 1: of our nation. He's coming forward as this big embodiment
Speaker 1: of that going do you see? Do you see who
Speaker 1: we are? And it's our opportunity and invitation to go
Speaker 1: inside and go Okay, where am I dehumanizing even them?
Speaker 1: Because if I had lived the sum total of their
Speaker 1: life experience, I would also believe and act the way
Speaker 1: that they are. And so it's like, there are no
Speaker 1: bad people, only hurt people, hurt people.
Speaker 2: I've heard that line so many times, and you know,
Speaker 2: the people who are hurt in turn hurt others. I think,
Speaker 2: you know, Trump is a tricky caricature as a particular example,
Speaker 2: where yes, we hold the truth that hurt people hurt people,
Speaker 2: and we act to counter the harm and the hurt
Speaker 2: that's being created by this person. It's the both, at
Speaker 2: least for me, I don't even know if that's a question.
Speaker 2: It's more of a statement to get your response to, Oh,
Speaker 2: because I don't want to feel like so just have
Speaker 2: to vaguely love, you know, hurtful people and the world's
Speaker 2: going to fix itself.
Speaker 1: Oh yes, I do think there are some people who,
Speaker 1: because of their coping styles and wounds, are living in
Speaker 1: a little bit of denial of reality and doing what
Speaker 1: I call spiritual bypass where they're like, everyone just needs
Speaker 1: to raise their level of consciousness. And I'm like, okay,
Speaker 1: you tell that to a slave in chains in a
Speaker 1: diamond mind right now, like, oh, just raise your level
Speaker 1: of consciousness. Like we have to hold both.
Speaker 2: We have to hold.
Speaker 1: Both that there are certain sticky spots in this universe
Speaker 1: where people don't have the flexibility like on Maslow's hierarchy
Speaker 1: of needs to be thinking about the quantum and my
Speaker 1: embodiment and what story am I telling? Sometimes things are
Speaker 1: just really real, and how can we hold both that
Speaker 1: our relationship to things matters, that are embodiment matters, that
Speaker 1: are being this matters, and that there are very real
Speaker 1: things going on in the world that need to be stopped,
Speaker 1: that need to be talked about, that need to be
Speaker 1: addressed and not swept under the rug.
Speaker 2: Yes, and it's improv It all comes back to improv comedy.
Speaker 2: I want to back up on some terminology. We've got
Speaker 2: source code, We've got a coding session rather than a
Speaker 2: therapy session. We've got symbolic versus concrete or circumstances. I
Speaker 2: think you use that word can you give us a
Speaker 2: lay of this linguistic land that you're also creating. What
Speaker 2: is symbolic versus the traditional way we tend to approach
Speaker 2: kind of articulating our our problems are in our selves.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Sure.
Speaker 1: So if we think about the client who had the
Speaker 1: dad that he associated with the silver Back guerrilla, the
Speaker 1: concrete circumstances in his life that week may have been
Speaker 1: that some dick cut him off on the road. He
Speaker 1: comes in and he wants to tell me about this
Speaker 1: specific situation that's so frustrating and so irritating, and what
Speaker 1: do I do about these people everywhere that are trying
Speaker 1: to cut me off?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 1: And it's this very specific thing. But instead of going
Speaker 1: with the concrete specifics, we're going to dive deeper beneath
Speaker 1: to the symbols, the symbolic landscape or symbolic nexus that
Speaker 1: got encoded into him when he was little, that's running
Speaker 1: his life now. It's the algorithm of his matrix. It's
Speaker 1: what he notices, it's what he attracts, it's what he
Speaker 1: orients around. It's his favorite story to keep telling, no
Speaker 1: matter how awful and enraging it is. And so we
Speaker 1: go down, down, down, and we work with the symbols instead.
Speaker 1: Like we were talking earlier, there's this gorilla in the mouse,
Speaker 1: the big part in the little part. Those are archetypal symbols.
Speaker 1: And when we can resolve things down at that symbolic layer,
Speaker 1: poof his life shifts. He notices different things, he attracts
Speaker 1: different things, he creates different things, he embodies different things,
Speaker 1: he believes different things, he relates in a new way.
Speaker 1: And that's the work that I do.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I want to dive deeper into your source
Speaker 2: code world and your coping styles world. What have you
Speaker 2: found when you've gone inside? What are the wounds that
Speaker 2: you've been able to kind of categorize and label and
Speaker 2: give some structure to to help us make sense of
Speaker 2: that internal landscape so we could adjust how we show
Speaker 2: up in the external landscape.
Speaker 1: So source Code has identified that there's twelve coping styles
Speaker 1: that we all share, and all of us have several.
Speaker 1: I had all twelve, which is sort of what allowed
Speaker 1: me to be the conduit for the work. But those
Speaker 1: coping styles are the defense mechanisms that we inherit in
Speaker 1: our early experience when we don't get the precise support
Speaker 1: need at each developmental stage. So all of us are
Speaker 1: walking around with these patterns or coping styles, or glitches
Speaker 1: in our matrix that make things hard, these tough patterns
Speaker 1: that keep repeating. But what's more interesting to me is
Speaker 1: that under them, as soon as we dissolve them, which
Speaker 1: is what source code does, under those defenses, each of
Speaker 1: us is the most exquisitely beautiful energy, the most loving, relational, curious, playful, magical,
Speaker 1: gentle spirit waiting dormant inside of each of us to
Speaker 1: awaken beyond those defenses. That's what I find inside when
Speaker 1: I assist someone in stepping out of a lifelong nightmare
Speaker 1: that they've been trapped inside of. You know, when you
Speaker 1: think about your life, you notice those patterns that keep
Speaker 1: repeating of like why am I always invisible? Why does
Speaker 1: no one hear me? You know? And it's like, because
Speaker 1: that's something that got encoded into you and now you
Speaker 1: keep reliving it. But it doesn't have to be. So
Speaker 1: this morning I received a DM from a student who
Speaker 1: was in a class with me last night, and she said,
Speaker 1: you know, I was feeling very upset and missed because
Speaker 1: in the first half of class, every time I wrote
Speaker 1: something in the chat, you missed it. You skipped over
Speaker 1: that and read everyone else's and I felt so invisible
Speaker 1: my whole life. And so during the break, I decided,
Speaker 1: let me stand taller and speak my truth and speak
Speaker 1: my needs. She came forward and was like, I won't
Speaker 1: be invisible, and then she got the love and the
Speaker 1: support she needed. So she saw that it was a pattern,
Speaker 1: a pattern from childhood that keeps repeating, and she shifted
Speaker 1: her energy, she shifted her embodiment, she shifted what she's
Speaker 1: willing to participate in. I'm not going to keep playing
Speaker 1: out that old story. And then she got to have
Speaker 1: a new experience.
Speaker 2: So what flash into my mind just now was an image.
Speaker 2: It's a civil rights image from nineteen sixty eight. The
Speaker 2: Memphis sanitation workers are striking. They're all black. They're holding
Speaker 2: up signs that simply say I am a man right,
Speaker 2: just affirming and asserting a different story, a different ownership
Speaker 2: of self that's been denied, you know, and encoded right
Speaker 2: into laws and practices and cultures. Also children who created
Speaker 2: those laws and practices and cultures, and not being seen,
Speaker 2: not being humanized. But to humanize yourself first and demand
Speaker 2: you know that others humanize you as well, and so
Speaker 2: even in that image, for me, there is a bridge
Speaker 2: from this symbolic work and the things that are going
Speaker 2: on in any individual person right back to the way
Speaker 2: you even protest. The way you show up can affirm
Speaker 2: a truth that you find in your own, you know,
Speaker 2: kind of internal landscape.
Speaker 1: Yes, Like it's a radical act of citizen ning to
Speaker 1: change our story, to change the narrative that we're living
Speaker 1: within and our relationship to ourselves and others in the world.
Speaker 1: Of Like, I won't participate in that old way of being,
Speaker 1: the authorizing me to you, humanizing, the fighting the oppression. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I won't. I'm not going to do that to me.
Speaker 1: I'm not going to do that to you. I am
Speaker 1: going to stand for love. I will stand for love,
Speaker 1: and in that being this change my world.
Speaker 2: So standing for love it literally sounds and feels beautiful.
Speaker 2: You've mentioned, you know, this term coping styles. Can you
Speaker 2: describe one or two of them and how they relate
Speaker 2: to that early childhood development.
Speaker 1: One of the things we're developing as children in our
Speaker 1: first five years of life is our sense of will.
Speaker 1: What do I have control over? What can I impact?
Speaker 1: What's my scope of influence? And we need to be
Speaker 1: able to feel that we can control things and not everything.
Speaker 1: It's got to be that optimal frustration like ooh, I
Speaker 1: don't get to control absolutely everything, and also the optimal
Speaker 1: indulgence of but I do get to decide what I
Speaker 1: wear to school, but not a hero costume, not a
Speaker 1: superhero costume. But you know, I can wear any of
Speaker 1: my shorts or any of my tops. Right, So that
Speaker 1: we need to feel that we have some say, some voice,
Speaker 1: some choice, some agency, agency power, but not despotic agency,
Speaker 1: not control over absolutely everything, where our tantrums can control
Speaker 1: our entire families. So as we're developing our will, which
Speaker 1: really happens between ten months of age and four years
Speaker 1: of age, during that process, things can go wrong in
Speaker 1: one of two ways or both ways, which is we
Speaker 1: can be over indulged or we can be overly frustrated,
Speaker 1: and those create the indulged coping style and the frustrated
Speaker 1: coping style, and you can actually have both. But when
Speaker 1: we're overly frustrated, it's like everything is in no, we're
Speaker 1: constantly blocked and thwarted. Our will doesn't matter, our voice
Speaker 1: doesn't matter, our needs don't matter. And so the cool
Speaker 1: thing about the human spirit is that it can never
Speaker 1: be broken. The will does not disappear, but it goes underground,
Speaker 1: and it turns against the self and against the world,
Speaker 1: and we become self sabotaging, and as frustrated people feeling
Speaker 1: bad starts to feel good. Somehow, we couldn't win by winning,
Speaker 1: so we learn how to win by losing and making
Speaker 1: everyone else lose. And we feel a lot of stuckness,
Speaker 1: a lot of resistance, a lot of warlike energy.
Speaker 2: Life is hard.
Speaker 1: That's our mantra, and we're literally frustrated. And the antidote
Speaker 1: of frustrated is to get in flow, to say no
Speaker 1: to what we don't want directly, instead of kicking under
Speaker 1: the table, say yes to what we do want. Want
Speaker 1: what we want, get what we want, feel clear, feel direct.
Speaker 1: So one of the ways that the frustrated coping style
Speaker 1: can play out in terms of citizen ing is if
Speaker 1: we feel like there's no way to win and my
Speaker 1: will doesn't matter and I won't be heard, why the
Speaker 1: f would we show up to vote? I don't matter,
Speaker 1: No one listens to me anyway. You know, f the man,
Speaker 1: and we don't realize we are the man.
Speaker 2: I am the man.
Speaker 1: I am one of we the people who get to
Speaker 1: decide what goes on here. But if we didn't feel
Speaker 1: empowered as children to be able to make decisions, then
Speaker 1: as adults we also don't feel we have the power
Speaker 1: to make decisions. So the indulged coping style is sort
Speaker 1: of equal and opposite. It's when during the time of socialization,
Speaker 1: no one sort of showed us how we impacted others.
Speaker 1: So either we were deeply indulged by our parents or
Speaker 1: neglected by our parents, and in either of those situations,
Speaker 1: our will ruled the roost. Whatever we wanted, we got.
Speaker 2: That's what I'm feeling. I'm feeling like I don't know
Speaker 2: who coined it, but you know, to the person born
Speaker 2: into the benefits of a system of oppression, other people's
Speaker 2: freedom feels like their oppression because waits, you got something
Speaker 2: you wanted, Well, that was mine. I was supposed to
Speaker 2: get that, And so like we've indulged at scale. You know,
Speaker 2: some groups of people men have been indulged, you know,
Speaker 2: relative to women in the world. The backlash to feminism
Speaker 2: by people like and Andrew Tate, who's a caricature as well, well,
Speaker 2: there's something indulgent about that, right. The lack of patience, perspective,
Speaker 2: respect that someone else's will also matters.
Speaker 1: Yes, And really the indulged experience is an unawareness that
Speaker 1: anyone else is even real or exists or matters. It's
Speaker 1: like I want what I want at any cost, and
Speaker 1: I'm going to get it. It's kind of like the
Speaker 1: Stanford marshmallow experiment, like I can't even think about later.
Speaker 1: I never really fully developed my frontal I.
Speaker 2: Think you're talking about an experiment involving torturing children with
Speaker 2: access to marshmallows.
Speaker 1: It's like, if you don't eat this one now, you
Speaker 1: can have two later, okay, And to it's developing their
Speaker 1: capacity to wait.
Speaker 2: That's what a PhD would say. Yeah, from the outside,
Speaker 2: I'm just like, give the kid the marshmallow. Come on, man,
Speaker 2: Like they're a child. They can't like rationalize this right.
Speaker 1: Well, that's you know, that's that critical period in development
Speaker 1: when they start to be able to either wait or
Speaker 1: not wait. And if we can't wait, we have that
Speaker 1: indulged coping style. So how looks as a citizen is
Speaker 1: why would I vote? It doesn't affect me, doesn't affect me. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's all me, me, me, me me, It's not anything
Speaker 1: against anyone else. It's like, I don't want to mess
Speaker 1: with anyone else, but don't tread on me. Don't take
Speaker 1: away my freedom. Don't take away right exactly, don't take
Speaker 1: away my capacity to always have exactly what I want
Speaker 1: in every moment, because I'm used to that indulgence.
Speaker 2: So with these styles you've mentioned, you know the word antidote.
Speaker 2: As far as what we do with them, what does
Speaker 2: that mean? What are we trying to do with these
Speaker 2: styles beyond get over them or process them? Right? What's
Speaker 2: the goal?
Speaker 1: I like to say that we go from being possessed
Speaker 1: by them to possessing them. I have this coping style,
Speaker 1: but I'm not unconsciously ruled by it. So each of
Speaker 1: the styles has an antidote, which is the healed position.
Speaker 1: So for indulge, the healed position is actually intervening, which
Speaker 1: is a term coined by the late Buddhist monk tik
Speaker 1: not Han. He coined that term to talk about how
Speaker 1: within every single being is every other being. So in
Speaker 1: a piece of paper, you've got to know about the
Speaker 1: tree that made that paper, and the birds and the
Speaker 1: squirrels that lived inside of that tree, and the water
Speaker 1: in the sunshine that nourished the tree, and the logger
Speaker 1: that cut the tree, and the mill worker who made
Speaker 1: the paper, and the mothers of the humans who were
Speaker 1: involved with making this book who fed them from the land,
Speaker 1: you know, and the big bang that created all of
Speaker 1: this divine unfoldment forever ago. So starting to know about
Speaker 1: we're all nodes in a web of being. I'm not
Speaker 1: the only node. And really the wound inside of the
Speaker 1: indulged wound is that we didn't grow up in a village.
Speaker 1: And it's this deep emptiness that causes this consumer and
Speaker 1: this need for more and more and me and me,
Speaker 1: because we don't have a sense of belonging, and so
Speaker 1: we're in this sort of solitary confinement of the myth
Speaker 1: of separation that it's me against you and we're competing
Speaker 1: for finite resources dominating a land instead of being of
Speaker 1: the land, of the animals, of one another and belonging.
Speaker 1: If we had that sense of togetherness and rootedness and belonging,
Speaker 1: we wouldn't be me. MEI me, gimme, gimme.
Speaker 2: You just described something Elizabeth and I talk about a lot,
Speaker 2: like why the suburbs is responsible for gentrification in the hood, right,
Speaker 2: It's like people who didn't grow up with a village
Speaker 2: out there in the Bonies, coming into the city because
Speaker 2: it's cool, don't know how to be around other people.
Speaker 2: See some black kids on the Stuplan music, don't know
Speaker 2: how to inter be so they call the police instead
Speaker 2: and say, like, this is disturbing my existence, right, this
Speaker 2: noise is foreign to me. Therefore I have to squash
Speaker 2: it and mute it and silence it and push it away.
Speaker 2: And that's lack of practice at inter being at some
Speaker 2: larger but still I think parallel level. That's my translation.
Speaker 2: When I'm hearing things that have to do with early
Speaker 2: childhood development and what we inherit, I think of generational healing, right,
Speaker 2: these inter connections between generations. What does that term mean
Speaker 2: to you? And do you see any connection between that
Speaker 2: and our ability to create better circumstances to have a
Speaker 2: healthier democracy, to create a healthier culture of democracy through
Speaker 2: generational healing.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, So we're talking about the fractal nature of reality
Speaker 1: and how our outsides reflect our insides, and how our
Speaker 1: insides get encoded in our first five years of life.
Speaker 1: So we are born into a long lineage of unconscious
Speaker 1: generational pain handed down through the millennia. But for some
Speaker 1: incredible reason, we're alive right now at the time where
Speaker 1: we actually have the capacity to become aware of the
Speaker 1: paradigms and dynamics and patterns and say the buck stops
Speaker 1: with me. I won't unconsciously pass this down to my children.
Speaker 1: I'm going to see these things and I'm going to
Speaker 1: shift them. When I would do it as a psychologist,
Speaker 1: it would take me a long time, and it was
Speaker 1: pretty laborious because I was working with the mind, which
Speaker 1: can play tricks and go around in circles. But the
Speaker 1: thing about energy is it can shift in the now.
Speaker 1: I did a coding session on.
Speaker 2: That's what we call them coding sessions in source code.
Speaker 1: Okay, yes, because we just work with the symbolic code.
Speaker 1: We don't work with any of the circumstances going on
Speaker 1: in your life. But I was coding someone who essentially
Speaker 1: realized and named I was born into this metal chamber
Speaker 1: of fear around me. My father had one kind of fear,
Speaker 1: my mother had another kind of fear, and both made
Speaker 1: me feel so trapped and so scared and like I
Speaker 1: can't trust myself. And so we started to know about
Speaker 1: that started to know about the metal chamber, started to
Speaker 1: feel how impossible it was, how it wasn't, can't, can't,
Speaker 1: And we started to dissolve and resolve that so that
Speaker 1: he could energetically feel this shift of that outside thing
Speaker 1: oppressing him. Ah release, and he was like, I trust myself,
Speaker 1: I trust my instincts, I trust my energy. I've never
Speaker 1: felt like this in my body before. I've never felt
Speaker 1: this much good energy circulating in my body. And I said,
Speaker 1: you know, there's always some fear when we outgrow our parents' paradigm,
Speaker 1: that we're going to have to split off from them,
Speaker 1: or that this means we don't love them. But no,
Speaker 1: we invite them in.
Speaker 2: We go. Come with us.
Speaker 1: There's a new world where we're not ruled by this
Speaker 1: metal chamber of fear. Come with me. I love you,
Speaker 1: Let me contain you in a new way. Let me
Speaker 1: show you. This is evolution. And he felt it. He
Speaker 1: was like, I want to invite them into this new world.
Speaker 1: I don't want to keep living as a captive to
Speaker 1: my parents' childhood wounding.
Speaker 2: It seems like if we break or shift, you know,
Speaker 2: our paradigms, if we rewrite some of our code, that
Speaker 2: can also shift the relationships around us. If we outgrow
Speaker 2: our parents, right, we're also shifting and maybe they're not
Speaker 2: ready for that shift. You know, maybe we are losing people.
Speaker 2: We are erecting a new boundary and they don't fit
Speaker 2: on the new inside of us. Can you speak more
Speaker 2: to the consequences, especially relationship wise, of shifting our internal landscape.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I think that sometimes people have such calcified coping styles,
Speaker 1: and we're so tormented as little ones that they show
Speaker 1: up in a way now as adults that really is
Speaker 1: legitimately unsafe. That no matter how relational we try to be,
Speaker 1: no matter how safe we are as we show up,
Speaker 1: no matter how much love and understanding and forgiveness, which
Speaker 1: is just understanding that we give, they're still abusive and
Speaker 1: cruel and frightening and disturbed.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 1: If that is the case, I do understand erecting that
Speaker 1: boundary of you know, until you can be kind, I'm
Speaker 1: not available for contact. And you know, another one of
Speaker 1: my students a couple of days ago, had an experience
Speaker 1: with her father where he has really not shown up
Speaker 1: for the family. And my student's sister is quite sick,
Speaker 1: and she said, hey, dad, this is what's going on
Speaker 1: with my sister's condition right now in the ICU. And
Speaker 1: he said, I didn't need to know that. And she
Speaker 1: used the technique that I just taught them, which is,
Speaker 1: if you want to go deeper, just go slower. And
Speaker 1: she said, you didn't need to know that. She just
Speaker 1: mirrored that back to him slowly, and he said, it's
Speaker 1: hard to hear that, and he started showing up. He
Speaker 1: went to the hospital for the first time when she
Speaker 1: wasn't planning on doing. He reached out to his other children,
Speaker 1: which he wasn't planning on doing. So her courage in
Speaker 1: that moment to not be victimized to his pattern that
Speaker 1: she'd experienced her entire life and instead lovingly reflect it
Speaker 1: back to him patiently, slowly. He shifted because within each
Speaker 1: of us is that essence. I was talking about an
Speaker 1: innate healing function that wants to express and receive love.
Speaker 1: And she gave him the opportunity to be freed from
Speaker 1: that lifelong defense of avoiding.
Speaker 2: With a person like the father you shared with us.
Speaker 2: I almost want to say being forced, but even that
Speaker 2: language doesn't feel adequate. Being given the opportunity to see themselves,
Speaker 2: A lot of folks don't get that right. And it
Speaker 2: was done slowly, just gently in this particular example. And
Speaker 2: there's power in just you know, holding up that mirror
Speaker 2: with love but still holding it right. You're not accepting it,
Speaker 2: You're just saying like, here you go, you like what
Speaker 2: you see, without saying all those words either yes.
Speaker 1: And that is the essence of source code. That's all
Speaker 1: we do is we hold him loving mirror up to
Speaker 1: the code we've with precise aim and accuracy, reflect the
Speaker 1: code back to itself and it starts to shift.
Speaker 2: I keep finding these other historic sort of external world
Speaker 2: concrete world examples. I'm a huge fan of Frederick Douglas.
Speaker 2: I think he was just like Savage with his language,
Speaker 2: and this brother held up mirror lovingly to a country
Speaker 2: that in so many ways refused to see itself. Honestly,
Speaker 2: but he found words, He found language, He found jokes,
Speaker 2: you know, he found rhetoric, He found panash and style
Speaker 2: to help dress up what was ultimately a mirror. Is
Speaker 2: this your fourth of July, America? Is this what you're celebrating?
Speaker 2: In one of his most epic and famous pieces, which
Speaker 2: is posed as a question, what to the slave is
Speaker 2: the fourth of July? So the power of the mirror,
Speaker 2: fractally with a father figure or with a founding father figure.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, because when we mirror something back to itself and
Speaker 1: it starts to alchemize and dissolve and shift, that person
Speaker 1: is now the center point of a fractal universe, in
Speaker 1: a new reality, a reality that can connect instead of disconnect.
Speaker 1: And the ripple effect of every minute change is unspeakable.
Speaker 1: I literally went to a yoga class a couple of
Speaker 1: days ago and it was so good that I was like,
Speaker 1: what is going on here? She was having us talk
Speaker 1: to our neighbor, touch our neighbor, look at eye contact.
Speaker 1: When we walked out, she sprayed each of our faces
Speaker 1: with rose. Missed all fifty of us from the class,
Speaker 1: and I said, Alex, what is happening? And she goes,
Speaker 1: I read your chapter and I was like, what she said,
Speaker 1: I was inspired by your book and it shifted me.
Speaker 1: Now her shift from reading my book shifted that class.
Speaker 1: Those fifty people are walking out into the world now
Speaker 1: from a place of deeper connection oneness, inter being, love, safety, joy, pleasure,
Speaker 1: beauty whoa Every ripple effect is so so strong and
Speaker 1: so meaningful.
Speaker 2: And what I took is spray myself in the face
Speaker 2: with rose water. So see, we all have our stories, right,
Speaker 2: that's my coding, that's my After the break, Sam shares
Speaker 2: how we can recode ourselves without abandoning our responsibilities to
Speaker 2: our communities. How do we stay present to the process
Speaker 2: of recoding ourselves while still being present to our responsibilities
Speaker 2: to others, to our families, to our communities. Do you
Speaker 2: have any advice on how to practice the both here? Yeah?
Speaker 2: I mean that.
Speaker 1: Actually that question speaks to one of the other coping
Speaker 1: styles called the premature style. And I won't go too
Speaker 1: deep into it, but it's basically this idea that my
Speaker 1: only way to know about love is to give. That
Speaker 1: receiving is not okay, So all my energy goes out.
Speaker 1: I give, I do, I volunteer, I caretake. But we
Speaker 1: don't know about feeding, receiving, needing. It just feels wrong.
Speaker 1: It's a feeding injury from toddlerhood. But when we're premature,
Speaker 1: it really feels like a split, like either or, and
Speaker 1: you know that split around giving. I can either give
Speaker 1: or receive. It's a misunderstanding because if we just give
Speaker 1: and give and give, we're pouring from an empty cup
Speaker 1: and eventually we burn out. But when it's that beautiful
Speaker 1: loop of nourishment, of taking and tasting the love, receiving, receiving,
Speaker 1: receiving support, receiving care, receiving guidance, and feeling so nourished
Speaker 1: and so full that it's like my cup runneth over.
Speaker 1: Of course, I'm here to share and show up for you.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's as simple as put your own oxygen
Speaker 1: mask on first. It's a give and take that's much
Speaker 1: more sustainable and pleasurable for everyone.
Speaker 2: Much of your work centers on this belief that what
Speaker 2: we experience in our families, our early childhood, shapes our
Speaker 2: lives as adults in major ways. And in talking about
Speaker 2: dissolving these childhood wounds, these coping styles, we pick up,
Speaker 2: you've also mentioned the importance of growing up. Right when
Speaker 2: we do this work, we're growing up from this adolescent
Speaker 2: stage and stepping into more fully formed adulthood, becoming elders,
Speaker 2: not necessarily an age, but in kind of self knowledge.
Speaker 2: What does that shift look like to you? And can
Speaker 2: you give any other examples of how someone can begin
Speaker 2: to think about moving past that hurt child into more
Speaker 2: full adulthood or elderhood.
Speaker 1: So my sense is that we've been living in what
Speaker 1: I call the age of the wounded child, where that
Speaker 1: generational pain has been passed down through the millennium.
Speaker 2: Hello, hello, Elon. Sorry, I just again, Well, that's right.
Speaker 1: It's not just us that are wounded children, but it's
Speaker 1: also you know, our leaders that are wounded children, and
Speaker 1: so our infrastructure and our laws, and you know, the
Speaker 1: systems that are holding us are created by wounded children,
Speaker 1: and they perpetuate wounds. And so it is my heart's
Speaker 1: greatest wish and my intuitive prediction that we are now
Speaker 1: exiting the age of the wounded child, and what that
Speaker 1: means to me is becoming true elders. In indigenous communities,
Speaker 1: they know about the importance of that right of passage
Speaker 1: into elderhood, and adolescents go through vision quests and other
Speaker 1: rituals to have an initiation into elderhood. And we don't
Speaker 1: have any of that. We're still running around as wounded children,
Speaker 1: creating democracy, as wounded, stinking.
Speaker 2: Children in our adult bodysuits.
Speaker 1: Yes, and I'm always inspired by psychotherapist and soul activist
Speaker 1: Francis Weller, and he talks about how moving from adolescence
Speaker 1: to elderhood is about going from looking for places of connection,
Speaker 1: seeking for places of connection to building them. So I
Speaker 1: want to talk about when you talked about Grace Lely
Speaker 1: Bogs and Adrian Marie Brown's reference to that in that interview,
Speaker 1: the first interview of this season, she was talking about
Speaker 1: Grace Lely Bogs being accused of a politician of being
Speaker 1: a naysayer you don't like the way we're running this country,
Speaker 1: and she said, yeah, I'm not just a naysayer. I
Speaker 1: can create. And she went out and created many places
Speaker 1: of belonging and places of social change. So one way
Speaker 1: to citizen and to become an elder is to literally
Speaker 1: go out and create places of belonging. And also, if
Speaker 1: we think about source code and the fractal nature of
Speaker 1: the universe and that our inside world creates our outside world,
Speaker 1: simply our being this when we stand for love, is
Speaker 1: inviting people into the new world. Instead of saying, gosh,
Speaker 1: darn it, I'm living in a world that I don't like,
Speaker 1: that doesn't resonate, that doesn't feel like a fit, that
Speaker 1: doesn't feel safe, that's not organized the way that I
Speaker 1: want it, and focusing on what we don't want. Instead
Speaker 1: we embody and live into exactly what we do want.
Speaker 1: You know, the yoga teacher brought a little more love
Speaker 1: to the room and everybody lit up. So when we
Speaker 1: bring more love into everything we do, that's how we citizen.
Speaker 1: That's true elderhood.
Speaker 2: Yeah, what does that true elderhood look like for you
Speaker 2: in your life?
Speaker 5: Oh?
Speaker 1: My cry. I was talking to a friend who's known
Speaker 1: me since I was fifteen, and she was looking at
Speaker 1: the source Code community and she said, my god, Sam,
Speaker 1: you created the love you always knew as possible. Like
Speaker 1: the way we relate with each other in my dy
Speaker 1: networks and our membership and all courses, all the groups
Speaker 1: is radical transparency, unconditional love, safety, unconditional welcoming, and the
Speaker 1: boundary that you know, cruelty is not okay, Meanness is
Speaker 1: not okay, Hiding is not okay, Lying not okay. There
Speaker 1: are pillars of boundaries protecting this space. But within that
Speaker 1: everything else is just met with love and understanding and
Speaker 1: support and care and fun.
Speaker 2: It's really fun.
Speaker 1: I think fun is a big part of the new world.
Speaker 1: I think we've been taking things really seriously.
Speaker 2: Yes, you're like a quantum time traveler, and so your
Speaker 2: report back from the future world being more fun is
Speaker 2: welcome news. Thank you Paul Revere from the symbolic world
Speaker 2: to tell us that fun is on the horizon, not
Speaker 2: just threat. Well, congratulations on your own transition into elderhood
Speaker 2: and breaking that cycle, and thank you for sharing that
Speaker 2: with us. I think you know that's also a demonstration,
Speaker 2: and I think a lot of us expect stoicness and
Speaker 2: stiffness and hardness and coldness and softness is also very powerful.
Speaker 2: So yeah, thanks for practicing and not just preaching. There's
Speaker 2: a sequencing in terms of I guess it's a statement
Speaker 2: I'll make and then see how you respond, Okay, because
Speaker 2: I'm putting some of these pieces together that you've shared
Speaker 2: already that even if we embrace a fight mentality, we
Speaker 2: have a fight lens. We have a fight writer in
Speaker 2: our internal writer's room that sees and projects everything into
Speaker 2: the world as a fight. So I'm a fire. That's
Speaker 2: my identity. I'm just going to do that all day,
Speaker 2: every day, real hard, and that's how I'm going to citizen, right,
Speaker 2: I'm going to citizen as a fight. We have us them, right,
Speaker 2: it's us versus them, and I'm going a citizen in this
Speaker 2: binary of you versus me as opposed to you and me,
Speaker 2: And so people who've done no internal searching whatsoever are
Speaker 2: citizening every day. Right, But it seems like while we're
Speaker 2: doing some of that external stuff, if we rewind a
Speaker 2: little bit, if we dive inward, citizen inward, then the
Speaker 2: effect of what we're doing externally is going to be healthier,
Speaker 2: more sustained, last longer. And so is it a prerequid
Speaker 2: it is it preferable to try to work on and
Speaker 2: heal some of those wounds before we engage fully in
Speaker 2: all the dreaming together. Otherwise we might corrupt our own
Speaker 2: dreams and envision something that's not as whole or as
Speaker 2: healed as we really want the world to be.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that's exactly right. And I noticed this
Speaker 1: when my students try to, you know, dream about what
Speaker 1: they want for their personal lives or the life at large,
Speaker 1: and their dreams are tainted by their coping styles. I
Speaker 1: don't even realize it. Like I had a student who
Speaker 1: just really wanted to win his court cases so that
Speaker 1: the judge would believe him, and that was an enactment
Speaker 1: of his childhood when he was judged and wouldn't be
Speaker 1: believed and it's like, what do you really want beyond
Speaker 1: the wounding? So yeah, but I don't think it's that binary.
Speaker 1: First you have to do this and then you have
Speaker 1: to do this. It's always like a you know, it's
Speaker 1: all happening simultaneously.
Speaker 2: Because the center point is everywhere. I'm taking up what
Speaker 2: you're putting down.
Speaker 1: But I feel like I want to share this story
Speaker 1: because this idea of dreaming together can sound a little
Speaker 1: woo woo. But there was this troop of wild baboons
Speaker 1: in Kenya that was studied by a man named Robert Sopolski,
Speaker 1: and he wrote a book called a Primate's Memoir. But
Speaker 1: what happened was that this was well, let me back up.
Speaker 1: So primates are one of the only animal species with
Speaker 1: a lot of learned behavior. Most animals are just guided
Speaker 1: by instinct, but we actually teach our young how to
Speaker 1: do things like use tools or what the social rules are.
Speaker 1: And in this particular troop of baboons, like all baboons,
Speaker 1: there were alpha males who were really violent and rowdy,
Speaker 1: and there was a lot of oppression in the group.
Speaker 1: So the female baboons were taunted and new males coming
Speaker 1: in from other troops which is what the adolescents do.
Speaker 1: They have to leave home and find a new troupe
Speaker 1: so that there's no inbreeding. They would taunt the new
Speaker 1: males and haze them, and they would prevent the females
Speaker 1: from grooming them in order to assert their dominance.
Speaker 2: Sounds like a college fraternity, Yes, exactly.
Speaker 1: So these males we're going and eating food from a
Speaker 1: nearby tourist attraction place from the dumpster, but only the
Speaker 1: alpha males were allowed to go eat that special food. Well,
Speaker 1: they contracted tuberculosis through the food, and they died. All
Speaker 1: the alpha males in the troop died. And it was
Speaker 1: mostly female baboons and their instinct and their sensibility was
Speaker 1: to groom everyone and to touch everyone and to include everyone,
Speaker 1: and so new males that would come into the circle
Speaker 1: would be immediately met with touch, welcoming connection, and it
Speaker 1: became a peaceful maybe the first peaceful troop of baboons.
Speaker 1: There was no conflict, there was no fighting, there was
Speaker 1: no hierarchy, there was no alpha. It was a new culture. Now,
Speaker 1: new baboons are coming in all the time into this
Speaker 1: and so he didn't know what would happen. But the
Speaker 1: researcher seven years later came back and it was still peaceful,
Speaker 1: Which is why I say things can shift now. If
Speaker 1: every human laid down their arms literally and metaphorically.
Speaker 2: That would be that. Are you saying we have to
Speaker 2: kill all the alpha males.
Speaker 1: Doctor saf No, we have to love them and set
Speaker 1: boundaries with them.
Speaker 2: There again, that's my inner child.
Speaker 1: Yes, so there are ways to be powerful. They just
Speaker 1: don't know how else to be powerful. They're scared.
Speaker 2: You know, I get it, there are other ways to
Speaker 2: be powerful.
Speaker 1: I know in the moments when I when I get
Speaker 1: intense and dominant, it's because I'm scared. It's because I'm scared.
Speaker 1: And when I feel held and supported and safe and
Speaker 1: attuned to and believed and I calm down, I stop dominating.
Speaker 1: So I'm just like them.
Speaker 2: We all are, and and that is that's really powerful.
Speaker 2: I'm just like them. Can be very hard to say
Speaker 2: about people We judge harshly because we want to believe
Speaker 2: that we're nothing like them. My sister Belinda is nine
Speaker 2: years older, thirty years wiser. She is a Yogi. She's
Speaker 2: a Buddhist. She is a teacher and very spiritual leader
Speaker 2: in Lansing, Michigan. That's I don't know if she called
Speaker 2: herself a spiritual leader, that's baby bro looking up to assist.
Speaker 2: But I remember during some of the deep intensity of
Speaker 2: the Trump era in her yoga classes, she was encouraging
Speaker 2: people to feel compassion toward Donald Trump, and a lot
Speaker 2: of her students were like, that's where Jordan line b.
Speaker 2: We're not doing that, Like he's nothing, I am nothing,
Speaker 2: like she's like, there is a part of us represented there.
Speaker 2: It's not the part we want to amplify. We don't
Speaker 2: want to turn it up to eleven the way he's
Speaker 2: caricaturistically display but we got to recognize the self and
Speaker 2: the other. Our very first guest, Valerie Corps, shared that
Speaker 2: lesson with us. There is no stranger. The stranger is
Speaker 2: a part of myself. I do not yet know who
Speaker 2: do not yet acknowledge. So thank you for sharing those words.
Speaker 2: In that perspective that we are in everything. We are
Speaker 2: in everything. We ask all of our guests one final question.
Speaker 2: Because we have a definition here of citizen as a verb.
Speaker 2: We have some principles associated with that interpretation. But given
Speaker 2: your life story, given your work, given your source code
Speaker 2: and the coping styles and everything you've been journeying through.
Speaker 2: What does it mean to you the word citizen if
Speaker 2: we interpret it as a verb.
Speaker 1: I suppose it's the functional side of knowing about inter being,
Speaker 1: that we're a part of something larger, that each of
Speaker 1: us matters, that what we do affects everyone else and
Speaker 1: what they do affects us, and that it's worth giving
Speaker 1: that some time and attention and care.
Speaker 2: We have a transition now to a live audience Q
Speaker 2: and a yes. All right, so yes, say your name,
Speaker 2: where you're at and your question. Cynthia lloyd Hurst.
Speaker 4: I'm in Palm Springs, California.
Speaker 6: Today, we I think a whole hell of a lot
Speaker 6: of people we are working to be more self aware
Speaker 6: and I'm loving your way into it.
Speaker 4: I think it's fantastic. What I keep noticing time and
Speaker 4: time again, and you've mentioned it just a little bit today,
Speaker 4: is that sense of I'm growing in my goodness and
Speaker 4: awareness and if they would just stop, everything will be okay.
Speaker 4: Those jerks need to leave for my world to be wonderful.
Speaker 4: And I'm just wondering if there's just one other thought
Speaker 4: you might give us around our own work there.
Speaker 1: So what I do with source code is I look
Speaker 1: for the symbolic realm. So everything we're experiencing is a
Speaker 1: reenactment of our early experience in our coding. So if
Speaker 1: our sense of self is I feel okay in here,
Speaker 1: and if they out there would just stop, everything would
Speaker 1: be o okay. That person is telling us about what
Speaker 1: it felt like to be a very young child. If
Speaker 1: they would just stop, everything could be okay. And that
Speaker 1: echo and that haunting of that feeling as a little
Speaker 1: one becomes how we see the world and how we
Speaker 1: make sense of the world and how we talk about
Speaker 1: the world. So if I was doing a coding session
Speaker 1: with that person, I would say, we need to know
Speaker 1: about this thing outside that's doing something that feels like
Speaker 1: it just wishes something could stop this, and inside feels okay,
Speaker 1: but outside doesn't feel okay. And we just work that symbolically,
Speaker 1: and as we did, something would shift inside, and because
Speaker 1: we're fractal, something would shift outside.
Speaker 2: How much time we talk in five minutes, five weeks,
Speaker 2: five months, Like, what's the lag time? What's the Doppler
Speaker 2: effect on the internal shift to the external shift? And
Speaker 2: I'm sure there was no formula, but I am curious
Speaker 2: about measuring the rip I guess, and when we see
Speaker 2: signs that something has actually changed.
Speaker 1: I think again, it's the yes, and like it changes
Speaker 1: everything right now, and there's also incremental change over time.
Speaker 3: Thank you, Aaron Mast from the good old little state
Speaker 3: of Delaware, not the city on Ohio. First of all, Sam,
Speaker 3: thank you so much for everything it was for your insight.
Speaker 3: I am very aware of my short temper and ease
Speaker 3: of frustration sometimes with my kids. Been working on it.
Speaker 3: I'm much better where I am now than one it
Speaker 3: used to be about two years ago, probably so. I
Speaker 3: have a son who's turning five. Pretty sure with my
Speaker 3: short temper and frustration I've already imprinted on him a
Speaker 3: little bit at least. I just want to know do
Speaker 3: I need to work on myself. Is it better to
Speaker 3: change my code first before I start working with him?
Speaker 3: Or can we do this together? Aaron?
Speaker 1: I just want to celebrate you coming forward as a
Speaker 1: man and owning your impact on your child and owning
Speaker 1: your coping styles with such grace and dignity. I find
Speaker 1: that when we change, our children change without much effort,
Speaker 1: sort of instantaneously, especially if they're younger. But I want
Speaker 1: to speak to this part of you that I think
Speaker 1: is the omnipotent coping style, which is one of my
Speaker 1: core wounds, which is how we didn't feel safe as infants.
Speaker 1: This is pre six month stuff, and so when everything
Speaker 1: is not ordered in the way we think it needs
Speaker 1: to be, we feel very threatened and frightened, like life
Speaker 1: or death kind of feeling, and we explode. And so
Speaker 1: I would encourage you to be with your five month old,
Speaker 1: six month old little Aaron and hold him and just
Speaker 1: let him know he's safe, because the antidote to omnipotent
Speaker 1: is safe. We didn't feel safe. Things don't feel safe,
Speaker 1: and that haunting comes with us into adulthood. Things have
Speaker 1: to feel very controlled or else they don't feel safe,
Speaker 1: and so we just want to that little baby you
Speaker 1: in so much love that didn't feel safe and that
Speaker 1: wasn't helped through feeling difficult feelings and knowing that it's
Speaker 1: all okay. It's like okay to not feel okay. Sometimes
Speaker 1: we didn't get that support, and so feeling not okay
Speaker 1: feels really not okay, and it becomes a very FASTI
Speaker 1: ear to sixty reaction. So notice what might shift for
Speaker 1: you if you can hold this part of you with
Speaker 1: even more care the way that a very young infant
Speaker 1: needs to be attuned to, instead of judging this self,
Speaker 1: which I didn't really hear you doing. But I just
Speaker 1: want to even encourage more, more love and more understanding
Speaker 1: for this very young part that still doesn't feel safe yet.
Speaker 1: Just help him feel safe, little by little and come
Speaker 1: join us in the source code community.
Speaker 2: We can help. Thank you so much for that question, Aaron.
Speaker 2: I think you've captured and represented many people beyond yourself.
Speaker 2: So you've done You've done a bit of citizen ing
Speaker 2: right there all right. Next in the queue is Mishaq Weber.
Speaker 2: Go ahead with your question.
Speaker 7: I'm calling from Minneapolis, Minnesota. We Shack Weber. So what
Speaker 7: I find creates a lot of change is kind of
Speaker 7: simple recipes, And I was just wondering if there's just
Speaker 7: a few, like everyday things that come to mind that
Speaker 7: we can do to help create a stronger sense of
Speaker 7: interveing ourselves or others the belonging that you talked about,
Speaker 7: or any of these other kind of healing methodologies. I
Speaker 7: was just kind of curious if you had kind of
Speaker 7: everyday practices that people might have in mind.
Speaker 1: I think what's beautiful about the process of healing is
Speaker 1: it's often a lot more gentle and a lot more
Speaker 1: pleasurable than we thought. So one way to activate a
Speaker 1: sense of intervening is to just connect with ourselves first,
Speaker 1: because again, deep in our hearts, deep in our bones,
Speaker 1: deep in our beings, deep in our bodies is all
Speaker 1: the truth we would ever need to know, and this
Speaker 1: deep connection with all things. So simply slowing down, having
Speaker 1: a cozy cup of tea, journaling, getting a massage, which
Speaker 1: Bear Tunda and I are huge proponents of.
Speaker 2: Massages for freedom. That's my new movement.
Speaker 1: You know, baths, snuggles. It's really that simple. It's just softening,
Speaker 1: becoming more embodied, connected to that deep wisdom that lives
Speaker 1: inside of all of us and our connection with.
Speaker 2: All that is. When you say embodied, Sam, what does
Speaker 2: that mean? I think the way that I.
Speaker 1: Use it just there was different than I sometimes use it.
Speaker 1: But when I just said embodied, I meant living more
Speaker 1: from the energy in our body than the little ticker
Speaker 1: tape in our minds. And also when I talk about
Speaker 1: embodiment in terms of emerging from a coping style and
Speaker 1: entering its antidote, when we are stuck in a coping style,
Speaker 1: we are stuck in a certain embodiment. It makes us tense,
Speaker 1: it makes us feel a certain way in our tummies,
Speaker 1: in our viscera, in our emotions, in our energy field.
Speaker 1: And if we shift that embodiment and we start to
Speaker 1: soften and loosen, That's why I say the shift can
Speaker 1: happen in the now with energy is like, Oh, I'm
Speaker 1: not close anymore. I'm open. And that shift and embodiment
Speaker 1: to walk through the world open, receptive, warm, heart centered
Speaker 1: creates those ripple effects. It's not just a concept that
Speaker 1: we think about in the mind. It's an actual embodied
Speaker 1: way of being and living.
Speaker 2: Thank you for that, and thank you miss Shack. We
Speaker 2: have a question from Elizabeth Gratch that our producer Ali
Speaker 2: will voice for us, which means you all get to
Speaker 2: meet Ali. Hello.
Speaker 5: This is Ali coming in from Toronto, Ontario, Canada, and
Speaker 5: I'm voicing Elizabeth Gratch's questions. So this is for veritunde.
Speaker 5: Have you always been able to nurture your confidence and
Speaker 5: was there someone or someone's in your life who helped
Speaker 5: set that beautiful self possession, focus and drive in motion?
Speaker 2: And how yo not expecting a question from me? Thank you,
Speaker 2: Ali Slash Elizabeth Ah. I had a complex and diverse
Speaker 2: array of early coding by my mother and by my hood,
Speaker 2: and it was filled with a lot of love and
Speaker 2: the confidence that you are perceiving. First, thank you for
Speaker 2: nice words, self possession, focus, drive, and like, I'll put
Speaker 2: this on the LinkedIn. But I remember that my friends
Speaker 2: often dreamed of being things that their parents wanted them
Speaker 2: to be, and I noticed that because my mom was
Speaker 2: so different. She was just like, you could do this,
Speaker 2: or you could do that. You could be an actor
Speaker 2: if you want, or you could be like a gardener
Speaker 2: or as you tell me now, a garbage man. I
Speaker 2: really wanted to be a garbage man for a long
Speaker 2: time because you get to ride on trucks yay, and
Speaker 2: you get free stuff double yay. Like it's a win
Speaker 2: win situation. That built an early habit of me of
Speaker 2: confident exploration of possibility because there was not so much
Speaker 2: weight attached to the specific path that I would walk,
Speaker 2: just encourage to find and walk the path. So I
Speaker 2: just give like a thousand pounds of credit to my
Speaker 2: mom for encouraging that and embedding that piece in me.
Speaker 2: She embedded some other stuff too that wasn't always sustainably useful.
Speaker 2: But in answer to that question, that's Mom's work. So
Speaker 2: thank you. Rest in peace, Anita, Lorraine Thurston, and whatever
Speaker 2: you're perceiving there, Elizabeth is a piece of her shining through.
Speaker 1: I just want to acknowledge that a lot of what
Speaker 1: we inherited from our parents was really good and beautiful
Speaker 1: and useful. So much of our coding works. It's just
Speaker 1: these twelve glitchy things that are in our way. But
Speaker 1: all of us got good stuff too.
Speaker 2: Thank you for that.
Speaker 5: You know.
Speaker 2: The way you describe these styles is I think healthily
Speaker 2: judgment neutral. Right, you talk about finding antidotes, not destroying, erasing, shaming.
Speaker 2: These are not like diseases to be eradicated. They are
Speaker 2: pieces to be integrated, not being possessed by, but possessing.
Speaker 2: And so if we can own those parts, then we
Speaker 2: can own our full selves. And I always skip to
Speaker 2: the macro metaphor with a society, a city, a nation,
Speaker 2: a species, and it's like, let's own the glitches. You know,
Speaker 2: they are features, not bugs, and they give us an
Speaker 2: opportunity to walk a different and better path. They give
Speaker 2: us an opportunity to learn, They give us an oh
Speaker 2: yay me I get a chance to recode myself. I
Speaker 2: get a chance to refound myself. I get a chance
Speaker 2: to reconstitute you know, myself and a nation at the
Speaker 2: same time. All right, last up, we've got Janine the
Speaker 2: novig one of our most frequent contributors.
Speaker 8: Thank you, Philadelphia. Here's my question. It comes from my
Speaker 8: location as both a parent and a daughter. This has
Speaker 8: been so resonant for me in this way. I think
Speaker 8: other people too. I'm looking at Aaron and other folks
Speaker 8: in the chat where we were kind of resonating about
Speaker 8: how we raise our kids and then how do we
Speaker 8: raise up the little us that was hurt? So my
Speaker 8: question is, like in that silver back example, right, we're
Speaker 8: all very seduced into being the silver back, Like we
Speaker 8: all have a version of a scenario where being the
Speaker 8: silver back is adaptive. It's safe, it has worked for
Speaker 8: in my case, forty some odd years. It satisfies my ego,
Speaker 8: it matches the world around as opposed to being soft.
Speaker 8: You know. So I'm in this work all the time,
Speaker 8: and I'm wondering if you have daily practices for interrupting
Speaker 8: that seduction to be the silver back of you know,
Speaker 8: your own life.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much, Janine, and that question really helps
Speaker 1: me clarify that to me, it's not that the alternative
Speaker 1: our silverback or soft that's still that old paradigm of dominance.
Speaker 1: But to me, standing for love is very firm, very firm.
Speaker 1: Do not touch that stove because I love you. I
Speaker 1: love you. It's different. So it's beautiful that you're firm
Speaker 1: with your children. They need that. Where's it coming from
Speaker 1: If it's coming from love?
Speaker 3: Yeay.
Speaker 2: I want to formally thank you again Sam for being
Speaker 2: a part of this with us. Welcome to how to
Speaker 2: citizen community, and thank you for showing us how to
Speaker 2: citizen within so that we can citizen better out there.
Speaker 1: Thank you. I have truly loved being here. I've been
Speaker 1: listening to your podcast from the beginning and it is
Speaker 1: an honor in my life to be your dear friend
Speaker 1: and to learn from you. You are quite a force
Speaker 1: of love and goodness in this world.
Speaker 2: In the face of all this work we've collectively got
Speaker 2: to do, it's easy to feel like the last thing
Speaker 2: we have time for is ourselves. But I want us
Speaker 2: to really take in what Sam said. It's a radical
Speaker 2: act of citizen ing to change our story, to change
Speaker 2: the narrative that we're living within, and our relationship to
Speaker 2: ourselves and others in the world. She reminds us. She
Speaker 2: reminds me these issues, especially the current culture, the things
Speaker 2: that we don't like about the way the world works,
Speaker 2: they all came from us too. We are at the
Speaker 2: end of our fourth season and I'm so glad that
Speaker 2: Sam helped us close it out. After this interview, we
Speaker 2: let Sam drop off the zoom and I stayed on
Speaker 2: to have a conversation with a few of the live
Speaker 2: audience members, and I got a question that felt heavy.
Speaker 2: Aaron mass from Delaware asked, what direction do you see
Speaker 2: the country headed in? Do you have hope for our future,
Speaker 2: for my kid's future. Whoo, Aaron put his kids on me.
Speaker 2: All that was a lot. That was a lot, And
Speaker 2: I want to share with you a version of what
Speaker 2: I shared with Arin. I see the United States of
Speaker 2: America getting harder to live in. You can sense it
Speaker 2: in the weather, and that's not a metaphor literally the weather.
Speaker 2: You see it on the ground in our behavior. There's
Speaker 2: something really sad about a nation that requires this many firearms.
Speaker 2: It's an explicit indicator of the lack of inter being
Speaker 2: the lack of trust that we're all building walled cities
Speaker 2: around our two car garages and trying to recreate entire
Speaker 2: societies within that as opposed to joining and participating in
Speaker 2: the societies were already a part of. And so what
Speaker 2: I'm observing is this large slide in that direction, and
Speaker 2: it feels like it's picking up. I don't think the
Speaker 2: climate migrants knocking on our southern border are inspiring evolved
Speaker 2: levels of political response from our federal or many of
Speaker 2: our state governments. I don't think that the human beings
Speaker 2: who are recognizing the inter being within themselves in terms
Speaker 2: of gender identity and giving a voice and new names
Speaker 2: to that, I don't think they're being met with the
Speaker 2: most mature, evolved, healed response from the prevailing establishment of
Speaker 2: rule makers and gatekeepers. And I don't think most of
Speaker 2: us are afforded enough time, space and security to truly
Speaker 2: meet this moment we find ourselves in. So yeah, I
Speaker 2: think it's gonna get harder, it's gonna get hurt, and
Speaker 2: I have great hopes for us and for our children
Speaker 2: because this culture's unsustainability is so readily obvious to so
Speaker 2: many of us, Because our ability to indulge in and
Speaker 2: digest the lie that more and more and more and
Speaker 2: mine and mine and mine will get me everything I
Speaker 2: need is on full display to be a lie. And
Speaker 2: I think that underneath all that froth and that noise,
Speaker 2: there's this stillness, there's this deeper truth. There's people like
Speaker 2: Sam and Adrian, Marie Brown and Ruhab Benjamin and John
Speaker 2: Alexander and Claudia Holitz and Steve Kerr and Priya Park
Speaker 2: for all our guests, and they're all coming from different experiences,
Speaker 2: saying essentially the same things, trying to take us to
Speaker 2: this same place, a place of completeness, of peace, of belonging,
Speaker 2: of membership, of citizen ing. And I'm willing to keep
Speaker 2: hoping and fighting for that place for them, that journey
Speaker 2: to that place, no matter how hard it is to
Speaker 2: keep envisioning it. What's keeping me citizening is holding both
Speaker 2: these feelings. I'm exhausted and I'm excited. I'm pessimistic and optimistic.
Speaker 2: I mourn what we've lost and celebrate what we can
Speaker 2: still create. And we can still create a lot of
Speaker 2: good as long as there's enough of us working towards
Speaker 2: creating a culture based in love. One where we try
Speaker 2: to live together better. Then I'm in for more ways
Speaker 2: to connect to doctor Sam's work. Head to her website
Speaker 2: Doctor Samraider dot com. There you're going to find a
Speaker 2: free quiz to discover your coping styles, as well as
Speaker 2: ways to access the forthcoming source codebook through her Return
Speaker 2: to Love membership program. As always, check the show notes
Speaker 2: for links to all this as well as the books
Speaker 2: referenced in this episode. If you take any of these actions,
Speaker 2: please brag about it online and use the hashtag how
Speaker 2: to Citizen. Also tag our Instagram how to Citizen. I
Speaker 2: am always online and I really do see your messages,
Speaker 2: so send them. You can also visit our website howdocitizen
Speaker 2: dot com, which has all of our shows, full transcripts, actions,
Speaker 2: and more. And I want to thank you one last
Speaker 2: time for joining us this season. Please stay connected. Follow
Speaker 2: how to Citizen on Instagram, Visit howtocitizen dot com to
Speaker 2: join our email list, explore all of our episodes, and
Speaker 2: engage with our massive library of actions that you can
Speaker 2: take together. Let's keep citizen it. I look forward to
Speaker 2: seeing you again. How to Citizen with Baritunday is a
Speaker 2: production of iHeartRadio Podcasts and Row Home Productions. Our executive
Speaker 2: producers are me Baritunde Thurston and Elizabeth Stewart. Our lead
Speaker 2: producer is Ali Graham, Our associate producer is Donya abdel Hamid.
Speaker 2: Alex Lewis is our managing producer, and John Myers is
Speaker 2: our executive editor. Our mixed engineer is Justin Berger. Original
Speaker 2: music by Andrew Eapen with additional music by Blue Dot
Speaker 2: Sessions and our audience Engagement Fellows are Jasmine Lewis and
Speaker 2: Gabby Rodriguez. Special thanks to Joelle Smith from iHeartRadio and
Speaker 2: Leila Bina Row Home Productions