Speaker 1: If I don't see myself as a psychologist, as adult
Speaker 1: who's tough, but if I see myself in my more
Speaker 1: wounded form and vulnerable form, then I can have more compassion.
Speaker 2: Welcome to the one you feed Throughout time, great thinkers
Speaker 2: have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes
Speaker 2: like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think,
Speaker 2: ring true, and yet for many of us, our thoughts
Speaker 2: don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy,
Speaker 2: or fear. We see what we don't have instead of
Speaker 2: what we do. We think things that hold us back
Speaker 2: and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking.
Speaker 2: Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort
Speaker 2: to make a life worth living. This podcast is about
Speaker 2: how other people keep themselves moving in the right direct,
Speaker 2: how they feed their good wolf.
Speaker 3: Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is
Speaker 3: doctor Roddalie Weininger. She's a clinical psychologist, psychotherapist, and meditation teacher.
Speaker 3: She also leads meditation groups in Santa Barbara and retreats globally.
Speaker 3: Roddalley is the author of two books, including the one
Speaker 3: discussed here Heart Medicine, How to Stop Painful Patterns and
Speaker 3: Find peace and Freedom.
Speaker 4: Hi Radalley, Welcome to the show.
Speaker 1: Thank you, Thank you so much for inviting me.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I'm really excited to have you on. We're going
Speaker 4: to be discussing your book, which is called Heart Medicine,
Speaker 4: How to Stop Painful Patterns and find peace and freedom
Speaker 4: at Last. But before we do that, we'll start, like
Speaker 4: we always do, with the parable. In the parable, there
Speaker 4: is a grandparent who's talking with their grandchild and they say,
Speaker 4: in life, there are two wolves inside of us that
Speaker 4: are always a battle. One is a good wolf, which
Speaker 4: represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the
Speaker 4: other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed
Speaker 4: and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops and thinks
Speaker 4: about it for a second and looks up at their
Speaker 4: grandparents says, well, which one wins, and the grandparent says,
Speaker 4: the one you feed. So I'd like to start off
Speaker 4: by asking you what that parable means to you in
Speaker 4: your life and in the work that you do.
Speaker 1: Thank you for bringing this parable. That's actually one of
Speaker 1: my favorites and I use it quite a bit in
Speaker 1: teaching because it's so apropos to always where we are,
Speaker 1: but also where we are today, and it means that
Speaker 1: we have a choice. As I say in my book Lurps,
Speaker 1: we all have long standing, recurrent painful patterns. We all
Speaker 1: meet triggers. The world isn't easy, and we have a
Speaker 1: bit of a choice on how to respond. And we
Speaker 1: can respond with kindness and patience and wisdom and compassion,
Speaker 1: or we can react in an angry way, or selfage way,
Speaker 1: or greedy way, or impatient way, or just putting our
Speaker 1: heads in the sand. So I think that is what
Speaker 1: it means. You know, It's like we do have actually
Speaker 1: some power to see where our life goes. I know,
Speaker 1: Jack Cornfield said once he paraphrased an old Chinese proverb
Speaker 1: that says intention leads to behavior. Behaviors create habits. Habits
Speaker 1: have something to do with our personality, and our personality
Speaker 1: has something to do with our destiny in a way
Speaker 1: a similar way to talk to the two wolves.
Speaker 3: Yeah, totally.
Speaker 4: So the heart of your book talks about these, as
Speaker 4: you said, Lurps, long standing recurrent painful patterns of hurt,
Speaker 4: which I'm pretty sure anyone you feed listener. Here's that
Speaker 4: and goes, oh yeah, okay, all right, I've got those,
Speaker 4: but let's explore them a little bit more. What are
Speaker 4: these things, these lurps?
Speaker 1: Well, I think these are knots in our psyche, old
Speaker 1: wounds that are basically becoming calloused, and they become these
Speaker 1: knots of behaviors, of memories, of thoughts, of feelings, of
Speaker 1: body symptoms, sometimes of events. And they have been talked
Speaker 1: about in the West by Jung and by Freud as complexies,
Speaker 1: and in the East they are called samskaras or in
Speaker 1: Pali sankaras. And the only difference is that in the
Speaker 1: West they are you hugely seen as originating in our childhood,
Speaker 1: and in the East they are seen as passing through lifetimes.
Speaker 1: And you know, it doesn't really matter. It just matters.
Speaker 1: We know that they're old. You know they're old, and
Speaker 1: they are reoccurring. And this thing about lurps is that
Speaker 1: they are like patterns of relating their dynamics that we occur.
Speaker 1: And so we often come to a place where we say,
Speaker 1: why this again, you know, doesn't this feel similar even
Speaker 1: though these are completely different people or completely different circumstances.
Speaker 1: And then at times we feel like sitting ducks to
Speaker 1: our own old, painful patterns.
Speaker 4: You say, at the heart of a lerp is a
Speaker 4: term that's used a lot more in modern day use,
Speaker 4: which is that there's a trauma at the heart of
Speaker 4: a lot of these, whether we're talking about a capital
Speaker 4: to your lowercase T trauma, that that's where these originate.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's right. And when you say lower case tea
Speaker 1: or uppercase T, I imagine that you mean was uppercase
Speaker 1: tea something huge happening, like a war or an earthquake,
Speaker 1: or our house burns down, or somebody dies, or we
Speaker 1: get abused really badly, And lower case T are more
Speaker 1: these microtraumas, let's say, an atmosphere in the house, maybe
Speaker 1: a way we weren't neglected, kind of in a subtle way,
Speaker 1: you know, like I've fed and closed you. But maybe
Speaker 1: we never got the right attention, or we were pushed
Speaker 1: in a certain way, or there was huge competition with
Speaker 1: our siblings, or we felt really misunderstood. So these are
Speaker 1: probably more the lower case teas.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's precisely what I mean.
Speaker 5: Yep.
Speaker 4: So one of the things I loved in the book
Speaker 4: was first how much you shared your own experience with
Speaker 4: these and then secondly, how clear you made it that
Speaker 4: this is not a quick fix situation, right, Like, these
Speaker 4: things don't go away quickly. You talk about how Native
Speaker 4: Americans knew for thousands of years that forests and grasslands,
Speaker 4: you know, had to be tended over a long period
Speaker 4: of time, and you say, with this work, there's no shortcuts,
Speaker 4: only diligent, careful tending. We've got to work with these
Speaker 4: things thoroughly, persistently, and with loving care. And I think
Speaker 4: that's so important because I think we get very frustrated
Speaker 4: on our healing journey when it doesn't happen quickly.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's right, And I think unfortunately our society primes
Speaker 1: us for that. We are kind of in this consumer
Speaker 1: society where we want quick fixes, quick pleasures, and I
Speaker 1: think especially pharmacology leads us in that direction. Take this
Speaker 1: pill and that pill and this intervention and you're just fine.
Speaker 1: And so I think our frustration, tolerance, or our ability
Speaker 1: to suffer with ourselves has to be built up again,
Speaker 1: you know, to see ourselves with compassion and understanding and patience.
Speaker 4: Looking at your own life, where do you think your
Speaker 4: lurps came from?
Speaker 3: Or some of them?
Speaker 4: I mean I suppose we all could probably list a
Speaker 4: handful of them.
Speaker 1: But yeah, definitely, and I think that's how it started.
Speaker 1: My mentor is Jack Cornfield for over twenty years. He's
Speaker 1: a psychologist and meditation teacher. So we talked a lot
Speaker 1: about it. He really encouraged me to work with this
Speaker 1: and all this and write about it. And my lerbs
Speaker 1: came from my mom. I grew up in post war
Speaker 1: Germany and my mother had me out of wedlock. She
Speaker 1: was quite traumatized by the war herself, where she was
Speaker 1: a young medical student medic on the East Front, and
Speaker 1: her fiance died and came from a Catholic family, and
Speaker 1: so she had a baby with another doctor, which was
Speaker 1: in Bavaria nineteen fifty seven. Very shameful, you know, it
Speaker 1: was kind of unheard of, and so she hit me
Speaker 1: in an orphanage for two years and then presented me
Speaker 1: to her family as adopted, which I guess was a
Speaker 1: little bit more face saving than having a child without
Speaker 1: being married. And then she was always very busy, you know,
Speaker 1: as a doctor. I was having, luckily a very nice
Speaker 1: nanny from when it was two to four. But then
Speaker 1: we moved to my aunt's house, so I think the
Speaker 1: first one was abandonment and maybe a sense of reject
Speaker 1: So I think that I noticed is always a really
Speaker 1: tender point for me when I feel excluded, and I
Speaker 1: think that was even more than in the family, because
Speaker 1: they treated me a little strange. You know, they didn't
Speaker 1: quite know where I was coming from, and there were
Speaker 1: all these stories and wasn't quite clear, and there was
Speaker 1: a lot of shame and embarrassment. So that sense has
Speaker 1: stayed with me, you know, when I don't feel quite
Speaker 1: accepted or what maybe others can let roll off their
Speaker 1: backs more easily, was just for me really a trigger
Speaker 1: and brought up in a big inner reaction. Yeah.
Speaker 4: I can only imagine too, what the collective society in
Speaker 4: post war Germany was like. Yeah, post war America was like, yay, right,
Speaker 4: it's a period of prosperity and everybody's happy, and we
Speaker 4: think of it. Here is this grand time in America.
Speaker 4: But I'm sure your experience there is so radically different.
Speaker 4: I mean, Germany was just destroyed.
Speaker 1: Right, and deeply ashamed and guilty and in denial. And
Speaker 1: even though my grandfather, he was a historian, and he
Speaker 1: himself was prosecuted by the Nazis for speaking up, but
Speaker 1: there was still you know, the whole They were refugees
Speaker 1: from what is Poland now, and so they had come
Speaker 1: with supposedly three pairs of clothes and an old pot,
Speaker 1: and my grandparents were in this refugee resettlement camp for
Speaker 1: a few years. So yeah, there was lots of shame
Speaker 1: and poverty and then having on top of all a
Speaker 1: kid born out of wedlock. For refugees, you know, feel
Speaker 1: very much for refugees nowadays. You know, when I hear
Speaker 1: about how many Ukrainians are resettled and South and Middle
Speaker 1: Americans losing their homes, you know, it's like I just
Speaker 1: can only imagine what that must feel like, and how
Speaker 1: many lurps those poor kids will have.
Speaker 4: It's a little overwhelming sometimes as we get to know
Speaker 4: more about trauma and how it affects people, and then
Speaker 4: you see so much of it in the world, and
Speaker 4: we know how it just carries on and it gets
Speaker 4: passed on, and it's certainly in my less hopeful moments,
Speaker 4: I feel very deeply overwhelmed by it, feeling like we're
Speaker 4: caught in this cycle.
Speaker 1: And I think our lurbs, our longstanding painful patterns from
Speaker 1: our childhood get we brought up by new difficult environments.
Speaker 1: You know, war definitely brings up something for me and
Speaker 1: maybe for other families too. So I think this is
Speaker 1: a highly triggering outside environment for all of us. And
Speaker 1: depending on what we experienced when we were little or
Speaker 1: maybe in past lives, whoever knows, things are getting inflame again.
Speaker 1: And yeah, there is a question how to respond, and
Speaker 1: I think the response has to be both psychological and spiritual.
Speaker 4: Yeah, you know two of your main mentors. I've had
Speaker 4: the great privilege of speaking with both of them in
Speaker 4: the last few months for this show, Jack Cornfield and
Speaker 4: Joanna Macy. And you know, oh yeah, Joanna Macy's work
Speaker 4: is you know, very focused on being able to feel
Speaker 4: the heartbreak of the world and yet remain resilient in
Speaker 4: face of that. Let's turn back to lurps a little bit,
Speaker 4: and I want to talk about I just sort of
Speaker 4: cast the dark side of lerps there. But you say
Speaker 4: that they also have the potential to help us find
Speaker 4: meaning and amazingly, to discover the very purpose of our lives.
Speaker 4: Say a little bit more about how meaning and purpose
Speaker 4: are embedded in these things.
Speaker 1: Yes, you know, the first noble truth by the Buddha
Speaker 1: is the truth of suffering, and that also can bring awareness.
Speaker 1: You know, it's kind of a bit of a wake
Speaker 1: up call. Like I had to come to a place
Speaker 1: where I had in my early twenties stomach also in
Speaker 1: two car accidents. Actually I was two months in the hospital,
Speaker 1: and that led me to go to Sri Lanka. I
Speaker 1: went with my boyfriend nineteen eighty to Sri Lanka and
Speaker 1: ended up in a monastery there. And looking back, in
Speaker 1: some ways, I'm grateful that I in a way hit
Speaker 1: the wall or let's say, my windshield, because I wouldn't
Speaker 1: have stopped and really had to reevaluate my life, feel
Speaker 1: deeply what wasn't right, and actually look for a meaning
Speaker 1: and purpose. So in some ways this has become a doorway,
Speaker 1: you know, And I think Palma Children says it's so
Speaker 1: beautifully when pain is the doorway, and I think it's
Speaker 1: too hard to see that in the moment. You know,
Speaker 1: if something terrible happens to somebody, you can't just say, see,
Speaker 1: this is a doorway. You know, it would feel misunderstood
Speaker 1: or you know, it feels like a narcissistic wounding as
Speaker 1: we call it in psychotherapy. But maybe later in hindsight,
Speaker 1: we say, you know, in a way, this was a
Speaker 1: wake up call and that gave me a chance to
Speaker 1: reorient my life.
Speaker 4: You know, I basically burnt my life to the ground
Speaker 4: at the age of twenty four with heroin addiction, and
Speaker 4: I'm grateful for that because I was forced at that age.
Speaker 4: People are often like, well, how did you get into
Speaker 4: being interested in all this stuff? And I'm like, well,
Speaker 4: I kind of I was forced into it in a
Speaker 4: really strong way, And I feel grateful in many ways
Speaker 4: for me that it was that bad that quick. It's
Speaker 4: giving me more of my adult life to work on
Speaker 4: healing exactly.
Speaker 1: You know, I have us twenty two. Yeah, so in
Speaker 1: some ways I'm glad it happened early.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 4: You know, when you talk about that doorway, there's that
Speaker 4: old saying when one door closes, another door opens, which
Speaker 4: I think speaks to kind of what we're talking about,
Speaker 4: like that, you know, we can walk through these things.
Speaker 4: But the thing about that little saying, which it's a
Speaker 4: nice little saying and it's true, but is that, you know,
Speaker 4: often nobody talks about what seems to me to be
Speaker 4: a long, dark hallway, like one door closes, doesn't mean
Speaker 4: the other door opens right up. Very often you're like, well,
Speaker 4: now I'm in the dark and you're and we're there
Speaker 4: for a while and we have to kind of just
Speaker 4: keep walking, and then another door opens and we go, oh,
Speaker 4: I see all right, you know this makes sense now.
Speaker 4: But that dark hallway is part of the journey. I
Speaker 4: want to hit one other piece of lurps here before
Speaker 4: we move into healing them, and I want to talk
Speaker 4: about why do we obsess and repeat?
Speaker 1: Right?
Speaker 4: There is a part of lurps that is this obsessive rumination,
Speaker 4: chewing over the same We just going through the same
Speaker 4: thing again and again. What's happening there?
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, Freud called it repetition compulsion. I think
Speaker 1: there are different opinions why that is. One is just
Speaker 1: becoming a habit basically to repeat. If you look at
Speaker 1: it more positively, and I'm also drawn to see it
Speaker 1: more positively, it's like we want to jump over the hurdle,
Speaker 1: you know, we repeat it because there must be a
Speaker 1: way through. You know, there must be a way through.
Speaker 1: There must be a way through. So it's maybe both
Speaker 1: you know, there's a habitual piece and then there must
Speaker 1: be a way through or over this. But it's quite
Speaker 1: heartbreaking at times, how we do things again and again
Speaker 1: and again and get stuck in such a rut. And
Speaker 1: sometimes the pain can become actually this another sometimes these
Speaker 1: Freudians have such good words. It can become a pain, mama.
Speaker 1: You know, the pain becomes the familiar thing. And you know,
Speaker 1: if we don't know peace, then pain is maybe the
Speaker 1: only thing we have.
Speaker 4: Yeah, So as we turn towards healing here you say
Speaker 4: that awareness practice is fundamental to working with all forms
Speaker 4: of these lurps. Say more about why awareness is so
Speaker 4: fundamental and what you mean by awareness in that context.
Speaker 1: Well, what I mean by awareness is that we look
Speaker 1: back at ourselves and we say, ah, that's what's going on.
Speaker 1: Rather than just distracting ourselves or putting our head in
Speaker 1: the sand or turning to addiction or TV or our
Speaker 1: devices or whatever, we have to not be there. And
Speaker 1: I think that's basically what awareness is. There is self awareness,
Speaker 1: you know, being aware of what's going on in ourselves.
Speaker 1: There's metacognitive awareness, which is really noticing the processes in
Speaker 1: our heart and mind, and then there's awareness of our environment.
Speaker 1: Then there is the moment by moment non judgmental attention
Speaker 1: that John coverts In talks about. And then I see
Speaker 1: sometimes awareness as like the Tibetans do, as a field quality,
Speaker 1: as something that is already there, that is always here.
Speaker 1: The field quality of awareness we can tap into the
Speaker 1: groundless ground of being. In the last maybe five ten years,
Speaker 1: I find that actually more important because it gives us
Speaker 1: a wider perspective.
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Speaker 4: to join today. What you're pointing at there is this
Speaker 4: idea of there being two types of healing, and I'm
Speaker 4: putting words on things that don't quite fit, but we'll
Speaker 4: run with it. And the one would be psychological healing, right,
Speaker 4: it's going back and looking at what happened to us specifically,
Speaker 4: understanding what that causes us to do, processing that, unwinding it.
Speaker 4: But it's very personal, it's very specific to me and
Speaker 4: my thing. And then there's another type of healing, spiritual healing.
Speaker 4: That makes me think of something that Marvin Gay talked about,
Speaker 4: which was a different type of healing, but that is
Speaker 4: not what the show is about. That may not be
Speaker 4: a reference you get, but some of the listeners will anyway.
Speaker 4: But spiritual healing and what you're talking about there is
Speaker 4: connecting to something that is bigger than us, that is
Speaker 4: non personal in a sense. It's not about me and
Speaker 4: my stories. And you just mentioned that over the last
Speaker 4: five years or so for you, that that second part
Speaker 4: has become more and more important. And I'm curious if
Speaker 4: you have an opinion on whether the psychological healing that
Speaker 4: you did before that made that spiritual healing easier to do.
Speaker 4: Did it have to happen in a certain order, did
Speaker 4: you pursue them, I think to some degree in parallel.
Speaker 4: What are your thoughts on how those two work together.
Speaker 1: I'm thinking about that a lot, because you know, I'm
Speaker 1: a trained as a psychologist, and actually in my early twenties,
Speaker 1: with these car accidents, I started psychotherapy, which was unusual
Speaker 1: in Germany in nineteen eighty or seventy nine, and I
Speaker 1: also started meditation, which also was very unusual there. My
Speaker 1: relative thought I had entered a cult, you know, they
Speaker 1: thought it was basically dangerous, And I think they go
Speaker 1: hand in hand. For a long time. It was probably
Speaker 1: until the nineties. I felt there were like two camps
Speaker 1: when I started my PhD, you know, after I got
Speaker 1: my MD in Germany, I got my PhD in America.
Speaker 1: But my more psychoanalytics supervisors thought that my spiritual path
Speaker 1: and I always went to retreats all the time whenever
Speaker 1: I could, was basically an escape, you know, like they
Speaker 1: called it, like an oceanic merger or something strange, and
Speaker 1: I couldn't basically talk about it. While many of my
Speaker 1: early spiritual friends thought that psychology was a waste of time,
Speaker 1: you know, it should just be spiritual. And I was
Speaker 1: really Jack, who I met in eighty six, but maybe
Speaker 1: it was a bit later that he said that, you know,
Speaker 1: like that they actually fit together, and he gave me
Speaker 1: permission to bring those together for myself and in my work.
Speaker 1: But I always had the sense that they fit together.
Speaker 1: There was just no platform for that, you know, there
Speaker 1: was no conceptual framework for that. And I was trained
Speaker 1: as a therapist not to talk about spirituality, so whenever
Speaker 1: I did, I felt I had to not tell my
Speaker 1: supervisors or I had to kind of hide it. And
Speaker 1: it was actually Jack in the early two thousands who
Speaker 1: asked me, do you meditate with your clients? And I said, no,
Speaker 1: boundaries and transference, countertransference, this and that, and he said radly,
Speaker 1: get over it, and so he really gave me permission.
Speaker 1: And since then I have gotten big time over it.
Speaker 1: And you know, time has moved with me to a
Speaker 1: degree that now insurance companies pay for it. So it's
Speaker 1: really wild how times have changed. And I do think
Speaker 1: they so fit together. You know, I think our spiritual
Speaker 1: healing and it doesn't have to be religious, but spiritual
Speaker 1: in a sense that there is something bigger that holds
Speaker 1: us too, that has meaning and that is there. And
Speaker 1: I remember at one long retreat it was actually a
Speaker 1: solo retreat, but I had Jack over skype every few days,
Speaker 1: and I asked, Jack, you know it's the universe personal
Speaker 1: or impersonal? And he said hmm, and then he said
Speaker 1: I think it's both, and I said that's what I
Speaker 1: thought too. And it's the great mystery, you know, like
Speaker 1: the Native Americans call it the great mystery. We just
Speaker 1: can't wrap our mind around. It is certainly not a
Speaker 1: person or it's not untopomorphic, and I'm quite happy to see.
Speaker 1: I just can't wrap my mind around it, but I
Speaker 1: can feel it. What do you think?
Speaker 4: I think the answer to men questions is both. Yeah,
Speaker 4: you know, I'm kind of a both person with a
Speaker 4: lot of these things that seem like they are delineated.
Speaker 4: They're closer together than we often think. I've been thinking
Speaker 4: recently about different topic, but well, similar topic. We talk
Speaker 4: about thought and emotion, and we separate them, right, but
Speaker 4: I've started more and more to go. Well, we could
Speaker 4: talk about them as if they're separate in some way,
Speaker 4: and there's some ways we could point to them being separate,
Speaker 4: but they never seem to be without each other. They
Speaker 4: seem to co arise. So you know, are they more
Speaker 4: one thing than we think? There's certainly a deep interconnection
Speaker 4: and co arising between them.
Speaker 1: There is. And then was body too? Yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: body is also cool rising with emotions. Maybe the difference
Speaker 1: is thoughts, just in that pure form don't have so
Speaker 1: many physical residues, but emotions do. And you know we
Speaker 1: feel them in our bodies as a tightness in the
Speaker 1: chest or not in the stomach, or hot or cold
Speaker 1: or whatever it is. The core rising is just the
Speaker 1: wide world, and it's just how can we hold them?
Speaker 1: And I guess if we have this wider perspective, you know,
Speaker 1: if there is the sense of awareness also having a
Speaker 1: field quality, there's this spaciousness that's bigger and that holds
Speaker 1: us all in which we are all interdependent and co rising,
Speaker 1: like Johanna says. You know Joanna who actually was this
Speaker 1: morning at our meditation. Yeah, she's there many mornings, and
Speaker 1: so she says that everything is co rising and interdependent,
Speaker 1: and that interdependence then brings compassion.
Speaker 4: So let's move a little bit into your program of healing.
Speaker 4: You've got twelve steps of healing, and these are not
Speaker 4: to be confused with the twelve steps of say AA
Speaker 4: or a twelve step program. These are different twelve steps
Speaker 4: and we're not going to make our way through all
Speaker 4: twelve of them, but I thought we might pick a
Speaker 4: couple out, if that's okay.
Speaker 1: Sure.
Speaker 4: The first one is to recognize what your LRPP or
Speaker 4: your LURP is, and you have twelve different things that
Speaker 4: might be a clue to us. Can you just mention
Speaker 4: what a couple of those are.
Speaker 1: Yeah. The first one is that we feel it in
Speaker 1: our bodies. You know, something hits us or we feel winded,
Speaker 1: or suddenly our head hurts or you feel the tightness
Speaker 1: and our jaw a chest or hot or cold or
Speaker 1: something happens and it's like, oh wow, I don't feel white.
Speaker 1: And then often there is an emotion that's bigger than
Speaker 1: the situation would warranted or would be expected. You know,
Speaker 1: why does it spend me so out of shape? You know,
Speaker 1: somebody disinvited me from their book club? Why is that? Why? Exactly? Exactly?
Speaker 1: And then rumination. You talked about rumination. You know, our
Speaker 1: mind spins. We wake up at night between three and
Speaker 1: four and the mind just goes and can't stop. We
Speaker 1: can't fall back asleep or early in the morning, or
Speaker 1: maybe we feel a sense of you know, like post
Speaker 1: traumatic strust symptoms, like a sense of unreality, or maybe
Speaker 1: a bit of tunnel feeling or a bit of dissociation
Speaker 1: or something like that may happen, or a generalization. You know,
Speaker 1: we feel, oh wow, it was just the book club
Speaker 1: that rejected me, but now I feel the world is
Speaker 1: against me. You know, we generalize out from the book
Speaker 1: club to the world.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So these are a few of those.
Speaker 4: Yeah, one of them you mentioned and you sort of
Speaker 4: hit it. There is this narrowing awareness and that's probably
Speaker 4: the one for me, My mode of lurp coming up
Speaker 4: is shut down. It's just the power down. You know,
Speaker 4: my awareness just shrinks. So it's just like me sitting,
Speaker 4: you know, sort of immobilized. Luckily that rarely happens to
Speaker 4: that degree anymore, but I can remember many experiences where
Speaker 4: like it would happen. And that was the thing for me,
Speaker 4: was just this almost complete sort of shut.
Speaker 1: Down, shutdown, right, and it shuts itself down. You know,
Speaker 1: we don't even say okay, now I'm shutting down. It
Speaker 1: just happens, yes, yes, And that is so insidious.
Speaker 4: Now to that insidious nature of it, I often think
Speaker 4: about this is particularly poignant for me. Right now, I'm
Speaker 4: going to see my dad this weekend. My dad has
Speaker 4: Alzheimer's and he's declining quickly. And we never had a
Speaker 4: great relationship, and I would periodically throughout my adult life,
Speaker 4: I would be like, all right, I'm going to play
Speaker 4: golf today with my dad, and I'm going to like
Speaker 4: dive under the surface with him, right, I'm going to
Speaker 4: like make a deeper connection with him. And I would
Speaker 4: get in his presence and all of a sudden that
Speaker 4: desire would just vanish. Oh yeah, And so It wasn't
Speaker 4: even like I was consciously choosing like oh I'm afraid
Speaker 4: to do this, this feels too risky. It was like
Speaker 4: all that desire to do.
Speaker 1: It just gone yeah.
Speaker 4: And it was like you said, it's so insidious, because
Speaker 4: I thought, oh, I guess I don't really want it,
Speaker 4: and I was like, no, I don't.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 4: With some more reflection, I was like, oh, that's not
Speaker 4: actually what's happening here, right, just the situation is triggering
Speaker 4: a shutdown process that happens completely unconsciously.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it is. It's very unconscious, you know, And we
Speaker 1: have to be really patient with ourselves. And you know,
Speaker 1: besides mindfulness as the next step, you know, noticing our
Speaker 1: feelings and thoughts and body symptoms and being aware of them,
Speaker 1: they're self compassion because I think first when we see
Speaker 1: VC and sometimes it's too much. Oh I didn't want
Speaker 1: to see all of that, you know. So how shut
Speaker 1: down I am, or how bent out of shape I am,
Speaker 1: or how great my craving is or whatever, you know,
Speaker 1: so how rejected and shamed I feel, And so I
Speaker 1: think we need this. I call it a psycho spiritual
Speaker 1: container of mindfulness and compassion and patience with ourselves and
Speaker 1: really a lot of kindness.
Speaker 4: I'm wondering if you could say a little bit more
Speaker 4: about practicing self compassion, because I think it's something that
Speaker 4: more and more everybody is aware is probably a good
Speaker 4: idea and is really really difficult.
Speaker 1: It's difficult.
Speaker 4: You actually describe a situation in the book that happened
Speaker 4: early in the pandemic where you sort of spiraled into
Speaker 4: a lurp and you know you were finding it hard
Speaker 4: to give yourself self compassion. Can you talk about how
Speaker 4: you found your way through that?
Speaker 1: Ah with my ex husband? Yeah, yeah, So I felt
Speaker 1: really triggered because you know, we always, even though we
Speaker 1: get along really well, there's this thing about the kids,
Speaker 1: where do the kids live? And which actually I've here
Speaker 1: a lot of people can understand well and identify with.
Speaker 1: And then I felt just again overlooked and not heard
Speaker 1: and not recognized and kind of frustrated with myself that
Speaker 1: I couldn't get with it better. You know, why can't
Speaker 1: I just let it go? You know? And so noticing
Speaker 1: my own lurb, you know why this was hitting me
Speaker 1: so badly, and also his lurb, you know, he comes
Speaker 1: from a similarly wounded family to mine, and I think
Speaker 1: that's often with our partners. I think some smart psychologists said,
Speaker 1: we're meeting often people on a similar level of development
Speaker 1: or not development. So we meet others that are also
Speaker 1: having their lurbs. They are then our excess and we
Speaker 1: have to share our kids with them, and so it
Speaker 1: needs a lot of compassion to hold this, to find
Speaker 1: our ways through.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so I assume for you some of what's happening
Speaker 4: in that moment is you've got all these things happening,
Speaker 4: and as you said, there's a little bit of you know,
Speaker 4: why can't I let this go?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 4: Like right, I'm a psychologist, I'm writing a book, I'm
Speaker 4: a mindfulness teacher, like what's the matter with you? And
Speaker 4: I think anybody who's been working with these things for
Speaker 4: a while is going to have some flavor of that, right,
Speaker 4: some flavor of I know the answer here. I interviewed
Speaker 4: the poet David White yesterday and he had a line
Speaker 4: that just really hit me, and he said, heartbreak is
Speaker 4: when we're called to let go and can't. And I thought, oh,
Speaker 4: my goodness, like that just really landed for me.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that is good.
Speaker 4: Yeah, So you're in this place where you feel like
Speaker 4: I should be doing better, but I'm obviously not. So
Speaker 4: how do you find self compassion for yourself there?
Speaker 1: I think with experience, I think it becomes almost like
Speaker 1: a new pathway, a new habit. I think once we
Speaker 1: are able to have it once or twice or three times,
Speaker 1: it's more possible again to do that. And sometimes remembering
Speaker 1: the little kid I was, you know, the isolation and
Speaker 1: the not self pity but self empathy. And that also
Speaker 1: if I don't see myself as a psychologist, as adult
Speaker 1: who's tough, but if I see myself in my more
Speaker 1: wounded form and vulnerable form, then I can have more compassion.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and you have practices in the book for this.
Speaker 4: You've got a few that you use specifically for self compassion.
Speaker 4: And I wonder if you could share a little bit
Speaker 4: about one of the practices. There were three that sort
Speaker 4: of jumped out to me. There was recognizing ourselves practice,
Speaker 4: understanding ourself in practice, or the good enough parent practice.
Speaker 4: Pick one and tell us a little bit about what
Speaker 4: it is or how you do it.
Speaker 1: What was the second one you mentioned?
Speaker 4: The second one was recognizing ourselves practice.
Speaker 1: Right, so I think really allowing yourself to get into
Speaker 1: a laxed place, to allow yourself to feel your body,
Speaker 1: your breath, and especially to recognize in your body where
Speaker 1: you feel raw and where you feel vulnerable. You know,
Speaker 1: it's like maybe even put your hand on your heart
Speaker 1: and they found out this has actually a physiological effect.
Speaker 1: To do that, and then in your mind's eye, bring
Speaker 1: to mind this feeling that you might have of rejection
Speaker 1: or maybe of being left out or missing out or
Speaker 1: whatever it is, and to feel where is this Maybe
Speaker 1: it is in my heart going right through to my back,
Speaker 1: and stay with that felt sense, and then maybe having
Speaker 1: an image come up from a time when we were
Speaker 1: small where we felt that sense of heartache, maybe a rawness,
Speaker 1: a tightness in the heart, in the back all the
Speaker 1: way through where that was maybe a bit of nausea
Speaker 1: in the stomach, maybe a little bit of light headedness.
Speaker 1: And bring in this child, you know, that exile as
Speaker 1: they call it now, an internal family systems, you know,
Speaker 1: bring in the exile and give them your love, your attention,
Speaker 1: your kindness, and feel with them and maybe even feel
Speaker 1: what it felt like for them physically. You know, it's
Speaker 1: kind of unexiled, the exile. Make them your kin again,
Speaker 1: your internal kin, and really feel that in your body,
Speaker 1: and maybe there will be some compassion, maybe there will
Speaker 1: be some forgiveness. You know, sometimes we have to forgive
Speaker 1: ourselves for being in the wrong time, in the wrong place,
Speaker 1: or whatever happened, and then really staying in connection with
Speaker 1: the broth, breathing through it all and coming back to
Speaker 1: body and brath with self acceptance.
Speaker 4: You know, as I read your book and I look
Speaker 4: at the practices, there's a part of me having done
Speaker 4: four hundred these interviews where I look at them and
Speaker 4: I go, Okay, well, I've seen a lot of this before, right.
Speaker 4: I really think the way that you sort of combine
Speaker 4: the spiritual and the psychological is really well done. There
Speaker 4: really is within these practices instead of talking about the
Speaker 4: two being complementary, there actually is a commingling of them.
Speaker 4: The good enough parent practice being you know, sort of
Speaker 4: an example of that, or the understanding our suffering practice.
Speaker 4: There's mindfulness, there's awareness, and there's current moment awareness and mindfulness,
Speaker 4: and there's bringing some of the psychological things into that.
Speaker 4: And I think that container is interesting to use the
Speaker 4: word psycho spiritual container, which is it's one thing to
Speaker 4: sit in, say our therapist's office, and talk about a
Speaker 4: certain thing, and it's a different thing to do it
Speaker 4: when we're in a slightly different state of mind, one
Speaker 4: where we have relaxed the body, where we have dropped
Speaker 4: deeper into our awareness, which is what a lot of
Speaker 4: your practice is. They're calling us to do. They're sort
Speaker 4: of centering us, dropping us in, and then allowing us
Speaker 4: to try and process some of those things from that
Speaker 4: place exactly.
Speaker 1: And I think that's something I'm becoming more and more
Speaker 1: cognizant and aware of that this wider perspective is really
Speaker 1: helpful and the wider spiritual container, and I think some
Speaker 1: people are catching onto that, like Richard Schwartz from IFS,
Speaker 1: you know how the big self is really helpful, especially
Speaker 1: with personal woundings. I just saw that a few weeks
Speaker 1: ago and I thought, wow, he's coming to a similar
Speaker 1: place I didn't even know, you know. So I think
Speaker 1: now we have permission to bring the psychological and the
Speaker 1: spiritual together, and soon insurance companies will even pay for it,
Speaker 1: you know. You know. Oh, it's like time is moving on,
Speaker 1: probably with the urgency of the times. We need it.
Speaker 1: We need this strengthening of the holding container. Just the
Speaker 1: psychological is not enough. And I feel maybe what helped
Speaker 1: me is that I kind of intuitively knew that all
Speaker 1: along since nineteen eighty, but I felt I had to
Speaker 1: do it in secret because my spiritual teachers or my
Speaker 1: therapists didn't know, you know, and they were in different camps.
Speaker 1: And now we are becoming one camp, and which is
Speaker 1: so beautiful, and that is what our world needs. And
Speaker 1: to have this camp without card membership, you know, we
Speaker 1: don't have to be Christians or Jews or Muslims or mine.
Speaker 1: We can be, but maybe we can also be more
Speaker 1: than that, or we can be neither of it.
Speaker 4: Well, I certainly think we have way more options on
Speaker 4: the table for us, which is in many ways a
Speaker 4: very good thing, as you've described. And yet I'm also
Speaker 4: struck by looking at some of the practices in the
Speaker 4: book that you've got, and again these are awareness mindfulness practices,
Speaker 4: recognizing that that word practice is really important. That you're
Speaker 4: able to do some of these things because you have
Speaker 4: developed some mindfulness, some stability, you know. I think we
Speaker 4: have a tendency. I certainly have had one over the years.
Speaker 4: I think I've gotten better at it and I've learned,
Speaker 4: But it used to be like, pick up a book
Speaker 4: read it because I'm like, okay, oh, finally I've got
Speaker 4: something that's going to fix me. And I read the
Speaker 4: book and it says do this practice, and I half
Speaker 4: heartedly do it while I read the book, and then
Speaker 4: I go that didn't do anything, and I set it
Speaker 4: aside and I go, all right, what's next, you know,
Speaker 4: versus really realizing that this is deep work that, as
Speaker 4: you said and I quoted kind of very early on,
Speaker 4: is you know, we have to do it thoroughly and
Speaker 4: persistently and cannot be in a hurry.
Speaker 1: Yeah. And you know there is a do you know
Speaker 1: this quote by Jack Cornfield? The miraculous to happen is
Speaker 1: an accident, but practice makes us excident prone. Yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: I think practice makes us excellent prone.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And it kind of keeps a channel open not only
Speaker 1: to our own heart but also to the great heart
Speaker 1: of the world.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 4: So, what would you say to someone who is feeling
Speaker 4: like they've been working on this stuff for a while
Speaker 4: and they still feel like, you know, I get just
Speaker 4: all wrapped up in my lurps. I'm doing this stuff
Speaker 4: for thirty years and I still just feel like stuck.
Speaker 4: What words of wisdom would you have for people who
Speaker 4: are kind of in that place.
Speaker 1: Well, I would say, I know the feeling. Recently at
Speaker 1: a retreat, it happened to me, you know, I was
Speaker 1: at this four we could treat in spirit walk and
Speaker 1: I did actually a little sock chin thing with two
Speaker 1: other teachers and doing the four week would treat. And
Speaker 1: then when I came the other people I was doing
Speaker 1: that with, they were doing this together for a long time.
Speaker 1: They said, oh, we don't know if we want you
Speaker 1: in our group, and for to day I didn't hear
Speaker 1: anything from them, and it really lurked me, you know,
Speaker 1: because spirl Rock had been the place of working through
Speaker 1: urbs for me, and I thought, oh, here I am
Speaker 1: with my lurb. You know, it really helped to find
Speaker 1: out that my lurb was still well and alive, but
Speaker 1: that I noticed it. And then after two days they said,
Speaker 1: oh it's all fine, you know, we just do this together,
Speaker 1: and everything puffed away, you know, all the stress, and
Speaker 1: I actually thought, isn't this interesting? Usually I would have
Speaker 1: been chewing on my I lurk for probably two to
Speaker 1: three weeks, and now it was two days where it passed.
Speaker 1: You know, it just puffed away, so I would say
Speaker 1: it will still come up, but it will pass maybe
Speaker 1: a little quicker.
Speaker 4: Yeah. The thing I often think about is what would
Speaker 4: I be like had I not done so many of
Speaker 4: the things that I've done. So it's very easy to
Speaker 4: habituate to what my current state of mind is and
Speaker 4: be like, okay, well, you know, but then to look at, like,
Speaker 4: how far in some ways we've all come. And I
Speaker 4: think that's an important part of the journey, is to
Speaker 4: sometimes reflect and go, oh, geez, you know, I'm not
Speaker 4: free from suffering because you know what, I'm human, so
Speaker 4: of course I'm not going to be But you know,
Speaker 4: it's not like this work hasn't borne a lot of fruit.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's just not perfection because sometimes we get sold
Speaker 4: or we want you know, we all naturally want a
Speaker 4: pain free life, that is why.
Speaker 1: And in a way, marketing and advertisement pushes us to that,
Speaker 1: to not be terribly modest and you know, to kind
Speaker 1: of overstate ourselves and you know, so I think that's
Speaker 1: unfortunately part of even here in our psycho spiritual community,
Speaker 1: we are definitely not free from that totally, and there's
Speaker 1: a big challenge to our authenticity and our humility. You know,
Speaker 1: it's like, if you're too humble, you won't be anybody.
Speaker 1: But then we don't want to be anybody because there's
Speaker 1: no self. Well where do we go? Right, It's a
Speaker 1: tough one and to just again maybe be compassionate with
Speaker 1: our human condition. And we are always teetering between the
Speaker 1: personal and the universal reality. You know, we have to
Speaker 1: get our driver's license renewed, and also at times we
Speaker 1: are really at one with the universe. YEP.
Speaker 4: When I think of Jack Cornfield more than anything else,
Speaker 4: I think of the phrase that he's used so many times.
Speaker 4: It's not his phrase, but he's used it so many
Speaker 4: times that I associated with him is the ten thousand
Speaker 4: joys in the ten thousand sorrows, And that, for me
Speaker 4: is just one of the most grounding ideas for me.
Speaker 4: Whichever side of that I'm on, I go okay, yeah, normal,
Speaker 4: you know. And if I'm on the ten thousand sorrow side,
Speaker 4: I go, okay, that's normal, and you know, there's some
Speaker 4: joys coming around the corner, because you know, and if
Speaker 4: I'm on the joy side, I'm not surprised. Let's wrap
Speaker 4: up with sharing a little bit more about Step eleven,
Speaker 4: which is letting in the mystery. I know we've touched
Speaker 4: on it a little bit. It's always a great place
Speaker 4: to go. So I'll hand it over to you with
Speaker 4: no specific question there so much as talk about the
Speaker 4: role of letting in the mystery in this healing process.
Speaker 1: You know, it's really coming to the experiential place that
Speaker 1: the mystery is here, that it's more than a thought,
Speaker 1: it's more than a concept. And I think there are
Speaker 1: practices like the Tibetan pointing out practices that allow us
Speaker 1: to get to this place, or I think lock Kelly
Speaker 1: does it these days in a more accessible way. And
Speaker 1: actually that's kind of how I teach these days, because
Speaker 1: I think it's so important to experience physically and energetically
Speaker 1: the great interconnected beingness of us all, and to feel
Speaker 1: that awareness can sink from my prefrontal cortex into my heart,
Speaker 1: into life around me, and that inside and outside is
Speaker 1: actually not that different, and that they are interconnected, and
Speaker 1: that I can see even be mindful from that greater perspective.
Speaker 1: And it's quite interesting. It's no way like being in
Speaker 1: a flow state. You know, we can actually be very
Speaker 1: alive and very aware and very attentive from this place,
Speaker 1: it's not being spacy, it's actually being hyper aware yet
Speaker 1: relaxed at the same time and connected. And I find
Speaker 1: that is for me one aspect of the great mystery.
Speaker 1: And we can't connect it, however, we want through our heart.
Speaker 1: When we're really in our heart, we feel this complete openness.
Speaker 1: Love is probably the main entry point to the great mystery.
Speaker 1: But then, you know, if there are prayers we have
Speaker 1: from our childhood, from whatever religious upbringing we have, that
Speaker 1: is fine to bring them in. You know, often in
Speaker 1: the beginning of a practice mindfulness or effortless mindfulness practice,
Speaker 1: I start with a heart opening, not just because I
Speaker 1: think it's a good thing, but also because it comes
Speaker 1: our mind. It calms our whole system down. It's like
Speaker 1: a little child that is afraid, and when its mother
Speaker 1: holds it and comforts it, then it feels secure, and
Speaker 1: then the ruminating, busy mind calms down. Then our heart
Speaker 1: becomes like the doorway to the great mystery. And it
Speaker 1: actually was Henry Miller who had Epidorus in Greece say
Speaker 1: when my little heart beats in unison with the great
Speaker 1: heart of the world, the beautiful quote. And I think
Speaker 1: that's like to speak with Johanna Macy. That's when we
Speaker 1: can be in touch with the great mystery and come
Speaker 1: to engagement for our world. Because part of the great
Speaker 1: mystery is compassion, is love. And I think ram das
Speaker 1: one who was really telling us that, you know, it's
Speaker 1: like you swim in God, you know, you swim in love.
Speaker 1: And I think, was that love we can hold our alerbs?
Speaker 1: You know? Then, was that love we can be patient
Speaker 1: with our alerts? That love we have enough space.
Speaker 4: Well, I think that is an absolutely beautiful and perfect
Speaker 4: place to wrap up. So thank you so much for
Speaker 4: coming on the show and spending time with us. I
Speaker 4: really enjoyed the book. I think there's a lot of
Speaker 4: great practices. The practices are available. I believe if you
Speaker 4: get the book, you get linked to all the practices
Speaker 4: as guided meditations. Yeah, and we'll have a link in
Speaker 4: the show notes to where people can buy the book
Speaker 4: and also to your website and all that stuff.
Speaker 1: Yeah. And you know, you can even have the practices
Speaker 1: without the book. Maybe I'm not a good salesperson, but
Speaker 1: on my website you can find them, and you can
Speaker 1: find them on the Shambala website. And I teach every
Speaker 1: morning seven point thirty to eight and you just coming
Speaker 1: through Mindful Heartprograms dot org and it's free. I'm quite
Speaker 1: stubborn to not put a price on the meditations. We
Speaker 1: have a few other great teachers, So anytime join us.
Speaker 4: I assume that's Pacific time, seven thirty Pacific time.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's Pacific time. And Monday night seven fifteen and
Speaker 1: Monday mornings we have a wonderful meditation at ten o'clock
Speaker 1: in the morning. And actually a lot of Europeans are
Speaker 1: joining us to that one.
Speaker 4: Well, again, thank you so much.
Speaker 1: It was really a wonderful interview, and thank you so
Speaker 1: much for your wonderful presence.
Speaker 5: Thank you.
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