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