Confusion, Self-Compassion, Introspective Questioning - Episode 26

Awareness That Heals, Episode 26.

Nobody instinctively likes confusion, but if you look at it from a more contemplative place, you'll see that confusion arises when we have something deep that we don't know.

The Awareness That Heals podcast helps its listeners learn to develop the capacity to have a more healing response to emotions and situations rather than becoming stuck. Your host, Robert J. Strock, has practiced psychotherapy for more than 45 years. He wrote the book, "Awareness That Heals: Bringing Heart and Wisdom to Life's Challenges," to help develop self-caring and the capacity to respond in an effective way to life's challenges, especially at times when we are most prone to be critical or to withdraw. Together, we will explore how to become aware of our challenging feelings and at the same time, to find alternative ways to live a more fulfilling and inspiring life.

I'd like to welcome you again to Awareness That Heals, bringing heart and wisdom to life's challenges. As we've been talking about, the subtlety of self-rejection is so much that we can't be reminded enough that when we have our most serious rejecting feelings that are difficult for us, we really hate it in general. And when we hate it, that's what self-rejection is, or when we don't like it. And it's hard enough to stay aware of our difficult feelings, but our reactions to it, that's really subtle. And if we don't see that reaction, that inner hatred, we're either going to be contracted or lose our energy and be withdrawn. So the stakes are very, very high. The theme today will be to go deeper, subtler, and broader in ways that we're challenged and ways that we reject ourselves and how to move from this rejection towards self-compassion. We're winding down in this crucial area today as we finish up this moving from self-rejection towards self-compassion. First, I'd like to start off by introducing Dave, my closest friend for 50 years and partner at the Global Bridge.

Thank you for the introduction. I am happy to be here and continuing to be here. And let's dive in.

Ready to go. So one of the areas of self-rejection that is again, most, pardon the expression, deadly, is dealing with medical challenges. That when we are feeling sick, have a chronic illness, have noticed that we have a test that we have to take or that we should take that really is scary for us. And that fear oftentimes, we don't like that fear. And so we get avoidant of even going to the doctor or even thinking about it. Goes into our fleeting awareness and leaves us scared, makes us lose energy. And sometimes makes us more agitated. So it's a very good example, and gonna start off with one with something that happened in a men's group that I'm part of. And there was a man named Fred who was an avid golfer, and he had a prostate issue, major prostate issue, and had some kind of beams that pinpointed taking a large part of his prostate out. He was radiated, and that was in the background, not something that we had been talking about. And then suddenly he was talking about the fact that, damn, I don't know at all. I, I'm— I've been playing golf for 50 years, and I'm hitting the golf ball 40 yards shorter than I've ever hit in my life. I don't know what the fuck is going on. And he was really pissed off. So I started laughing, you know, in sort of a friendly type of laugh. And he said, what's so funny? And I said, do you really think that you having radiation for all that time and being as exhausted as you have been and losing 40 pounds as well, that the changing conditions of your body and what you've been through, not to even mention part of the psychology possibly, do you really think that that physicality hasn't led you to hitting the golf ball shorter? And the whole group laughed. I mean, it was hysterical, you know, that, Everybody glimpsed not only him, but also how we all might do that in a situation when something major changes in our life and we can't think as clearly, we can't do a sport as well, you know, we're more emotional, we're more withdrawn. And so what was very clear that Fred felt like a failure, inadequate. And he hated it. He hated that feeling, which led to a feeling of depression. When he was there on the golf course, he had anxiety because he was sure he was going to hit it short again. And he didn't have that voice that we've been talking about so much where it said, well, of course you're going to hit it shorter. Because you just went through hell for 6 months with being radiated and operated on and going through all that, not only stress but bodily changes and absorbing your body being weakened. So we all need to look closely when we're dealing with anything medical that we're inevitably going to have some type of fear response or being bummed out or feeling of falling or loss or emptiness. And if we don't feel the feelings, inevitably we're going to become either more depressed or we're going to become more agitated or both. And so if we trace them back, we can see God, why am I feeling so far from my heart? Why am I feeling so empty or depressive? And then you see, oh, I just went through a surgical procedure. Oh, I'm not hitting the golf ball as well. And then when you see that, the idea isn't to stay stuck with it, meaning one-dimensionally, but it's to be able to find a voice that's going to say to you, It's perfectly natural that this is happening, and in this situation, you're going to recover a lot through time as you get farther and farther away from the radiation. And be reassuring. And I'm so sorry you gave yourself such a hard time while you were there. This is the hardest thing any of us have to go through, and it's so important that you remember these words and if at all possible, the reassuring tone that allows you to feel safer, to feel more accepting, to feel more trusting, to feel more peaceful. And that's not to say that it gets an eraser and makes all these feelings go away. It just means you have a vacillation between feeling a loss and feeling and acceptance and certainly a tolerance. And maybe even once in a while, like happened to the group, you'd have some humor around it. You'd be able to laugh at how absurd it is that you have these expectations that even though I'm going through massive medical changes, I'm going to be the same person.

I'd like to add something into what you just said that that as people who have been looking, or excuse me, hearing these podcasts know, I've had some familial wife medical issues in the last 8 months that have been very significant. And I am, and I don't think this is true for everybody, but I think it's true for a lot of people, when people that I love that are very close to me are going through exactly what you described, I am the kind of person at least that identifies it almost like it's me. And what you described is— it's almost exactly— I can identify with what you're saying. And it was very hard for me to— and I'm glad you ended towards this point— to change the feelings. Forget about extinguishing, that was not on the table, but even change them with the awareness that, yes, this was, in my case, uh, fortunately going to get better with my wife, or, or things of that nature. It was, it was, it was still hard for me. Very hard.

Yeah. And I think even the idea which I mentioned, but what I mentioned was incomplete, of extinguishing the feelings, or even lessening the feelings, or even adding positive feelings may be way too grandiose. It may be that you just have these wisdom thoughts, as we've talked about in the past. They're not just thoughts in your head. They're thoughts to be revered. They're thoughts to be guiding you to your next thoughts. When you say, this would be difficult for anyone, of course this is natural. It's like, you may not be able to have the juice because you're still caught up or I might still be caught up in the fear. But the knack is really hearing clearly, saying clearly the perspective that's true and really balanced. Like, you know what, the odds of this being so-and-so are so-and-so. So even if you can't relax, know that I know you rationally could be much more relaxed at this point. And then you're satisfied that your wisdom is speaking while your feelings are in somewhat of a freakout. But what do you do as you sit with that is you keep repeating the wisdom. So you want to repeat it hundreds of times so you can get yourself more centered. And getting more centered in your wisdom doesn't mean the feelings are going to reliably change. Maybe they will, if it's not as serious, but if you're dealing with something serious like your wife and you're dealing with a very serious disease, then it's going to be more capturing of the emotions. But it's one of those times where we need to learn that our wisdom is more important than our feelings. And I'll say it again, because I know It's almost impossible to learn this because we're taught from a very young age, well, how you doing today? What do you feel? And what you feel is who you are. And as I've said at other times, terrible barometer for that being an evaluation of who you are. If you have your wisdom speaking to you, that's who you are more than your feelings. And when you look back, your wisdom isn't going to just give you frosting, isn't going to just give you reassurance when it doesn't deserve it. It's going to be objective. It's going to be a truth seeker. And so it's important to give the value to the greater one that's more accurate, truthful, observant, seeing things clearly. And it sounds simple, but when you're in this altered hypnotic state of anxiety or fear, you need to really teach yourself, I want to really speak out those words. That are giving the accurate perspective of how much risk I'm really in. And I want to face that. And I want to develop at least as much as possible empathic thinking. And that means you don't have to feel the thinking, but the empath itself is thinking that way is your wisdom. So a second example that really captures something that is really a danger for all of us happened when a friend of mine went to a large workshop with Stephen Levine. And Stephen Levine is, or was, a Buddhist teacher and especially a death and dying specialist. And I say that in very rare respect because, and His Buddhist teaching didn't come into play unless you were a Buddhist. If you needed to be an atheist, he was going to be an atheist with you. If you needed to be a Christian, he was going to be a Christian with you. He was the real deal and had the greatest expertise of anybody I've ever seen in dealing with death and dying. So a client went to Stephen and was listening in the group. And the group was talking about really feeling bad One member was talking about really feeling bad because they had cancer and they knew somehow that they caused it. And they knew it was their fault and they were trying to reconcile, what did I do that really caused my cancer? Was it when I was angry at so-and-so? Was it when I didn't express my anger to this other person? Giving themselves a really hard time. So Stephen asked the group, and this is something that individually I just can't help myself but do the same thing, but in this case it was a group of 1,000 people. Who believes we create your own reality? Who believes something like came out, which it had come out within the last year or two before, a book called The Secret? The Secret came out and it really expressed, yes, the secret is you can manifest whatever you want to manifest. If you want to manifest a Ferrari, if you really think about it enough, you'll manifest a Ferrari. And you can certainly manifest your health. And had this black and white picture of cause and effect and how much we could impact our own health. And Stephen said, we have to be so careful when we hear something this stupid. And I just loved it. I just laughed. You know, the part of me that is so angry at all these simplistic solutions was so happy to hear him say that. He said, listen, if you created your own death, So has everybody that's ever lived in history. You know, we're all bad, and therefore we die because we're bad. And it's the biggest bad rap you can have. And the people that are proposing these grandiose statements that we cause what happens to us completely are really dangerous to all of us when we're sick. And that impacts us, that general message, you know, something like so-and-so failed in his fight against cancer. Now, that person might have completely succeeded in my standards by facing it straight on, being able to talk about it to the degree they needed to to be healthy, being relatively compassionate with themselves of this is the most difficult thing I've ever gone through. I'm depressed, or I'm anxious, or maybe I have some faith, or whatever they— wherever— just tracking themselves wherever they are. And so we can see how when we feel this fear, or even worse, this guilt that we've failed, that, that feeling of inadequacy, that feeling of being depressed is that unconscious self-rejection. And we so badly need to give ourselves our wisdom and, and really go into the question of, would this be difficult for everyone? Do you know anyone that this would be easy for, facing themselves having lessened capacity, and maybe it's going to spread throughout their body? Is that really realistic? And we're really talking about inquiring of what question would I ask myself that would lead me to the wisdom that I need, which is what we'll be getting into in the next series of episodes, wisdom guidance itself. But what are the questions I need to ask myself to guide myself to find the thoughts that would support me. It's like, am I really making a big deal out of nothing? You know, would this— do I really deserve mercy? Do I deserve kindness? Do I see this as normal? And of course, the response is going to be in the affirmative to all those questions. And just starting to ask those questions is really what brings you out of it. And when I say out of it, I mean not completely out of it, but allows you to have a part of you that is still alive, is still centered, is still capable, at least some of the time, of interacting with people that are important to you, that, that might be in your family, they might be your closest friends. And it doesn't mean the feeling's going to go away. The feeling is part of reality, part of being human, and we all really need to, to ask ourselves those questions at this critical time that are designed to support us inquiring from the heart. So one of the other areas that we touched on in the last episode that is similar to illness because of the way we deal with it, is when we're really deeply confused. And it's vital. And the younger you are in listening to this, the more lucky you are, because it's a little easier to understand when you're older. That when we're aware that we're confused, that gives us a chance to not reject ourselves. Because if we look deeply at it, we'll see that confusion is there when we're asking ourselves a deeper question like, what do I need to do with my job situation? What do I need to do with my wife's— wife or husband situation? What do I need to do with my relationship to money? Now, if you stay just watching video games or you stay eating bonbons or you stay in a superficial state, you don't have to worry about confusion because you're not asking deep questions. So it's important to recognize when you're confused, hopefully there's a statement that goes, good for you, good for you that you're deep enough to be asking this deep question and recognize that oftentimes there's not going to be a quick fix. But what you want to, what we want to train ourselves to is that when we have confusion, that means we need to give it more attention because there's something important that we really innocently and sincerely don't know. And when that's there, we really want to make it an ally. And when we make it an ally, it helps reverse the chain of self-rejection. Because if we don't accept the confusion And we see, you know what, I'm not sure whether I should leave my wife or my husband. And then we avoid it. We go, you know, life goes on and we, we keep feeling depressed or empty or judgmental, and we're not really dealing with the underlying issue of the confusion. And it's scarier sometimes to deal with the confusion, or it's inconvenient. Or it's enlightening because sometimes we see, you know what, I want to leave, but I don't have enough money to leave. I don't want to be homeless. I don't want to be begging my parents and not sure whether they're going to say yes or not, or a friend. So I've got to figure out what are my best options. And this would be difficult for everyone. And that's the key thing. Nobody instinctively likes confusion. But if you look at it from a more contemplative place, you'll see that confusion arises when we have something deep that we don't know. So we actually want to be consciously as confused as possible, with reverence, with respect, and then really deal with the issues. And at the very least, we'll reach if we stay with it, a merciful conclusion of, I don't know still, this is really hard. Now, I deal with this almost every session I have with a client. I view it as if I don't have confusion in a session with a client, it's probably because I haven't gone deep enough or they haven't gone deep enough. So I'm looking for where's the confusion, and there's tremendous dignity in confusion. The problem is not the confusion itself. It's the rejection of it. It's the avoidance of it.

Just want to amplify that in my situations, and I'm remembering one specifically where I had a part of my life that was absorbed in a certain work that took— yeah, just absorbed So many hours of my day, my weeks, and my years, and confusion was there, but I hadn't identified the issue. I hadn't identified that was what was going on. It took me embarrassingly long to understand that was the root, that was what was going on. And it went and drifted into other parts of my life because I naturally, for me, wanted to understand. Well, for me, I wanted to understand. I won't say it was natural, but it was uncomfortable. What was this about so that I could get to it? And it was hard to identify.

And what was it?

It was recognizing for me that economically I could retire from that part of my life and free myself and get off, for me, what felt like a treadmill, a mouse running around a round treadmill, and that I could jump off of that and I could see what was in that gap, and that gap was frightening to me, and so I turned away from it.

Really glad you brought that up because that allows me to give a little bit of a hope, inspiration for the many people that are in that situation. The fact that you even were aware of feeling disturbed before you got to the confusion is more than most people do when they're in that situation where they've been lucky enough or fortunate enough or good enough to be able to be financially free, but they don't realize it. So they go on and on and it becomes an addiction, avoid it more and more and more, and it becomes a serious addiction. And it's a big part of where the world is screwed up because the wealthy want to become wealthier and wealthier and wealthier because they're too uncomfortable to face the uncomfortableness and then too unaware of the uncomfortableness to drop into the confusion and not dropping enough into confusion to really engage it. And so staying depressed or guilty with oftentimes rationalizations that, oh my God, well, COVID's here, so I have to protect myself and make sure I have extra protection for my kids and my family. And not seeing that by doing that, all the millions of people that have excess money, that are holding it to themselves and not taking care of the poor and not taking care of the world, are contributing to the problem in the world. And so the stakes are very high for our individual psychology, but they're also very high for our planet. And The Missing Conversation, the other podcast that I'm doing, that's really what the whole focus is. So for those of you that relate to this, please go to The Missing Conversation because it really is dealing with homelessness, regenerative agriculture, immigration reform, and something I call psychopolitics, and also psychoeconomics, which really is dealing with this kind of confusion and the importance that we all really dive deeply into it. So virtually all of us have areas we don't like, whether it's with confusion or with our health, and we usually limit this to our fleeting awareness and zip out. And so what we really want to train ourselves to is when we have this fleeting awareness, we want to try to access, as we've discussed in earlier podcasts, the intention to heal and the courage to find that intention to heal so we can stay with the underlying confusion or feelings of difficulty while we're sick. And when we do this, it's like a mini miracle every time it happens. And we need to recognize, because it doesn't feel good, we don't recognize it's a mini miracle. We don't realize it's a path. We don't realize oftentimes, most times for most of us, that it's paradoxical. The more we revere our confusion, the more we revere our fears of death or illness or loss of capacity, the more courageous a life we can live. And that's really subtle and requires a lot of humility and courage. To really be able to bring that home. So empowering our inquiry from the heart and really asking it at our times of greatest need, when we feel these primitive fears or these primitive confusions, is such a critical part of life and such a critical part of having a deeper life. So what my wish is for all of you is that you empower this kind of questioning from the heart, and it starts to lead you into your wisdom so you can see that your inquiry from the heart and your wisdom is really a more important part of life than your feelings. But it's only going to happen if you activate it. It's like having an idea in your mind of what you can do, but you've got to activate it when it counts most, when you're in the feelings. This is a very evolutionary step for any of us to take. And if we don't take it, it really pulls the plug on living an inspirational and fulfilling life. And when we do really take it on, it allows us to move from these areas of self-rejection toward self-compassion and wisdom. And my deepest prayer and wish, and the reason why this whole episode, From Self-Rejection Towards Self-Compassion, was spoken and written, was to empower us at the times of our greatest need to face the self-rejection with respect and dignity, even if we can't feel it, even if it's from our wisdom, and really be able to use this awareness to transform our lives when we most need it. I pray for all of us, including myself, because I have no illusion I'm beyond it. That I can stay with this when I'm most afraid, when I'm most anxious, when I'm most depressed, and I do this investigatory process and it leads me to my inquiry from my heart for my benefit and for the benefit of all human beings.

Thanks for listening to Awareness That Heals. Please click subscribe so you won't miss an episode. If you love the podcast, the The best way to help spread the word is to rate and review the show. This helps other listeners like you find this podcast. We're deeply grateful you're here and that we have found each other. We encourage you to download our introspective guides at awarenessthatheals.org. They will be helpful to you while listening to our podcast.