How To Support Our Emotional Health And Process Grief

Coming up on this episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy.

I actually think of grief as being comprised of at least four feelings. Sadness, helplessness, anger and disappointment.

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Episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy. Hi, this is Lauren Fein, one of the producers of the Doctor's Pharmacy podcast. Unresolved trauma and grief underlie most chronic health conditions. Yet many of us have been taught and socialized to gloss over our uncomfortable feelings. This can have detrimental consequences for both our emotional and physical health. In today's episode, we feature three conversations from the Doctor's Pharmacy about how to deal with our difficult emotions, which can often arise as grief. Dr. Hyman speaks with Dr. Joan Rosenberg about identifying disguised grief, with Susan David about why it doesn't always serve us to think positively, and with Tara Brach on engaging our bodies to radically accept and integrate our emotions.

Let's dive in. I think of disguised grief as the gap between what we kind of what we wanted, what we desired, what we dreamed of, and if you will, what really happened. What we wanted, you know, it's like there's this big gap.

Between our expectations and reality.

Right, right, exactly. And when I think about grief, I actually think of grief as being comprised of at least four feelings. So of the eight, there's sadness, helplessness, anger and disappointment. And we can experience them individually or we can experience them collectively. So I might feel helpless and disappointed, or I might feel angry and disappointed, all of its grief. And I think of there's kind of two major ways to identify disguised grief. and all of us have it. So if, and one way to understand it is if you're using what I call grief signal words. So grief signal words sound like cynicism, pessimism, sarcasm, resentment, bitterness, holding grudges, longstanding anger, longstanding hurt.

Wow.

Right.

So that's the list.

Yeah, and when it's long, it gets much longer, but just so you have an idea. So if there's bitterness, resentment, and grudges, you've got disguised grief.

Right?

Wow. That's a big statement. So a lot of people have that. A lot of people project their unpleasant emotions as being sourced outside of themselves.

Correct.

As you did this to me, it's victim, right? Resentment, all that passive, those are all victim.

Revenge is also, revenge is also to me a grief signal word. I want to get revenge. And what's underneath that? Those four feelings.

Grief.

Jealousy, disguised grief.

How is jealousy disguised grief?

Or envy. I want something that's over there. I don't get to have it.

You're grieving from that.

I'm grieving for it, right? So that's one way of beginning to understand that there's sadness, helplessness, anger and disappointment underneath that. The second way for me is I talk about five categories of grieving. And the first is grieving over what we got and didn't deserve. So the rageaholic, annihilation that you just described earlier. So think of grieving over what you got and didn't deserve is the bad stuff. It's the abuse, it's the chaos, All those kinds of things, the cruelty, hostility, all that kind of stuff that we went through, these difficult life experiences. That's one part. The second category is grieving over what we deserved and didn't get. That's the good stuff. The praise, the support, the nurturance, the consistent showing up at baseball games or track meets or that's great progress on what you did. I know you didn't hit the goal, but it's great progress.

Yeah.

Right? So it's grieving over that. And then it's grieving over what never was. So think of that as opportunities that, think of that as the facts and circumstances of your early life and the opportunities that basically didn't get to get realized. Grieving over what is not now, depending on where you are now. And then the last one is grieving over what may never be. It's what I call grief over lost potentials.

Yeah, it's beautiful. And those are all very human experiences. I think we've all had those, and I certainly have. And, you know, as I've gotten older, I've just sort of reframed life in a very different way, which is life is not there to. To meet my expectations. Like, that's just not what this whole game is about. And the more I focus on my expectations and my needs and my wants, my desires, my preferences, the more suffering I have. And the more dissatisfied I am and the more disappointed I am and the more all those unpleasant feelings happen that you talk about, and I'm like, well.

I have a choice.

Right.

I have a choice to meet what is or to fight with what is.

Correct.

You know, we've had Byron Katie on the podcast and she talks about loving what is. And it's such a beautiful practice because then, you know, yes, you still have to deal with all the generational trauma, your trauma, all the things that actually cause us to make meaning of the world in a way that doesn't serve us or make us feel like we have an authentic, confident beautiful life.

Right.

But is there another state that's beyond all that where we come to actually not hold on to those things that we are grieving about?

Absolutely.

To me, I always dreamed of having a happy family and lots of kids and a family compound and they work out that way. You know, like 62, you know, not married, and my kids are all over the place, and, you know, alcoholic first wife, which was all based on my choices, based on my trauma. And it didn't end up like that. And I can kind of grieve that. I can be unhappy with it, or I can embrace what I have now, which is a freedom I wouldn't have if I had all that.

Right.

So, like, I. I'm trying to just reframe my life story in a way that is. is taking away some of those beliefs and expectations that caused me so much suffering. Right, so for me there is a process to go through that.

So I'm not going to leave somebody in that disguised grief state and go, oh, I've got this, oh great, okay, I'm left with it permanently. I don't believe that at all. In fact, when I think about psychotherapy, if somebody stays in it and it really does the work, to me psychotherapy.

Is a grieving process.

It's actually making our way through the disguised grief. So that's, that's how I look. It's so, so there really isn't, and there, to me, there's an arc to it. So, so now, so now somebody's at that point, they're going to your, to what you're describing, they're starting to deal with these difficult life experiences. So, so the, the thing is you, you, you start there, you start, it's like the, and the, the, when you deal with feelings, my experience as a psychologist and doing years and years of psychotherapy, is that the, the memories just surface. They've just come right to the surface, and now they're available for making sense of. So the thought here is that you want to make sense of any difficult life experience you've had. You want to make sense of the impact and meaning it had for you across time. So in essence, who did you become?

As a result of that experience.

Yeah, exactly. Or if they were, you know, they happened multiple, then it's like, okay, then let's make sense of that. who did you become because of that? And I think about it of looking at the time it happened, as you aged, and who you are now. And the reality is, is when you start to make sense of that and understand the impact and the meaning it had for you, then some of the pain starts to fall away.

So give an example of what that would be like with a client of yours or a patient or somebody who just like is suffering.

I'm trying to, the first person that comes to mind is somebody who also grew up in an alcoholic household. She would, she just experienced, both witnessed and experienced abuse. And what she began to recognize as we started to work through the process of what that was like for her, She recognized how kind of impulsive she became, how into her adulthood, the poor decisions she would make, that how she would stay in experiences or situations that were not good for her because she wasn't assessing danger and safety well, and that she stayed longer than she needed to be, and also wouldn't speak up. So the process of making her way through that and understanding the impact that that had on her, she could begin to have a sense of choice. It's like, oh, wait a minute, I'm better now at reading safety and danger. That's not good for me. I'm not going there. Yeah. Right? And then the rest of it starts.

To kind of unfold in a similar manner. So what you're saying, just to summarize a little bit, is that we all have these unpleasant feelings. We all try to avoid them. But by actually sitting with them and actually metabolizing them and breathing through them and letting them kind of move through you, it brings you to a different set of choice points around how to be with your experience.

Absolutely.

And then it's actually the beginning of the process of healing. It's not the healing in of itself. It's just, oh, I'm good with these feelings. It's actually.

I would actually say both.

Both.

Because when somebody is cut off from themselves, they don't feel comfortable in their own skin. So the process of actually first being able to be present to your own feeling state, my observation over time, Mark, is that there's a natural organic lift in the sense of well-being just by reconnecting to your feelings.

So true. I mean, I felt so high when I got out of that month in Vermont and I was really quite amazing.

So it's, I would say, layers of healing. And then that will eventually be able to take you to the deeper work. Then what you want to do is eventually extract the good from it. and so it's like, is there any good that came? I know this is painful, it was horrible, it affected me in these ways, but now that I've made sense of it or I understand the impact and meaning it had on me, kind of what choices do I want to make? Was there any good that came from it? Somebody who grows up in an alcoholic household or an abusive household often becomes really good at school or extracurricular activities, keeps them out of the house. So the trajectory of their lives moves into achievement and a bunch of other things that are actually really good for them. But that came out of a bad experience, right? So that you can also, there is some good sometimes that you can extract from difficult life experiences. And then that's your choice point, because now you can forgive and now you can forge kind of new stories of who you want to be.

So let's move from the sort of the conversation around the metabolizing the unpleasant feelings to the promise really of your book, which is the second part of the title, right? Which is actually becoming more authentic and more confident and more resilient. And how does that happen? Tug us through that process. And how do your book help with building all the emotional strength and helping anxiety and confidence and all the things that allows us to create the life that we want?

The emotional strength part, is for me, two things. And it's going to work to keep on coming back to the eight feelings. The foundational piece and the foundational piece for me of confidence is your ability to handle the eight unpleasant feelings. It's the foundation of it. And if I, my definition of confidence is it's the deep sense that you can handle the emotional outcome of whatever you face or whatever you pursue. So the eight feelings are critical here.

It's emotional resilience and agility.

Yes.

Yeah.

But that's only a piece of it. So, and so, and there, for me, there's two aspects to emotional strength, two key aspects. One is I can handle the eight unpleasant feelings. The second is I can acknowledge my needs and limitations and ask for help. Most people see asking for help as weakness or a burden. I see it as a critical piece of emotional strength. Because when I can turn to you and say, hey, I can't sort through this, and you can say, well, wait, let me give you a resource. Now all of a sudden I'm going to have more confidence because I can do that. And so that's one. And probably if the foundation of the book were not the eight unpleasant feelings mark, then the foundation of the book would be one's ability to speak with ease. So speaking up is really the critical piece.

Okay, so this is a whole other rabbit hole because in our culture, we do not learn at all how to talk about our feelings, our emotions, our thoughts in ways that are safe.

Yes.

And we usually resort to blame, victimhood, anger, you know, judgment in the expression of our feelings. you made me do this and you did that. Like, there's a whole, like, negative subtext that we have around how we tend to express our feelings. But you're talking about a very different way. Can you kind of unpack that?

Yeah. Well, yes. Again, and my, my whole thing was kind of, I started out as a really shy, introverted kid, and, you know, it, you have the idea of wallflowers. I was velcroed to the wall.

Ah, you're a velcro.

So, so I, it, so, and I'd look over at my peers and go, like, they're so confident. It's like, how does one? develop confidence. So for me, the big lifelong question was, how does someone develop confidence? So, which is really good in the subtext of the book then. So the, what I, but what I realized is the speaking up piece. So we've got the foundation of the eight feelings. The speaking up piece is absolutely next. But, but there's a caveat here because it needs to be positive, kind and well intended. You don't just because you can speak. doesn't mean vomit. Yeah, exactly. No, can do. Right. Say that again.

So it's kind. Positive, kind. Positive.

And well-intended. Well-intended.

Yep.

So it's basically speaking truth with love.

Bingo.

Yes.

Yeah.

Stevie Wonder has a great song about this. This is, you know, change your words into truth, and then they change that truth into love. And maybe our great children's grandchildren and their great-grandchildren will tell. I mean, you, you can heal all the lineages by. speaking truth with love.

Yes. And actually, I often equate truth and love. That truth is love.

It is, but it needs to be.

Delivered in a well-intended way. So kindness and the kindness and good intention is really critical.

What if people are so stuck in their stories? Because I think this is where we get so identified with our trauma, our past or all the things that have happened to us that we often are unable to actually see through that and we get stuck. A lot of people break- you- mean.

Stuck in terms of being mean?

Or stuck in victim and blame and judgment and fear and panic and like so many people are traumatized. I mean sexual trauma affects one in four women probably more. I mean I was a victim of sexual trauma twice as a child. like, you know, it's. It's not uncommon.

It's very common.

And then there's the emotional abuse and the physical abuse. And you add all that up, it's like, who isn't touched by that?

You know?

Correct.

Right.

I actually have a friend who's like, she's so awesome. She's like, 30 years old. She just seems so great, and she's always just good. And I'm like, what's the story with you? Like, how are you like this? And she's like, my parents, they were just so loving and awesome and great. I'm like, Wow, you're one in seven billion.

Someone has to be willing to take responsibility. And you've got to be willing to take blame out of the picture. You don't get to blame. So you've got to go inward to look at the end.

So you can't be righteous.

No.

Like it's your fault.

No, it doesn't go outside. It's like, this happened to me. Let's make sense of it.

It's Gibore Mate says, Trauma isn't the thing that happened to us. It's the meaning we make from the things that happened to us.

Right, right.

And it explains how two people can have the same objective trauma, let's say sexual abuse, and have two profoundly different responses.

Right.

You know, one can become a 600-pound person, and the other can be, you know, CEO of the world, you know? and it's like, wow, how does that work? So if somebody really wants to do.

The work, I would say take blame out of the picture, then you take the victimhood away. So if blame's gone, then you're no longer the victim. Then it's an experience you went through. You make sense of the experience and you make different choices based on the meaning you give. But if you think you've been wronged, you've been wronged, then you're left with sadness, helplessness, anger, and disappointment.

And what if somebody actually has wronged you?

And many people have been wronged. It doesn't take that away. It's still part of your life experience. It's not about going back and writing the wrong necessarily. It's make, what did this mean to you? What was the impact? Who did you become because of it? And now how do you want to be based on what you're now aware of?

Yeah, so you don't have to become a victim of the Of the experience, yes.

Right.

It affected you. I'm not, in no way am I diminishing the painful impact or the profoundly painful impact that- and I was, when.

I was young, I traveled a lot and I went to Nepal as part of a medical expedition there up in the mountains and public health project. And we came back down after the expedition and we went to this part of Nepal outside of Kathmandu called Bodh Gaya. which is where all the Tibetan refugees.

Had come from China.

And it was a beautiful place. And I met someone who met someone on our long story short, I ended up sitting with this Tibetan doctor, because I was very interested in Eastern medicine and Tibetan medicine. And I got to spend the day with him while he saw patients with a translator. It was fascinating. And I was in medical school at the time. And I said, well, talk to him about his life. And he said he'd been in a Chinese gulag for 22 years. tortured, beaten, deprived of anything that was familiar to him from his being a Tibetan monk. He was a Tibetan monk because all doctors in Tibet are monks, unless they're modern doctors, but all historically. And he says, you know, I said, what was the hardest bid for you of that 22 years? He goes, well, it was those times I thought I would lose compassion for my Chinese jailers.

Powerful.

And I'm like, whoa, okay then. I've got to rethink everything. Because if that was your hardest moment in 22 years of being in a Chinese gulag, which you can imagine is in a very nice place where you're stripped of everything that you care about and love and means something to you, and you come out kind and compassionate and loving. Wow. So that really, Victor Frankl said that, right? Between stimulus and response, there is a choice.

Right.

And in that choice lies our freedom.

Correct.

Yes. And he was in a concentration camp. You know, you could be a victim.

In a concentration camp.

100%. Took everything of mine. They took my career, they took my house, they killed my family, they blah, blah, blah. And you could certainly become a victim justifiably, and I don't think anybody would argue with you about that. Nope. But he chose a very different response to the same stimulus as everybody else. And It's in his book, Man's Search for Meaning. It's a really powerful and very confronting perspective about how to think about your life. Because all of a sudden, you can't be a victim because the only way you can become a victim is if you give your power to somebody else to affect how you feel.

-Right.

-So there's this really interesting narrative that exists in society, on social media, this idea that we've just got to think positive, that we've got to find silver linings all the time, that we've got to Be positive that if people are negative, we've got to push them out of our lives. And this, on so many levels, this is unhealthy. For us as individuals, it's unhealthy because when we push aside our difficult emotions, it's not like they just go away. Really what you're doing is if you're pushing aside difficult emotions in the service of forced positivity, you are failing to actually develop skills to help you to deal with the world as it is, which is filled with grief and pain and suffering and complexity. And so you failing to develop the skills to deal with the world as it is, instead you forcing positivity in trying to kind of move into some false illusion of what you want reality to be.

That's true.

I just reminded me of this experience.

I had when I was going through.

A tough time and I was talking.

To this psychologist, psychiatrist I was seeing about the difficult relationship I was in. He said, Are you going to relate to the person in front of you or the person in your head? It's like, I had an idea of what I wanted and what I thought should be and the positive notion of it. But I wasn't actually dealing with the reality in front of me and I was being in denial of actually what.

Was happening and it caused tremendous suffering for me.

And until once I realized that, I was like, you know, it's like, are.

You going to write to the person you want or the person you have.

In front of you?

That's such a beautiful insight and it's so profoundly important because, you know, again, these difficult emotions don't go, you know, just disappear. And so we know that when people push aside in the way that, you know, this therapist was saying, you don't face into the reality of what is. When we don't do that, what we often do is we start to hustle with our feelings. So we start to either on the one hand, what I call bottling, where we push aside the emotions. We say, I shouldn't feel that. It's a negative feeling. I'm not allowed to. We might only allow emotions that seem legitimate, like joy or positivity. and basically what we're doing is we bottling those emotions. But what is bottling? Bottling is avoidance. And with avoidance often comes the kinds of behaviors that you spoke about earlier. It's like we're avoiding what's going on, but we're drinking more, we're doing Netflix more, we're on facing into a heartbreak that might be right in front of us and that if we face into, we'll be able to prepare ourselves more for. So that's one of the things we do when we don't face into the reality of our experience. The other, which looks completely different from bottling, is brooding. So brooding is when we get so stuck in our difficult feelings. I feel so bad. This is terrible. Why, you know, every time does this happen to me? And what we're doing is we're doing a denial of a different form so focused on ourselves. that we aren't able to see.

From becoming a victim basically.

Yeah, and you're not seeing the child in front of you, you're not seeing your loved ones, you're not seeing your colleagues because we're so focused on ourselves. And as it turns out, bottling and brooding looks so different. The one is about denial and the other is about getting stuck in. But both of those, when you look psychologically at the outcome, what you find is that brooding and bottling are both associated with lower levels of well-being, high levels of depression, anxiety, lower capacity to actually problem solve, you know, get your resume together, have the tough conversation, do what needs to be done. And it is also associated with, of course, as you could imagine, lower quality of relationships, because when you aren't able to be vulnerable with your emotional experience with others, they don't see you as human and connected and authentic. So again, the bottling part, the brooding when you're so focused on what it is that you're feeling, it's difficult to connect. And so there's a really tough impact when you in habitual ways deal with your emotions in this brooding or bottling. And of course, again, our societal narrative in many ways conspires against us being healthy with our emotions. It somehow conveys this idea that if you just positive things will be okay, but it just doesn't work out that way.

But if you know, throughout human history.

I imagine, you know, we've not been.

That much awake as human beings, right? And so, is this an age-old problem and we're just naming it and identifying it now, or is this something new given the stresses and challenges of our society?

Because it seems like there's way more.

Depression, way more mental health issues and challenges we're seeing.

And you're suggesting that part of the mental health issues we're facing are a result of flaws in our thinking and.

Flaws in our relationship with our emotional life that get us into these troubles.

Whether it's brooding or bottling or what.

Other challenges we face in actually having an authentic relationship with our feelings.

Well, and that's a really important question. So I think that there are parts of this thinking about emotions that you can, you know, that are historical, that if you look at how learning of particular subjects that seem more literal and able to be quantified, for example, mathematics, those types of subjects in schools have historically been elevated. And then of course the default becomes that the things that are much more difficult to quantify are put in this bucket of so-called soft skills. And it's not that they're soft. Of course, there's nothing soft about them. They are the most critical skills. But there's definitely been a historical demonization of emotions. We focus on in Psychology itself. So in Psychology, if we think about the whole transition of Psychology, where we had the focus on Freud and your internal world. And then of course the behaviourist came out and said, if you can't measure it, it doesn't exist. If you can't measure it, it's not important. And so emotions went into a game that, well, it's difficult to measure, therefore it's not important. We know it's important. We know it's important. So I think there's some things that are historical, but there's also a couple of things that are going on in our reality. In our reality, we as human beings have been outpaced by technology. We've been outpaced by technology.

What does that mean?

Well, you know, think of something as simple, not simple, as social comparison. 20 years ago, if you were comparing yourself, you might compare yourself to a person who you didn't like in high school who's now around in a Ferrari. Okay? But it was one person and you were comparing yourself to that person. Now we are comparing ourselves to literally millions of those people on social media. And so our capacity to actually process all of the different pieces of information that are going on, firstly by social media, but about other things as well, where the more we are faced with information that feels very complex that we don't know that feels ambiguous. The more as human beings we default as human beings to fear, trying to fill in the blanks, trying to create stories of what could be, we then find that this fear that we often experience gets transposed into much more of an us and them. Because if I can protect myself from the other, so we find greater levels of stereotyping, more rigid thinking. So, you know, a very long short answer to your question is I think that the signs of this are historical, but I think that there's something that's happening in the moment, which is this nexus of technologies, social media, difficulty in being able to process the information that exists that basically leads us as human beings to often engage in what I call cognitive rigidity or emotional rigidity. Where rather than being emotionally agile, we go on autopilot. You know, what am I doing here? Who don't I like? Who do I like? We engage in habits that don't connect with our intentions and we suffer. We really suffer.

So can you talk a little bit.

About how you define emotional agility?

Yes. So emotional agility at its core is about being firstly compassionate with ourselves. Our thoughts, our emotions and our stories. And I'll explain what I mean by that in a second. But firstly it's about being able to enter into a space in which we are compassionate. The second aspect is about being able to be curious with our thoughts and our emotions. What is this emotion signaling to me about what's important?

Important.

You know, if I feel rage when I watch the news, that rage is a signpost that I value equity and fairness. And so our difficult emotions, what I'm proposing here is that our difficult emotions aren't just things we need to get through, but that our difficult emotions actually signpost what is most wise and connected and values aligned and intentional for us as human beings. So emotional agility, it's the ability to be able to be compassionate, curious with our thoughts, our emotions and our stories, but also it's not just this abstract idea, it's the ability to be courageous enough to take values connected steps. So a very big part of emotional.

Agility is You just define what are values connected steps? That seems like an important phrase.

So.

If I, again, going back to the example that I mentioned earlier, if I feel rage when I watch the news, I could push that aside, or I could be hooked on the rage and just act in a way that hurts people. But if I'm able to show up to that rage and say to myself, you know, what is it that I'm feeling right now? What is this difficult emotion that I'm experiencing? What is this emotion signaling to me that is important? Okay, so for me, the rage is signaling that I value fairness and justice and there isn't enough of it. Values connected steps are then about saying what are actual physical actions that I can take that bring me towards my values. And what's really important here is you're not doing this in the hot emotion, you're not doing it in the rage and so now I'm acting out, rather you're doing it in a way that feels intentional and connected and that is bringing you closer to being the person you want to be. And I use that example with rage, but I can give you a different example which is imagine you are feeling bored at work. So that boredom, and it doesn't matter how busy you are because you can be busy bored as well.

True.

That boredom can be a signpost that you value growth and learning and that you don't have enough of it. Now, if you simply push aside that difficult emotion and say, well, at least I've got a job, then you aren't able to enter into the space space of using that emotion effectively. In five years time, you could turn around and say, Gee, I've been in this boring job for the past five years, but now you've lost five years of opportunity to do something about it. So values connected steps is this idea that when we become more able to metabolize discomfort, because sometimes the emotions we're facing into are uncomfortable, they're telling us about a society that feels wrong or a job that isn't going to work out or even a relationship that isn't going to work out. But when we face into that discomfort and when we become better at metabolizing discomfort, we are able to be more intentional and to be more aligned with who we want to be as people. And this is, you know, the hallmark of of integration and psychological health and well-being, which is about feeling connected and aligned as human beings.

Sometimes we can't help that first round of reactivity. It's like your friend who missed the plane. Missing a plane actually can trigger a very deep sense of trauma in a lot of people.

Yeah.

In fact, I would probably go into a major reactivity. I have a thing about missing planes. And so radical acceptance isn't that you don't end up getting anxious and uptight, it's that then you at some point bring acceptance to the reactivity that's there. Okay, I'm angry, I'm uptight, I'm down on myself for having done it. But at some point, if you can say, oh, okay, this is what's happening and make space for it, then you begin to interrupt the chain reaction that really locks us into a very small, tight personhood. And so it can be anywhere along the chain that at some point you go, wait a minute, this is how life is this moment. And the fear people have about radical acceptance, and I hear this a lot, is, well, if I radically accept what's happening, then how am I going to really make a difference in the world? That's the fear. And I remember it. I remember it really well because radical acceptance came out in 2003 and we were, as I was writing it and teaching about it, people said, well, if I radically accept that we're about to attack Iraq, because that was going on back then, then how am I going to stand up and try to in some way stop it? Because a lot of people anticipated the, the chain reaction of attacking Iraq. So what I described was my own process where I would read about the hawks in our government that were planning to attack, and I'd feel a huge amount of agitation and anger. And what radical acceptance meant was I say, okay, anger, anger, feeling it, open to it. And then I'd find underneath the anger, There was this really deep fear of what was going to happen, all the bloodshed and the proliferation and so on. And I'd say, okay, radically accepting the fear, open to it, feel it. Underneath the fear was grieving, really a sense of grief. And then again, I'd open to that, and underneath that was caring. And it was from caring that I could then act. There was a number of us from the Buddhist Peace Fellowship that went down to Capitol Hill and we actually got arrested and so on. It wasn't like I was passive. But radical acceptance of what was coming up inside me actually made it possible for me to respond, not shaking my fist with anger and hatred at others, but just out of caring, do it as intelligently as I could. So I kind of am saying that because radical acceptance is not a sense of resigning. you know, it's not passivity. It means fully engaged in this moment in an allowing way that creates the precondition for you, let's say, to go ahead and do your trip without your friend, but have a really creative Adventure on your own. It creates a precondition for that.

Oh, so you're saying is radical acceptance is, is really just facing what is, right? Facing what actually is not what you want to be or what you think should be or how life should be or what it's really. it's, it's, you know, so it's sort of loving what is. And, and it's a very different way of being with yourself and with your reality. It's, it's, and I think it's radical. And I like how you say it doesn't, it doesn't preclude action.

Right.

But it creates, it creates actually the foundation for action that can actually make a difference.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You think of, you know, there's a great story by, by Gandhi. I love this story where he, his mother brings him this little boy. My son, he eats candy all the time. Gandhi, would you please tell him to stop eating candy? He says, Tell him to come back next week. He'll come back next week. And he comes back next week and he says to the boy, Can you please stop eating candy? It's not good for you. And the woman goes, why didn't you.

Tell him that last week?

He says, Because I was eating candy and I had to stop eating candy. You know, I think it's sort of like that. You have to kind of be willing to accept all of your mishigas and craziness in order to actually sort of make the changes you need to make.

It's true. And Gandhi also took a day a week. He was the ultimate social activist, but he took a day a week to meditate and pray. So he said so that he could come back home to that space of openness and not making others into the enemy. you know, that kind of open-heartedness. So his actions would come from that kind of presence that we're talking about.

Yeah.

I mean, it's kind of terrifying for.

People, you know, think, I hear people say, oh, I can't meditate. My mind won't stop. I'm like, I feel too agitated. And, and, and it's hard for people to think about, forget about a 10-day Vipassana retreat with, you know, 12 hours of meditation a day. This is just like sitting with yourself for five minutes can be hard for people. and I can relate. I actually meditate every day and I do yoga and I fairly try to be fairly present. But I decided to do a retreat. Now, I'm very sort of very sort of connected to the Tibetan traditions and they do these dark retreats for like nine years or 93 months or like it's like I'm pretty, I literally go in a dark room with no light. and they get their food passed through a little door with a thing trap door so they can have no light. I don't know how they eat in the dark, but anyway. And I'm thinking, you know, I'm not gonna do that, but I'm thinking of, like, taking a month and going to a cabin somewhere with no internet, no phone, no books, no computer, nothing. Just me and my journal. And it's terrifying. It's terrifying to think. oh, I'm gonna have to sit with myself without distraction, without having anything to, you know, fill my time and just be. And I've never really done. I've done, I've done, like, meditation retreats, but you're like, you're doing something. Like, you're, you're, you're with people and you're not talking, but you're, like, meditating and you're, like, eating, and you're, like, there's a sense of, like, you're doing something, but this is, like, you do nothing is the most frightening thing. And I think in order for people to get your work, I mean, they have to come to a level of being willing to become friends with themselves and with their experience in their life in a way that they haven't been. So how do you help people get over that?

Well, first of all, it's true that it's scary. I just want to honor that.

I'm just being honest.

Yeah, yeah, it is. Because, you know, our whole sense of reality and our world and who we are is usually on a doing self, not a being self. the human doing not being. And the ultimately freeing meditation, the moments of when we're just letting life be just as it is, where it's just pure being, are the moments that really the awareness and love that's our essence can shine through. I mean, it creates a space for the goodness, what we sometimes call the goal to shine through. But it's rare. We're mostly like, because we're stressed, it's like being on a bicycle. And the more stressed we are, the faster we pedal away from the present moment versus just putting down the bicycle and just being. So it is a training. And so that's the bad news is it's hard because we're so conditioned not to do it. But the good news is everybody, and I've never met an exception, can train their minds and their hearts in the direction of really being at home with their life. Everybody can do it in that direction. And we have to go at different paces. Not everybody's going to jump off the cliff into three months of darkness or whatever. But that's okay. It's part of self-compassion to just find the level. Really, the simplest is just to say, well, I'm a great believer in every day, no matter what. I'll put that out there because I lived in an ashram and it was very vigorous and we did a whole lot of practice. But then when I had my first son, my only son, my child, oh my gosh, my life was so different. I left the ashram at the same time, so I had none of the supports and everything. And my practice got a little wobbly, but then I realized how much I counted on it to give me a sense of presence and open-heartedness and stability and steadiness. And so I made this vow, and this is, we're talking now 35 years, you just turned 35. I made this vow that I would practice every day, no matter what.

Wow.

But I had a back door mark. The back door is, it didn't matter what practice, it didn't matter how long, didn't matter where, It didn't matter what position. Something. So, I mean, big back door, all it meant was I had the intention to pause and be with myself for some period of time each day.

That's good.

And, you know, at the beginning when he was an infant, sometimes at the end of the day I'd sit down and just, you know, breathe for like two minutes and, you know, say, May all the world be blessed and go to bed. It's a bit of a trick because if you say, every day, no matter what, life loves rhythms, life is rhythmic, and it just creates this habit of, you know, Rumi says, Do you make regular visits to yourself? It just creates this habit of, okay, so what's it like right now inside? And we become increasingly intimate. comfortable being with discomfort or being with beauty or goodness or whatever is there. We just have increasing ease. So every day, no matter what, but just start slow.

It's so beautiful. And yeah, I love that even, you know, 30 seconds, you know, it's like if you can't find five minutes to meditate in every day, then there's something wrong with your life.

Yeah.

And, and you know, what you just said about 30 seconds, I, I think it's amazing if we're just quiet for 15 seconds, if we just take three long, deep breaths, our biochemistry changes. There's a settling, there's a new perspective. So it counts.

Also, you sort of talked a lot about a prayer, the Buddhist prayer that really has moved you and sort of become a mantra in a way, which is, hey, whatever arises, serve the awakening of wisdom and compassion. So how does that thinking or feeling or prayer help you get through challenging moments?

It's a powerful one. The presupposition there is we can't stop the difficult moments from happening. Like every one of us is going to lose our bodies. Many of us are losing our minds. We lose our love. Yeah, exactly. So that we have no control over, but what's possible is to deepen our sense of spirit, of love, of awareness through that experience. It's like the Dalai Lama was meeting with some Western teachers decades ago, and they asked him, you know, what can we bring to our students? And he said, Tell them to trust the power of heart and awareness to awaken through anything, through any circumstances. So that's the spirit of this. It's like, you know, when I've gone through, I remember one breakup that was brutal and something in me knew, I knew how attached I was and I knew how wrenching this felt. But there's some place in me that said, Please, make that deepen my sense of, you know, open-heartedness, compassion, understanding, you know, just may it serve. And if we feel like it can serve, we have space for it.

Yeah.

So then you basically kind of invite the difficulties in. It sort of reminds me of the, you know, the roomy guest house poem.

Right.

Which is really all about how all the challenges of life show up at your doorstep. And you should welcome it in as guests because they probably have something in there for you.

They do.

And most people we know can look at the difficult stuff, the divorces or the diagnosis of malignancy or whatever it is, and know that in some way it required that they called on resources inside themselves that they hadn't had to call on before. The courage, they had to deepen their compassion for their own life or for others. It calls forth the best of who we are if we're available.

Yeah, it's this school of, you know, they call it the School of Hard Knocks, but it's actually true. It's actually true if you're paying attention. If you're not paying attention, just keep repeating the same story over and over. I've seen people do that. I saw that my father, for example, he had multiple challenges, but he never looked inward. He just always looked outward. and I think it's easy to blame the world for what doesn't work in your life, but it's harder to look at yourself. And I think that's what you're inviting people to do and then creating a different relationship to their experience and their thoughts. And sometimes it's hard if you've had a lot of difficulties or traumas, and I think that's real. And you talk a lot about how people get disconnected from their body and dissociated and they don't want to feel that intensity of their emotional wounds. We hold on to them and there's like issues in our tissues, right? So how do we sort of get through that? How do we sort of learn to stop that and come back into our body and step out of those reactive patterns and connect with what really matters to us?

Yeah, well, you're naming it right that we're all, it's a pretty dissociated PTSD society. I mean, it's pretty pervasive. Whenever this world's hard for us, we are conditioned to pull away from where the rawness is. So we pull into our minds and into our circling thoughts.

Or just binge on Netflix.

I'm sorry? Yeah, exactly.

Or just binge on Netflix. Distract ourselves, right?

Right, which can give some temporary re-pro, you know, just give us a little break. But the reality is that there's no healing Unless we can contact where the energy has been kind of cut off and is living in our body and reintegrated into our wholeness. There's no healing. There's no discovery of our wholeness. Because otherwise we're living in a very virtual and thin part of our existence. So to really feel our hearts, we have to come back into our bodies. Love is not an idea. It's a felt experience.

Experience.

And so then the question is how? And it depends on how much trauma there is. If there's not huge trauma, there's some very beautiful practices of body scans where we just systematically learn how to come back in and feel and wake up to our body. And mindfulness itself keeps bringing us back to where the feelings live in our body. the two questions I always ask are, what is happening inside me right now? And can I be with this? And really using those two questions to keep coming back. If there's a lot of trauma mark, and this is really a tricky one, we found out over the last decade that a lot of the instructions for embodied presence were not very useful if people had been traumatized because they could get re-traumatized. They were told to go into their bodies and then it was just way overwhelming and flooding. So it needs to be gradual and there needs to be a container, a kind of safe space so there can be a learning of how to dip in and come out, dip in and then come back to safe space. But for when there's trauma, it's so important to to move, to dance, to feel your body just as well as you can in safe ways to get out into nature. It's like being outside, moving on this earth is really the healing recipe pretty much for all of us.

I agree. It's sort of my go-to therapy. If I go out on my bike or I go out and take a hike in the nature, jump in the ocean, it really like it's like it resets everything.

Absolutely, you too. Reboot.

You know what I've noticed though, sometimes when I'm biking, I'll notice that I'm distracted and that I'm in a loop in my head about something. And all of a sudden I look up and I go, whoa, and I get to bike in these beautiful places and I'm like, look at that tree, look at that rock, look at the sky, and this field, it's like you just sort of come back into the moment of the experience. you know, it's always there for us. It's like this big cradle that we can jump back into any moment.

Beautiful. Yeah. I think the biggest suffering is we forget our belonging to this living world and to each other. I mean, that is the suffering. And nature is a pretty tried and true way to re-experience the elements and that that's what we're made of. I mean, you know, or Stardust, or Earth. This is what we are and we intuit that. I hope you enjoyed today's episode.

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