The Awakened Family with Dr. Shefali Tsabary

Welcome to the Doctor's Pharmacy. I'm Dr. Mark Hyman and that's Pharmacy F-A-R-M-A-C-Y, a place for conversations that matter. And today's conversation I think will really matter to you. It's with Dr. Shefali, who's an extraordinary teacher. She's a psychologist. She integrates Western psychology with Eastern wisdom to bring us into an authentic life. She's a clinical psychologist. She's an international speaker and she has written some extraordinary books. New York Times bestsellers, the Conscious Parent, and the Awakened Family, which I was saying before that I wish I had grown up in, which I didn't. And I don't know how many of you out there listening have grown up in an Awakened Family, but I bet not too many. And if you want to learn how to create one, you should listen in. So welcome, Dr. Shefali.

Thank you so much for having me.

So, you know, as a parent, you often don't know the consequences of your behavior for things that might seem insignificant to you but might have a huge impact on your kids. A few years ago, I had an opportunity to sit with my kids with a friend of mine who's a life coach, Lauren Zander, and to sort of go through their stories, my story, to sort of understand each other differently and to sort of share what were the things that needed healing or resolving. One of the things that came up was that I said to my daughter, I got remarried and she wasn't happy about it. And I said, well, this is my life and I get to choose. Now, I thought that was the right thing to say at the time, but it turns out that it made her feel like what she felt didn't matter and that she was on her own. And I didn't have that intention, but this was on unintended consequences. It's sort of a minefield of, or I said to my son once, why can't you sort of study like your sister? And it made him have this whole complex. Yeah, thing. And I'm like, it wasn't intended to sort of destroy him, but it really had a negative impact.

Of course.

I didn't really mean to hurt them, but it stayed with them. And how as a parent can we talk to our children so we don't damage them? I often say to people, how do you be a good parent? Your kids come into the world as these beautiful beings who are basically undamaged, and your job is to stay out of the way and not screw them up.

Right, right.

So how do you do that?

Well, first you let go of the fantasy that you're not gonna damage your kid. Okay, good. And I don't even wanna use the word damage, you're just going to put all your stuff. This is just the way of the human experience. So when I write a book called the Awakened Family, People may be fooled to think that it's this perfect family. That's not what this book is about. And it takes deep reading and deep understanding to realize what this book is about. It's really about growing together, evolving together, and becoming authentic together. So that process is murky, messy, chaotic. It causes damage, it causes heartbreak. That is the human experience. But to understand that you're doing it, in the moment and apply as much consciousness as possible. So what you did with your children is you allowed for that space for consciousness to now rise in the midst of all the past unconsciousness. That's all we can do. We can keep allowing for consciousness to rise in the midst and awareness that we just effed it all up.

How do you do that? I mean, it's easy to say let consciousness come up, but most of us walk around pretty unconscious.

Right, so most of us are not on a path of spiritual awakening. Most of us have been deluded to believe that the material world Form is it. We go to work, we make money, we drive a car, we see a few friends, we eat, we sleep, rotate.

Rinse and repeat.

Right. And then many of us who have broken out of that paradigm and that cycle to ask deeper questions, who am I? Why am I here? What is my purpose? And those spiritual seekers begin to realize that there's this world of form, yes, but we don't need to be limited by this world of form. And then we begin to penetrate all the things that culture has oppressed us with, all the ways we think we should be and all the myths we've followed and all these institutions we've been buried under, and we begin to break free and deconstruct and let go. So what you did with your children is you took a pause because you're on the spiritual path of healing, and you said, you know, I have to create a space to reconnect and reevaluate and reemerge in oneness. And you came from compassion, you came from, a desire of healing and abundance. So a spiritual warrior realizes that there's the world of form that we can get mired and deluded by, and then there's this other way of living, which is a sense of abundance, oneness, healing, emergence, constant seeking, connectivity. So as long as we have that desire and we see our children, for example, as ushers to that greater calling, then we'll always realign. We'll mess up. Just yesterday, my daughter told me how she believes I don't like her.

Oh, oh.

And you don't like me and you're mean and only one half of a mother, but you're not the other nice half. And I had to listen. But I came from a space of abundance, healing, oneness, and- and how old is she? She's 15 and a half. She's just a total nightmare.

I always tell my people, patients that don't worry anytime between like 13 and 18 your kids are going through a period of temporary psychosis and don't pay attention.

They're aliens and they'll come back and then you'll suddenly say, where were you all this time? But in that process they'll massacre you, you know, and that's okay. So again, if you're a spiritual warrior and you understand you're on this spiritual journey with your children to evolve, then you won't react, you won't get egoic, you won't get personal, you won't interlack as much. Right, as much. So yesterday when she told me how I was a mean mother and I'm not this and I'm not that, I'm not, not, not, not, not, not. I could see the rise of my ego to say, but I am, but I am, but I am. But like you did with your children, I was, because I've done work, I could allow the space to hear it, her experience, and connect to her and then offer her something she needed versus what I thought she needed. And this is the constant dance. of the spiritual experiment of this life.

So, paying attention to your kids for who they are rather than who you want them to be.

All of life, right? Paying attention to every moment as it is versus how we want it to be. This is the disconnect, right? We expect, we want, we then project, we rage, we react, because it's not what we want it to be. Spiritual teachings, wisdom teachings, train us to first accept the isness of the isness. It is here. She says she doesn't like you. Now let's connect.

Right?

We go deep into the isness of the moment and don't resist it. So how do you do that?

I mean, you're a parent, your kids saying all this horrible stuff to you.

But it's not horrible. See, we judged it.

You've judged it. Okay. All right.

But she said, you're a terrible parent. It's her experience. Yeah. So if we can enter the isness, very hard to do. I'm acting like I'm so. Well, that's what I'm asking. Like, how do you. First you have to deconstruct. Deconstruct it all. So first, the Judgment that I'm calling it. horrible. And this could be her putting it on me or me putting it on her. She gets a C grade. He gets a C grade. You say, oh, my God, my kid's gonna have a horrible future. Yeah. Right. Or she's making me feel horrible because we immediately enter prophesizing prophetic Omens of lack. Yeah. This is our default. What is our default?

Lack.

I'm not good enough. You're not good enough. It's not good enough. We're not going to be good enough. We're failing. I'm a failure. I'm full of Shame. This is the default. It's predictable, it's ubiquitous, it's really quite simple.

It's quite... How do you unhook from that? Like it sounds like a great idea.

I want to be like that. Well, first you have to commit to a spiritual path that you do even want to recognize, become aware, deconstruct and transcend. If you're not even wanting that, you can't do it.

That's different you're talking about than a.

Traditional religious practice or a religion. Yeah, yeah, this has nothing to do with that. Religion, I'm sorry, because religion too controls through a little bit of guilt tripping and lack and fear. Let's be real about it. If you don't, then you will. And then it's prophetic omens about the future and a little bit of control.

Heaven or hell.

Somebody on top and the big one and the... Yeah, it's all about duality in many ways. Good, bad, evil, heaven, hell. No, wisdom traditions are about Accepting the isness of the way of the Tao, the way that reality flows, and entering it with surrender.

You can fight the river or you can go with it, right?

Yeah, yeah. So wisdom traditions have nothing to do with an institutionalized practice or dogma or scripture. It's about going within, deconstructing your beliefs, your past, your present moment resistances, and transcending them. It's about deconstructing the mind, it's breaking free within the mind.

But it's not just intellectual. You work with patients using practical tools to help them understand.

Right, I teach them how the mind is full of resistant blocks and then I show them how psychologically they've been buried under. So I traditionally look at people as evolving across a spectrum of four layers. So one are the 99.9% that are mired in form and the material. So I call it the material level. Most of us are just zombies reactive in sleepwalking in the material level. Like I said, just concerned about eating, sleeping, making money, looking good, who do I belong, where do I belong, who are my friends, and rinse and repeat, right? That's their world. It's about money, very material, superficial, but they're enraptured by it and they truly believe that that's who they are because they haven't awoken yet or weakened yet. The next level is a psychological level where people begin to ask, who am I? And pain begins to send them to the therapist, to the seeking path. Like, let me ask for some help. I'm drowning. So pain is a great portal to snap people out of the material. It's usually bad health.

That's why I said people don't change until they have any P syndrome.

Absolutely.

Well, not enough pain makes people avoid change, right?

Pain is it. I've often told my patients, Go back, come back when you're in more pain. Because obviously this pain is not enough. It's a little bit, you complain, but you stay in the washing machine. When the pain is greater, come back. I just tell them, Don't come now. You're wasting your time. You're not ready. You're just wasting your time spinning. So pain catapults us from the material into the psychological to ask, who am I? Am I really? Maybe it's me. And we go to a therapist. But then we have a tendency to get stuck there too.

Yeah.

And just go on and on like, oh, my mother, my father. And I'm a therapist, so it's no excuse.

Yeah, you mentioned that before about the challenges of therapy.

Yeah, because therapy is also traditionally rooted in ways of being that regurgitate the past. And as long as we stay stuck in the past, we have a, it's a trap. We can keep blaming and being victimized by our victim status and our mother and our father. And just, it's a whirlpool and- I.

Can deeply understand the story and the why, but you don't change.

But you don't change. And you espouse and you engender a victim mentality. You stay there.

Yeah.

You know, you don't know then.

So you're saying people shouldn't go to therapy?

Well, I think it's the inevitable first step breakthrough after the material subjugation. You have to go to therapy. Then after you've done therapy and you realize, okay, deconstructed the past, I've stayed in the past, I've recognized where where my traditional belief systems come from, where my fear was birthed, and now few go to the next realm, which is the spiritual, which is I want to master my mind. I realize that I'm a co-creator of my reality. I see interconnectedness, but I can't understand it. And then you begin to meditate, and you begin to spend time in quietude and solitude and truly go deep within. and learn to have a communion with your truth. You begin that deeper contemplative process. And then the fourth layer is the transcendental layer.

But you need help to do that, right? I mean, you can't just sit by yourself.

No, you need help. You need help. Yeah, I had help. I had tremendous help. I went to spiritual teachers, wisdom books, read voraciously, and also helped myself. Yeah, so you have to be self-initiating. You have to want this. That's why when I see people are not ready, it's no knock on them. They're just not ready. They don't have to be ready. But it's a choice between one kind of living and another kind of living, and it's distinct. And you can define and identify people based on their propensity. They're either here or they're here. And then the transcendental level is where you've truly understood that the mind is conditioned. We live in a deeply conditioned world. predicated on lack and fear. And that mind truly seeks to liberate out of enslavement, its own enslavement. And that mind is the true rebel or the warrior and the liberator, but also the lover, the compassionate person who proposes oneness and sees the world on an elevated level and takes people toward that light.

So how do you practically help your patient? You say, you know, start meditating, is there technique, is there Yeah, first I have a philosophy.

First people need to recognize where they are at. Not everyone can meditate. Not everyone can go for therapy. So I first pay homage to where is my client on these four levels. And most people are on the material. So I help them on the material. They only need help strategically because they're so mired in form. And then I slowly begin to show them how they are creating their own patterns. And then when you begin to show people their patterns in therapy, they begin having aha moments. Wow, I'm just like my mother was, or I am projecting onto my daughter all the things that my mother projected onto me. No knock-on mothers. But, you know.

That was the way my friend, who's a life coach, used to really help me stop and think, which she said, you sound like your mother. And I'm like, oh, because my mother tended to, be on the negative side and tend to look at things and not always the bright side of life, shall we say. And I developed that same habit. And it was jarring when I would actually see it, because it was told to me in a way that wasn't blaming or accusing or judgmental. It was just kind of funny and joking, but I was like, oh, okay, I get it. And I don't want to be that way.

Right, there's nothing to be judgmental about. It is the way. to inherit the patterns we absorbed in childhood. We are all living patterns, not lives. We are a pattern. So it's when you awaken that you break the pattern and disrupt the pattern. But if you're not on the path of awakening, you are living a pattern.

Okay, so let's dig into some practical stuff because we all were kids. We all had parents, and many of us are parents, are going to be parents. and we all dream and hope the best for our children, and it doesn't always turn out great. So as you were writing this book, the Conscious Parent, and in your work, what are the lessons, the sort of little nuggets of wisdom that you can share with people who are listening about how do we become a conscious parent? And what does actually that mean? And what is an unconscious parent?

Yeah. So this is not about things turning out great. So we abandon all.

Oh, okay. All right.

Because what is great?

Right?

Is so Shaka Sengor, who's coming to my conference, Evolve, he was incarcerated. Was that so bad? Because now look where he is. So we put judgment on experiences based on our very conditioned minds. And this book, I hope, or my books, totally take the roof off all conditioned labels. There is no good or bad.

There is no- your book isn't called the Unconscious Parent.

No, it's called the Conscious Parent. So the conscious parent realizes that they've been living in a conditioned world. That culture has dictated how they should feel, think, believe, and that's not true. It's not true that a successful child is one who is obedient. It's not true that a good child is compliant. It's not true that a child who gets A grades will be a success in the future. It's not true.

So many, many CEOs are dyslexic.

Yes.

And they're terrible in school.

But we've cookie- Right, we've cookie-cuttered our existence to survive, but it's all based on fear. So a conscious parent is the parent who begins to realize how conditioned they are by their own childhoods and culture. and they do not wish to impose this on their children as much as possible. Like some default damage is going to happen just by the human to human experience. But so in my life, for example, I'm ever watchful of the dumping I'm about to always do, and I minimize it and I mitigate it. I don't always succeed, but I'm always watchful. What's my stuff? What's her stuff? Who is she truly to the most organic core that I can distill her to. Can I truly see her without my screens? This is the endeavor. It's not perfection. It's not the destination. It's the endeavor.

So how do you do that?

By having a spiritual practice of mindfulness. So meditation is the only way anyone on a spiritual path can not lose their mind.

So you think we should all meditate?

If I could give one law and one dictate out of my place of tyranny, it would be everyone.

The tyranny of meditation.

The tyranny of meditation.

Breathe!

Close your eyes right now! Yes, I would do it with glee. Yes, because the practice of sitting with yourself, confronting your own mind, and realizing the wisdom that your thoughts are not you. They're just impulses constantly being stimulated by the noise around you and by your own generation of energy. But it's not the true you. You begin to realize in meditation that there's a you that's beyond the thoughts. And you're the witness of your thoughts. And as you go deeper and deeper into meditation, you realize there's even and awareness of the person who was just aware of the thoughts. And you go deeper and deeper to.

Realize that- who's the watcher watching the watcher? Who's watching the watcher?

Exactly. So then you- To quote Dr. Seuss. Right. And then you disconnect and you detach from this egoic hold of I am my thoughts and I am my feelings. And then you can live in a space of greater spaciousness and awareness.

It was a training of the mind, really. Right? Because we have these minds that are so- Undisciplined.

Exactly. Conditioned. Conditioned, habitually addicted based on childhood.

Automatic ways of being.

Based on childhood patterns and cultural conditioning, and you want to deconstruct that.

So when you say meditation, is it a particular kind? Is it mantra meditation? Is it breath meditation? Is it pasana meditation?

Yeah, I do vipasana, but that's just what I do. And everyone has their own portal, and it's all to be respected.

You know, the Buddha talks about true nature or bodhicitta, which is sort of clear mind. and, and, you know, who are you beyond your thoughts and your conditioned self and your experiences? And, you know, I studied in college. My major was Buddhism and Eastern religions, and I practiced, you know, meditation and yoga. It was very impactful for me to begin to sort of differentiate, you know, my sort of conditioning, emotional reactions, automatic ways of being, and sort of to realize that there's a there's a being that's not all of that. It's not my thoughts, not my emotions, not my behaviors, not my physical self. And I recently had a profound experience. Not that I would wish it on anybody, but I got really sick over a year ago, and my physical body completely collapsed. I'm, you know, 185 pounds, six foot three, and I lost 30 pounds. I was. I'm already pretty skinny, and I was really, really skinny. I couldn't. focus on anything. My mind was completely gone. I could just basically watch Netflix or HBO go, and that was it and sit in bed. Emotionally, I wasn't really available. Physically, I wasn't available. Mentally, I wasn't available to myself. And the only thing that I knew was true was that there was some being entity, true nature, something, whatever you call it, that was abiding through all of that, and I actually was completely at peace and surrendered, even though I didn't know if I was going to die. I was really close to death. And it was being in that experience that sort of reinforced the view that none of the noise matters. That just connecting into that place of who you are allows you to live a more authentic life. So let's talk about authentic life. Because you write a lot about it, you speak a lot about it. I don't know if people know what that means. How do you live an authentic life? How do you be your authentic self? What does that mean? But for me, that experience, even though I said when I was younger, had a lot of those experiences, it just sort of reinforced a shift in the way I want to show up in the world, how I want to relate to people, how I want to treat myself, the work I want to do, what matters, what doesn't matter. Things that used to upset me don't upset me anymore. And it's just so easy to go through life.

You just clean all the cobwebs. and you could see clearly who you need to be because you stop buying into the fear that you are who others think you need to be. You just let all of that go because you came down to your elemental core of you may die, so you better live the truest way you could because there's no time to waste.

Yeah, not everybody has that experience though. I mean, I think I've been with many people dying and they still are in their patterns right up to the moment of death.

Yeah. Yeah, because many of us have grown up with so much pain that we created all these barriers against pain. But those barriers now obstruct our true self. So those people who even death doesn't break the shell, it's because they were so defended all their life against pain that they just can't let go of their identities. And this is what we do in life, To ward off pain from others, we become who they want us to be, or we rebel against it, just one or the other. But what we don't become is non-labeled or non-judged or just spacious awareness, which is what children really are. And they live in that space. They don't know whether they're boy or girl or African-American or Caucasian or pretty or they learn that. Right, through a conditioning. And they become that identity and that label. I'm married, I'm smart, I'm athletic, I'm a jock, I'm a theater kid, I'm a geek. God, there's so many labels. So as we keep putting on labels and holding on to them because we believe that's who we are in order to be in the world, we go further and further away from spacious awareness and moving with fluidity and flow because we're always quagmired by the role, the role of husband, the role of wife, the role of parent. That becomes its own crazy, tenacious identification. Many parents screw up not because they're really not smart or not wise, it's because they so want to be a good parent, right? But there's a whole trap there because they want, they want, I want, so I want to be a good parent. It's all identification with a role versus just being present for who your kid is.

Yeah, that's an important statement you just said, being present for who your kid is, because they may not be who you want them to be or who you dream for them to be. And I think a lot of cultures, I mean, I'm Jewish tradition, I mean, there's a sense of, you know, performance and achievement. Achievement, you know, so the friend of mine who's a, you know, Indian, very successful Indian businessman talked about how he was raising his kids and pushing them to be, you know, at this level of excellence, you know, that was just, I thought was kind of intimidating if I was his kid.

Sure.

And yet, you know, he thought that was the best thing to do for them.

Because he's so conditioned by the artifice of success.

Yeah.

But we all have been seduced by this. And so then to not do that means we're failing as a parent. That's why I said you have to make a choice. You either go the conditioned way and get mired in it and get enraptured in it, or you realize that it's all creating a false self. It's really not who it is we are or need to be. Our children don't need to follow this. They need to follow their own inner calling. And a life lived even on the street, but to one's inner calling, to me, To me, is a more worthwhile life than a false life lived in a gilded castle.

Yeah. No, it's so true. So how do you still meet the sort of innate thing that a parent wants their kids to do their best and be their best without sort of being authoritarian or sort of controlling.

Right, this is the question I always get asked. How can I make my kid be Implicitly motivated. But you know, how can I make them be implicitly motivated, right? You know, we're so insane, we parents, you know. So we try to not push, but we're full of pushing energy. We're full of controlling energy because we're deeply afraid. And this is where the conscious parent may differ because they've done the work to confront their fear. They've surrendered their expectations of their fantasies being met via their children. They've said, you know, my child is not here to meet my needs. My child is not here to fulfill my fantasies. I gotta go do that on my own. My pain cannot be solved by my child. I cannot use my child to rescue me. So the conscious parent fully sees the separation of the two paths, and in that can really see the oneness of the two spirits, you see? When we're enmeshed, we think we're one, but we're not. We're just enmeshed.

Also, Michael Bloomberg talks about how we sort of are just here as stewards of our kids. Yes. We don't own them, we don't control them.

But there's a delusion because they come from us, they bear our name, or we give them our name, and so we own them and we possess them. But that's the delusion. And then we're eternally dissatisfied, disappointed, despondent, our children grow up with shame. The child is like, what have I done?

And the parent is, what have you not done today? You know? It's even in the language of some traditions, like in the Jewish tradition, in the Hebrew tradition, in the Hebrew naming of somebody, you say you are so-and-so the son of, you know, I just came back from the Middle East and you're so-and-so the son of this one, the son of that one, the son of this one, I'm that one, it's.

Like, no pressure, you know, you're like the son of like 10 generations and so... But then you identify with it. Of course you're the son biologically, of course there's a biological element, but we're doing something else. We're trying to tie people both to the tradition of a lineage, but also we're telling them there's expectations that come with this. Yeah.

Right?

So how do we allow children to be part of tribes and families, but without the bondage of the expectation that comes with that lineage?

And you've said in an interview before that you teach your daughter to question everything, which is sort of the opposite of telling them what to do, right? Why is that important?

Well, I don't believe that our children should be obedient little robots. I believe they should be questioning even irreverent at times beings because there is a lot of crazy out in culture. There is a lot of insanity. So if my child doesn't see it, I would have a problem with it. I'm like, do you see how crazy? So in doing that though, we do raise rebels, right? We do raise somebody who speaks out and we'll call you crazy. So like my daughter said, yes, mom, you. You have to take that with the whole experience, right? You're raising a child who can see through the inauthentic nature of the conditioned culture. And that's a good thing. But the parent would be threatened if they haven't done that work themselves.

Yeah, I remember my daughter when she was like, eight, maybe. She said, Daddy, how come what you see on TV and like all the advertising, actually when you see it in real life, isn't actually what it seems like on TV. Exactly, yes. And I'm like, wow, that is a very smart little girl.

Right.

And she is beginning to notice and question the discrepancy between what the culture was telling her and what the truth was.

And it's a difficult process to awaken because to recognize that what culture has been selling you is a big sale and a big lie, predicated again on fear and mass control, it's scary to realize, wow, I was raised my whole life believing that if I was successful and if I was wealthy, I would be happy. And that was a lie. That was a lie. That's disorienting. You dedicate your whole life to success and achievement and wealth, and then you're still not happy. That feels like you've been ripped off. But this is where the conscious parent would do it differently, would realize that nothing external can ever create happiness. It's an internal endeavor.

Let's talk about something really important. I think it affects so many people. And, you know, when I, when I raised my kids, it was pre-internet pre-social media. In fact, until my son was in the eighth grade, my daughter a little older, we didn't have television.

Right.

And the only reason I got it was because he liked basketball. Yeah. And, and so we read, we played, we did things outside. They got to experience life. We grew gardens. They got to have an authentic, tangible experience. We cooked together. And today I see, you know, little babies on iPads. I see kids completely distracted. I see the electronic babysitter everywhere. I see the data now coming out about how this affects kids brains and development and ability to connect and have authentic relationships. And, you know, we had this explosion of social media, which is almost a in a way an oxymoron, it's anything but social, right? It's disconnecting. You think you're having experience of being connected. In fact, it's not really authentic. People really need Facebook, they need FaceTime. And I don't mean on the iPhone, I mean like literally authentic relationship. How do you counsel parents to deal with this ubiquitous penetration of social media? And it's even worse than traditional media or TV because it's ubiquitous, it's everywhere. Portable. It's portable and it's also manipulative in ways that other media wasn't. You knew you were seeing an ad. Before, for whatever, now you're seeing embedded things, stealth advertising, celebrity advertising. You think it's authentic and it's just not.

How do you help parents deal with this? Yeah, it's a big, big mess. And there is no easy answer. And really, I hope one day we'll wake up and throw all our iPhones away. But of course, we won't. We'll become more automated and more robotic till we have a natural demise, you know, because that's where we're heading. It's becoming increasingly disconnected, mechanized, and it is alarming. I try not to get into fear about it because it's the way of the 99%, so it's the way of the way. But now what? Now what? So it takes a lot of gumption for the parents to create connectivity, create playtime. You know, I don't believe I did it differently.

Do we restrict it for our kids? Do we let them have it? Well, I think-- They go, they sleep on their phone.

If I had to do it again, I-- I was the first generation really to see it. So I succumbed because I was so seduced by it and it was such a bauble and a trinket and I was like, I want my own iPhone. So we didn't know. We didn't know what a cesspool this was and what a riptide it had. So now, being aware, I tell parents, no screens till teens, you know, just don't do it. Try not to do it. The TV is so much more benevolent. We used to complain about the TV. I'm all for the TV now because the kid can't take it to the bathroom, the kid can't take it to the car, you have the remote control.

That was the flip phone.

Get them a flip phone. So, but the parent has to be willing to A, create greater connective experiences, but we find it so addictive because it allows us to not be parents. You know, you said it's an electronic babysitter. So it's going to take a lot of gumption for parents to create connectivity. and then create healthy boundaries.

Those were still teens.

Very difficult because the parents themselves are now addicted and we are distracted and we just lost our way now.

It's interesting, there's a whole movement around digital detox.

Yes.

Detox camps where people go for the weekend and just put away their phones. I went to a wedding, it was actually an Indian wedding the other weekend and it was the request was everybody put their phones away and people show up and it was just an amazing experience. I grew up in the area where there were no cell phones, there was no internet, there was just people. And I found it very enticing to be engaged in the same kind of interactivity and I do it for work and I am always on it and it's something I struggle with, but I've gotten better and better about like having safe times where you can disconnect. I bought my wife a little box for our anniversary, which was this little wooden box. And she's, oh, that's a nice little box. I said, that's not the present. The present was I put my phone in the box for the weekend. And I give you the gift of my presence. And I thought I was doing it for her. Yeah, it's really for you. It was like I had the best time, because I wasn't constantly looking at my phone, checking my email, looking at texts. I literally could just be present. I could listen to music.

I could just daydream. I could play with the cat. I mean, whatever, whatever.

What's the connection?

Yeah, and I don't think it's necessarily the phone, it's what we're doing on the phone, right? So if we're listening to music on the phone or reading a book on the phone or really connecting, you know, sometimes we need to connect to people. Of course. Those are not the mindless distractions that succumb us to endless hours of addiction. It's this constant need to be on Facebook to see what other people are doing. It's really that that's mindless. The prying into other people's lives and wanting people to validate yourself through Instagram and Facebook, that's the addiction. If you're reading an article on the New York Times website, that may be good for you. I don't think there's anything wrong with reading, with learning, but it's this vapid part of social media that's alarming to me.

And it's interesting how It's designed to be addictive. Like it's not an accident the way they present the information.

Because it's all visual, it's quick, you scroll, but you can spend 10 minutes and not know and not have learned one. Or 10 hours and not have learned one positive thing. So how I do it is to give myself boundaries. I have all my favorite wisdom sites there. my favorite wisdom podcast. So if I'm going to be there, I'm going to be learning and cultivating.

What about your daughter?

No, my daughter is completely addicted to senseless, rapid activities as most teenagers, like Snapchat, which is drives. I want to take the phone and kill it. But I also know that she needs to find her way with it because this is the culture. And I, I was a bad parent by giving her the phone. I didn't know.

Yeah.

So now I try to educate, but you can't. control, you know, I don't want to do anything out of an imposition or an oppression. I wanted to do from the, I want the child to awaken to it themselves. Yeah. So then I become more of a jewel, you know, come, come to me. Let's go hiking. Let's go out. Sure.

So I connect more. Great experiences. Great experiences. Essentially, I, I, the new iPhone software has the ability to track the screen time.

Yeah.

And the hours, which I think would be a fascinating experiment for people to do for themselves.

Where were they? But also for parents to do on the kids.

On the media, where they were. Yeah, so it tracks your usage in a way that's much more transparent. And you go, wow, I spent like four hours scrolling on Facebook today. I mean, what a waste of time. I could have been learning something or talking to a friend. You know, it's just, I think it's gonna be interesting. And I would love to sort of have a way of tracking my kids and my niece, my nephew and seeing like, what is actually happening? I mean, I remember when I was, this was still when they had like the flip phones. I got them for my kids and they were in junior high just so I could have the ability to contact them. And I got the bill for my phone. They're like 2,000 text messages.

That's crazy.

And I calculated how many text messages a day or minute. And I'm like, what are you doing in school all day? 2,000 text messages. Unbelievable.

Yeah, and I would still say texting to friends It's still different. It's still at least an attempt at virtual connection. But it's that mindless scrolling and posting and needing validation. That's the psychological abyss that people are in and they don't realize. They're doing it for this hunger, this craving, this see me, see me.

It's not the real self.

It's never. It's all edited and photoshopped. that's what I. The texting to friends is still connection. Connect.

Yeah.

You know, it's 2000 times a month. I know that.

But that's still. It's an attempt at connection. It's the. The complete self-absorption and the other absorption that. That I'm talking about, where you're so invested in other people's lives and so measuring your own life in comparison, that is the pitfall, the psychological pitfall.

Okay, let's talk about something else, which is death.

Okay.

Something people don't like to talk about, think about. But you sort of talk about death as an opportunity to actually be more engaged in life and have a more authentic life. Can you talk about that?

Well, you know, we're really dying all the time, so I don't know why people are so scared of the final form death, but we've already had form death. We've already died, our infant self died, our toddler self died, our adolescent self died, our romantic selves with many partners died. We're constantly evolving. So death is, is. It's not something to be afraid of. If you're going to be afraid, now stop, contemplate and be afraid that you've already died so many times. So it's the final, the final apparent physical death that we're afraid of. But that also is not the end of the end. It's a constant transformation. Where does that energy go? It's got to go somewhere. I don't know where, whether it's going to be incarnated or in a form of a biological being, like a flower, compost, bacteria. But it's going to transform. So we've already seen evidence of that in our own lives, right? We've already transformed. The death already transformed into a new spaciousness. So the fear again is because we don't understand the nature of ourselves and how life evolves. And so we have fear. So we live in fear and then in that fear we don't really live.

So if I'm really curious about this book, the Awakened Family, because it's something that I definitely aspire to. fail that.

Yeah.

Wish they came from.

Yeah.

And the subtitle is how to raise empowered, resilient, conscious children.

Yeah.

Which is what we all want.

Yeah.

So can you sort of break it down for us? What are the practical steps? Because we've been talking, you know, yeah. But let's talk about some of the practical ways that you can begin to create an awakened family with the notion that it will never be perfect.

Yeah. Right.

But that what are the things that we can learn and that you've learned through working with families and parents.

I'll just outline a couple. So one is that an awakened self or an awakened family is endeavoring to be authentic. So we are always waiting for the child to unfold in their self-expression. So for example, I didn't do any structured activities with my child till she was six because I was waiting for her to tell me how do I know whether she likes horse riding or parachute.

You didn't get her practicing the piano at two years old, no?

Learning Mandarin or parasailing? I didn't know. So I'm waiting because I wanted to be authentic to her. So that's very hard for parents, is to match it to who the child is showing and revealing themselves to be. Because we're in some hurry and the age of six was already too late. She couldn't join any group activity. She ended up only doing tennis and horse riding because those were the solo activities because she was so behind the curve, Mark.

Yeah.

Isn't that insane at six? So first to show parents the insanity and then to show them that it's about authenticity. This is not about a family that all does everything together and everyone believes the same things. It's about each one being authentic. So the parent has to be able to withstand that, right? Like a child wants to explore Hinduism, but the family's, you know, Muslim or no religion. How is the parent going to truly live up to that value of authenticity? Very few parents can. They say they want to, but no one can. The second thing is to let go of ideations of good and bad. There is no good child, there is no bad child. Every child is endeavoring to be their most revealing self. And if they can't, it's because we haven't created the conditions. So the parent always turns the spotlight within. How is this moment showing up for me to evolve? What does this say about my childhood wounds? what does this say about my projection? So the daring parent is always turning it around to, let me examine myself, let me detach from my expectations, let me release my control, let me surrender, let me attune to what my child is really saying. So constant practice, letting go of good and bad. I don't know what's good, I don't know what's bad, I only know what is, what is, and allowing my child to have their life's experience. If they need to be lost a little bit, that's their life experience. How can I find their way for them? Lostness is part of the human experience.

Hard to do. Hard to do as a parent, right?

Hard to do because we're believing we need to lead our children to success.

Or that we're in control.

And we're in control. The spiritual parent, conscious parent, understands there is no control. There's no one to lead. There's no future, it's all in the present. There's no good or bad, it's all conditioned. It's only the self that needs to be raised.

So how do you teach that in a family? I mean, you say in terms of family values, these are our family values. We believe we should be authentic, we should be honest.

But if you're lucky, if you have a spouse who's on the same page, yeah? So that's very rare. So you just basically, that's why I say it's all about one, any one parent who wishes to awaken. That's the family, one parent, one child. Don't wait for your mother-in-law, don't wait for your siblings, don't get permission from your parents or your spouse or your partner. This is about you. You awaken and you free your child.

So are there practices or conversations or ways of sort of making this practical for people? Because it sounds like it's a hard thing to get people's hands around.

Right, because I think I'm being so practical, but I understand what you're saying. This is what people always say, Give me the tools you didn't tell me. because spiritual practice is not about cookie-cutter tools and keys. You can't put it on a wall. It's a wisdom, it's a way of being, it's an enlightened mind. So, yeah, it's a tougher path because there are no golden strategies. Because if I gave you golden strategies, it's against the teaching, right? It's like then you, so you wake up your kid, then you smile five times, then you give ten compliments, right?

You can't. No, no, that's it. I'm thinking more, you know, like I studied Buddhism and, you know, it's interesting when you look at, the way it is. It's not a religion. It's a way of looking at the way the mind works. I call it a phenomenology of the mind. It's a description of these automatic patterns and what causes suffering and how to undo them. And so I think there are ways to teach that. I think there are ways to teach, break things down for people, say, well, your perception is this, but here's what the real story is.

So every parent who wishes to do that, needs to go on this path. The child is not responsible to free us.

It's not changing the child, it's changing.

Yourself, is what you're talking about. Changing yourself. So you have to endeavor to go on this path. Like I said, extricate from the material, enter the psychological work and the terrain of deconstructing your childhood patterns, seeing that everything is a pattern, then going to the next step of learning meditation and learning wisdom. It's a path that you have to follow. If you wish to embody this, as your life's purpose, right? And then daring to break paradigms, daring to say, you know, I'm not afraid of telling someone that my kid failed, or I'm not afraid of saying, I made a mistake, or I'm not a good parent in a conventional way, or I lost my temper, because I'm all about self-exploration. So when you have the right vibrational frequency of what your path is about, you start breaking paradigms. You start not caring or being so attached to what people think.

In Buddhism, it's interesting, you have the concepts of the teaching, which is the wisdom teaching called the Dharma, the importance of practice, so self-work, and then the importance of community, they call the Sangha. Those are the three pillars. So you can't do it on your own, number one. you need the understanding, the intellectual understanding of the nature of our thinking and our emotions and our behaviors and our thoughts. And you also need the practice. The practice.

So it's the Buddha, the Dharma, the Sangha. These three are the pillars of your practice and your path. So you attract that, you go for it, you invite it into your life. So you train your mind, you do the practice of it. the mindfulness, the meditation, the application. And you have to be surrounded by people who support that and who also are like-minded and like-hearted. You cannot, you can do it on your own, but it takes a real maverick to do it on their own. It's true.

We talk about eating, right? We talk about exercise, how about getting sleep? But, you know, we need brain training because our minds are unstructured, they're on discipline.

That's the most essential thing in the world. It's the thing that creates happiness or suffering. Is the mind. It's not how many hours you exercise or how pretty you are or how buffed you are. This is the birthplace of all suffering. And why? It's not really the birthplace. It is conditioned. So once you decondition, you're back to the mind's original nature, which is freedom. The conditioned mind is the suffering mind. So once, and who are we conditioned by? Really just silly culture. Once you see through culture, you realize It's really just a scared place of lack. And once you get out of it, because you don't wish to be part of lack and competition and fear anymore, you go back to the original nature of your mind, which is a free mind.

So part of what you're saying is really learn some of the wisdom traditions, like learn how they've uncovered the patterns of the mind that cause suffering and the ones that create happiness. And second, you're saying, Develop a practice.

Develop a practice.

Just like you're gonna work out and do strength training, you know, how do you do that? And I think personally, I've come into this 40 years ago, left it for a while and have come back recently to a discipline practice. I mean, I did yoga, breathing, I would do things, but it was very different when I started again to daily meditate 20 minutes twice a day. I was just in Abu Dhabi at Cleveland Clinic and the CEO there is this amazing guy. who is extremely high performing, has incredible vision, is really focused. And I'm like, what's different about this guy? And, you know, by the end of our visit, he revealed to me that he's a regular meditator, that he does 30 minutes twice a day, that he follows a particular practice, and it's helped him understand his mind, be less reactive, be more authentic in his way of leading. I mean, it's really had this amazing impact. I mean, you And you see it's not just kind of, you know, hippies and Birkenstocks doing this. You've got, for example, Seattle Seahawks were meditating why they won the Super Bowl. You've got Michael Jordan and his Chicago Bulls were all meditating under the instruction of the coach who wrote a book called Sacred Hoops. And it was all about the, I mean, sacred hoops, basketball, who's talking about spirituality and sports.

But it's really about the activity of training the mind. You're absolutely right. On a concrete level, it's this marriage, it's this commitment, it's this dedication. to enlivening your mind and to liberating your mind. But as I said in the beginning, people have to want it. And typically, it's not something we feed our children at school or we say, you know, to our spouses, if you're not a meditator, can't marry you. It's not part of the language. But we do see if our spouse has a good job, if they look good, right? But this should be part of the chemistry, and this should be part of the evaluations.

School.

Yeah, it's one of my favorite things. When my wife and I sit and meditate together, it's such a great.

And then we cuddle after, which is pretty awesome. Yeah. It's really about a worldview at the end of the day, right? Understanding that we are conditioned and we want to be less conditioned.

We want to be more authentic. And it's not just an emotional thing that happens when you meditate. There's a wonderful book I'm sure you're familiar with called Altered Traits by Daniel Goldman, who wrote Emotional Intelligence and Richard Davidson, who's studied some of the world's most advanced meditators. You know, Tibetan monks who've lived in a cave for nine years and have meditated the whole time. I mean, people have, you know, 30, 40, 50, 000 hours of meditation, and their brains literally change. The brain waves change their, their creativity patterns change, their ability to have love and compassion changes.

You are literally rewiring your entire inner terrain, how your synapses join and connect. And you're changing that, right? So, like you were giving the example in our break of how you had this impulsive, quick reaction based on a template from childhood. Meditation can undo that. But you have to just work at it through awareness. And the tool is awareness. There's no real tool, physical tool, it's the power of awareness. So that's why all meditation teachers will say when you ask them a question, The first thing they'll say is first be aware, then sit with it, and then wait to see what unfolds, right? Because it's not something that is concrete. It's something that you have to go within and allow.

Yeah, so true. And don't be scared that you have to meditate for 30 or 40,000 hours and live in a cave for nine years. The science is really clear that even people who do within a few weeks or months see profound changes in the brain, the immune system, stem cell production.

And you don't even have to sit there. You can wash dishes and breathe. You can drive a car and breathe.

Once you learn to keep your eyes.

Open when you're driving the car. But once you learn to center on the breath, which is really the most elegant tool of going inward, the Buddha said, Just focus on the breath. Which is what we're doing all day. We're breathing all day, but we're not aware. The breath brings you in the present moment. The breath is the intermediary between the external and the internal. The breath is impermanent. It teaches you the law of impermanence. The breath is transient. The breath is in the now. The breath is in and out, right? So it's constantly making you go inward and outward. The breath is accompanying you everywhere. So you have no excuse to not be on the breath. And that, in essence, is meditation. You don't have to sit in a yogi position or in quiet. In fact, to be on the breath in the midst of Times Square and the traffic jam and the children pooping and screaming is the exalted application of meditation. It's not about cocooning yourself and telling everybody, Shh.

Right?

So I teach meditation online and I do it with online courses. And if the dog barks, I go see.

You know, I meditate on airplanes.

Exactly.

Subways, subways.

Right, because people think it's this very, you know, coveted, pedestaled, phenomenal.

Your perfect cushion, your perfect incense.

That's another attachment. It's another attachment. It's just about being in the present, so enter the present wherever you are.

Yeah.

That's powerful. Wow. So, if you could sort of be in charge for a day in the world, what would you suggest or create for people to wake up?

Silence, quietude, solitude, breathe. Do it for 10 hours, the entire world will change. Because that will naturally create less reactivity, naturally lessen the ego, which is the cause of all strife and violence. Me, my identification to me and my views. And the minute you begin to meditate and see that your thoughts are just thoughts which are conditioned, then all your ideas like I am a Muslim, I am a Catholic, I am tall, I am better, I am white, I am black, dissolves. And then you realize, oh, we're all one. And we're all interdependence. So when I kill you, I kill myself. So no more. So it's the end of all conflict, strife, and violence.

It's the beginning of love.

It's the beginning of this eternal oceanic dissolved state called love. Yes.

Amazing. Thank you, Dr. Shefali, for joining us in the Doctor's Pharmacy. Thank you so much. It's an amazing conversation, lots of food for thought. You've been listening to the Doctor's Pharmacy with Dr. Shefali. I hope you enjoyed the conversation. I encourage you to share this with your friends and family. If you like this podcast, be sure to give a review and subscribe wherever.

You get your podcast, and we'll see.

You next time on the Doctor's Pharmacy.

Thank you so much.