Dr. Cassandra Vieten | Healing the Mind by Coming Home to the Body

We are definitely born into this world with a temperamental biological genetic makeup that significantly influences how we view the world. If you come into the world with altered dopamine processing or altered serotonin processing, you are already going to have greater likelihood that somebody pulls in front of you and they start slowing down and you're going to be like, what the heck is wrong with this guy? You know, why is he in my way? And you more likely to personalize it, more likely to view it negatively, more likely to tell a negative story about it. And whereas somebody else might be born into this world with the genetics that have them look at that same experience and say, ooh, that guy must be having a hard day. Let me back off a little bit.

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Have you ever wondered what might happen if we treated mental health not as a fixed state, but as a skill? In today's episode, I have the privilege of sitting down with Dr. Cassandra Vitin, a trailblazer in the fields of psychology, mindfulness and integrative medicine, Cassandra brings a rare depth of insight drawn from decades of clinical research and real world application, including her leadership at the center for Mindfulness at UC San Diego and her pioneering work with mind body interventions, psychedelics and even virtual reality for healing. Together we explore how mental well being is not just a matter of diagnosing and treating symptoms, but of cultivating the internal conditions that make transformation possible from the inside out. Cassandra shares how mindfulness and spiritual practices can be woven into clinical frameworks and why identity, when unexamined, can become one of the greatest obstacles to change. This conversation is an invitation to step beyond resistance into acceptance, into a more expansive vision of who we are becoming. Let's dive in. My name is Dr. Plitmall, your co host for this session, and I'm really happy to be here today with Dr. Cassandra Vitan.

Welcome Dr. Vithen.

It's good to be with you again.

So today we're exploring really the power of our beliefs, both conscious and unconscious, to influence how we perceive the world, what we make of it, the meaning we add to it, our reactions, our behaviors, and many sense the results we create manifest in our lives. So let's start by exploring your work in the mind body medicine field. So what if you could describe mind body medicine for us a little bit and what role beliefs play in that or what role mind body medicine can play in transforming, limiting core beliefs to more life enhancing or life affirming beliefs?

Yeah. Well, thank you. I mean, I would say that mind body medicine is just medical care, regular medical care. But unfortunately, the way that conventional medical care in the west is performed right now, particularly in the United States, is a much more biologically oriented type of care, which is good. I mean, the movement towards biology and measurement from superstition was a very good one about four or five, 600 years ago, a thousand years ago. But the pendulum at this point has gone a little bit too far in that direction, ignoring the effects of the mind or belief systems on the body. And what I mean by that is not that people don't know about it because everybody knows about it. It's just that it's not emphasized in treatment. So a good example I like to share is I had a friend not too long ago who had a liver disease and she went to her doctor and she was someone who exercised and had good nutrition and he gave her some medication and she said, is there anything else I can do about this? And he said, no, not really, just come back in six months. And I don't think that's true. I think there are a lot of things that she could do to help her body activate its own innate salutogenic or, you know, healing oriented response, including things like mindfulness, reducing stress, changing belief systems, guided visualization. There's tons of evidence now that what we think and what we pay attention to, what we believe, what we visualize, has actual biological effects on our bodies, on our brains, on our hormones, on our gene expression, not only the functioning of our brains and bodies, but even the structure over not too long a period of time. Evidence shows that, for example, a daily mindfulness practice for only about 20 to 30 minutes a day has effects on the brain, including things like neurogenesis and thickening of the cortex. And so there really is no separation between mind and body. And we just need to, I think, rebalance and say, yes, we do need to address these issues biologically, but we also need to address them in the realm of what we think and imagine and believe.

And so we know today that most chronic illnesses, we can look at this both in terms of healing illness as well as optimizing health and wellbeing. Right. But in terms of illnesses, we know most chronic illnesses arise from some kind of systemic inflammation, which is really has to do with our mind states. Right. Chronic stress, which is related to the mind states and other things that, as you said, impact gene expression. What we know today about epigenetics and so forth. So our mind states are all important and our beliefs have a lot of impact on our mind state because what we believe about ourselves in the world influences how we interpret what we're experiencing. And then that can lead to states of chronic stress, or it can lead to states of mind states or heart sets that support more harmonious or kind of a balanced way of being with our lives. So I wonder if we could explore a little bit your sense of the connection between beliefs and how the mind band influences health for better or worse.

Yeah, I mean it's really a bi directional, it's really completely blended. But let's say for now there are two poles. It's bidirectional that the body and biology affects the mind in very profound ways. And you know, if you have less circulating serotonin, you are definitely gonna feel less happy, less. Less of the feeling of everything's going to be okay or I'm a generally good person or I live in a generally good world. So for sure, biology affects the mind. There's no question, and I am absolutely not against biological treatments. But the mind also affects the body. And so it really needs to be addressed at both levels. And it really should be more like a three legged stool that there's the environment. So your beliefs and worldviews and what you imagine and visualize affects your body, your body affects your mind and what you believe and how you talk to yourself. And then all of that is encompassed with your environment. And there's also a little bit less attention to creating a healing environment than I think there should be. That can go anywhere from, you know, changing your room to one that when you wake up, you feel happy, you know, painting the colors in your room and having things on your bedside table and putting your phone outside of your room or outside of reach while you're sleeping. And all those kinds of the people you hang out with, the TV shows you watch, what you listen to, what you read, all of those things in your environment affect both mind and body. And so it's really important that we start to look at this more holistically and say, when I'm feeling out of sorts or when I'm feeling ill, what is going on with my physiology, what is going on with my mind and my beliefs, my story, my narrative and what's going on in my environment, and really address all three.

You've spoken about a kind of mental health renaissance that we're in these days with innovative approaches to mental health, including psychedelic assisted therapies, cold exposure, various kinds of energy medicine, mind training, mindfulness, and so forth. So I want to how this kind of movement, this mental health renaissance, challenges some of our older beliefs about mental health and what dominated the field of psychiatry and where that could be leading us.

The mental health renaissance I like to talk about because we talk a lot about the mental health crisis. And if you read the news and listen to the news and everything, you know, all you hear about is the epidemic of loneliness and the depression and anxiety, and all of those things are true. There's definitely a major crisis happening and. And it's really good that people are talking about it more than they used to talk about it and stating the truth about what is so about the poor state of mental health across our world right now. But at the same time, there is this very. There's reason for optimism because there's a big wave of mental health treatments that are going far beyond antidepressants, going far beyond our previous ideas of talk therapy, sitting in a room and talking to someone. Now both of those have helped me considerably throughout my life and they help a lot of other people. So I'm not putting them down. But what we need to add to those is all of these other ways that you can sort of hack the system. You know, hot and cold exposure. You mentioned there's some really good data showing that exposing yourself to a cold bath or an ice bath, exposing yourself to heat, either a hot tub or a hot sauna, or alternating between the two, has substantial effects on mood and well being. We've already mentioned mindfulness, just simply sitting, paying attention to your breathing and your body sensations, practicing that for about 20 minutes a day, doing it in a particular way with kindness, openness, compassion, gentleness, practicing that and learning it and allowing yourself to witness your train of thought, teaching yourself to witness your body sensations and your thoughts as opposed to being completely fused with them, turns out to be an incredibly powerful antidepressant, anti anxiety, because you might still have those feelings arise or those thoughts arise, but there's a part of you that's witnessing them arising. And that part of you that's witnessing is not itself in the depression or anxiety. And so more and more people learn to say, well, I'm having some depressive thoughts, but I don't feel miserable, I don't, I'm not suffering. And that is a big change. Another you mentioned is psychedelics that we are beginning to carefully, thoughtfully use these agents that have been used for millennia to shift people's perspectives and to give them insights, to be able to help people break outside of their narrow box of thinking, come up with new ideas and insights about things that may have plagued them throughout their entire lives. And then when they come back from that altered state of consciousness with help from another person, typically integrating those new insights and saying, okay, well, if this belief I had about myself my whole entire life is not true, and I just had an embodied experience in an altered state of consciousness, not only that it's not true, but that belief has been harming me and decided to let it go. It's amazing how sometimes those sessions, only one session, can be completely life changing. And that once you've had that insight, it's hard to unhabit. It stays with you.

Yeah, I think it's really fascinating how psychedelic experiences properly held can really illuminate mindsets and belief structures that have been creating a lot of our own suffering. And we see it clearly enough that we have the possibility of actually letting that go. We both see how they're negative influence on our life and we see they're kind of untruth, or at least they're just one possible narrative. And obviously something is malleable and changeable. So that's quite fascinating. You also mentioned the hot and cold exposure. I haven't invested in a cold plunge tub yet, but I have been doing cold showers for several years, religiously, every morning, and I do think it's very helpful.

You know, we've mentioned some more extreme practices, but even less extreme just being out in nature for a particular amount of time every day or every week, paying attention to spending time with loved ones and being fully present while you're spending the time with the loved ones, engaging in specific times of day, or, you know, setting aside time for exploration of your spiritual practices or religious practices, or if you're not a spiritual or religious person, existential contemplation about humanistic values that are important to you. Truth, beauty, justice, honesty, gratitude, journaling, art, creativity, being of service. There's an entire world out there of things that you can engage in that do change the way you think, the way you view yourself, the way you view the world and your brain and your body.

Absolutely. And it's kind of ironic, maybe more tragic in some cases, that as you mentioned, there's a lot of challenges in our world today where people talk about the poly crisis, there's so many crises going on, as well as the existential threat of human caused climate change that creates a lot of anxiety for a lot of us. And there does seem to be an epidemic of anxiety and depression and suicidality and so forth. And at the same time, we've never had access to more tools that would support healing and support optimizing our health and wellbeing. And many of these tools have been around forever, but there's more information about them than ever now. There's a lot of research demonstrating how and why they work, and then there's new tools that have been developed. And so it's kind of an interesting time that we have all this available to us. And I guess it's what we really need is wider public education, which is really the purpose of these summits, so that people will be making use of these tools to address, you know, what's really been going on societally, which is, you know, maybe the news tends to spin it to the negative a bit, but it is pretty widespread, the suffering that's happening for people. So. But the good news is we know how to address it.

A couple things I didn't even mention yet are exercise and nutrition. And so I was trained as a psychologist, a clinical psychologist, and me and most of my colleagues were not trained at all in any form of how exercise affects the mood or the brain. Or the thinking patterns or nutrition. So it's really unfortunate that somebody can go in for mental health treatment and get treatment for years and never once have the involvement of a physical trainer or a nutritionist. You know, those kinds of divides still exist. And I've been working with the John W. Brick Mental Health foundation for quite a while now. And this is one thing that they're trying to break down is the divide between the exercise world and the mental health world. And I think there's going to be some really interesting things happening in that domain. For example, they just created a certification program for fitness professionals to be mental health informed. And the next step will be to create a certification program for mental health professionals to be movement informed. And so building those bridges is very important, really important.

I've often felt that one of the best things a therapist or a psychiatrist could do, rather than sitting in a small room with their patient and then prescribing them something, would be to go out and go for a walk together. Do a walk. You've also been involved in virtual reality and new virtual reality tools that can help with perspective in the same way that maybe psychedelic experiences would create a perspective shift or a shift in consciousness that there are virtual reality tools that can do. So I wonder if you would share your experience with that.

Yeah, well, I mean, I've been just kind of obsessed throughout my career with how can we shift people's perspectives? How can we help them see new possibilities that allow them to be kinder to themselves and others and the planet? And there's a really good reason why we have fixed beliefs. It has to do with cognitive efficiency. And so one of the ways we move through the world as we are born and, you know, are raised and get older, is we create these cognitive categories and we say, okay, this is like this, this is like this. This is like this. We do it based on similarity and difference. So, and then we do it based on what we like and what we don't like, what causes pleasure, what causes pain, and a few other kind of pretty binary things. You know, is it good? Is it bad? Do I like it? Do I not like it? Is it this or is it that? Is it like me or is it not like me? So that's kind of how the computer of our brain works. And it's really good because otherwise we'd walk through, wake up every day, and have to relearn everything every single day. So we don't want that. The problem is when they get so fixed and so rigid that they're driving Our lives, either consciously or unconsciously. And they're driving us to engage in thought patterns and behaviors that are not good for us. They're not good for our loved ones, they're not good for the planet. And so trying to shake up those rigid, concretized beliefs is a big trick, because the brain is wired to not have those shaken up. It's immune to change in a way. So what we need to do often is have some kind of a profound experience that shifts our perspective. And that can come from a spiritual experience we've mentioned. It's fairly reliable, actually, that it would come from a psilocybin session, and even better with preparation, with somebody sitting with you, with integration afterwards. And it doesn't necessarily change people, for in a lasting way. You still have to engage in practices after you've had one of those aha moments that help you to integrate it into your life. Otherwise, you might be stuck just searching for that aha moment over and over again and still kind of being a jerk on the freeway and, you know, not doing behaviors to help change yourself or the planet. So you've got to follow up those big moments with practice. But this is a long answer to say that. One of the things I got really interested in was virtual reality, which I do work with pretty often. This is my little headset in my office. And when I first got introduced to virtual reality, I did an experience in kind of a big open space, and I put on the headset, and the people had created a floor that you walk across in the virtual world. And it looked kind of like a cartoon. So it's just a metal floor that you're walking across. And then all of a sudden, either side of you falls four stories, and you're on a tiny plank that you're walking. And so immediately, my whole entire body gets a cold sweat. You know, I'm like, oh, my gosh. And then they say, turn to your left, and now just simply walk off the plank. Allow yourself to fall the four stories in virtual reality. And I could not do it. I could not get my body to do it. And my heart is beating. You know, my nervous system is completely activated. And the first thought I had was, oh, my gosh, this is going to work. Like, this is going to work to help people have experiences that change their perspective. It's powerful enough and the illusion is powerful enough that I think it can do something. We know it can do something biologically because I'm sweating right now. My heart is beating fast. So anyway, we've created several Virtual reality experiences. One is taking people into space, having them wake up on the moon basically and come back to the Earth from the moon in a space capsule. This was a collaboration with the Institute of Noet. This is produced by the Institute of Noetic Sciences using real NASA footage and audio, as well as Edgar Mitchell, who was the sixth person to walk on the moon and the founder of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, who has passed away since using his narration of what it was like for him to go back to the Earth from space. So beautiful music. And it's really trying to give people at least an echo of what we call the overview effect that astronauts experience when they look at the Earth from space and they see there are no boundaries between countries and they have a increased social consciousness. They feel much more convinced that we are all one species on this planet and even that the entire planet is an interconnected whole. Everyone deserves life and love. And that there's. When you look at the Earth from space, it's so small in this vast billions of miles of blackness that you become much more interested in making sure that you care for it and that we preserve it and many other things. And so we're trying to give people that experience in space. We also take people into VR and teach them how to meditate and self compassion practices in highly conducive environments like, you know, island resort where there's a beautiful meditation room with birds and waves and a bamboo forest. And you know, so these are conditions, as I mentioned before, the environment is important. And so these are conditions where you can give someone an illusory environment and make it easier for them to be able to learn meditation and self compassion. And then ideally when they come back to ordinary reality, they have had that a little bit of that insight and they're able to translate it into their everyday lives.

Are any of these virtual reality programs publicly available?

Yeah, there's the Edgar Mitchell VR Experience is on Steam, which is one of the most popular virtual reality stores on the Internet. So if you go to Steam and look up Edgar Mitchell VR experience, you can also just watch it on YouTube at 2D if you want to know what it's like. The other one, Compassion island we call it, is in a platform called vrchat, which is open source. And maybe after this I can give you the way that people can get into it. You can put it with my bio. But we're using these in experiments. We're looking at people's biology, their heart rate variability, their self reports of how they feel before and after Behavioral measures. We're having them go through tasks online and see if it changes their perception or their responses or reactions. And it's a fascinating field of study, but it's all focused on how do we shift people out of those rigid perspectives, those very fixed perspectives that can be harmful.

Well, it's really fascinating. And that experience you had, being on the plank, being willing to step off that plank, reminds me of doing a firewalk, which I did do one time.

Yeah. It really shifts your mind about what's possible. Yeah.

So I wonder if we could talk for a moment about the relationship between beliefs and what are sometimes called limiting core beliefs and how we transform those. So one, maybe taking a psychological perspective, you can develop more awareness around limiting core beliefs that you may have paying attention to your self talk or by other means, and then begin to look at those and see whether they were all formed in our childhood. None of us escaped childhood without some of them. And you know, you can see them as maybe reasonable things that we came up with at one point or not to interpret our world, to make sense of the world, or even to keep ourselves safe. But then we can look at them. Are they currently serving us or not? Or are they back really decidedly not serving us. Then you know, look at ways to deconstruct them, no longer believe in them, replace them with other beliefs. So we could kind of directly address the beliefs and try to change them directly. But you also mentioned all the things we can be doing for our health and well being, diet and exercise and proper breathing and hydration, mindfulness practices, and some of these other things like cold and hot exposure and psychedelic experiences, these virtual reality experiences, and some of these experiences. I'm curious if you feel just engaging more that might almost organically begin to shift some of our perspectives and beliefs. We might just kind of organically develop a more positive view about ourselves in the world. Because a lot of the limiting core beliefs basically have to do with feeling like all the ways in which I'm not enough and then all the ways in which there's not enough of what's desirable to go around. You know, love and land and wealth and fame and respect and all that. And therefore we have this fear based view of the world. You know, I'm probably not good enough to get it and there's not enough of it. And so I'm in this constant struggle. And so I'm wondering if these two different approaches may be to transforming those beliefs. One kind of directly identifying specific limiting core beliefs and looking to deconstruct them or change them or replace them, and the other where they might just kind of organically begin to shift by engaging in these health and wellbeing activities.

Yeah, definitely. I mean, I teach a workshop at the Esalen Institute called How We Change and why We Don't. And that is a workshop that is very focused on translating what we've learned about ways that people do change their core story. And some of it is surprising. And as number one, I would say about what you said, not all of them come from childhood. We are definitely born into this world with a temperamental biological genetic makeup that significantly influences how we view the world. So if you come into the world with altered dopamine processing or altered serotonin processing, you are already going to have the greater likelihood that somebody pulls in front of you and they start slowing down, and you're going to be like, what the heck is wrong with this guy? You know, why is he in my way? And you more likely to personalize it, more likely to view it negatively, more likely to tell a negative story about it. And whereas somebody else might be born into this world with the genetics that have them look at that same experience and say, ooh, that guy must be having a hard day. Let me back off a little bit. You know, it's just a different personality.

Those genetic inheritances that you're describing there, that may set us up to have a more positive or less helpful neurochemical propensity, those can also be sort of epigenetic factors, right?

Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. You can come in with, like, a increased sensitivity, which could lead to you being very empathic and loving and caring, or could lead to you, if you have negative childhood experiences, could lead to you being sensitive in a way that's not helpful. You know, easily offended and reactive. But I think it's really important for all of us to just sort of say, like, hey, I was dealt a hand of cards when I got here. And then whatever happened in my childhood and in my upbringing, not only through my parents and family, but through society itself, through religion, through culture, through socioeconomic status, through media. I mean, a million things, right, have built where I am today, my own experiences, my culture, what was passed down to me, intergenerational traumas and intergenerational blessings and privilege. And so here you are with this beautiful, messy, wonderful, icky ball of yarn that you are, you know, and let's say what you want to do with that ball of yarn is weave it into a tapestry that is your life. And so the second thing I would say is there's been a lot of focus on letting go of beliefs that don't serve you or getting rid of things inside of you that you don't like. And I tend to teach something that's called radical inclusion, which is that every aspect of yourself, no matter how negative, no matter how difficult, is welcome, that it is a part of you that gets to stay. And the difference is that it may not be allowed to take the driver's seat anymore. So you might say, I have a part of me that tends to be very self critical. It'll tell me that I'm all the things that you were just saying. You know, I'm worthless, I'm not good enough, I'm not this, I'm not that. And when that voice starts to speak up, I notice that it's talking and I say, oh, there's that voice again. I know that one so well. And I say, come on over here, sit next to me. I got you. I'm going to put my arm around you. You're going to sit right next to me and you're not going to drive the car. And I understand when you feel insecure, when you feel like you're not worth it. Let's do all the things that we know counteract that feeling, which is everything you and I just talked about, being in nature and being with friends and doing our practices, writing and journaling and a million different things. Being able to begin to not only tolerate but welcome and even love those parts of yourself with a kind compassion, but also with a firm boundary, fierce compassion, that says you get to stay but you don't get to drive. That's one thing. Another thing is just as you said, one of the things we found is that very often addressing an issue in your life head on or directly doesn't work. You know, let's say you have trouble with overeating, or you have trouble with finding difficult relationships, or you have trouble manifesting the job that you want to have and many other things. You could keep hammering away on that weakness or that difficulty of yours for years and it may not ever go anywhere because you're in a locked battle between a couple parts of yourself. But what you can do is make your internal and external environment less hospitable to the way of being that you don't want and more hospitable to the way of being that you do want. And so it's called creating the conditions. And that's inside. How do I create my internal conditions that are less hospitable to the ways of being that I don't want and more hospitable to the ways of being that I do want. What makes it more likely that I'm going to be the way I want to be? So let's say that I really want to exercise in my life. And so one thing that might make it more possible is if I lay out a yoga mat with weights, with stretchy bands, with a table that has my laptop on it that I plug in the night before, I bring up the exercise video I want to do so that when I wake up, I get a drink, I take care of myself, and then I hop onto that mat and do it. So much more likely than if I'm sitting in bed with my phone going, oh, God, I wish I would get out my exercise stuff this morning. That's a silly example. That's a superficial example, but it's actually not. Because if you did it and you did it for 20 minutes every morning, it would change your entire life. Your mood, your hormones, your neurotransmitters. And so that's the third thing I guess I would say is small changes. What? You know that book, Atomic Habits? Small changes really make a gigantic difference. We all have this belief that, you know, if I don't go to meditating for an hour every day, that I'm not really doing it. It's not true. Five minutes a day at the beginning, seven minutes, eight minutes, nine minutes. If you can get yourself up to 14 minutes a day, your life will change. And so really paying attention to those small changes that make big differences, this is incredibly helpful.

What you've really been talking about is strategies for change now. And you referenced taking this more acceptance based approach. And we've learned from the field of mindfulness with mindfulness based, well, general mindfulness altogether, the importance of the attitudinal qualities that Jon Kabatin emphasizes, for example, but also modalities like acceptance, commitment therapy and dialectical behavioral therapy, rather than that older style of cognitive behavioral that, you know, let's just replace the bad thoughts with good thoughts or kind of almost doing surgery on yourself. It's more this acceptance approach which tends to then lessen the influence of those more negative thought patterns or beliefs on us and gives us more space in order to make different decisions. And then also it sounded like you were referencing with the parts that, you know, voice, dialogue and internal. Yeah, you know, Dick Schwartz book, there are no bad parts. So again, the acceptance approach.

Yeah, yeah, I find it very powerful. And you know, it's. For many people, it's paradoxical. You know, they've been trying to wrestle these things to the map their whole life. They've been trying to kick them out and eliminate them forever. And when they finally say, you know, this is not a thing that you need to eliminate, in fact, bring it closer, be examine it more closely, be curious about it, be fascinated by it, you know, and those inner parts of us that have been trying often to protect us in a weird way once they start to get listened to. And you know, there's a Tibetan practice called feeding your demons. You sometimes you need to make deals with those inner voices and say, look, you don't get to do that. But what is one thing that would help you? What is one thing that would allow you to allow me to be this different way? And they say, well, you know, if I could have a hot fudge sundae once a week, I would feel much better about letting you do this plant based diet that you want to do. And you're like, okay, deal, let's do it right. So you can work with the parts of yourself and instead of continuing to fight with them, continuing to try to wrestle them to the mat, most of them are not ever going to give up. We have this built in immunity to change. I mean, you know, I think if you can change a belief system inside of you, knock yourself out. Like I would say one example in my own life was, and this happened in part through psychedelic journeys is, you know, I'm a curvy person, I'm five feet tall, I'm curvy, my entire family is, you know, back to who knows how long ago is curvy. And I didn't realize until I took a psychedelic journey that I had really been so ashamed of my body, just so mad at myself and so much like, you know, you should be slim. That's the only way to be healthy is to be slim. And every time you see a curve, every time you see a bulge, every time you see a pooch, it's a reason to be ashamed. Which means that happens almost every day, all the time. And so finally getting into a much bigger perspective. And goddesses throughout the centuries and Greek statues throughout the centuries, and you know, Indian dancers and I mean, I just had floods and floods of women throughout millennia having curvy bodies and absolutely fell in love with the exquisiteness of every single curve on my body. And that has never gone away. I mean, since I had that insight, I've never been motivated by shame or self hatred around my body. That is a big perspective shift that's a big thing that changes the quality of life on an everyday basis. And I wouldn't. If you had asked me before that, are you ashamed of yourself all day long, I would have been like, no, what are you talking about? You know, so you don't know. Sometimes these things are happening. So those kinds of moments of insight that lead to long term freedom from a limiting belief are absolutely powerful in terms of increasing quality of life.

Yeah, it's an incredible example. Some of the liberating insights that come from psychic experiences. So to reinforce this quality of acceptance that we can really come from a place of self acceptance, self compassion, and working with our internal psychological and neurobiological landscape rather than trying to shove ourselves around or do surgery on ourselves, regardless of what epigenetic factors we may have inherited and so forth, it's universal that the negativity bias that's referenced in our human psychology and neurobiology. The job one for any species is survival. So we're set up to pay more attention to threat than anything else. And so our long term memory ends up filled with that and we end up, you know, tending to spend things. Nobody escapes that. That's just the human condition.

Right, right.

So we're all born with that. And we can realize that's just part of life. And we have the human capacity to be conscious and sort of transcend that and not let it run our lives. But we have to proactively. We need to proactively do things so we have the ability to do that. But it's there. It's there to keep us alive. But if it dominates our life, that's not so helpful. But that's just the universal human condition.

Yeah.

The more we look at it and understand it's working, the more we can turn it to our good, to our benefit, the more we understand what kind of really makes us tick.

Yeah, yeah. My friend Rick Hansen likes to say, you know, humans in general are like Velcro for negative experiences and Teflon for positive ones. And that means that you have to purposely, intentionally, what he calls, take in the good. You know, when you experience things that are working, things that feel good, things that are flowing, that you have to spend time paying attention to it and even bringing it back up to mind, like, boy, that was a wonderful day I had outside with my partner yesterday. Or, you know, write it down, journal about it so that you can purposely make it more Velcro inside of you. And those kinds of experiences actually serve as antidotes to stress and difficulty. If we pay Greater attention to them.

You also referenced, you know, setting yourself, setting ourselves up for success and all the wonderful insights that have come out of recent books like Atomic Habits and Tiny Habits and others. We know a lot today about how habits are formed, how they can be transformed and changed. And one of the really the key insights I think is setting ourselves up for success or even a health habit like leaving your phone out of your bedroom when you go to sleep at night. Because a lot of us can get into that pattern of waking up immediately, looking at our phones and looking at the news and what are we getting? We're getting a lot of stress from that. Right. And just leaving the phone downstairs, you're much more likely not to do that. Takes a lot of effort to get up, run downstairs, get your phone and engage in that. Right. So very simple things can say us up for success in that way.

Yeah. And I think it's important to also address even though they're simple, even though they're small, even though they're all of those things, they are not easy. And you know, that is something that's really lies at the core of some of this too is if something were going to change your life like 20 minutes of exercise a day, wouldn't you do it? Would be a complete no brainer. But we're not, we don't, you know, we don't always do it. And so that's the next frontier of this whole thing about rewiring your beliefs is why wouldn't I do those things? Well, why wouldn't we? That's something to contemplate. One reason may be that you are simply under resourced. You're working too much or you're taking care of other people too much and you simply do not have any extra batteries left. That's a real thing. And that means, okay, I'm going to have to actually schedule the time for myself to do these things and to not only do them, but have the spontaneous time for fun and play and relaxation so that I can build up some energy reserves to be able to do these things.

Personal change, personal transformation all requires energy. And you know, just again pointing to the importance of fundamental self care habits. How do we take care of ourselves so we have the energy for our life to go in the direction we'd like it to go?

Yeah, yeah. And then there are other reasons why we don't do it. We may be having mental health struggles that depression makes it very hard to sometimes make it down to your mailbox, much less on some kind of a 20 minute exercise routine. So when you are having those kinds of problems, that is when it's really helpful to bring in a community, to bring in other people who can help serve as scaffolding as you rebuilding yourself. We cannot, almost very rarely can humans do this alone. And so if you look at something like a 12 step program, that is a good example of a community that has set into place inside of the community several of the aspects that we know help people change and help sustain change. Social support, you know, repeated rituals, spirituality, practices, you know, all these kinds of things that are included in a community like that. You know, having one other person be paired with you to help you walk through the first stages. So it might not be a 12 step program, it might be some other form of community, a meditation community or a church or you know, even if you can find a community that's. Oh, there's a great one called Integral Transformative Practice that comes out of. Esalen and Michael Murphy and George Leonard created eight practices and usually in fall, regional groups all over the world will start a year long process where they all meet together and work on these things. So I highly recommend that if you are having struggles with things that you've struggled with for a long time and you've tried to do it on your own, it's really helpful to find a community of practice of like minded folks. They don't have to be exactly like minded, you know, you don't, they don't need to be copies of you or else that would be kind of boring too. Find a community that's interesting, that seems like it's engaging in practices that are new and could help form a scaffolding as you move forward in your path.

Yeah, there are a number of communities like Ken Wilbur also has the integral life practices and community that at heart, mind we have a membership that does that. And so I think it is really important to engage in that. You mentioned the 12 step work addictions as an example, where we can, you know, if we're suffering with addiction and we can study about it, learn about it and be able to get a PhD about our own addictive cycles and still be completely unable to break free from it. Yeah, it's been shown the importance of community is so important there. I wonder if you also mentioned depression. I wanted to ask you about that. So we talked about all the things we can do that are healthy for us, that'll help us change and optimize and will change our beliefs over time, or at least not have negative beliefs drive our lives so much and there's just so many different things we can do. But when someone's depressed, they may know about all those things and just not have the ability or the will or the energy to do them. So what might be some strategies there where someone can make that shift? You mentioned community, but again, that could be something that someone's depressed or unlikely to engage in. Community.

Yeah, yeah, it's really difficult. I mean, first of all, I am a big proponent of asking for medical help or therapeutic help. You might need treatment, you might need inpatient treatment. You might need to ask for intensive outpatient, which is where you go to therapy all day, every day or every afternoon. You may need to see a therapist, but also be in groups that are supportive of what's going on with you. So when you get to the point where you cannot help yourself and you can't even get to these self help groups that might help you, that's when it really is time to call for medical help. And I also advise everyone to, even if you're not in that place right now, one in four people experience a serious mental health challenge every year. And so it's important that you come up with a plan. What is your insurance cover? If you did get into a situation like that, who would you call? What is your mental health plan? Because when you get into that situation, that's the worst time to try to find help. What you want to do is have it in your back pocket and be like, I know what my insurance covers. I know who that mental health professional is and that's who I will call if I get into a deep, dark place that I can't get out of. So that's one.

Yeah. I have a colleague. I do a lot of work in the corrections field and public safety, and I have a colleague who's a now retired police lieutenant and he talks about being a police officer. He knows he's exposed to both primary and secondary trauma and chronic stress. That's just part of his job. And so to work smart, he knows he needs to take care of himself. So he has regular check ins with his, what he calls his mental health coach, which is his therapist. Right. And he just considers that just being smart, being preventive in terms of taking care of himself. We all necessarily have to have a therapist, but we might want to know how to access a therapist just in case.

Yeah, yeah. And you know, I work with police too, and they call it a perishable skill. You know, you have to keep learning how to hit a target. You have to keep learning every year you update your skills. It's the same thing with mental health. It is a little bit of a perishable skill. You need to keep it up over time. And sometimes it's one of the analogies I've heard is like clearing the brush around your house. If you live in a fire zone, you know, you want to clear the brush around your house pretty often. You don't want to be clearing it when the fire's on its way.

Absolutely. So we have a lot of mental health providers, therapists and so forth in our audience, and I know you've done work around spiritual competencies for mental health professionals, and so those will probably be of interest to our lay audience as well. So I'm wondering if you could talk about those a little bit.

Yeah, I mean, this project really came out of the understanding that most therapists and psychologists have not been trained in addressing the spiritual or religious aspects of people's lives. And that is a very important part of many people's lives. It can be, for, I don't know, 60 to 70% of people will say it's the number one driving influence of their lives. It's how they make sense of their life is their spiritual or religious beliefs. It's how they make sense of something as large as losing a loved one, all the way down to how they cope with having a flat tire on the freeway. You know, it's a very important part of people's psychological lives that most psychologists and mental health professionals have not really learned how to address. Obviously, there are some people who have, but most general psychologists and mental health professionals will not ask you specifically about your spiritual or religious beliefs. And I think that's a real shame because of how important it is in people's psychological lives. A lot of them also don't ask. They don't really know how to ask, or what's effective or what's ethical, or would it be intrusive, would it be welcomed by the patient? So they just avoid it. So one thing we're doing is trying to establish what competencies should every mental health professional know how to do and what skills should they apply? And it starts with just inquiring. Do you have any spiritual or religious beliefs? Are they relevant at all to the issue that you're bringing in? If you don't have spiritual or religious beliefs, what principles or values do you hold most sacred? You know, what is the overall purpose of your life in your mind? Do you feel like you have an assignment in the larger level? These questions are very important to ask people because One thing that we know is people rarely maintain changes because they should do it. They maintain changes when it becomes a part of their identity. I am the kind of person who does this, and that's everything from personal changes to societal changes like things that lead to climate change behaviors and such. So it's never very effective to tell people what they should do or even to tell yourself what you should do. It's more effective to find out how is this aligned with my larger purpose, identity driving force in my life? If my assignment is to, for me, help shift people's perspectives so that they can see new possibilities that allow them to be kinder to themselves, others on the planet, what behaviors do I need to engage in to achieve, to be in alignment with that purpose? And when you start to align your behaviors with your overarching purpose and you bring that purpose to mind on a frequent basis, it becomes more about what you're moving toward than what you're moving away from. And when you live your life about what you're moving toward instead of what you're moving away from, there's just a more joyful feeling about changing these behaviors as opposed to, oh, I shit, I know I should do that. You know, that kind of stuff. So that's a really important piece, is to delve into what is your assignment? What is your big assignment? What is your purpose? What is the driving principle in your life? And write it down, bring it to mind, put it on your bedside table, put it on your mirror, and then you can use it as a litmus test when you come up with difficult decisions or when you're trying to decide, should I indulge myself right now with something and say, is this advancing that purpose, or is it moving me away from my purpose?

I'm glad you brought up the notion of identity. I think we can think of identity almost as a kind of meta belief in a way or collection of beliefs. And I personally think it's one of the greatest obstacles to change. And we so often hear people say, well, that's just the way I am. I've always been that way. I don't see how I could be different than that. That's always the way I felt about things. That's just the way I am. And we all need identity. I mean, maybe we can get to spiritual heights where we go beyond the need for identity. It requires quite a bit of work, I think. But most of us, we, you know, we're born these very fragile creatures in a symbiotic relationship with our mother or surrogate. Parent. And then we have to begin to individuate. And so we start building an identity from which to navigate this challenging world, especially as a little tight full of these giants. And so we build an identity out of whatever's available to us. And depending on our childhoods, that may be more or less functional and more or less benevolent, but it becomes our identity. And the alternative is kind of black hole of emptiness. Groundlessness. That's an aspect of life that we explore in spiritual traditions and through psychedelics and other means as adults, we can begin to maybe get more comfortable with that. But as children, we have no way to embrace groundlessness and emptiness and these kind of things. So we hold onto our identities pretty tightly. So I think identities can be really one of the biggest obstacles to change, but also one of the greatest facilitators of change. Personally, I finally stopped smoking in my 30s. And after trying to quit many times, it was really when my identity shifted. It clearly happened for me that I, instead of seeing myself as a smoker, somebody who loved a cigarette but knew it wasn't good for me and wanted to try to quit, I really, my identity became that of a non smoker who started smoking as kind of a messy habit, kind of off putting, kind of, you know, obviously bad for health. But also it was kind of something that, you know, ashtrays suddenly look kind of disgusting and my whole identity changed. So now I'm a non smoker and never smoked again. It became quite so. I wonder if you could say a little more about identity and how we work with identity.

Yeah, I mean, I think it's, you know, I love that. And it's like, what story do you tell yourself about yourself and what story do you tell yourself about reality? And the first step is recognizing that those are stories, they're not necessarily reality. They're just your stories about who I am or your story about reality. And shifting those stories is really one of the most highest leveraged things that you can work on. Because when you shift a core story, it ripples out into a lot of different areas of your life. So, you know, you could try to address every area, you know, relationships and nutrition and exercise and, you know, work and all this stuff. But then if you shift a core story, that ripples out into all of those arenas. And so with environmental behaviors, for example, I remember when it just started to become very hard for me to throw away a plastic container. You know, it was just like, I just don't feel right about this. I don't think this is the type of person I am, I don't want to be. I don't want to be participating in damaging the environment. And so now I've got this fun field trip where I take all my empty plastic containers and I go to a refillable shop and I fill em up with what I need and bring em home. And you know, it's such a small tiny action but boy it makes me feel aligned with who I want to be. And so that's the other thing you can do is just be like who and how do I want to be? Whether it's an upcoming conversation that you're having with someone who and how do I want to be in this conversation? Or a bigger thing, who and how do I want to be in in this life? Who and how do I want to be in this marriage? Who and how do I want to be as a parent? And using language that speaks to that is a big deal. Like inside of your own mind, the way you talk about instead of saying I have a really hard time exercising, you can say I'm paying a lot of attention to exercising more. So that's just a different language. You know, I'm someone who has a really hard time exercising versus I'm paying a lot of attention right now to exercising more. It gives your brain a different message and it's more helpful as you move forward. It's more effective in every way. And you know, I want to also just make sure we say, you know, there are certain, as you said with addiction, there are some core beliefs that are so strong that it's hard to shift them. And that sometimes just takes a lot of people circling the wagons. It takes a lot of time of reading and working hard on it and getting help, getting physical medical help, getting other kinds of help. And you know, that is another story that you could shift is someone who needs help should feel ashamed about it. To every single one of us needs help at some time in our lives, maybe more than one time. And people who you ask for help are typically honored by you asking. They're not shaming or upset about it, they're honored by you asking. So you can even try to work on shifting your story about needing help. The last thing I would say is just that concept of identity. You know, sometimes you start by saying this is the type of identity I have and I want to have all my behaviors aligned with it. But then over time as you do these practices, your identity begins to get bigger and bigger and the boundaries between your identity and everyone else start to become much more permeable so instead of am I doing the behavior that's right for me and my purpose, you start to say, are we all doing what we all want to be doing to make the world the way we want it? And that movement from I to we is a very powerful movement.

Yeah. And I love the way Dan Siegel talks about that, of not losing me along the way. So he talks about me. I don't. It doesn't exactly roll off the tongue, but it is. It honors a sense of acceptance, accepting our experience, ourselves and our story. But seeing stories are malleable and seeing that we can move to this larger kind of world, consciousness, echo consciousness, larger state of mind, where we start thinking in those terms and that can really help us personally as well. What you think might be. We've kind of been talking about this and also want to reference. You have this idea of creating, I think, an ecosystem of well being, which we've been talking a lot about. And I just want to get that out there because I think you pointed that out in many ways that we could work on creating that ecosystem for ourselves. But if there is one in your experience working with others and with yourself, the one kind of limiting core belief that seems to be most commonly detrimental to us as human beings and what might be our, maybe the most essential evidence based strategy for beginning to work with that.

Oh, gosh, there are probably a lot. But I will use one that my colleague John Aston and I have been working with for over 20 years, which is, this shouldn't be here, this shouldn't be happening. As we move through our day or our lives and we get confronted with things, it could be as small as it's raining, and we say, ugh, this shouldn't be happening. It's too cold. Oh, this shouldn't be here. Or worse, you know, somebody says something or something happens, this shouldn't be happening. It's so much more effective to say this is happening. How do I want to respond? You know, I want to get an umbrella, I want to get a jacket. You know, do I really want my dinner to be ruined by the fact that the room is colder? Or would I rather have decide to have a wonderful time even though the room is cold? And you know, when it gets bigger, it's harder. You know, my child is not doing well or my marriage is failing, or it looks like I might need to find a new job? Even then, though, staying in, this shouldn't be happening. People can stay in that for years. In fact, they can stay for years. And that shouldn't have happened. And that belief causes more suffering than almost anything else. So if it can be like that is happening, do you feel pain because of it? How do I want, what is the next right thing to do? Do I need to ask for help? Do I need to take some time off to consider this, what needs to happen next, given that this is happening and you can feel even the difference in the voice? It's a compassionate, this is happening. This is what's happening. I'm sorry, this is a, it's a. Tara Brock says this is a moment of suffering. Or Kristin Neff. You know, this is hard. But something being painful and hard is different than it being miserable and suffering. And the miserable and suffering comes from. I don't accept this. I don't want this to be happening. I'm not gonna, you know, yeah, you can have times, of course that's where you are. And that's fine, that's totally normal. But if you can in general be like, if this is exactly as it is, which it is, because it's happening, how then would I respond in a way that makes me feel like I'm the type of person that I want to be?

That's incredibly powerful. That is, I think, one of the real acupressure points of our self created suffering and understandably. And we need to have compassion for that tendency. But it can be so liberating to simply find a way to feel what we're feeling about something but then shift into some kind of acceptance. Not saying that that's okay. It may be it, you know, quite frankly it sucks. But what am I going to do? What's the thing I can do to move forward rather than staying trapped in my resistance or my resentment about it? Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, this has been incredibly illuminating and I really appreciate everything you've shared with us so much. I think it's going to be really helpful to our audience. How can people find out more about your work, your various initiatives and so forth?

Yeah, the easiest way is to go to cassandraveaton.com so yeah, come and find me there. And thanks Vliet. It's always wonderful to be with you.

Equally so. And I really encourage people to check out your work there. Cassandraveaton.com and thank you so much.

All right, thank you.

Take good care.

Thank you for joining me on the Radical Responsibility podcast. Remember, real change happens when we commit to our growth, face our challenges with compassion, and stay open to transformation. If you found, if you found this episode helpful, I encourage you to subscribe and help us spread the message of healing and personal empowerment. Stay grounded, stay present and stay true to you. Take care.

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