Dr. Gay Hendricks | Turning Fear Into Fuel for Personal Growth

Welcome to the Radical responsibility podcast. I'm Dr. Fleet Mola and I'm excited to guide you on a journey of authentic transformation. In each episode, I'll bring you insights from leading experts to explore trauma recovery, mindfulness practices, positive psychology, and innovative breakthroughs in health, wellness and life optimization. This is a space for real conversations that inspire meaningful change, helping you find alignment with the person you were always meant to be. Let's get started.

What if the greatest ceiling on your success isn't out there in the world, but inside yourself? In this episode, I sit down with Gay Hendricks, a true pioneer in the field of conscious living and author of the Big Leap. This is a conversation about expanding beyond.

Fear, embracing your zone of genius, and learning to live from a place of joy and purpose. Let's get started. My name is Dr. Fleet Mall, your co host for this session, and I'm.

Really happy to be here today with Dr.

Gay Hedricks. Welcome, Gay.

Thanks a lot, Fleet. Really good to be with you.

And I remember from our last interview, you actually wrote one of the early books on breath work.

Yes, breath and breath work have been a really important part of my discoveries about how powerful natural body wisdom is and how much an effect, how many rapid changes you can create using the technology of your body.

Yeah, and breath work is getting a lot more attention. Has for the last five years, ten Decker, Jim Nestor's book, brought to a lot of people's attention. But you had one of the really early books there, and I'm sure we can explore that today in that light. Maybe just talk a little bit about, you know, how your career path developed, kind of what the origins of that are, whether it was elements of fear and anxiety that you overcame in your own life to step into your career in the way you have. And then developing the work with your wife Katie, the way you, you reached so many, really probably millions of people at this point. So wonder if you could just, you know, give us a little bit of a sense of the origin of all that.

Yes. Well, I say my career really started with a bang because throughout my childhood I was taken around to a lot of different medical specialists because I was obese and everybody else in my family was skinny. And so they couldn't figure out what the problem was. And so I was given shots. I remember when I was in elementary school and then again in when I was 13 or 14, given so many shots about this problem and also taking pills for it when I was in ninth grade, I remember they prescribed some fantastic new diet pill that was actually Amphetamine, you know. And I remember my ninth grade year, I made straight A's because I couldn't sleep. You know, I basically was cranked all the time, but I never really solved the problem until one magic day, which solved my problem, but also showed me what human transformation was all about. And up until that time, I hadn't thought much about it because I wasn't a psych major or I was a, you know, in college or anything. I think I took one psych course that was largely about rat training, which didn't really appeal to me very much. But I was an English major, and I always loved to write. And so I just hadn't had anything I really wanted to write about until this Amazing Day in 1969. At that time, by the way, I should tell you that I'm about 6ft tall, and at present I weigh about 185 pounds. And, you know, if you saw me walking down the street, you'd say, there goes an athletic looking old guy. You know, pretty healthy lifestyle and all that. And so when I had this experience, though, I weighed more than 300 pounds, and I wore big, thick glasses, and I was in this really toxic relationship with a woman that I'd been in for a couple of years. But I couldn't figure out how to get out of it because we shared the. This apartment, and neither one of us could afford to move out, basically. So I hope you've never been that poor, but maybe you were somewhere back there, but I know some members of your audience have been. I think I had about $39 in the bank at the time. But what happened on this day? I went out for a walk to clear my head after I'd had a big argument. And this was in New Hampshire, where I was working at a little school for delinquent boys as a kind of a teacher, dorm counselor kind of person. And so I went out for a walk. And also I smoked heavily at that time, cigarettes. And I went out for a walk. And I was walking down this lonely New England country road, and it had snowed recently, and I stepped on a place where snow was covering up a patch of ice, and my feet shot out from under me and I went, wham. Down on my back and I hit my head. But I didn't knock myself out. I always say it was an out of Hendrix experience because it knocked me for about two minutes out of my normal way of seeing the world. And what happened during that couple of minutes really changed my life and really opened up my career for me. Because what happened was it was like it turned on the lights inside me in places I'd never seen before. And when the lights came on inside me, I realized how angry I was and how the muscles, especially in my neck and shoulders, were tense with old anger. And I realized also that I smoked to try to get away from this intense grief I felt in my chest. And when I smoked, that went away. And then I went down even further in my body, and I realized I was anxious all the time. I was afraid all the time. And I'd never really even recognized the symptoms of it at the time. Now, you know, if somebody says, hey, I've got butterflies in my stomach, we could say, oh, are you scared about something? But I didn't. I wasn't even aware of that feeling down there. And it's amazing to me now, being sensitized 50 years later to my body, that I hadn't ever felt any of those feelings, like anger or sorrow or fear. But in that moment, I saw that I was consumed by those feelings that I had never expressed or let myself feel. But the real magic happened is I realized that behind and beyond all of those feelings was this special place that I started calling pure consciousness. That was like being aware, but without any thoughts or pictures or memories. It was just like pure awareness. And I could realize in that moment that we are all that way, that there was nothing special about me. We're all wired for pure consciousness, but it gets obscured by the fact that we get lost inside anger we haven't dealt with, or fear we haven't dealt with, or sadness we haven't dealt with. But on this magic day, I was 24 years old, I had this experience, and two minutes later, I started coming out of it. I realized, oh, gosh, I'm lying on the ground. I'm freezing. Oh, my gosh, I want a cigarette. Oh, my gosh, I gotta walk back a mile in the cold to the house, you know? So I started. My personality started coming back. But I had this really amazing insight at the moment, which I think it really changed my life and maybe even saved my life. I had the thought of, I'm going to do whatever it takes in my life to feel that pure consciousness in every moment. And whatever it takes, I'm going to do it. And so as I came back, everything was the same in my life, except that commitment had shifted. And so you'll probably get a kick out of the radical way I went about losing my weight. I don't know if I'd highly recommend this as the diet for all time. But I started eating only foods that I hadn't eaten before. My theory was, okay, everything else had made me fat. What if I just started eating foods that I'd never eaten before? And so that became my criterion. And for the first three days of my diet, all I could find there was this huge pack of blueberries in the freezer and I basically lived on blueberries for a few days. Occasionally I'd take a little hit of protein, but and I lost like 10 pounds in three days. And this led me to my first, what I now call my upper limit problem. But I started losing the weight and by the end of the first month I'd lost 35 pounds. I'm going to stop here to wet my whistle and take a drink and take a breath. But that's the moment that everything got underway for me.

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Yeah, I wonder if you. I don't know if you went to a doctor for that, if you were tested for a concussion or anything, but I'm wondering. Neurobiology almost sounds like the hit on your head knocked your default mode network offline for a minute so you could have one of these more expanded state of consciousness experiences.

I didn't experience any kind of blankness or darkness or anything, but I. Yeah, I didn't have a concussion. I checked on that later, but in fact I went to the doctor to find out. At first I thought feeling all these things was a problem because I didn't know how to deal with them. Like with fear. It took me a long time to figure out how to deal with fear, because, as you probably figured out by now, fear isn't quite like the emotions of anger or sadness, because you have mechanisms like crying that are automatically wired in when you're feeling sad. And you can even see a cat or a dog, you know, if they have a loss, kind of snuffling. And the same thing with anger. You know, you can go to an anger workshop or just turn around on your bed and pound on some pillows, or say, I'm angry and express it in some way. But what do you do with fear? And so I had to learn that. And that's what led me into breathing, as a matter of fact, because I learned that breathing was not only a searchlight that you could use to explore your feelings with, but it was a treatment, at least for fear anyway. Because, I mean, if you look into the medical research, you'll see that all it takes is three or four big, easy, deep breaths to begin to change the stress chemistry in your body. You know, it doesn't take 50 breaths or an hour of breathing, but three easy, big breaths will begin to lessen the charge of adrenaline and other stress chemicals in your body. I think breathing has immense capacities for healing, not just helping us feel better, but actually deal with problems that, you know, that haven't been able to be dealt with in another way. Let me give you an example. There was a study at Johns Hopkins where they had graduate students sit in the waiting room of a bunch of different medical doctors, MDs offices. And one of them was a cancer doctor, one of them was a lung doctor, one of them was a surgeon, one of them was a dermatologist. So they covered the whole range of medical specialties. But here's what they found. What the graduate students were actually watching for is the person's breathing patterns. And they found out that almost 90% of people that were waiting to see a doctor about something were in an anxious breathing pattern. They were in an escalated breathing pattern, by the way. I think the research Criterion is about 14 or 15 breaths per minute. If you have more than that around there, I think more than 15, let's say, breaths a minute. That's in the anxiety zone. And so these students were looking at whether the person had a breathing disturbance in addition to whatever else they were seeking treatment for. And that's when they found that nine out of ten of them did, regardless of the problem that they were seeking treatment for.

So, you know, fear, anxiety, on some level, you know, there's kind of a biological baseline of this. I mean, you know, we're wired to survive and we have all the mechanisms of fight or flight built into the limbic brain and so forth to keep us alive. And was much more necessary at a time when our lives were continually under threat. And then even at the cellular level, we know from cellular biology that even at the cellular level, there's kind of an imperative to stay alive, to eat and to procreate, to pass on the genetic material. Right? So we have this kind of. And fear can be intelligent. Fear can keep us alive. So there's some baseline of fear that's there. And to your earlier point, you know, I led a very deep transformative workshop for many years, very intense and taking people deep into family awards and stuff quickly. And a lot of shadow work and integration work. And inevitably it was almost always rage work or grief work. And then that allowed us to get into the real healing work. But on the surface, they had to go through either rage expression or grief expression to be able to drop it at a deeper level. But I'm wondering if this kind of, you know, we can talk about anxiety. Some people experience anxiety mentally, emotionally, physically. It can be very much a physical experience of anxiety. And then there can be just kind of baseline existential anxiety. So I'm wondering if we think about fear and anxiety almost as to the level in which it's hardwired into our biology. Can it be used as fuel for personal growth? Can it be used as fuel for evolution? I would imagine that a breath practice can help that. So I wonder if you could.

Sure like to go with that. I really appreciate you bringing in the evolutionary aspect of that because, you know, fear has been around for a lot longer than we have. I mean, we've been around in our current form. The, you know, the brain hasn't changed that much in the past 50,000 years, and the overall system hasn't changed that much in the past half a million years. But we as humans, upright walkers, we're pretty new to the scene here, evolutionarily speaking. And it remains to be seen how long we're going to be here if we can get our politics worked out. But so far, so good, because we've developed a really amazingly intricate and exemplary nervous system, because what it allows us to do is build skyscrapers and go listen to a symphony and appreciate a Mozart that wrote those things and died when he was 37. So it has these exalted aspects, but it also has some very baseline aspects too, and fear is one of them. Fear is a real early arrival because it keeps us safe. A lot of people don't realize that fear actually has four different expressions. Not just fight or flight, but the two other that we see in clients is fight, flee, faint, and freeze. And if you see animals throughout the kingdom of Animalia, you'll see that a great many of them don't fight or flee. They roll up in a ball and pretend to be dead or asleep. And that's their adaptation. So they go for the faint mechanism. Some animals go for the freeze mechanism. Like if you see a scared rabbit, they will do their best to keep their eyes steady. So the twitch of their eyes, because the twitch of their eyes is what gives away their location. In fact, a friend of mine who is a hawk trainer tells me that a good hawk can spot the twitching of a mouse's eye from a quarter of a mile in the sky. So the ability to read body language is very present in our world, and we happen to be not very good at yet. And one of the things that I teach, and I imagine you teach a lot of, is how to take your organic ability to be aware. Train it on the insides, kind of without flinching. And when you train it on fear, here's the big point I want to make. Since fear is here to stay, don't try to get rid of it. It's been around for longer than you have. Instead, make friends with it. Allow it to be the fuel, the juice that runs your creativity, because it's freely available for that, you know, as long as it gets acknowledged and you're willing to let those feelings through. I think the big mistake that people make is they seal off the sensations of their feelings such that they can't really tell what they're feeling when they're feeling it. Oddly enough, we happen as human beings to be pretty darn good at letting people report certain sensations. Like, by the time you toddle off to kindergarten, you've usually mastered the ability to tell when you need to go to the bathroom or not. But the other feelings, like fear and anger and sadness, we don't get much training, do we, on how to perceive those at an early age?

No, we don't. And, you know, absent some discomfort, like needing to use the bathroom or feeling thirsty or hungry, we tend to ignore the internal landscape of the body and live up in our heads pretty much. So if we engage in some kind of training that is giving us greater access to interoception or interoceptive awareness, the somatic awareness of the body, which will also give us greater emotional awareness. And even when people really drop into deep states of being and through meditative means, they often report feeling there's this underlying kind of almost like a hum there, low level fear and anxiety that they realize that they've been interpreting that as anxiety. But it's really a fundamental kind of aliveness. It's kind of the biological, spiritual aliveness in the body.

I really appreciate you mentioning that, Fleet, because there's an old saying my granddad used to say he was a carpenter and he said. And he was speaking of politics. He was saying, if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. You know, so if you only have one interpretation of a body signal, that's a problem because you could be interpreting it completely in a way that makes you sick. And so, you know, one of the big things that we teach is three fundamental feelings that get people in the most trouble, especially in relationships. Katie and I write relationship books like Conscious Loving in addition to our books for personal transformation, such as the Big Leap and Entrepreneurship. But in those relationship books, one of the things that we've discovered is that if people just learn to communicate about anger, sadness and fear, their chances of making the relationship work go up hugely. And if they don't learn those simple things, they, you know, tragedy is often ahead. And so wouldn't it be great? Here's my. My pitch for changing the educational system. Wouldn't it be great if we had first graders being able to learn how to say, I'm angry with you or I'm sad or I feel scared right now, I don't know what to do. I had to learn those things the hard way as a grown up. And relationship arguments and things like that. And we've had about. I think we're coming up on having worked with about 5,000 couples over the past. Katie and I have been together 45 years. So we do relationship seminars and big presentations as well as work in our office. And one of the things we've discovered in all of those people is how easy it is to change a relationship if you learn a few basic things. And that's one of them. How to communicate those three basic feelings without making the other person wrong. You don't have to say, I'm mad because you're no good. Such and such. You can say, I feel angry right now with leaving the blame out of it. And it works real magic in relationships. Same thing with being able to talk about sorrow or grief or fear. Those are really Important things to talk about. And we've seen real breakthroughs in our counseling office with couples where a person just gets able to say, oh, my palms are sweating right now. That was the only sensation he could report. And I said, okay, well, that's a great. What do you think that's about? And he said, I wonder if I'm scared about something. And I said, well, check and see. And he said, well, how would I do that? And I said, well, look for these sensations in your, around your belly. Look and see if you feel some butterfly sensations. Because you know, when blood leaves the stomach and heads toward the muscles, when you're scared, of course it leaves behind a little unsettled feeling. Many people call that butterflies. But if you notice carefully, you have other sensations of fear, such as a tight belt around your belly where you're not breathing. That's the third thing. Your belly is tight and your breathing is going faster and shallower than would actually nourish your body. And so those are three easy things that even in an educational workshop, forget about therapy for a moment. In a relationship workshop, in educational terms, you know, we've had 500 couples in a big auditorium talking to each other and saying things like, I feel scared right now. I feel butterflies floating around in my stomach, or I feel a tight belly. And learning how to communicate those simple things and incredibly restorative to relationships.

Yeah, it's amazing how powerful the simple distinctions can be. That same training I referenced before, where we did a lot of rage and grief work, we used to, you know, I mean, there's, it can be great to develop greater emotional literacy like in the work of non violent communication. You know, there's hundreds of feelings, words, and it's great to get that literate. But in that training, we would bring it down to, no, we're going to even talk about we're mad, sad, glad or scared. Those were the, the four emotions we're going to talk about. Just to simplify it. And people used to being able to acknowledge, wow, I'm mad or I'm scared or I'm sad. Right. And you know, because we're just, we haven't been educated or raised in a way. In fact, generally we're kind of, most of us have been strongly enculturated to be disembodied and to deny our feelings. Our whole culture is about not feeling right.

Well, a lot of my students are doing good stuff about that. Like, we have a, a couple of people that are educators who design something that we offer on our website. Called the Conscious Kids curriculum. And it's all full of the things that I wish I'd been taught when I was in elementary school. And so this can be implemented in any place. It doesn't have to be an official, you know, sanctioned elementary school or something, but anywhere kids gather in a Cub Scout troop, we have lots of Cub Scout troops that use the Conscious Kids curriculum as the basis of the things that they do with their Cub Scouts. Yeah, I was young.

I wasn't getting any social, emotional learning or emotional intelligence training. Quite the opposite. But I do remember I was a competitive swimmer. And right before it was time to do a race to get up in the blocks and race, I would get this terrible butterflies in the stomach thing, right? And I talked to my coach about it. I mean, it was almost debilitating. And he said, just use that as fuel. Just use it as fuel, in fact. And I learned to do that, and it was really advantageous once I was able to do that.

Yeah, See, because what I think we need to do is befriend all of our feelings, because they all are different types of energy that are directed through different places in our body. But it's all that life juice, that energy that makes us feel alive. And, gosh, I've learned so much about positive emotion, too. Once I learned how to deal with some of those painful ones. Like, for example, I don't ever remember feeling the genuine feeling of compassion in my chest until after I dealt with a lot of things in my grief background about. You know, it was after that that compassion sort of started happening spontaneously. You know, I didn't go to a compassion workshop or anything. It just started appear. And I think what happens is as you begin to deal with things like anger and sadness and fear, it becomes more open to other things in that area. Like, for example, with fear, I think that's the easiest entry point to what I'm calling pure consciousness. Because fear, most people experience down in the center of their belly, maybe, or up in their solar plexus, or maybe up a little bit in their throat. But wherever you feel it, it's important to make friends with it and say, here I am. Let's just explore this rather than trying to make it go away. Because the sad fact about fear is, the more you make it try to go away, the worse it comes back on you. You know, it's just like, I bet it's been a while since you've read Swamp Thing comic books, but if you look into Swamp Thing and the predecessor to that called Man Thing, Comics. I was a comic book freak when I was a little kid. Anyway, when I was 12 years old, we used to trade comic books. That was kind of like our currency with each other. But Swamp Thing lives on fear. And if I'm standing there on the shore and I'm scared, Swamp Thing will come up out of the bog and begin to move toward me. But if I open up and ask my fear, hey, what do you got here to teach me? Or what can I learn from this? Swamp Thing goes, ooh, goes back into the bug again. So we want to use the energy of Swamp Thing, but not have it up in our faces all the time. And the only way I really think to do that, correct me if I'm wrong, but the ways I know to do that, that really work are all somatic in nature, having to do with breathing. Breathing or movement, for example. I don't think we can think ourselves out of being scared permanently. And so I don't have a lot of faith in the purely cognitive approaches unless they have some kind of somatic element to them.

Yeah, I'm, I completely agree with you. And I'm deeply involved in this kind of somatic work. And I teach a deeply embodied approach to meditation. And I think it's all about that, that body work. And since many of us are, most of us, unless we're really young and you know, getting to explore, enjoy some alternative education, maybe where you have the kind of education you're, you and your colleagues are developing for children. But most of us, we're not taught how to be in the body. And so the body can be a painful place and a fearful place. And instead we build this artificial home called the ego, the psychological separate self, to kind of live up there and live our lives from there. And I know in your work you sometimes talk about these, the need to move beyond these, these kind of ego based fears, these fears that are kind of purely, almost self created psychological fears that are part and parcel of not being an embodied human being, but instead living in this psychological construct we call the ego. I wonder if you could talk about that a little bit as a reality that we all deal with and then how we can begin to move beyond that.

Well, if you look at how the personality and then the ego developed out of that, I say we have personality one and personality two. Personality one is all the things you learn and you know, go back to when you were six months old. What were you doing when you were six months old? You're kind of hanging out and doing little things. And one day, something big happens. One day you're being appreciated just for pure being. You're being appreciated for just being there. And then a second personality develops. One day you realize, oh, there are certain things I do that they really like. When I go, they like, ha, ha. They laugh. Or when I go, they do that, they really like that. And so one personality that develops is what I need to do for approval and recognition. That's a good thing because we all need it for food and everything. We need to get along with our fellow humans. But then one day, personality two develops. Personality two starts working. When personality one comes to a grinding failure, like, one day, you don't get appreciated for what you're doing or you get punished for it. Like, remember John Bradshaw? He wrote a book called Shame. It had shame in the title, and I can't remember healing the shame that binds us. Anyway, he was telling us one day about shame, and he said when he was a little boy, he ran into the living room, he was learning body parts, and he said, this is my elbow. And the adults went, yay. And he said, this is my chin. They went, yay. And he pointed toward his penis and he said, this is my. And everybody went, oh, no. And so he felt shame that he had thought he was doing something good, but it failed, you know, and ended up getting punished for it. So personality, too, is not focused on what can I do for positive recognition. It's focused on what do I have to do to avoid pain? And so there are a number of responses to that question, but one of them, what do I need to do to avoid pain? Is not participate, not play, not be involved. Because if I'm not involved, it won't hurt me as much. And that's a central problem in relationships, by the way. I have people in here in their 40s and 50s suddenly realizing, oh, my God, you know, I don't really know what love feels like separate from that feeling of defending myself, you know? And as they learn to deal with that feeling of defending themselves, then they get a pure feeling of love, back and forth. But until then, it's being filtered through that old program of personality number two. So personality number two always looks for ways to avoid pain and avoid losing in situations where you might want to win. And so don't play is one of the things that we make a decision on. Another one is very popular is play, but play like you don't care. You know, participate but not care about being in the game. And so that's another big problem, because I face people in Relationship problems every day where their partner complains he's never there, he never seems to be there. It's like. Or she. It's like talking to a brick wall. And so that I want people to let go of that brick wall and be more porous and permeable and just be direct about the pain instead of trying to conceal it or hide it or come out in ways that are destructive in life. It's easy, actually, but it feels hard if you're stuck within it.

So continuing along this vein of how we can work with fear, that's, as you said, it's been there longer than we have. And how we can work and sometimes manifest in various forms of anxiety. How can we actually use this as fuel for personal evolution, for growth and so forth. And as you said, it could be one of the most direct means for realizing what you're calling pure consciousness, our actual nature, who and what we are. So another way you talk about this is stepping into our genius zone. And I wonder if you could talk about what you call the genius zone and the relationship between that and having befriended our fear and so forth.

Great question. The two are very related because let's just use fear as an example. Let's say I'm scared about something if I let myself feel it instead of trying to make it go away. Lighting a cigarette or eating a piece of chicken or whatever we use to distract ourselves. Turning on Star Trek or something instead of doing that. Just letting ourselves experience doesn't have to be for a tenth of a second, but it's just the decision to feel it rather than override it. That's a crucial moment, because the moment you open up to feeling anything like fear, what happens if you do what I call savor it? If you let yourself actually feel what it feels like, it disappears very quickly. And you see that pure consciousness right there. It's there all the time. It's just that when we're scared, it's like we have a belt around our belly. And so we can't feel what the other stuff is in our belly because we're focusing on the tight belt. And so when you're scared and don't know how to deal with it, that tight belt stays on all the time, even stirring up your dreams. What happens, though, is you begin to let yourself feel what you're doing is really admitting that you are part of the universe because it has all of these flows in it. And you're participating in the flow now. And so it's a hugely different thing to be standing Back watching the game rather than being right in the middle of it and feeling it. And since we're all here, I want us all to be right here in the middle of the game and not try to be thinking about other stuff all the time. And so if you're feeling what you're feeling, you're going to be feeling pretty soon pure consciousness. That relates to genius Zone because it's basically the same thing that when you let go of all the stuff you've been doing to defend yourself and just feel the reality of the streams and powerful currents coursing through us at that moment, what happens is those automatically become the fuel for creativity because you don't have to do anything except let yourself experience it more. Because it's really, I mean, if you look at the universe, how it works compared to us humans, we human beings often generate a lot of stress, tension and anxiety to get things done. And sometimes that's based on purely a mental script of, you know, having learned that I. That has, that's what it takes, you know, in your family or whatever to get things done. But there's a whole different way of getting things done. Like I have seven magnificent 300 year old oak trees on my property and I like to look at them and I like it. Every year they drop their acorns and that's a hassle to pick up, but still it's. They participate in the flow of life. They don't ever say, oh damn it, it's winter again, I gotta drop my acorns. You know, they're just doing what they do organically. And human beings, I believe if left to our own devices, we will tend to do what's spontaneously good for ourselves and other people. If we don't have to filter our energy always through the loops of undigested sadness or undigested anger or undealt with fear.

Well, I think this is fascinating that you connect fear and getting in relationship and befriending our feelings again, coming back into the body feeling as the access point to what you're calling pure consciousness. Even people in spiritual traditions may talk about this as the nature of mind or enlightened mind or people reference to source or in quantum theory. And we may be talking about, and I know Dr. Deepak Chopra, when he talks about this level of experience, he says that is creative intelligence. So that is the genius zone. And very interestingly, you know, we are manifestations of that. So there's nothing in our experience that is not a manifestation of that source. So when we get in touch with something like fear. And we can dissolve our resistance to it, or the stories around it, or the identifications with it, or all the echoes around it, just getting in touch with it. It's the vehicle that starts to get us in touch with source. And that could be true for anything. I mean, even our thoughts, which can be pretty inane at times. But if we're meditative enough, even just the arisal cognitive energy itself is just another manifestation of source. So it's really amazing you're talking about that we can not only befriend these things to have a better life or heal ourselves, but these are the direct pathways into our ultimate destiny of what we can realize as human beings.

I completely agree, and I've had the joy of being on the front lines as people realize that many thousands of times, But I never get tired of it, because, I mean, that's what happens in a session here, is that a person may go through all of that, but they leave feeling that pure consciousness and realizing, oh, that's where it all comes from. And once you realize that, also you begin to wonder, why am I making up pain and conflict all the time if I have the power to make it up any way I want it? That didn't occur to me at the very beginning, though. You know, after I had to have a few more painful experiences. But Katie and I got together in 1980 and 45 years ago, and we made a very crucial decision early on. We decided to have our relationship be about not only teaching us what we needed to know about relationship, but we also wanted to learn how to teach other people things if we found them to be useful. And so we basically been on the path of learning new things and passing them along for the past 45 years. And it's a great way to spend life. You know, I'm 80 years old now, and I can't imagine not doing what I do. You know, I can't imagine retiring from it or anything like that. I mean, what's better than drinking the pure existence of life every day? You know, being with that kind of nutrient. It's a very powerful thing.

Indeed. Indeed. You mentioned before this idea of the upper limit problem, and I know you talk about this in your book the Big Leap, so I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about this.

Yes. Well, this. One of the big things that I do is help people get in touch with and release their upper limit problems. And the upper limit problem is the tendency to sabotage ourselves when things start going better, basically. Because what happens when things Start going better is it stirs up fear. And fear is where all the upper limit problems come from. So I also want to make it really clear that I learned a lot of this working with very powerful people like CEOs and things like that. I started working with juvenile delinquents. But I think these things transcend all levels of life. Like I've had movie stars in here that had bigger self esteem issues than the average person. They just covered it over with a lot of fear and rage performance, you know, but then life gets them when they get triggered in an argument with their beloved or something. So I think that I want to get back to this little subject of being able to use things that used to be fear, just the energy of it, to draw on them for personal growth. Because if we start thinking that way, then we're starting to think of life being a journey that has different little twists and loops in it. And I think that's a very important thing to think of, that you're on a journey to fulfillment. And how fast the journey goes depends entirely on how fast we can let go of whatever those little upper limits are. And a couple of them are really important to let go. The upper limit problem. I'd say if I tossed a pebble into a group of 100 people, it would no doubt hit somebody that had this belief I don't deserve the good things of life. And now that may sound crazy, but a lot of people, even movie stars, go around feeling underneath like, I don't deserve the good things that happen to me. They feel like an imposter. I've had really well known people use that term, term to me dozens of times where they say, yeah, I feel like an imposter. You know, in one person's case, I remember they were going down to get their palm prints on the walk of Fame or whatever they call it down in LA and triggered an anxiety attack the day before because it brought all, I don't deserve it. I've never deserved it. They're making a big mistake. I'm really a. And nobody knows it. You know, if people only knew who I really was, nobody would by my music. And so those kind of things, people get wrapped up in that at an early age. And even though they may build stuff on top of that, oftentimes that comes up and gets a grab of them. So being scared that I'm not worthy, that will cause you to sabotage yourself over and over again. A second one is a lot of people have the feeling developed from early in life that they don't deserve to be in the spotlight. They don't deserve to be the star of their own lives. And so they kind of hide and kind of sit on the bench and don't really participate in the game as much. And there's a third group that I think have a lot of problems too, and that's people that can't let go of the past. A lot of people keep themselves limited and in check by fear based on the fear that if I change it will be disloyal to and hurtful to people in my past or people I know that are still in my life now from my past or sometimes just mentally. I've had dozens of people in here talking about still arguing with their mother 30 years after she died. You know, so it's all things that we can internalize, too. The important thing, I need to wrap things up. I know, because we're running out of time, but I do want to make a super big push for opening up to loving your fear and exploring your fear and anxiety rather than trying to put it away. But if you want to put it away for the time being, if you're.

Doing something, you don't want to be bothered by it.

My always advice is to take three or more easy breaths that last longer than 10 seconds each. Okay, so five seconds in, five seconds out, and do that three times and just notice what's beginning to happen in your body. It makes a difference. And like I say, we don't want to go around all the time just making fear go away. We want to open up to it and learn from our anxiety, but sometimes it's going to get a grip on our throat or something, and we don't want to have to deal with it. And so three easy breaths as your way through.

You mentioned some of the real obstacles to change there, and I think another one related to our past or something, you know, you talked about early, early in life we'd start developing this personality and personality one personality, two, you know, adaptive personality, avoidant personality, these kind of things. And we're doing this because we need some kind of identity to function right. We can't go back into the womb. We need some kind of identity to function. And having some identity is better than having no identity because we don't know how to deal with pure consciousness and groundlessness when we're 6 months or 18 months old or much less. It's difficult enough when we start trying to expl that as adults. So you often hear from people, that's just the way I've always been. And it's almost like, if I changed, who would I be? And happy and suffering, but that's who I am. And if I changed, well, who would I be? And it's too frightening. The idea of not being who I am is too frightening to change. That can really be an obstacle.

Well, not only that, I remember having a popular blues type singer in here one time. That was really what it came down to. This person said, you know, I don't know who I'd be if I didn't feel pain. How would I even perform if I didn't feel pain all the time? Well, at a certain point in life, you start asking a deeper set of questions. And I was totally confident that this person could be totally happy and also sing the blues at the same time. So no matter what kind of life you're in, I think having befriended fear is going to be one of your best friends ever.

Wow. Well, I think that's a great message to leave our audience with and really illuminating. I wonder if you might be willing just to lead us in some kind of like a little exercise or something related to breath and relating to befriending fear or just connecting with our body, Something like that.

I want to teach you a breathing secret. I mentioned the 10 second round trip breath. Five seconds in, five seconds out. Don't make it a contest, but just with me right now. Take three easy breaths. I'm going to start. In, 2, 3, 4. Out, 2, 3, 4. In, 2, 3,4. Out, 2, 3,4. In, 2, 3, four, five. Out, 2, 3, four. And then just keep being easy with it. Slow it down. Go for more elegance, more ease, more peace. Just begin to slow it down. And a trick is not to stop at the top. Roll it over. In, in, in, roll over, out, out, out. The reason is the fight or flight reflects. Catches a breath at the top. When you get scared, you go. But easy breathing involves a rollover at the top. So in real easy. And then rolling over into the out breath.

Oh, that was great. That was like just a reset button for the nervous system. I feel really beautiful, juicy, great. Thank you so much. Dr. Gay Hendricks. This has been illuminating. Thank you very much for everything you offered.

Thank you very much. Blessings to you.

You too. Be well.

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 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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