EP 145: Conscious Loving for Healthy Relationships | Katie and Gay Hendricks

Welcome to Radical Responsibility, the podcast dedicated to ridding the world of blame and shame, where we explore the issues you care about from a unique perspective. 100% ownership for each and every circumstance we face in life, day in and day out. Hi, welcome to the Radical Responsibility podcast. This is Fleet Mall, your host and in this episode I have a conversation with Katie and Gay Hendricks, renowned relationship counselors, therapists, authors, best selling authors. Gay Hendrix was one of the earliest teachers of breathwork, which is enjoying an incredible renaissance these days. Founders of the Hendrix Institute and authors of more than 40 books. So we had an incredible conversation about what it takes to really nurture and strengthen our relationships and how staying curious about, you know, the problems and feelings we're experiencing each with each other. And you know, they had these wonderful ways to undercut those tendencies in long term relationships where we tend to get into bickering or arguing and this becomes kind of chronic. And they had a way to really shift this and keep the quality of our relationship front and center so that our relationships is really a source of nurturing and joy throughout our lifespan. And they really model it and they're for real. And they're really some of the most renowned relationship therapists on the planet. Katie and Gay Hendricks.

And I'm here today with Katie and Gay Hendricks. How are you all doing today?

We're doing great. So happy to see you.

Really wonderful to be with the two of you. You have brought so much wisdom, so much practical guidance and teaching to the world for probably over four decades now. And it's just, it's a real honor to spend some time with the two of you today.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

So I'm gonna, I'm sure many of our audience will know your work well, but for those who don't, I'm gonna share some, some of your bios. So I'll start with Katie. So Katie is a PhD and a psychologist, psychotherapist, an evolutionary catalyst, a contextual disruptor. I love that term. Freelance mentor who's been a pioneer in a field of body intelligence and conscious loving for 50 years. She describes her purpose as I feel, though I feel through to the Heart with Laser Love and Evoke Essence through Deep Play. Well, that's, that's quite an expression. That's wonderful. Katie is the co author of 12 books including a best selling Conscious Loving at the Speed of Life and Conscious Loving Ever After. How to Create Thriving Relationship at Midlife and Beyond. Passionate about the Power of Embodied Integrity and Full Spectrum Presence for Work Explorers. The how of consciousness and the structures and practices that befriend and transform fear into presence, relational authenticity and resonant collaboration. Absolutely fabulous. And you are.

Have been working through the foundation for Conscious Living and you have the Big Leap online programs. I want to ask a little bit about that later. And.

You'Re board certified and the dance movement therapist. So you've had a very varied career. And I love the play focus part of it. So I'll share a little bit about Gay Gay Hendricks is also psychologist, a PhD psychologist and leader in the fields of relationship transformation and body mind therapies for more than 45 years. He earned his PhD in counseling psychology from Stanford and served as a professor of counseling psychology at the University of Colorado for 21 years. And he has written more than 40 books, including bestsellers such as the Five Wishes, the Big Leap and Conscious Loving, co authored with his wife Katie, and.

Co founded the Spiritual Cinema Circle, which distributes inspirational movies and concerts entertainment to subscribers in 70 countries. He's offered his seminars worldwide, appeared on more than 500 radio and television shows including Oprah, CNN, CBS, 48 Hours, and many others. So welcome to both of you again. I want to read a little something just to start us off here. That is.

From your website, the Hendricks Institute. And to find more about gay and Katie's work, please go to thehendricksinstitute.com.

So here's what you have to say about yourselves there on that website. For nearly 40 years, we have loved, lived and learned together. We're our own best customers for the practices you'll find here. Our relationship is a living laboratory for conscious loving and we've personally tested everything you'll find here in the bedroom, over breakfast and in the boardroom. We've written more than 40 books, trained thousands of coaches, appeared on Oprah and hosted seminars around the globe. We've broken through the muck of limiting beliefs and explored the boundless creativity, intimacy and ease on the other side. We're committed to helping others expand their capacity to give and receive love. Wow. Fabulous. And setting a pretty high bar. So let's, let's see where we go with this.

So our theme today is relationship, which includes intimate primary relationships, romantic relationships, as well as other family relationships, social relationships and professional relationships. You're both psychotherapists, so I imagine you have a lot of experience in supporting people in relationship and you've done a lot of couples therapy as well as individual therapy. I know so. And the really cool thing for our conversation is today is that the two of you have been in relationship. For what anniversary did you hit this year?

Well, we just celebrated our 39th wedding anniversary. So we met in January 1980.

Uh huh. Wonderful. Okay, so you know, you've been able to do this for a very long time. You've been happily married for a long time and you actually do really model. And I've listened to many of your videos and read some of your books and I've interviewed you before a number of years back, and I realized you all do really do model what you teach and share with others. So what makes both your marriage work and your teachings that you're teaching in business partnership work? I mean that's, you know, some people can work it out to be married and work together and some can't, but you all have been in partnership for quite a long time and I'm sure you have your own activities, but you know, you do co source the Hendricks Institute and you teach together and you've been married together. How do you make all that work?

Well, when we first met and got together, we first recognized each other, recognized that we were so interested in the same kinds of approaches to expand our ability to feel really alive and really connected with others here on the planet. And when we got together, we decided that we wanted to have all aspects of our lives connected and, and that we wanted to focus on being fully connected, but also fully expressed in our own creativity. And we right away based our relationship on both of us being able to take full responsibility for what was going on. Both of us being committed to being completely authentic with each other, and both of us being committed to our own creativity. And that was one of our very first conversations. And so from the very beginning, we wanted to live what we were teaching and not have our lives compartmentalized.

That was like a first date conversation.

Yep.

Well, yes, it was. It was because when I met Katie, I had just actually within a month before, for the first time in my life, sat down and really figured out what I really wanted in a relationship. And I know it sounds kind of crazy for a relationship therapist to not get around to doing that himself until he was 37 years old. I think during my teens and my 20s, I got to be a relationship expert by making every possible mistake that it was possible to make in relationships. But finally, on this one magic day, I sat down and said what's really important to me. And I came up with three big things. One, I wanted to be in a relationship where both of us were absolutely honest with each other, where nobody was holding back anything, stonewalling feelings or anything like that, because I'd been in tons of relationships where it was kind of hard to figure out what the other person was feeling, and I wasn't doing a good job of communicating that. So that was, number one, absolute honesty. Number two, I wanted to be in a relationship where both people could take some personal responsibility for stuff that came up, rather than just blaming the other person. And blame and criticism had been part of a lot of relationships I'd been in, and I was just really tired of that. And I figured if both of us could learn to take personal responsibility for stuff that came up, we'd both be able to solve problems quicker. So that was number two. And the third thing, which was really important, why I really lit up when I met Katie, was I wanted somebody who was as passionate about their work as I was passionate about mine. And I had looked and looked and looked, but I never found anybody like that. And then when I walked into that room and struck up a conversation with Katie, this was actually. I asked her those things.

Very first thing.

Very first thing. I'd like to have some coffee with you, but I want you to know these three things about me. And fortunately, she said yes.

Yeah. But I have to tell you also that the very first thing that he said to me when we actually conversed was, I'm very attracted to you.

Modeling transparency. And I'd like to have a cup of coffee with you, but first I have to let you know. And so I listened to that. And so my response after a very brief interlude was, well, how about lunch?

So instead of coffee, I upped the ante a little bit.

Well, you know, that's so important. I remember back in my earlier relationships, and, you know, I often really struggle with. With being able to be honest about my feelings. And, you know, that's the doorway into all the different kinds of codependency where we start kind of shifting ourselves and not being authentic in order to stay in the relationship out of fear or, you know. And so that kind of both the mixture of honesty and then. And is also taking responsibility for our own feelings and contributions and so forth, that just seems to be the bedrock of any kind of sane relationship.

Well, it really is true because, you know, we've met with either in our seminars, relationship seminars, or in our office, thousands of couples. So we've been able to get a pretty good idea about why people break up, as well as how we can get them to get back together. And one of the big things that people break up over is not having their feelings listened to or not being able to talk about their feelings. So, I mean, it's something that I've seen gifted teachers teach children in the first grade. You know, I've actually witnessed communication classes in the first grade where kids were learning how to listen to each other's feelings. So it's possible to do that. It's just that we get trained in the wrong thing. So when we get into relationship, we don't know how to do some of the basic things like take responsibility for an issue or communicate about an issue. So we default into blaming and criticizing. And that's the second thing that when you talk to people about why did you leave the relationship? Many people said, I never felt appreciated. I felt blamed and criticized all the time. And so in our work, we really went out of our way to create some alternatives to that. So Katie and I, when we first got together in the first year, we decided to make our relationship a no blame space. And we started working on that, eliminating blame and criticism. And it took us literally years to get down to the last 1%. But for the last 20 or 25 years, neither one of us have said a critical word to the other. So the payoff is you get to live in this kind of atmosphere of creativity where nothing is ever criticized.

And what we did is, instead of blaming each other, we made two moves. One was to shift into curiosity and wondering. So rather than blaming, we made what we call the move where we started to wonder, hmm, how am I co creating this? And what might I be doing differently? And then rather than blaming and criticizing, which is really looking at your partner as sort of your own personal improvement project, we decided to focus on appreciating and the great power of appreciating, both in being sensitively aware of, like, a person's feelings and what they might be wanting to share with you, but also appreciating as a way of giving attention to what's emerging, what's being created, what is really working, and that's really made all the difference. And we know that in successful relationships, we have at least a 5 to 1 ratio of appreciations to criticism. And that's what we started with, was really upping our appreciation ratio. And I still find it when I work with clients is that that's the most powerful thing that we can do, is up the appreciation level.

Wow. I mean, that's what I love about your work. It's so practical. And I have to say, actually, with my sweetheart, my wife Sophie, I got into a little bit of tense moment just last night. That I created trying to give some feedback about something I wasn't happy about. And of course that created a predictable reaction. And I remembered you all talking about shifting the vulnerability and, and, and instead of, you know, trying to express, you know, how I felt she should be or something that I wouldn't have, but really I just got into what was underlying that, which was my own fear and vulnerability. And I just. Beautiful. And it completely shifted. Thank you very much for that.

Well, yeah, that actually has saved many thousands of relationships. And actually I can remember the moment where we made that transition in our own relationship. We were together a year or two and all of a sudden there was this one day where I was criticizing Katie for something and at the same time I realized, oh, my belly is tight, I must be also scared. And so instead of continuing to criticize her, I went inside and I said, I'm scared about something. What am I really scared of? And finally what emerged was, I'm scared that I'm going to lose you. And so there was this weird thing that went on in my unconscious, I guess about I was so afraid I was going to lose her that I didn't want to let her close for fear it would hurt worse if she actually did. I mean, that's how our unconscious minds create such incredible havoc in our lives.

Absolutely.

And I can still remember this moment in my own body because I could feel your shift from being to ah, to being open to me and you're trusting me to let me in and to really be able to experience you at your core. I felt so honored by that. And it opened up this sense of oh, oh, so much more of a possibility of exploration and of co creating together that that's really the solution in any kind of hassle that you're having is to drop down into what's most deeply true for me right now. What am I experiencing? And that opens the doors to real magic.

I love what you said about a blame free relationship. And I consider my mission in life to eradicate the world of blame and shame, which is not a small mission, but it's really the focus of my work. And.

So contractually, yes, and at the same time we're all triggerable. We all go into fight or flight and relating to all kinds of things and it has to do with all kinds of personal backgrounds and trauma and even genetic stuff. And so how do we, you know, create that space of safety that we can do the work to get to the place you all are talking? It is so easy to for one or the Other to get triggered and then get defensive and not feel safe. And so, you know, I'm curious about how you all work with that, maybe even at corner, maybe almost at a little bit of the neurobiological level with that.

Well, here's the thing to know, first of all, for all of us, is that there's a pulsation in relationship. There's a getting close and then there's an individuation and a getting close phase and an individuation phase. And it mirrors what goes on in the first year of our lives, where in the first six months of our lives, we're very much in need of nurturing and closeness and learning how to receive nurturing from another person. But in the second six months of life, the baby begins to crawl, we begin to crawl, we begin to explore. And so this pulsation stays in relationships. And many people don't know that. And they dishonor that by trying to make this phase, you know, when it's moved through, and trying to also attack people when they go into this phase. And so we kind of have a push me pull you. Oftentimes that takes place in relationships where both people are afraid maybe of union and individuation. Sometimes in a relationship, there's one of them that's really into union. You know, one of them is the hugger, and one of them is the more standoffish one, or there's a split sometimes between. One of them is very logical and the other one is very emotional. And so what's important to know is you've got these pulsations, and they are both about learning things. This pulsation is about learning what are the barriers in the way of my being fully able to be in union with another person. And then this phase is about my own relationship with the universe, what's in the way of my own individual relationship with the expression of my genius in the world. So those two phases have to be honored because what happens is that most people don't make a smooth transition. It's not like a gavotte to classical music, you know, it's not like a Mozart Gaza. It's more like a slam dance where people are in two different phases at the same time.

What's really important for people, and a tremendous shortcut is to again go to body. And what are my body sensations that let me know that I want to get close? Because those are very reliable. And what are the body sensations that let me know I need a little solo time. And in our society, we favor the Society favors closeness and you know, like, how's your better, you know, how's your other half? How's your better half? And considers the couple a unit rather than two. Yeah, two whole people. So really honoring the relationship dance through noticing what your body sensations are and communicating those. Like, for example. Yeah, I'm noticing that I'm feeling just a little bit of irritation and I'm not mad at you about anything, but I just am feeling maybe a walk around the block or just listening to some music by myself. It's not as if you have to go on an expedition and come back. It's just honoring that. Integration often requires solo time. And a healthy relationship is going to be a dynamic of getting close and getting separate through, really, through the whole relationship.

I think this is really important territory to explore because often we get into that dance of I'm needing more space. No, I want more closeness. Right. And so how do you communicate that? So it's not like a, you know, a slam dance or whatever it is that it's actually, you know, you can. How do you communicate to know with each other?

Well, our process is based on what we call microscopic truth. Microscopic truth is identifying something that's unarguable. Just something you see like through a microscope. Like, for example, what let me know that day that I wasn't really angry, that I was scared about something was a body sensation. I could feel butterflies in my stomach. And so that let me know, oh, I'm scared. And so I just blurted that out to Katie. I'm scared. I don't know what I'm scared about, but I'm scared about something. So you have to start with these microscopic observations. I remember there's one famous tape from way back where Katie is working with a Vietnam vet. And the first thing he's able to identify says, oh, you mean like my palms are sweaty right now?

Yeah, it was so profound.

And it was his first time of getting back into his body since Vietnam. He'd been, you know, because of the traumas, he'd been living somewhere else way up in his head. And it made such a difference. And I remember the moment too, and I watched it on the tape later because his wife had been sitting there and the moment he said that, she burst into tears because she'd never had an experience of him just communicating his feelings in a non judgmental way. And here we say, learn to communicate the most significant feelings in the same tone of voice as you tell the time of day. Like, I'm scared or I'm angry. Or I'm sad or I feel confused. It's learning how to read those sensations and bring them out directly so you're not hiding them down inside and stonewalling them when people try to find out how you're feeling inside.

Yeah, I like that term, microscopic observations. I wonder if you could also say microscopic vulnerabilities. Because often we don't know how to be vulnerable. And maybe if we can learn to do it in those small ways, like you said, being able to just say, I'm afraid without, you know, often I think we have to get really upset before we're willing to be vulnerable. Right.

Well, if the volume has been turned way down and you haven't been paying attention for a long time, generally the sensations have to escalate to kind of get your attention. So getting curious about what you're experiencing, especially body sensations, feelings, and whatever you're experiencing. And I think one of the mistakes people think is they have to have it figured out before they communicate about it. And what we found is what we call speaking from discovery. I know how when I have something going on and I can start talking to Gay about what I'm noticing, the actual act of speaking into this open space between us opens up the. Oh, I know what that's connected to. Oh, I got sad earlier and I didn't handle that. Oh, that's what's. And I've had that happen so many hundreds of times that it becomes really an opening, a portal into deeper connection, but also discovery so that your relationship doesn't recycle, it keeps opening to new territory. Like I keep discovering more and more about you every day. You know, after 40 some years, I.

Keep the thing we just had last night, it was some little job I.

Had that you didn't know about. Oh, God, it'll come back.

Yeah. Katie says I've had more jobs than any other human being she's ever met. Because I was always. When I was a kid, I was inventing little businesses, you know, lawn mowing and lemonade stands. But there was one we came up with last night that I'd done for a few weeks and I can't even remember now. But anyway, here's the thing. It's all about how open you are to learning because life is willing to teach us by tickling us with a feather. If we're open to learning, it's open, also willing, if we're not open to learning, to wonk us over the head with a big stick. And so I've had both many times when I Was very oblivious to myself. I got taught by the big stick many, many times. But as I opened up more and more and got more tuned into what was going on inside myself, that said to the universe, oh, he's open to learning. Therefore, we do not need to beat him on the head with a stick anymore, because he's paying attention now. But the important thing is to keep opening, opening, opening more and more to what's going on in there. Because the more. It's like when we're in New York, we always go to the.

Museum, to the Met, to see a particular Rembrandt that we love, a Rembrandt self portrait. And I've been going there for 40 some years, probably to see this portrait over and over. And every time I see something new in it. Because part of appreciation is being sensitive to input, to being able to learn new things about something, even though I've known the person for 40 years, to be open to learning something new about her all the time. So it's a magic ingredient in life.

Well, that sense of discovery seems to be the key to keeping relationships thriving over the span of time that you all have been together. So I'm still thinking about how, you know, where people can begin with. Because everything you're talking about, really, at least in my experience, takes practice. And how do we create the safety with each other? Because a lot of, I would imagine a lot of couples, you're sitting there, you know, should I bring this up? I mean, even if I would say I'm thinking, I'm feeling a little irritation. I'm not sure if it's you. That could be enough for the partner to go, what do you mean? You know, and start feeling all defensive and afraid. Right. So.

Well, kind of what.

There was some work I did years ago where people doing, you know, dyadic work with couples and really doing a lot of deep listening. And I. And. And they talked about, through that practice of really doing a lot of relational work like that, something emerged they called the third presence, almost the presence of the relationship. Like, the relationship has its own energetic presence which can create that safety hold, even when we need to go our own ways or when one person needs to take some time out or things. You know, there's a container that's kind of an energetic container that's kind of holding the relationship. And it seems like that it takes practice to get there. So I'm wondering if you could talk about the pathway of this a little bit of how people who haven't really even done any of this kind of work you're talking about can begin building that kind of context for their relationship.

Well, the starting point for any important new project or solving a problem is commitment. And we've explored the power of commitment for many decades and find it to be just an incredibly powerful step. It's really getting in, it's turning toward and getting in, it's getting off of the benches and on the field, or getting from the side of the pool into the pool so that you can actually be in the relationship.

We've had many people come here who've been married for 10 years, or in one case I can think I've almost 30 years where one person had never fully committed, you know, always had what I say is a foot out the back door. And so there was never both feet in the relationship. And that's a real problem because anytime there's a lack of commitment, that sets up a situation where it becomes much easier to criticize the other person. Just like somebody sitting up in the stands can criticize the quarterback.

What a bad play.

But down on the field, it's really different. It's very different. And so in one way or the other, integrity has a great deal to do with relationships going forward over time and flourishing over time. Because it's one thing to be chemically whoosh in love with another person, but in order to make that relationship last, people need to show up over and over again with integrity. They need to speak honestly, they need to keep their agreements, they need to be very honest about what they can do and what they can't do, and they need to be very honest about what they want. But those are all things that we don't get taught much in school. So, you know, you get out into relationship and it would be like, thank goodness they don't do driver education like that, because if they did, they would say, okay, here's some keys, go out and bash around until you figure out how it works, you know. But instead we get six weeks training, or at least I did when I was learning to drive. Where's the six week training in high school for relationships? I'm kind of. I'm sore about the fact that there's not more resources available at a young age because I graduated from high school and even college without ever having 10 minutes training in how to make relationships work. And I think that's criminal miseducation.

Well, you mentioned knowing what we want, and I think underlying commitment is first really knowing what we want. And when I heard you talk about how the two of you met that you had gotten really clear about what you wanted. And lo and behold, you manifested it. It's almost in the realm of manifesting. Maybe not. I don't know if we want to talk about the secret, but it almost was like that. You got that clear about who you are and what you wanted. And Katie showed up a month later.

Yes. And that works in lots of other areas in life. I remember the great Earl Nightingale said, 70, 80 years ago, success is the progressive realization of a worthy ideal. And when I came into my relationship with Katie and I had this certain ideal, I wanted to have this partnership that ran on positive energy, that when we hit snags, we could move through them by taking responsibility for them and not blaming. And that we were also very committed to our creative paths. And that really made a difference, because when stuff comes up, as it inevitably will, you have a way to move through it. And so that, I think, is so important in having things in a relationship. Kind of little problem solving skills, problem solving algorithms, that you can move through stuff quicker. Because in the early days of our relationship, we'd have a couple of days of grooving along just fine, and then something would happen. It would take us three weeks then to get back into the groove. Later on, we learned how to do it more and more, more quickly. So if we get out of the groove, it's just 10 seconds, we can pop back in again. So it does take practice, though, and there's not a lot of miracles to it. It's kind of like a friend of mine lost 30 pounds and got his body in shape by starting out doing one chin up a week every day, and then the second week going to two chin ups a day every. By the end of the year, he's lost 30 pounds and he's doing 52 chin ups. And so you kind of sneak up on enlightenment like that. Even though most times people think of enlightenment as being kind of like a bolt of lightning. It's really something that gradually grows on you through the practice of certain specific skills.

And that's related also to committing. So committing really gets you into moving toward what you want, and recommitting gets you back on the path when you fall off. So most people think, if I've committed and then I don't keep my commitment, that I failed and I should just give up. But we really see commitment as a place to come home to and that recommitting allows you to navigate when the wobbles occur. So it really can take, I think, for some of our issues for me, moving from concealing to revealing took hundreds of recommitments to say, okay, rather than beating myself up and feeling bad, I could simply recommit, okay, I recommit to revealing rather than concealing. And then I would say something that was actually going on for me right then. So even if it's something that you don't know, something that you want, but you don't know how to get there, you really can't know how to get there because commitment comes first, and then the how begins to appear. You begin to navigate by moving more and more toward what you really want. But what we found was that suffering, complaining, feeling bad, punishing yourself actually don't move you toward what you want any faster.

So I love that shifting from concealing to revealing, that is so powerful. So, yeah, again, I just love the very practical nature of your advice and the idea of having an algorithm that we develop with each other when we recognize things are off track, that we can, you know.

Shorten the time that it takes to get it back on track. Right. And. And I think that that's another really key to success in relationship. So some of the things I think that really undermine relationships and have relationships eventually fall apart are these kind of chronic arguments, chronic bites that couples get into. And sometimes it may just be a lack of relationship skills and, you know, family trauma, whatever stuff that you know, that we're just not conscious enough to not let that stuff get us into this. Right. But other times there can be value differences. And maybe, you know, you get into relate, you do have enough shared values to be in relationship, but you do have some key value differences. And often those can be, you know, friction points. And how do we work with that?

There's a great line from Walt Whitman.

Says I am large and contain multitudes. And I think what we need to do is get that view of ourself and get that view of the other person too, that we are both large and contain multitudes. But here's the algorithm, and that is to get willing to learn from the differences rather than criticize the differences. And that's a key thing because once you shift to being curious about the other person rather than being critical about the other person, that opens up a tremendous amount of space for intimacy in the relationship.

Yeah, that curiosity, I remember, I think you said it now and I remember from our previous conversation. When something comes up in a relationship, instead of going into that critical or defensive or attacking, it's just.

That's really interesting. Could you tell me more about that? I'd love to know. Understand more about what you're feeling right now. It's just that sense of curiosity.

In fact, tell me more is really a great thing to have in your background that you can bring forward. Tell me more then what happened and what interests you most about that. Those are ways of keeping the conversation going, but also opening up to what you can learn in any given situation. Another key, though, is in opening your body. So we forget, because most people live here and think of this as my body and where I'm located. And the more that we open up to our whole body learning and our whole body awareness, we bring in so much more capability for discovery. So simply just shifting your body rather than getting stuck in a certain posture, opening your breathing and particularly turning towards, turning toward rather than. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, you know, giving your partner half of your attention or doing what we call a flyby, where you go, love you, babe, as you're going out the door that you actually fully turn toward, and then that opens what you were talking about at the very beginning that we space where energy and awareness flows between you.

As a matter of fact, I have something I want to show you here. I just noticed it sitting on the other end of my desk.

Back in the good old days last year when people used to come here for actual workshops before we started doing them on Zoom.

We used to give people this little silicon band. And you can't read it here, but it says breathe, move, love on it. And what we're getting at there is a simple algorithm for how to move through life efficiently, which is always remember to keep coming back home to your natural body resources like breath and movement. You know, there's a famous Charlie Brown cartoon, Peanuts cartoon from way back a long time ago, where Charlie Brown is bent over like this and walking around with his head down. And Lucy says, you know, what are you feeling? And he says, oh, I'm depressed. And she points out, she says, well, if you keep walking around like this, you're going to be depressed. If you get up like this and walk around, you won't feel depressed. And then he says, but how am I supposed to stay depressed if I don't keep my head down like this?

First of all, we need to remember to stay alive to our body resources like the natural gifts we've been given for how to move through things. When we go through trauma, human beings go and clutch our breath and squeeze our muscles. So as soon as we can learn to breathe and move, move again in a situation you can get unstuck. But the third thing, Breathe, move, love, is that the root of many, if not most of what human beings struggle with is some unloved part of ourselves or some unloved part of the other person, or even an unloved aspect of the world that we haven't learned to love and accept yet. And so in the absence of loving ourself for our scare, for example, or our anger or, or our sadness, when we don't love ourselves for that kind of thing, we close down to it, which of course is going to bring a certain quality of life to you. It's going to bring more things that make you sad. And so the moment you open up to that and breathe through it and learn to love those kinds of things about yourself, then suddenly a new world opens up because you're not stuck in those old things that you've been carrying around. You've got actual life energy flowing in the relationship.

You move into creativity rather than reactivity. And one of the big goals for our work with people is to observe others, especially those close to you, as a work of art, as an evolving work of art. And my job is to appreciate and to really give my attention to what's emerging. How can I support you in moving toward what you really want rather than, this is my personal improvement project and my job is to just keep tweaking you so that you can get better. And when you make that fundamental shift, people really do blossom in ways that are so evident and not only make a difference to your personal relationship, but then begin radiating to the community, become a source of energy for giving and receiving more love in wider circles.

And again, though Fleet, it comes down to our relationship with ourselves. First of all, do we see ourselves as a failed improvement project or do we see ourselves as an evolving work of art? I like to suggest the latter, but I've been in times in my life when I saw myself as a failed improvement project. And so what you want to do eventually is get to a point where you can love even those things about yourself that you find most unlovable, because then that opens up the most space for love in the relationship.

Well, let me ask you about the how to of that. Okay, so you know, even if we're trying to have a fairly self compassionate relationship and we've done a lot of work, but you know, there's things that come up that are, you know, some of our more fear based or neurotic behaviors or, and you know, when, when they, when they do take us over and we say something dumb, you know, or unkind or, you know, we have our bad moments and, you know, in terms of, okay, I know, I don't want to beat myself up for that, but love myself for that, love that. But where is there some underlying thing in order to be able to love that? It seems like we have to see something that that's arising out of to find that compassion for ourselves and that love. I mean, just to love myself for being selfish in a moment or angry, it seems kind of hard. But if I could, where is that coming from? Is that how I find what I can love or how I can love myself?

Well, it goes in layers. Sometimes the first thing you can do is just love yourself for not being able to love yourself. You know, to accept that in this moment, I'm having trouble doing that. But it proceeds in layers. And just like with another person, if you love another person, there's one layer on the surface that you may love, but there are deeper and deeper and deeper levels that you come to. And that's the art of it in yourself is coming up to those places maybe for the 50th time. And instead of judging yourself for it this time, actually to open your heart to it and love and accept that aspect of yourself. So you kind of work your way down through the layers by starting with the stuff that's hardest to love on the surface. Just like if you look at your skin and you see a pimple, well, you have to start there. But ultimately, loving yourself for what's inside that caused the thing in the first place.

Here is an algorithm that I've used many times with people is to first accept what day it is and get the sense of, okay, today I may not care, I may not like it, but this is what day it is. And then to give that sense, same acceptance to the thing that you did or the thing that happened. And then I invite people to have the thing be next to them. Imagine being next to a close friend on a porch swing and just being with each other, and that's another layer. And then to think of someone or someplace that you know you love. And until you're having the experience of loving, and then to give that to the thing that feels unlovable. And that sequence has been very reliable just to move through to, from accepting to loving.

Oh, beautiful. You both brought up breath breathing before, and I wanted to ask you some questions about it because there's been a kind of a huge resurgence or renaissance of interest in breath work. And it's always been around for thousands of years. And it comes and Goes. But right now, Jane Nestor's new book on breath, and.

Anders Olson's got a book, Conscious Grieving. And you wrote a book by that same title, Gay. And you had your breathing box through Sounds True. And I think you had another Sounds True. You all did a lot. You were pioneers. I mean, breath work goes back thousands of years, but kind of in the body mind movement here in the west, you were pioneers. And I'm curious if you, if you keep up with where all that's going and, and, and just the importance of that in terms of our own health and well being and also as a support for relationship.

Well, first of all, I'm delighted to see that it's growing like this because I remember when I was a graduate student in the early 1970s, this was before the computer age, I tried to find all the different things I could find about breathing, and there was not very much. There was no scientific literature or anything like that. Now, 40 years, 50 years later, golly, there's been hundreds of scientific research projects into breathing for everything from depression to anxiety. So it's like a supermarket of great stuff now. So I'm delighted with that. And I can remember meeting some of the other early pioneers, like Stan Groff and the Rebirthing fellow, Leonard Orr, and others that were interested in breathing. And it was like you could fit all of us into a telephone booth. If we'd had a, an international symposium, we would have been able to meet in a very small place. And so I'm really delighted that people have discovered so much more about breathing. In fact, somebody told me a while back that they were at the American Medical Association Breathing Somewhere convention, which you think of at a very conservative place, and there was a number of breathing workshops going on. I was tickled to hear that, you know, because I can remember when I first I proposed to write my book Conscious Love, I mean, Conscious Breathing. After Conscious Loving came out, I remember the look on my editor's face. She said, what do you want to work on next? What do you want to publish next? And I said, well, I want to do a book called Conscious Breathing. I can look. Look on her face. What?

I'm happy to say that that book is still in print and selling like hotcakes here almost 30 years later now. And so it struck a chord and I'm very glad because it's, it's such a natural resource. I just want everybody to discover that, you know, that if they knew a few simple breathing tricks, they'd be able to clear anxiety out of their body and Kind of wake up from that heavy, depressed feeling that we go through from time to time as human beings. And so anyway, I'm the world's biggest cheerleader and I try to keep up as much as I can. I have not read the book you mentioned yet, but I've seen it and I have it on my list of 118 books to get to when I have time.

Well, it's because he did look at the research that you can now find, I guess both on the Internet, but he traveled a lot. And it's amazing that the knowledge about breath and the therapeutic value of breath is gone in and out, that it's been discovered and forgotten, rediscovered and forgotten, especially by the mainstream of science. Right. And so fascinating story.

Yes. And for viewers to let you know that hendricks.com has some videos on breathing, some fundamental practices that will really deepen your experience of just exploring the power of opening breathing and how that connects you to more aliveness, just more vitality in general.

And also on our foundation for Conscious Living, our nonprofit foundation, there are a number of resources over there, free resources about breathing too, including some of the best, simplest breathing practices we know.

Is your breathing box now available in digital form as kind of down.

Yes, it is.

Yes. Sounds true.

Yeah. It's an absolutely great resource.

I think so too. Yeah, I remember when you were making that and I was so delighted that we had a box and there were cards and this was again before the Internet.

Yeah, it's nicely digitized now, but it's been a real process because I was such a passionate cheerleader for breathing for so many years before it kind of caught on in the mainstream. I can remember I wrote my book Conscious Breathing when I was still a university professor at the University of Colorado. And when I would tell colleagues what I was working on, that's a common thing when you stop in the hall and talk to some colleague. What are you working on? I would say, well, I'm working on my book Conscious Breathing. And so I got teased endlessly. People would pass by me on the. They'd say, there goes Hendrix again.

I also remember, what are you going to do? Chapter one, breathe in. Chapter two, breathe out.

Chapter four, heavy Breathing. So I got teased endlessly. But there's nothing like a best selling book to end people teasing.

Exactly, exactly. Quieted down a bit. So what's the big leap about? I suspect it might have something to do with what we're exploring in this.

Yes, yes, the big leap. I'm really grateful to all the people, especially in the coaching industry that have accepted that kind of taking that on as one of the bibles of the coaching industry. Well, the big leap is about two big things that I think everybody needs to know about. One, it's about what I call the upper limit problem, which is the tendency to sabotage yourself when things start going better and to sabotage success. And what's different about the big leap is I show exactly what's under it and a kind of 1, 2, 3 path of how to unwire those things in yourself that are causing the upper limit problem. Specifically four or five big fears that I enumerate in the book and show you how to move through those. So the big leap is about the upper limit problem, but it's also about what I now call the genius zone, which is that part of ourselves that is the part of ourselves that we really need to bring forth in order to make our greatest contribution. So it has become my deep conviction as I've worked with now a little bit more, I think, than 20,000 individuals in our seminars and our offices. It's become my conviction that each one of us has a genius zone inside us that we can bring forth. And it begins with commitment. You need to be committed to bringing it forth. But once you make that commitment, there are some easy ways to get re established in your genius so that you're bringing forth the part of yourself that makes the most difference to you and to the world. And as you begin to bring your genius online and bring it up, two things happen. One is your relationships get a lot better because you're operating in your own genius zone. By the way, shameless plug here. My new book coming out in the summer is called the Genius Zone. And so it goes into all of this in more detail. But you're going to have to wait till June 29th for that one, according to my publisher. So those two things together, learning how to unhook your upper limit problem and learning how to center yourself in your genius zone is incredibly important to human life. And so I'm happy to.

As far as the big leap goes, I wrote it 10 years ago and then I've been working on how to go to the next level with it. And that's what the genius zone is going to be about. I'm so happy that so many people have discovered the big leap, though, because I want to live in a world where everybody's operating out of their own genius zone.

Well, it'd be a much big. What an amazing world that would be. You know, it's so important because I think A lot of us don't realize we have kind of like a thermostat, that it'll keep us from going completely off the rails the lower, but it also keep us from growing and succeeding because it gets uncomfortable. Right. And we turn to thermostat, says, oh, cool it back down. Right. Stay in there. So how do you change that? So you get into actually how to change the. Why?

Absolutely. In fact, all of our work. All of our work is about how to expand our capacity both to give and receive more love, but how to expand our capacity to enjoy more and more energy. And it's really an evolutionary problem because we've had thousands of years of really acclimating to responding to what's wrong and being really quick at catching the threat. But what we're evolving into now is how can I be more and more open to what's wanting to come through me? That is unique to me and is a way that I can contribute, but it's also something that I love to do. So your genius is. Is not hard work. People think if I'm not working hard, I must be missing something. But in your genius zone, you're doing what you love to do, where time disappears and it's easy. And you think other people must know how to do this. But as each of us is living in our genius, I like to think of us as instruments in the big orchestra. And we're each contributing our voice and our uniqueness into the whole making great new melodies together.

Wow. Well, I'm going to pre order that book as soon as you can. And in the meantime, I'm going to.

Already pre order it.

I haven't read Big Leaps. I'm going to get a hold of that because this is an area that really fascinates me. And we have a day of the summit that's focused on the science and change and habit formation, habit deconstruction, which gets into some of that internal wiring. And so as I said before, I think you all. We could have put you all on any day of the summit and just started talking about that subject. You would have brought so much value. But the name of our summit is the best year of your life. And, you know, we're all kind of back on our heels while some of us more than others, and with the pandemic, and we're trying to encourage people to not have that be cause for settling, to get back on the balls of our feet and engage life and go after, you know, what our dreams are and so forth. So going into next year, what would make 2021 the best year of your lives at this point in your life?

Great question. I also want to say that we operate out of that intention which we give in the ultimate success mantra that's in the big leap. The idea that I expand every day in love, abundance and creativity as I inspire other people to do the same. So the idea that I think life is at its best when you're both opening up to greater degrees of wisdom and creativity and ourselves, but also when we're using that as a way to serve other people and a way to be in relationship in greatest service with other people. So I think that for me in 2021, I want to keep expanding in my ability to love and be loved by you and my ability to bring forth whatever next step of creativity I can bring forth.

Yeah. Being friends with the unknown and really what's wanting to emerge. And my, my sense is that we're moving more and more toward co creativity and collaboration rather than individual by myself, it's me against you. So moving from the fear trance into co creativity, individual co creativity and co creativity that I think would make a fabulous 2021. And I can't wait to end this year.

Well, this has been so inspiring and wonderful. Thank you both so very much. I know that this is just going to offer so much to our audience and and I really encourage all of our audience to check out the work of Katie and gay hendricks@thehendricksinstitute.com and check out all their amazing books and work and look forward to that Genius Zone. Who wouldn't want to operate in the Genius zone?

Well, thank you so much. Thanks for organizing such a wonderful way for people to be together.

Thank you. Thank you both.

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