Our Inner Dialogue: Being Mindful of What We Say to Ourselves

Welcome to the Living to 100 Club Podcast. Here's our host, Dr. Joseph Casciani.

Welcome to all of our listeners tuning in to the Living to 100 Club Podcast. This is Joe Casciani, your host for this program. I'm very happy to welcome each of our listeners. As many of you know, these podcasts are recorded and are available within one week on the club website, livingto100.club. We focus on successful aging, longevity, and making it over the hurdles. And one of the best parts about hosting these conversations is bringing in guests to share valuable information with our listeners, information that makes us more informed helps us to live longer and healthier, and inspires us to do better. Today is no exception. I'm very excited to announce that our guest today is Sheen Towers. Sheen and I will be discussing the talk that goes on in our head, what we commonly refer to as self-talk. How we speak to ourselves impacts how we deal with other people and how we cope with difficult events. Sheen will share his expertise about self-communications and the dialogue of self-liberation— what it is and what it does. First, a little background. Sheen is a London-based hypnotherapist. He's been helping people to transform how they speak toward themselves for the best part of two decades. Through simple yet profound understanding, he has successfully helped many who have suffered trauma, abuse, depression, and anxiety. Now the co-founder of the Dialogue of Self-Liberation, also referred to as TDSL, she is sharing this practical transformational system online, helping people to develop the mindfulness of self-communication and nurture self-forgiveness and self-compassion. Shin hosts the TDSL Global Community Calls where he provides continuing support to people around the world who wish to improve and enhance the quality of their self-communications. As a lifelong martial artist, Shin has also developed seated Qi Gong for people with mobility challenges.

Qi Gong.

Qi Gong. Qi Gong. Thank you. Thank you. Welcome to our program, Sheen. Glad to have you with us today.

Thank you very much, Joseph, and thank you for inviting me.

Great, great. Looking forward to this conversation. I always like to begin by asking our guests to tell us a little bit about the journey that brought you to where you are today.

Well, with regards to the, the therapy work that I've been doing, um, I never wanted to become a therapist. The thought never entered my head. And, um, I many years ago was introduced to a gentleman whose name was Vernon C.F.

Bell.

Vernon is, uh, more really famously known here as the founding father of the British karate movement. And, uh, he, um, was the first Englishman awarded a black belt in Shotokan karate, and that was back in 1957. And he ended up opening karate schools all around, all through the United Kingdom. And he was also not so famously known as one of the, one of the founders of the oldest regulatory body for hypnotherapy in the United Kingdom, which is called the British Association of Therapeutic Hypnotists, which he was a founder member of in 1951. And so he was my friend, and I— and we shared an interest in martial arts, and, uh, and also we shared an interest in, um, the— what's sometimes referred to as the perennial wisdom, the, the, the archetypes and themes and wisdom which unites all the different religious teachings and spiritual, spiritual methodologies really, the wisdom that flows through all of them and the themes. So we used to have some wonderful conversations. I liked him as a person, loved him as a person very much. He was quite a mischievous character and a very blunt man. And one day I was visiting him and early on in our conversation he said, I'm going to ask you a straight and simple question. 'Only a yes or no will do. Do you or do you not wish to study hypnotherapy with me? You don't have to answer now, but before you leave here this afternoon, I want you to either give me a yes or a no. Is that all right?' That's how he said it. And so for several hours, I was racking my brains trying to come up with a reason to say why I would say no. And every reason I came up with, I realized I respected him too much to give him a very poor reason why I would say no.

Sure.

And so the only reason I said yes is because I respected him too much to just, you know, give him a lame excuse and wriggle out of it. Well, and I had no idea what I was in for, but, um, I accepted. I thought it was a wonderful opportunity because he had a wealth of experience of helping many, many people over probably about 50 years or so of his life. And, um, I remember the very first experience of going to study with him was I realized that I was entering into a process. So basically, I studied with him as his personal student for the last 4 years of his life, and during that time, he, he gave the very best of himself to me. I got the very best of him. He, he passed on to me his preferred methodology at the latter part of his life, and a very profound understanding he passed on to me of a principle. And what he taught me and how he helped me totally transformed my life on every level for the better. You see, I was completely unconscious, uh, of how negative the internal dialogue that I'd become so habitually used to hearing myself say to myself about myself. I was completely unaware of how I'd picked up along the way, because of experiences I'd had in my past, some very negative beliefs about myself, very unhelpful patterns and habits of self-talk. And I, I was very stuck. I was always, um, you know, some of the people who've known me for many, many years, my oldest friends, had no clue about how I'd normalized this inner negativity reflected toward myself because I kept it hidden. They would always say, you know, they described me as a glass half full person and an optimist by nature, but But it was when I was on my own that I became very skillful at giving myself a very hard time.

Sure.

I became an abuser unto myself with the words I was speaking toward myself, about myself, but I didn't realize I was doing it.

Internally, you were a glass half empty. Yes.

And so Vernon helped me, first of all, to acknowledge, to apprehend, to, to kind of identify the stories that I've been telling myself about myself. And then he helped me to understand how to let go of the habit of reinforcing those beliefs and those habits and patterns through altering literally how I communicate toward myself, about myself. And so for the last 20 years, I've been passing on the same understanding with the same methodology he taught me, utilizing that methodology, um, with many, many people who've been to see me for help after, after he passed. I've seen incredible transformations in people who have come to see me in various states of broken, sometimes very, very broken and very, very lost, and I've seen incredible transformations utilizing the methodology that he passed on to me.

What a great story, very touching story about your connection with him and his influence, powerful influence it sounds like on you and your personal development and your professional development. That's a very touching story. So I'd like to talk more about the self-talk and the self-dialogue, but first just let me ask you about your current professional work. What What types of clients do you work with in your practice? What kind of problems do they present with when they come to see you?

Well, it was, uh, it became apparent very early on that there are many more people who've experienced trauma than I had any idea about. Um, so on a more superficial level, over the years there have been people who come see me for help with things as seemingly trivial, trivial as chocolate addiction. And in those cases, in that particular case, there's one particular client that comes to mind, was it took more work to help that person to let go or to alter their, their relationship and the way they perceive themselves in relation to chocolate than it has done working with many, many people who I've worked with who've been raped. It's a sad reflection on society modern society, but I've worked with many, many people who've been raped, uh, people who've been sexually abused, sometimes, uh, systematically over many years, uh, and the people who've been in violent relationships, abusive relationships, people who've been randomly attacked in the most horrible ways, people who've been on the verge of suicide. So a very, very broad spectrum. Um, but, uh, yeah, quite a— sadly, a lot of sexual abuse, um, and rape.

Yeah, yeah, that's so interesting. We can't trivialize something as what seems like a minor addiction to chocolate because that in itself can have a very pivotal role for the person in his or her own kind of awareness, self-understanding. Sure.

Yes.

Yeah. So, uh, what's the role of hypnotherapy? I mean, I know this is a huge subject. We could talk for probably months about this, but what, in a nutshell, what's the role of hypnotherapy in your practice?

Well, I, I would say firstly that, um, I don't like the term hypnotherapy or hypnotherapist, and I tell my clients I don't, because I, I believe that many people have very— they make assumptions about what hypnotherapy is and what it does and how it functions and what's going to happen if they go to see a hypnotherapist. And I think a lot of hypnotherapists are glad that people make those assumptions, and they trade off of the assumptions that people make, um, and, um, they leverage those assumptions. So instead, I describe the work I do as I help people to identify negative patterns of internal dialogue. And the associated negative beliefs we picked up about ourselves along the way. And then I help them to utilize the creative power of their imagination to work out how to let go of the habit of dragging the past with them into the present or projecting it into the future in such a way that they, they expect or assume that they're just going to meet up with the same experiences in the future. So basically, uh, allowing the, the past to be the past and to learn the lessons from the experiences we've been through, no matter what they've— how traumatic or upsetting or challenging those experiences may have been, so that we can learn those lessons and then choose to no longer communicate about the past as if it were here now, or as if it's going to be there in the future. Because when we do that, that's when our problems persist. The, if you like, the wheel of suffering keeps spinning because we're telling ourselves, I feel this, it's here now, I'm always going to, why does it always happen to me, these kind of things we say to ourselves. And we normalize it, and we, we accept that it's a belief based upon who we actually are. And that's why I said I did that for 20 years of my life, believing that's just me, life's taught me certain things, and this is just how I am, this is how it's likely to always be in the future as well.

So a lot of your methodology is really helping a person to learn the lessons, as you said, and respect the past, but not let the past control us, not let the emotions from the past control us today. Is that the assumption?

Yeah, absolutely true. Yes. And with going back to your question about hypnotherapy, even though I say I don't like the term, the first part of the work with the Dialogue of Self-Liberation, which is the name that I give to The methodology that Vernon taught me is about developing the mindfulness of self-communication. I use a lot of metaphor and symbolism in the work because the symbolism and the metaphor conveys things beyond the words. So to the subconscious mind, it conveys certain things more deeply. And so I have— there's a number of sayings that crop up in the work very often, and one of them is, how can we possibly let go of something if we're not even aware that we're carrying it? So if, if we've normalized, um, this belief that we are heavy on the inside, but we've forgotten that the reason we're heavy is because we've been carrying this big heavy weight around, dragging it around with us, and that's become so normalized that we've become numb to it, and then we forget we're even carrying it, and we think we're heavy.

Yeah, yeah. Sorry, go ahead.

Yeah, that's okay, go ahead. What were you going to say?

Oh, sorry, it's like this extra luggage that we're carrying around. We don't know We're carrying it. It's just kind of part of our normal life. This is the way. I'm just carrying extra weight.

Absolutely. You know, it's interesting you refer to it as like excess baggage. You know, if we go to an airport and they weigh the luggage and we've got too much, they charge a lot of money for that. That costs a lot to drag around your excess baggage. And it's the same on the inside, mentally and emotionally as well. It costs a lot. It's got a hefty price tag on it, really. It exhausts us. And we wonder why we've got no energy, because we're drained, because we've been dragging this heavy stuff around with us. Yeah. So we first have to— first and foremost, in order to change, we have to be completely fed up with feeling how we've been feeling. To the point where we're prepared to do something different. We have to be at the point where we say to ourselves, I'm really sick of feeling like that. I don't know quite what to do, but I really want some— I want to do something different. I don't want to feel like that anymore. And then the, uh, you know, if we've got that in place, that desire to change, um, then the first skill is, is identifying the baggage we picked up along the way. So that we then have an opportunity to work out how to let go of it and no longer drag it with us, or no longer throw it into the future in our imagination with the expectation and assumption we're just going to meet up with it again.

So that's helpful if the person reaches that point of, you know, kind of reconciling with himself or herself and saying, I'm done with this, I need to unload. That would be one motivation, but I'm thinking a person probably doesn't have to be at that, that extreme level either to, to want to change. And in terms of they feel some things aren't going right, they don't have to be at this kind of bottom place.

No, that's very, that's very true.

Yes. Yeah, I wonder if you could give us, um, maybe a case, uh, where you would look at this person's self-talk and how you helped him or her? Could you share something like that?

Oh goodness, uh, yeah, take your pick. Let's see, let's see, um, let's see if there was a— say, there are so many that come to mind really. Yeah, okay, here's one. It could be a person who has been in a job where, um, there's so many, Joseph. There's a couple here. One is a person who's been in a job where, uh, they've been, they've been being sexually harassed by their boss, and yet it's difficult to prove, and yet it has been persistent over a long period of time. And it was a woman with a male boss. And so for her, it was about developing the confidence to confront this and to be able to have the courage and the strength to take the necessary action by going to her boss's boss, the boss of the company, who apparently she believed got on well with her boss, who was the, the person who was being sexually harassing. And, um, she thought that it was not going to go anywhere. It was just going to cause her, um, career to be impacted very heavily in a very negative way. She'd spent many years building up a position and felt that it was not going to work out in her favor. And yet the, uh, what she had to deal with was just really awful. And so it was about building her confidence to have the courage to actually do this. And to cut a long story short, she worked it out. She worked out how to let go of the self-doubt and the fear and went ahead, and everything actually worked out very, very well in her favor. So she ended up with the, the boss siding with her and the person concerned losing his job and was able to deal with that in a very courageous way and also at the same time looked for another job and found another job that was working much better for her. And in an environment where she was well away from all of that stuff. So it was about overcoming something very, very, you know, unsavory, very tricky, difficult to work out how it was going to go, and it was about having the courage to try, really. And she was very successful.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, perfect example where the self-dialogue kind of held her back and Yes, kept her frozen. She was indeed unable to take those necessary steps. Probably some self-criticism or finger-pointing at herself too, for, you know, was she part of that harassment? Did she give off messages? I mean, I just don't know, but yes, sometimes if she felt it herself for some of the problem. Yeah, yeah.

There was another, another client who had a morbid fear of public speaking but ended up in a job role where that was something was required to speak in front of large audiences of people, and she would be terrified when approaching the microphone. And for the weeks leading up to it, absolutely in pieces, worrying and fretting about it. But then with a little bit of work, what we realized is that it wasn't actually— it felt like fear, but what it actually was was excitement. Because as soon as she did that for the first time in this new job role, her boss, one of the, the very experienced bosses, came up afterwards and said, 'That was absolutely amazing. As soon as you got on that microphone, everyone in the room was, was transfixed. Everyone was really listening to everything you said.' Um, and so she managed to work out that she's actually really good at that. And it was actually excitement that she was feeling but didn't know how to process it because she perceived the excitement as fear. So we had to transform the way she perceived— I helped her rather to transform how she perceived, um, the, the feelings in the body. And the whole lead-up to the thing became, uh, like a, um, a different stages along the way of a process that she would enter into. In her imagination, so that the approach was, uh, was approaching something which was just really wonderful and exciting. Um, and yeah, that worked very, very well.

Good story. Yeah, kind of redefining herself and finding that side of herself that she was not in touch with. And it reminds me of that story about Michelangelo and he was asked how he could create such beautiful, you know, works of art from a block of stone. He said, well, you know, it's a job of the sculptor to find that perfect image that's in there and release it. So we have to get in touch with our different sides sometime. And, you know, it's fearful. I'm sure there's some steps that create some anxiety about getting in touch with those other sides. I call it redefining ourself and Sometimes we let yesterday define who we are today, and that's too bad. That's unfortunate.

So yeah, and it's all too common. That's the thing, you know. The core principle of the Dialogue of Self-Liberation is based upon the fact that our problems persist because we communicate toward ourselves about our past as if it were the present or the future. And of course it's not. We're alive now, but it happens unconsciously through little words that we would say to ourselves about our experience. And literally, the words we use give content, they give emotional content to the experience. So when we say, I feel, whatever we say after it, we're describing, I feel this is something I feel. And then what we say after, I feel angry, and then we've defined what we feel. Maybe what we're talking about is an old anger. Yeah, maybe it's because of something that happened yesterday. It could be something happened 20 years ago and we're still carrying around an angry feeling. We're snappy at people or a person because of something still angry, still holding on to that anger. Like, you know, when you play fetch with the dog and you throw the stick, and sometimes the dog comes back and it won't give you the stick. You go to grab the stick and it'll hold on tight. It doesn't want it. It's my stick. Doesn't want to give it away. It's my stick. And sometimes you can pick the stick up and kind of wave the dog around, swing it about, and it's still holding on to the stick. That's what we do with our anger, with our, our lack of self-worth, our fears and, you know, anxieties, you know, our traumas and upsets, disappointments, grief, all of that stuff. We drag it around with us and we don't know how to let it go.

Yeah, we're not taught how to let go, and it plays out in different ways. So where does this come from? What makes the self-talk good or bad? I mean, just thinking too much or dwelling on things? Where does it come from?

You know, I think it's again a sad thing that we're taught to use language in a particular way where we've normalized that somehow we would never dream of speaking harsh, spiteful words to anybody. Most decent people, they don't do that, right? They're not spiteful, they're not harsh, they're not going to go up to some You know, if I use this example, I say to clients, you know, I imagine, is there like a child who you— have you got kids, or have you got like, you know, like friends who've got kids or whatever? And if you imagine like an adult looming over that child, wagging the finger, saying, you're useless, you're ugly, you're going to be a failure in life, no one likes you, you're really unlovable, I say to them, you'd be in there like a shot to defend that child. You wouldn't stand for it, would you? And they say, oh no, of course not. And yet somehow it's become somehow acceptable that it's okay to speak to ourselves like that. We refer to this in the Dialogue of Self-Liberation, I refer to this as the hidden epidemic. Because it's a worldwide thing. It's like we wouldn't dream of being spiteful to another with our words and and, and, uh, you know, um, in, in that way really to, to, uh, be spiteful to someone else. And yet it's okay to be spiteful to ourselves. And I did that for 20 years of my life unconsciously until it was made— I was made aware of what I was doing to myself. And then I was taught how to let go of the habit of communicating like that to myself. And it makes all the difference.

So this is a harsh conscience or the superego that's too, too critical of ourselves? Or, I mean, does this come from parents? Does it come from teachers?

Yeah, can come from parents, teachers. You know, when we're when we were school kids, having been bullied, spiteful words spoken by a husband, a wife, a lover, a girlfriend, a boyfriend. Yeah, definitely by a teacher. I had that when I was a child. I was in the top class for maths, and that was when I was probably about 9 or 10 years old. And the teacher really didn't like me, and she used to call me snail. She used to shout and scream, snail, you're stupid! And the whole class would laugh, and my ears would go bright red, and I'd get terribly embarrassed and sweat. And I ended up believing that I was stupid at maths, to the point where every time, even with simple arithmetic, you know, multiplication and subtraction and division and things like this, like a wall would suddenly come down if I was asked a sum like that. And I believed I couldn't do it to the point where when I left school— I left school when I was 15, and I, as soon as I'd taken my end of school exams, I took an exam for people with learning disabilities called Everyday Mathematics, and I failed. Because I believed that I couldn't do it. And yet over the years I've become very fascinated with numbers, but maybe not in a conventional way, not to do with arithmetic, but more in other ways.

Sure, sure. So for someone who has this sort of critical nature or self-criticism, in their self-talk. For any of our listeners that might experience some of this, what would, what would you say to help them get started other than, you know, finding some professional help? Where would you, where would you encourage them to start observing, and what steps could they take to ease up on themselves?

Well, first of all, we have to recognize that we're fed up with feeling how we've been feeling. We'd like some, we'd like things to be different. Then I would really recommend that, as Vernon said to me the very first day I went to study with him, he said, the first skill you're going to need to acquire if you want to feel better about yourself and the life you're living, excuse me, is the skill of monitoring what you're saying to yourself from moment to moment in real time. What are you actually saying to yourself now? Is what you are saying to yourself an example of playing an old hurtful memory over and over again, or imagining variations on that memory in which, if only I would have done this different, if only I hadn't done that, if only I'd have said this or acted like that? And of course, we just torment ourselves by doing that because we can't change what happened. But we may spend hours, weeks, months, years thinking, if only I would have done this differently or that differently. And we torment ourselves because what we're actually doing is just, you know, playing with a very old trauma and re-evoking those feelings and being stuck in the past in our imagination, in our memory. Or he said, are you imagining a future in which you continue to believe that you're just going to continue to suffer, you're going to feel rubbish in the future, and the same things are going to happen again. In which case, you need to develop the skill of really listening to what you're saying to yourself so that you can catch these things and then write down what those things are actually saying. What have you been actually saying to yourself? So writing a list is very important in the work. And so in order to— as the first skill that Vernon was describing, I refer to as developing the mindfulness of self-communication, being mindful about what we're saying to ourselves about ourselves. And I let, for instance, the most common negative self-limiting pattern of self-talk that I've come across over the last 20 years is, 'I'm not good enough,' and it's incredibly common. No matter how successful a person may be in one or several areas of their life, it's still incredibly common that people somewhere on some level level have picked up the belief that they're not good enough in some way or another. And it may be because they've had, uh, they've been told they're not good enough, maybe by parents or by a boss or by a lover or whatever it may be. And then they drag that belief around and then beat themselves up because they believe that whatever hasn't worked out for them in the past is their fault because they're not good enough. And it's incredibly common, and we say those things in so many different ways, spiteful, hurtful ways toward ourselves, about ourselves, beating ourselves up, feeling full of regret or shame or guilt. And shame, shame and guilt and regret don't do anything to help us to make progress. They just keep us stuck.

Sure, yeah. So this is where mindfulness comes into the picture. I wanted to ask about that. So it's really starting— the process starts with observing, being mindful of that self-talk, and then making a list of these repeated phrases or thoughts or sentiments, whatever goes on. And you see these common themes like, I'm not good enough. You see that, and that would probably show up in many people as I've you know, looking at their own dialogue here. You know, with the Living to 100 Club, I talk about successful aging, but I also talk about helping people manage setbacks, cope with difficult situations, obstacles that come along, maybe physical, maybe loss of a loved one, maybe, you know, some kind of setback, whatever's going on. What recommendation would you have to help people deal with these setbacks? And not necessarily triggering a lot of negative self-talk, but just to, just to get over these hurdles. Do you have any, any kind of thoughts about what, what people can do to get through these hurdles, these setbacks?

Well, so it's a very broad question, isn't it, really? Because what kind of Setbacks on what kind of challenges?

Well, they have a fall and they, they're confined to a wheelchair and they can't drive anymore, or they have a stroke, or they have a heart condition, a heart attack, and they're fearful of, you know, what's, what's in store for them in their future. These kind of setbacks.

Okay, so, so, um, there's a very old Chinese saying which is, where the mind leads, the qi, the energy, follows. And this is true of everything in life. If we fixate on a particular idea, we pour our mental and emotional, emotional energy into that mold, if you like, and we, we pour ourselves into the mold and we become that shape. We create for ourselves an experience or a belief that we align ourselves with. So we need to be very careful with how we are communicating. If it's, say, someone who's had a stroke. My father, my late father, had a stroke. He was a very proud man and a very active man, and when he had the stroke and one half of his body wasn't working very well, he became very insular. He became very, I think, depressed, really. It really got to him mentally and emotionally, but he bottled it up and I tried my very best to help him to communicate with his body in a way where the way he would literally speak to the, the parts of the body that weren't working very well, to encourage them to trust that they can relearn how to, how to re— how to connect. But unfortunately, in his case, he did the opposite. And this is all too common, is that we take parts of the body for granted until something is not working as it's supposed to, and then invariably we curse that part of the body. We say, my stupid arm, my bad leg, my useless foot, whatever, you know. And none of us like to be told we're stupid or bad or useless, and it's the same with parts of our own body. So there's an area of scientific research that I find very fascinating, which is referred to as psychoneuroimmunology.

Sure.

Which is the influence of the mind and our intentions, uh, and the influence that can have, uh, on the physiology of the body and on, on a cellular level. There's a lot of research now, evidence that's, that's, um, uh, backing up that the way we literally speak to the parts of the body, the vehicle which we're inhabiting, have a very profound influence over our ability to heal, our ability to reconnect, and to create new neural pathways in the brain through neuroplasticity. The brain's ability to adapt and to find other ways of connecting. So literally how we choose to communicate with ourselves, depending on whatever the challenge may be in terms of rehabilitation after maybe a fall or an injury, or like you say, a stroke or a heart attack or whatever. Speaking kindly to the body. Goes a very, very long way. There's a professor, I wish I could remember his name, my wife knows of my interest in psychoneuroimmunology, and there was a professor, he's a Scottish gentleman, who she— he was giving a talk in London a few years ago and she got us tickets for this talk and he told a wonderful story about some particular research where a lady had kidney failure, and they told her that it was either continuous dialysis or transplant, or, you know, or it wasn't going to go well. So she decided to engage in regular meditation. And in her meditation, what she did— and this is how he described it— she visualized her kidney as this great big thing in front of her, and she would approach the kidney with a bucket and a sponge with soapy water, and she would wash the kidney down. Then she had another bucket with clean water and a sponge, and she'd rinse it down. And then she had a towel, and she'd lovingly pat the kidney dry. And then she'd give it a little kiss. Yeah, but she did that on a cellular level. She was imagining it as a kidney cell, and then she'd move on to the next one. And apparently she regained the function of her kidneys. This is what the, the gentleman said, and this is researched, apparently documented. Case where that regenerated.

Yes, I've heard those stories. I've heard that, uh, Bruce Lipton is someone who talks about this a lot. You might— yes, yeah, yes, the power, uh, and how we can influence what happens to our physical bodies in a positive way and in a negative way. Very strong evidence showing that we do have that control. In this case, the perfect example of that. Yeah, great story. So we're running out of time, and I do want to ask about your, your being this martial artist, your lifelong interest in martial arts, and how have you used those skills in your, in your work with patients?

Well, yeah, I mean, yeah, yes, very much so. I mean, I use a lot of metaphor comes from things that I've learned through my studies and practice, things my, uh, my teacher— who, my teacher's name is Sifu Nathan Minajid from Columbus, Ohio. And, um, there is certain things that he said, certain principles that he teaches that go way beyond the physical practice of a martial art. He's a very down-to-earth man, uh, but he's also a very deep soul, deep thinker. And someone who said certain things at certain times that have really stuck with me. Like, for instance, the following: people think that vulnerable means weak, but it isn't. To be vulnerable means that we are open, and being open is the goal of this work. You know, things like that.

Sure.

So the developing kung fu as well, you know, Kung Fu literally means a skill which requires time and effort to develop. So that Kung Fu applies to everything. So for instance, a chef has Kung Fu in the kitchen, a barber has Kung Fu with scissors and a comb, etc. And so if we can apply the same attitude toward developing, if you like, the kung fu of self-communication.

Yes.

Yeah, developing it as a skill which we hone with practice over time. Then in the Dialogue of Self-Liberation, this becomes a life skill. It becomes a new default. When we've learned the skill of no longer beating ourselves up with that self-talk, and we know how not to do that, then that becomes like a default. Because why, why on earth continue to beat ourselves up when we've found a way to not need to do that anymore? So that becomes a form of kung fu.

Yes, that's beautiful. And then we see what new doors can be opened when we let go of that. Yeah, great.

Yeah, yeah, being open and receptive to new opportunities. Yeah, fresh perspectives.

A little vulnerable but also much stronger, right? Yes. Well, that's great, that's great, Shane. I have enjoyed this conversation very much with you. Thank you, Joseph Casciani. Yeah, you're sure welcome. Before we wrap up, I just want to remind our listeners about a few items. I'm pleased to announce a co-sponsor for our podcast, A Mighty Good Time. Are you looking for ways to stay engaged and stay active? Check out amightygoodtime.com. It's a one-stop shop for events and activities for those 50 and over. It's free to search and it's free to post. amightygoodtime.com. Also be sure to visit our website and see the option to work with Dr. Joe. That's me for one-on-one conversations about managing setbacks, overcoming a negative outlook, and getting back to feeling engaged and motivated again. Visit the Work with Dr. Joe page on our website and see the options available. You can pick up a copy of my book on Amazon, Living Longer Is the New Normal. I think that whatever age you're at, inspiration and a positive mindset can be put to good use. That's my message in the book. And be sure to sign up to our email list for announcements and newsletters with information and resources about moving forward. And while you're there, you can download a copy of my 9 Tips for Living Longer, a lot of useful practical strategies for successful aging and staying positive. Uh, Sheen, thanks so much for being a guest on our show. For those who might want to contact you, How can they do that?

Thank you very much, Joseph, for inviting me. I would recommend people check out the Dialogue of Self-Liberation website, which is learntdsl.com. learntdsl.com. And there they'll find several different options of how they can engage in online courses, or also working on a one-to-one basis with myself. If they want more personal help and assistance. But we have a couple of courses. One is an audio course that's downloadable via an app on a mobile phone, which is 5 lessons with accompanying audio exercises, guided visualizations, and what we refer to as guided contemplations, which are suggested spoken voice exercises.

Sure.

And then we have a live program which is the same material in a larger format with PDF downloadable PDFs plus the audio material plus one live Zoom call with myself with a small group of people once a week for 5 weeks at the same time each week.

Oh, great resources, great resources. learntdsl.com. Well, thank you again, Jean, and thanks to all of our listeners for tuning in. Hope to see you next time.

It's time to rethink, renew, and reimagine retirement. Hey everybody, Jeron Sebaste here, host of Retire Repurpose. Now, this podcast is about the non-financial parts of retirement, which many times can be even more challenging than the financial. We believe retirement is not the end, rather the beginning of what could be the most impactful, purposeful, and fulfilling season of a person's life. So don't retire, become repurposed. To listen now, search Retire Repurposed on your favorite podcast platform, Senior Resource, or Life Audio.