John Gray – Beyond Mars Venus

Foreign.

The whole teaching of the world is to know who you are. And we're really confused about who we are today. We used to have a culture that helped us find ourselves and the culture is confused now. And one of the reasons for that is that we don't need each other in the old ways. What we. But we have to find out, well, why do I need each other? And that's Maslow's hierarchy of needs. When your lower needs are being fulfilled, survival, security, identity, then what happens is you have the need for intimacy that becomes as important as food. And if you have the basics, pretty much, then what is your new need? Well, the need is intimacy and then self actualization. Foreign.

Welcome to the mindtrax podcast with breakthrough ideas to live your best life possible and how to make it happen. I'm Paul Shealy and today we'll be talking with John Gray. John Gray is the author of the most well known and trusted relationship book of all, all time. Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus. It forever changed the way men and women view their relationships. John's approach combines specific communication techniques with healthy nutritional choices that create the brain and body chemistry for lasting health, happiness and romance. John has written more than 20 books. The most recent is Beyond Mars and Venus. Relationship Skills for Today's Complex World.

Hello, John. So good to be with you. Thanks for joining the podcast, Paul.

It's a real pleasure for me. Good, good, good to be with you again.

Well, you know, it's. I have always admired you for the depth of your knowledge, the breadth of your knowledge, but more than anything else, your interest, your interest in the mind, your interest in the body, your interest in learning. Everything about you seems like you're always lit up by another new idea. I really appreciate about you. I think about you at our transformational Leadership Council meetings and there's always this entourage around you, leaning into anything that you're saying. It's really so lovely. So I want to ask you, what is it that's got your attention right now? What's inspiring your new thoughts?

Well.

Service. Okay. When you have something that has helped you, it's such a joy and a pleasure to be able to share that with somebody. And it's new for them, you know, for me, sometimes I think I have nothing to share until I'm talking with somebody and then I realize, oh, they don't know what I know. And so, you know, I think some writers have said I write to know what I think or I write to know what I know. And to a certain extent it's also true when I'm writing. But when I'm teaching or when I'm talking to somebody, I talk to know what I know. And as I know what I know while talking to somebody, more comes out. More, more comes out. And the, the whole idea people say, where'd you come up with this Mars, Venus stuff? And how men and women are different because the whole political climate was, we're not that different. We're not that different. And I kept seeing that it was just misunderstanding our differences that many times was creating unnecessary conflict, unnecessarily taking things personally when there wasn't such a big problem. And I, I. Where does this come from? I realized when I'm doing my counseling, I did nine years before I wrote that book. I did nine years listening to women talk for maybe eight hours a day as a counselor, right? So this was my training period of after being a monk for nine years, knowing myself, and I did know myself. I'm very happy, fulfilled person within. Then listening to women, it was. I would listen and I easily sort of hear the solution to their problem. And it wasn't like I was coming up with it. It was like literally they had the solution, but they weren't looking at it. And it would come into me. So people would express their problem, and then suddenly the answer to their problem would come up. And I go, where's that coming from? I never thought of that before. It was like their higher self has the answers to all their problems, but when they're not connecting to it, because I'm in my higher self, I got it. And I would just say it. And one of the easiest ways. This is a great thing for counselors to know when you're helping somebody and they have a problem, well, what do I do about this? The first thing I would say is, what do you do about that? And because clearly what they do is not working. So you're already canceling out, you know, what's not working. And when they're saying, this is what I do, suddenly what does work would just come into my awareness and it would come up again and again, and I would, of course, say these things. And so many of those things were extremely helpful until I collected enough of those to see there were about 12 basic ones that almost everybody had a misunderstanding, a need know something that they just didn't know, which would make their lives better. And I've, you know, I've written 28 books. But the key foundation is what I learned through those nine years. And then you build on it. You have a specialty and expertise.

So let me ask you. I run an exercise in the beginning of all of my retreats. And basically what you do is you talk for a minute and a half about who you are as your favorite color. Not really much of an introduction. Three people with you, they've never met you before. You turn back to them, and for a couple of minutes, they tell you about all your best qualities. And then I say, leap of faith, and they talk about your future. It is jaw dropping, John. Everybody sees the skills, the abilities, the amazing gifts, the. The gifts you're going to give to the world.

It.

It's all right there. Afterwards, they look back at the 3 and said, how could you know that about me? I mean, you've even talked about the goal that I'm working on right now. But here's the thing, John. We can see in others what they can't see in themselves. So what is it? What is that blind spot that prevents us from recognizing resources or capacities that are right there, invisible to everybody else?

Well, if you ask me what is causing that, I basically would say that's why we need relationships. We need each other to see ourselves. We need a mirror to see ours. I get up in the morning, I brush my hair. I'm looking right now, make sure my hair is okay, whatever. I see how my outfit, my colors are working. And I don't do too much of that, but I do it. Women do it a lot more generally, and that's very important to them. That makes them fulfill certain needs and them. So if I don't have the mirror, I kind of don't know myself. And so I learned myself when I. When I'm loving someone and they're loving me back, then I get to feel I. Who I am. I'm a lovable person. And when I teach a class and I see people going aha and ha. And having revelations, I go, oh, I have something meaningful to offer. I think that we are all interdependent. And it's a. It's trying to be so in. I'm sorry, interdependent is what I said. Trying to just do it all yourself is a part of the process. It's a balance of who I find out who I am, and then I share who I am with someone. They respond, and then I know myself even better. I have a phrase I talk about in relationships on this, which is.

So many people are unhappy in their relationships. And often when you hear it, the summation is my partner's not making me happy. And one aspect of the solution is to recognize it's not their job to make you happy. Your job is to be happy. Their job is to be. To help you be happier. And that's more of a romantic relationship where I can be happy on my own to a certain extent, but I need to interact with others for me to see myself as more than and to grow and to be inspired and be challenged.

Could you define interdependence in some way that anybody who's never heard the term could really get it?

Well, let me do it in the way I normally do it with my sons, but I'll do it in terms of my real expertise is. Although I've written a book, by the way, for parents with sons today because they have a huge challenge. It's called the Boy Crisis. It's very important for people to understand that. But the bottom line and relationships is we all have a male and female side. Okay? A male. Men bring something to the table that women don't have, and women bring something to the table that men don't have. And for me, and we'll just simplify it here, which is women have, typically, they have more nurturing feelings of love and men have more sense of, no big deal, detachment. I can handle this. No need to talk about it. Let's get it done. So that, that's a male energy. Now, women can have that male energy, of course, but that will call the male side and we call the female side, which is more emotional, more open, more loving, but also aware of what she needs. And so the interdependence in a relationship is I'm on my male side and I'm whole, complete in a sense, in myself. But something's missing. When I married Bonnie, I told her, you know, honey, I didn't realize this because I was so happy in my meditative world and my own independence and my own self sufficiency. I learned that, you know, I can go for days without eating even, you know, I have a strong, effortless discipline for myself. And I was happy and fulfilled. I didn't let things bother me. Then I married her. And one of the things I said is, wow. It's like I was living in a world of black and white and now it's full of color. You know, it's like a house is a house until a woman's living there becomes a home. There's dynamics of femininity. It's something that I don't have as much as her, but she doesn't have that detachment and that centeredness that I have and so she can be in a place of upset about something. And when I'm grounded in my masculinity, I'm giving her something she doesn't have at that moment, which is centered, grounded and, and basically non judgmental but logical. Most men, unfortunately, because they don't understand women, they, men become logical, but it sounds judgmental to the woman. It's like the phrase that women are saying now is, oh, he's just mansplaining is the word they're using, which is men explaining things. Well, we have to explain things. That's why the world is as great as it is today is. We got logic and we've got reason. But when women get emotional about things, men make the mistake of mansplaining or explaining why she shouldn't feel that way, rather than in his mind using logic to understand why she feels that way. See, that's actually what she needs at that. So that's an interdependence is that she depends on me for groundedness. You know, I would see it in the movies. I see it in grandmothers. They always say, oh, sometimes I'm upset and I just need my husband to hold me and tell me everything's all right. See, that's an ender dependence. She's feeling a need for reassurance and he's feeling hero. I'm not doing anything. I'm just saying this. And if you get too logical, then when woman says she needs to hear everything's all right, the, the logical thing is I don't know that everything's going to be all right. We can't know the future. So, so there's places where you, you blend the energy of the masculine and the feminine through a kind of interdependence. And so yeah, very briefly, the, the, the historical relationship has all changed. As you know, I have a new book called Beyond Mars and Venus Relationship Skills for this new world where women are more independent than they used to be. It was set up and it was a system that worked for thousands of years. And people tend to be critical of that system as opposed to realizing it's just out of date now. But that's what got us here harmonially. Men and women, nobody disagrees, were very, very different biologically. If you look, whenever a man is in a stress response, a chronic stress response keeps us from feeling love. That's his biology. You can't feel love when you're stressed out. You know, nobody can be happy and nice if you got a toothache, okay? So pain inhibits our Ability to feel that love. All right, so in this situation, you look at a man when he's stressed, and you look at a woman when she's stressed. Her biology, the biology, he's making 10. He normally needs 10 to 40 times more testosterone than a woman mix. And when he's stressed, his testosterone is going down, and it's estrogen. Now, estrogen is a female hormone. We call it female because women need 10 to 20 times more estrogen than a man. And a woman requires that huge increase of estrogen or to make babies. But of course, nature says, oh, if you do those things to make babies, we're going to make you feel really good. So estrogen is the key hormone associated with women's feeling of happiness and joy and so forth. So there's a million techniques and all of your tapes and everything helps us find that balance inside of ourselves.

And.

But the outcome of it, the outcome of it is for a woman, her estrogen levels will go up. And another reason why women today are so stressed out, and this is measurable. A woman in the workplace has on average, twice as high stress levels as a man. And when she comes home, they double again. And this is the sea of, of stress that we're living in. And what goes on for women is estrogen goes up when we're depending on someone. If you go to a doctor, you know about placebo, a big part of placebo that people don't yet study or whatever, is that when a woman feels, I can depend on someone, or if a man's on his female side and he's feeling, oh, I can't do it myself, I have to depend on someone else, what happens is your estrogen levels go up, stress levels go down, and so you get better. You know, it's all about removing tension and stress out of our body. Our brain can work better, our hearts can open. And so that interdependence is really what's necessary for love to last, is to find that I have a role and she has a role. And when we do our thing, we're contributing to each other in a meaningful way. We're of service. And so women don't always realize that the service they provide in a man's life is how much we need love. Women need love. But women don't realize when I take you to dinner and pay for the meal, if I'm dating, the gift to me is that you enjoy the meal. Women think, oh, now I owe him something. No, you already paid him, so to speak, is that men are hungry to have somebody acknowledge what we do. And that's. That raises testosterone, you see. And when somebody does something nice for you, that raises estrogen. And when that lower stress. And so that's an interdependence. The male, female energies, the yin and the yang, when they come into balance and service to each other, then what occurs? And the way I look at it, we don't have the biological research. I can feel it in my brain is there's a balance between the dopamine and serotonin in your brain, which. Then that interdependence of those two things, that's restful alertness, the alertness, the focus, that's your dopamine. But you're also relaxed at the same time, at ease. And when those two things happen, that is the formula for the brain to start making more gaba. And GABA is love. It's ecstasy. You know, when you're listening to music and you're dancing and you're enjoying yourself, you're making lots of gaba. So these are brain chemicals that are triggered. Now this is where it all goes together. Brain, body. When a man is making testosterone, his dopamine will go up. And you know, when and when a woman is making estrogen, her serotonin levels will go up. So ease and comfortable. So you bring those two things together. And now she's making both dopamine and serotonin. He's making both dopamine and serotonin because he's using intimacy. Physical intimacy is the most powerful. I mean, this is the real stuff where you produce the most hormones and. But it has to be with love. If you're just making pleasure, you're draining your spirit. If you're using pleasure to open your heart and express and receive love, now you're balancing the brain and that's why it can feel so good.

I'd like to come back to the nurture nature discussion about boys and girls, men and women. I have the pleasure of having raised three boys, and then I had two grandsons. And finally we got a granddaughter who obviously is the, you know, my heartbeat at any moment in time. But what I'd notice is that the boys, we go out for a walk, they immediately pick up a stick and they start hitting stuff. Whereas the granddaughter, she carries a purse, you know, she has little bags. Libby is the same way. Libby is an artist. She's a plein air painter. So she has boxes and she has bags and she has carts and she has all of this. And I go out fishing, rod and lures. And hooks. And I'm going out to gather lunch, you know, fishing in the stream. And this is so. It seems so appropriately anatomically distinctive between the sexes. So where is that? I mean, how did the little girl immediately know to. To have a cute little pink purse and carry it around? What is that about?

Well, that would be rather esoteric to actually go into the energies of pink. Pink is the energy of pink is love, okay? And so there's a draw towards that. The energy of blue is more masculine. These are just. If you think of the sky is blue, that's expandedness. When. When you're going into a. A meditative state, for example, you're expanding into nothingness. Now, what do men typically say to women when they're bothered and upset? We say, forget it. And women go, you don't want to hear what I have to say. You see, that's very masculine. Buddha taught that particularly men were following that advice. You have to realize it was mental. You know, you've been to India. I've been to India. If you say to Indian woman, do you meditate? Oh, it's too difficult. Too difficult. So there were different journeys and paths for different physiology and primarily for women. And the. Again, we're talking in the old days, not now. But it was a path of devotion. It was the path of nurturing and loving as dolls. Washing. Washing a doll's hair, for example, and cleaning. And those things are all nurturing behaviors. Well, why do women have nurturing behaviors? Because we're designed to. And for a woman to make a baby and take care of a baby. You know, this is thousands of years of, if you can, if you have the hormones to make babies, those hormones are going to motivate you to do certain things. And for men, if you don't have the hormones to make babies, you have hormones to help a woman make babies. And that's the evolution of humanity. So men, we take on the difficult things to make their life more comfortable and easy. Just like any wise man makes sure that when your wife is pregnant, you say, honey, you get whatever you want. I'm here for you. Because a happy wife means happy babies. Okay? This is all, like, inherent knowledge. This is that interdependence of the masculine and feminine. But what has happened there is an evolution of everything. And the evolution is when our needs are no longer primarily survival. You see that particular man, provider, woman, nurturer. That's perfect for a time in our world where we didn't have police force to protect you. We didn't have civilization in grocery stores where you could easily a woman on her own could go get all her food. She could have a security system. See, we have so much more now where women don't need men for the things they needed us before. So how do we get beyond this? Where we can still feel love for each other is to recognize it's all right there. If we just see the solution. The solution is, well, if you don't need a man for money and protection, what do you need a man for? And women go, I don't know. So many women today go, why do I need a man for? If you don't need a man, you're not going to have a man. Men are looking for a job, okay, I want a high paying job. That's every man wants a high paying job. And the men who don't want a high paying job are just men who experience that they didn't, they weren't able to get paid enough. And so they go, well then I don't want to do that. That's your typical man who says, I don't want this marriage anymore because no matter what I do, he's not enough to make her happy. See, that's his payment. I just want a happy woman. If I can't have a happy woman, what do I want to be with her for? Because that's what we're looking for. And women are saying, well, I give and I give and I don't get back. I feel neglected. She just wants a man who gives to her. She also cares about his happiness, but more importantly, she's unhappy. So there, these are, I just watch these things. Every person having the same issues coming in. Now, there's always exceptions to everything for those that may not, you know, relate fully to everything I say. But a lot of people do. And often we don't know who we are. And remember Paul and everybody, the whole teaching of the world is to know who you are. And we're really confused about who we are today. We used to have a culture that helped us find ourselves. And the culture is confused now. And one of the reasons for that is that we don't need each other in the old ways. What we. But we have to find out, well, why do I need each other? And that's Maslow's hierarchy of needs. When your lower needs are being fulfilled, survival, security, identity, then what happens is you have the need for intimacy that becomes as important as food. And if you have the basics pretty much, then what is your new need? Well, the need is intimacy and then self Actualization. A lot of people are skipping intimacy. You see a lot of these conferences for self actualization, and nobody cares about relationship, so it kind of. It keeps. It's not being integrated into their body. So a lot of sickness can occur in very enlightened people because they're not bringing it into the world through intimacy. Because you can, you know, you can just focus on meditating all the time, which is what I did, but then had to bring it back into the body through intimacy.

So let me ask you. Let me ask you a question about this, because you're on the threshold of another idea. I think when today I'm sure you're seeing it, that there is so many new gender distinctions that are coming through. So the LGBT community, q community is bringing some awareness to society, but those distinctions are just the tip of an iceberg. And I'm seeing a lot more children who are gender dysphoric. And I'm wondering, is this related biologically to the shift that's happening in the human family?

Absolutely. And the biology is part of it is, you know, there's always good and bad, right?

What?

There's one aspect of evolution. Let me talk about just healthy and good. Healthy and good. And then we've got something else happening to pregnant mothers where they're being exposed to hormone disruptors. Okay? Plastics and water have been proven in order to beat what's called hormone disruptors, inhibiting boys to make testosterone, inhibiting girls to, causing girls to make more testosterone. Okay? And these are now sicknesses and diseases and a lot our hormones that help motivate us in order to form our identity, to go. This. This feels right for me. So a lot of confusion around identity, knowing thyself. And so we're in a different place. A man learned who he was because his father told him, you know, do this, and saw his father doing this. And you have to remember that 50% of. Of boys in America, for example, don't have fathers. This is a tragedy. I mean, if they look at my book Boy Crisis, people are not aware where this is all coming from. For we're deviating from a subject. I was just getting to. If we come back to boys for a moment, just if we just look at healthy relationships, what happens is there's an evolution. And you'll see this even over age. As men get older naturally, theoretically, their wisdom increases. That means their estrogen levels go high. We're both grandfathers. We know that things don't bother us as much. We have wisdom. It's like, okay, just be Patient. It worked out. It's not such a big deal. Come on down. We've been through the upsets. Why waste time on that? Let's just. Beloved. Okay? That's a, that's wisdom. If, if a man has both, more estrogen gives him that wisdom. If he can maintain healthy testosterone, if he doesn't maintain healthy testosterone, that's his male side, which means he continues to contribute. See, when men retire and don't do something that contributes to the well being of others, which is testosterone, they've got three years and yes service. They gotta, they gotta continue to work, okay? They gotta be working. If men don't work, they don't make testosterone. If they don't make testosterone, it is the number one contributing factor to heart disease, okay? And there's no man that's ever had a heart attack that had healthy testosterone levels. It doesn't exist. You know, we look at cholesterol and those various things and yes, half the men who have heart attacks have low cholesterol and half have high. So there's not really that scientifically significant. What's significant is they all have low testosterone and high estrogen. And again, we're entering an age with science of understanding things. We always thought that, you know, aggressive, angry men had too much testosterone. No, they don't have enough testosterone. Their estrogen levels are soaring. We could, we first learned that when men would take testosterone and if they took too much testosterone, then their breasts became bigger. What is. And they also had road rage. Okay, so anger and breasts getting bigger is that first awareness for me. And then you start looking into this, you realize that when men are angry, it's always because they're, they've lost their confidence and they're in touch and they're. And they're talking and trying to do something. And the more they try to do something that's not working, their testosterone goes down and their estrogen levels go up. Anger is actually men being too far on their female side compared to their male side. Then I found out as a therapist, is that when women are upset, if they feel connection, okay, if they can feel someone understanding what they feel, there's a connection there. Their stress level goes down. And then you find out that when a woman feels connection, her estrogen levels go higher and higher. And then they look at the charts and you see that when women are stressed, their estrogen is low. What's happened in our civilized world as we went from survival, security and a sense of who I am bonding with people who are like you, that's belonging, then what happens is intimacy. Once you have a sense of who you are, you now you're ready to see another person who's different from you, but also find yourself in them. Okay, connect with her. For example, for me, when my wife is being vulnerable, I connect with her vulnerability. I get to feel the vulnerability inside of me that connects to her and at the same time get to experience the detachment inside of me which is not vulnerable. It's having both these two things together. It's synthesizing over and over. So when women aren't depending on men, then there's no job for us, so we're not attracted to them. It's like there's no job available. You'll have a bunch of depressed men. And then for women, when nobody's there for them, well, they're depressed, but they don't know what they need from a man. They think they know, but what I've defined in my Beyond Mars and Venus book is what do women need when they're more independent? They need a new kind of support to help them feel what they're missing. And what they're missing is what Maslow talked about. Intimacy, emotional fulfillment. And how do you achieve that emotional fulfillment? We have a lot of unrealistic ideals about a man providing emotional fulfillment for women. Is that he knows what you need and you don't. And he does it without you having to ask. And then you feel, that's so romantic. It is. That certainly. That is very romantic. And. And there's massive amounts of romantic novels that women indulge themselves in. Not all women, but this is this female world of if he loves me, he'll know what to do and he'll do it, and I don't have to ask for it. And my practical message is, the first thing is, if a man loves you, it doesn't mean he knows what you need. And if you tell him 10 times, he still doesn't know what you need. Because in his mind, if I did it once it's done, as opposed to every day, all those little things, that's what brings back the love. You have to keep generating it. It's a process. So he doesn't know if he loves you. It doesn't mean he knows what you need and doesn't mean he's always going to remember what you need. And he's going to do it without you having to ask. No, he doesn't do it without you having to ask. Sometimes he might, but he has to be rewarded to remember to do it. And when he forgets which he will do. You have to ask. So these are all things that women have to learn today to ask for what they need and then they have to know what they need. And if you've never gotten what you need, you don't know what you need. Okay, that's another important thing.

Yes.

If you grow up as a girl without seeing your father making you happy, then you don't know what you can depend on making mother happy. You see role models, this all goes in, we're sponges. If you don't see a man at home making your mother happy, happier, then you don't know what men are good for. You don't know to look for it, and you'll tend to look in the wrong direction or stop looking altogether. What do I need that for? Mom didn't need that. So we used to have role models where we were independent and the mother and father did their jobs. And then a man would see dad being successful, being rewarded by his mother's love. She looked up to him, that great things about him and said, I can be that, I can be that. Because he got a role model and a little girl gets to see, oh, I can depend on a man too. Well, when that family breaks up, girls don't get to trust men and men don't get the motivation that I can make a woman happy because his father didn't. So parental happiness is crucial in many cases for a child's healthy well being to stay balanced. And the culture made it simple, you didn't have to take a class on it, you just had to watch your parents do it. Because any woman who depended on a husband, who had a good job was particularly happy and he wasn't angry. Because when a man, when a wife is happy, men don't get angry. So then as soon as, you know, women become more various reasons. When you have a corrupt government, corrupt society, men don't get paid their worth and then their self esteem goes down, their testosterone goes down and then they get angry. So there were problems. It's just I got to witness when a man is well paid, not super paid, not underpaid, but well paid, a job he was good at, he came home, he just watched tv. My mother was very happy. They didn't have to have conversation, whatever. He was the protector. She had five boys. She would just say, if you don't listen to me, I'm telling your father. And occasionally he have to spank you. That would be it, you know, so he did his job. That was taught to him. Women did their job. That was taught to them by seeing what the mother did. Now we don't have parents that know what to do. And women are busy being independent. How do they learn how to depend on a man? And why do they need to depend on a man? Because they do. Because, well, being in a woman is dependent upon biological interdependence. And she is the part when you're feeling, I can depend on someone, your estrogen levels go up. And when a man feels that someone is depending on me, that makes him a man. I remember in my marriage, it was after we had a child and you know, I was sort of a young soul spirit, you know, I'm an old soul, but very youthful and so forth. And my wife said to me, you know, John, I depend on you. And I kind of felt like I.

Grew up in that moment.

And I think women often grow up when they have a baby and they realize this baby's depends on me. And when a man gets the message from a woman that, you know, he's no longer Peter Pan, you know, he's going to be a man, it's when he, he's really. Someone is depending on him and he has to follow through, it's beautiful. I have to do it. There's also an interdependence of love where the way she treats you always stimulates testosterone, even though you don't have the free testosterone that comes from dopamine. So you can't be dependent on your addiction, your high dopamine to make you happy, to make you feel alive. Well, what actually the benefit of high dopamine for men on another level is his testosterone goes up. That's our aliveness, that's our magic hormone. That's what keeps us moving ahead. And for women, it's the estrogen. And so when I communicate in a way which helps her estrogen to go up. And what would that communication be? First of all, never expressing anger at her. If I'm angry, I take a time off and I come back and be more affectionate and loving.

Just.

Men don't realize that safety is the hormone of oxytocin, where they feel safe. And the research has shown that women's stress levels go down when they feel safe. Like non sexual touch is one way it's easy to create oxytocin. But not being angry and not, not judging, not being critical, not being dismissive, all these things help women to feel safe. Safe to do what? Because we don't have danger around us in most cases, safe to express what's inside of me that I'm not sharing with anybody because I'm in the office all day and I can't reveal what's really going on inside of me. So I'm safe to express and therefore I have a wonderful husband who I can share anything with. And that what that does affirms my safety. But that then allows her estrogen to go up because then she can begin to experience how good it feels to share what's inside of me. Many women don't know that experience. They've never had that experience with a man. They may have it to some extent with a woman. But here you are living with this person and you can't reveal what's inside of you. And so you're always holding back, hiding. For a woman that inhibits estrogen production because she's constantly saying to herself, not with words, I can't trust him to hear this. I can't trust him to hear this. Independence is all about trusting for women. Freedom to express what's inside of them is. This higher level of intimacy is that you can see into me. And women sense it. And so what they seek is when they're not getting it, they want to see into the man. So in a sense, she takes on the male role of penetrating into him rather than him knowing. My job as a man now is not just to provide from the outside. I need to provide this safety and then penetrate into her through understanding what's going on inside of her. Now that presents these are needs now this is the need for intimacy. It's primarily men going into the woman, not the woman going into the men. Once the man has gone into the woman and she's feeling her needs fulfilled, then it's fine for him to share what's inside, but not as important to him. It's important to women because it produces estrogen. When you can open up and let somebody enter into you, which we see, this is all metaphor for sex as well. It's not the woman going into the man, is the man going in. And it's not all the time either. You go and you go out. We have a, you know, have a complete life where you're not totally dependent on your partner. But this is what elevates us to experience that higher level of intimacy which can enrich us not only as fulfillment as a family and to raise happy children and so forth, but also as a platform for self actualization, which, you know, you're. You're all about education and learning higher information. You talk about the eight stages of your Growth that's based upon the foundation of intimacy that propels us to the next level up. But it doesn't mean you have you neglect the lower level. Relationships are so important for people today. And when they suffer in relationships, it's primarily because they don't understand this new way of relating where men still are men and women still are women. And, and through my giving to my wife, I awaken my feminine side without having to become a female gorgeous, you.

Know, and, and what I love about your book Beyond Mars Venus is that you've taken all the fundamental principles are still just as valid, but you've really updated them based on the social, the cultural, the biological changes that are taking place. So thank you for that work. Powerful stuff. Everybody who's listening can benefit from it. I want to finish with one idea, John. You know, at the end of Abraham Maslow's life, he was working on the next stage that the idea of his pyramid was something he wrote in a paper. But what he was really tracking down is that beyond self actualization is self transcendence. And I would like to say in observing you and hearing your story and your process through life, you were looking to be self transcendent when you were that kid living homeless on the beach. As I was sleeping on a plywood board when I met my wife, she said, lose that. I said, but soft beds are for hoagies and rogies, but not for yogis. She said, you want a relationship, you're gonna have to get rid of that board. But, but so, so what I'm saying is that we need to go through this developmental process to now in our elder years, come to this self transcendence that we don't have to rush the process. And what you've shown are simple steps, small things that we can do to build loving relationships, to find our greater purpose to be of our higher service in life. Could you say anything to that idea as kind of a final message of how we can transcend the limitations of our lives and really step in to the fullness of who we are?

You know, we're on one part of us as animals and we're always seeking the fulfillment of a need. And I, I would say that while as a young man, whether, whether I knew it or not, I was seeking self transcendence. You know, I became the yogi. I want to be totally independent and, and maybe for me, I, I can see you're seeing that. And that's true. The way I would look at that is I was seeking a sense of knowing myself as self sufficient, there's a place. I look at stages as well. And I look at the stage of being a teenager as finding our identity. You know, it's as a child, you know, we're first dependent on our parents. The second one is now we branch out around 7 years old to be not so much dependent on our parents. But that's our safety net. And now we get to connect with other people. So we start going to school. And in that place of going to school, there's safety and there's play. If you know, for me, the ages of 7 to 13 or 14 were not safe for me with older brothers always kind of jealous of me for getting more attention, for being the younger, younger child. You know, there is, there was a place, right? And you know, even when I grew up, they said, oh, you succeeded because mother loved you more. You know, anyway, so there was consequences that mother loving me more. And she did say one day kids all, they were all telling me, oh, you're so successful, mother loved you, you were the special one. And I said that's ridiculous. I didn't notice that right. So I said, well, mother's still alive, let's go ask her. And my mother Sundays, I have seven children. I've done everything I can to love all of you equally. It's just Johnny, he makes you love him more.

What can we say? Anyway, sweet kid. So, so what was my point there? But that's that. But so I grew up and, and you knew me, if you knew me when I was really younger, I was as a spiritual teacher in the TM movement and so forth. I was, I never was joyful or anything. I just was very kind and, and, and teaching the ideas. And I felt like why, why are we not having so much fun? So I took some classes and acting, they do these. I forget what the classes where everybody does things that are spontaneous.

Improv, Improv.

Improv is so good.

I love improv.

Amazing because suddenly you no longer self conscious of expressing whatever's inside and you can do anything. And nobody says that wasn't good enough. They add to it. It's, it's amazing. So I did that for a year and after that I started making jokes in all my talks. Everything was fun and I've had fun since. You know, life is this fun thing. So I gave myself what I was missing in those formative years of 7 to 13 where I didn't feel safe because that's what we need to do is that, that's a time we'll be on our own relating with others. But we feel safe to explore life and other people and ourselves. Fun safety games are theoretically safe. You have rules, you follow the rules and everything's fine. And there's also winners and losers. I'm not in favor of everybody always. You know, you need motivation to win. And then you also be able to accept that sometimes you lose. So then the next stage and that's puberty. This is really important. That's where we disidentify from our parents and we begin to forming our identity. And that's what's missing today. A lot of confusion about identity. Because identity is formed as you have a group of people. Traditionally it's now you're with males, the boys like elders.

Initiation rights of initiation where someone can find themselves.

Yeah, yeah, they find themselves. A boy finds himself as a man. Okay. And there's and, and you can even see this in school. You'll see the girls are all together, the guys are all together. You see it all the time. Where the guys will hang out, the husbands will all hang out together. The women, there's a place of where our bodies resonate hormonally and we begin to form an identity. And for women, they have someone who understands their period and their emotions and how they look at life. And just talking creates a connection and intimacy because they have the same inner workings. And that's what we're needing at that time to begin to define who we are. Then around 21, these are cycles of seven. Around 21 that was a time of what can I being self sufficient. And I remember my teacher, I get this from my own life. But he always says, you know, you must be self sufficient. You must be self sufficient. And even today when I teach women about relationships, it's not like you have to do it all yourself. You need to find your self sufficiency with a life that's not dependent always on your husband. You know, I just, I just heard Michelle Obama talking about her happiness and how she can handle all the stress in her life. And she says I have a kitchen table and it's 12 other women. And we talk and we talk otherwise so many times I hate my husband. It was very out front. He said I'd say 10 years of my 30 year marriage, I hate my husband, but I would come back and talk to my girlfriends, feel good and then I could appreciate him more. So we never, you know, focus on just one source of happiness and that's that intimacy requires the, the level below which is I'm not fully dependent on my partner. To be happy, I'm dependent on me to create a series. It's like diversifying your investments instead of focusing just on one thing. Once you're diversified, then you can take the risk. And that's the. As you get in your 30s, that's when you have a strong sense of, I can be happy without just one person helping me. Now you can really open your heart and depend more on that one person for specific things that other people are not going to be able to. To give you, one way of looking at it is we have three people inside of us. One is the person that everybody sees. The next is the person that.

Is your close friends. They. They know more what's going on in your life. You know, the intimate life of what you think and feel. And then there's the person that knows your secrets. That's real intimacy. That's bonding. That's the deepest level of bonding that you can have when somebody knows your secrets. And. And of course, when you're married for 30 years, it's not that you have to tell them your secrets. She's seen every mistake you've ever made. You're not going to broadcast that to the world or to your friends. And that. That when you can tell a secret and still be loved, unconditional love for that, that. That's a deep, deep thing. So when we're talking about intimacy, I'm backing up a little bit. What do women need today? They need to be able to reveal their intimacy. And when you actually look at what's going on inside of women, and we now know this because we're in more of the world of psychology, and we realize there is this surface part of us, but deep inside, we're all longing for love. And particularly the female side of us is needing reassurance that we are loved. And the male side of us is seeking reassurance that we are successful in providing love for the person we value.

All right, well, you've given a lot of encouragement because there's so much science behind what you're saying, but also so many years of scholarship and observations that you have made. So I do want to encourage our listener to take a look, a deeper look at your work, John. I encountered it so many years ago. I found it as an essential part of my maturing and my relationship with my wife. And I can say we are happier married today than we were in the first seven years of our marriage. And it's a beautiful thing to. To follow what it is that you said and also find a higher expression of who we both are. So John, I want to thank you so much for being here on the podcast. Final word of blessing to everyone.

A final word. I don't know, I felt like you had the best final word. So I'll just that, you know, and my mine is just a new affirmation for me. I'll just say it because it's, it's recent for me, which is.

I'm one with the transformational fire of God and my purity is God's desire.

Gorgeous John. Thank you so much. Peace and blessings. Thank you.

Foreign.

I hope you enjoyed our conversation with John Gray. You can learn more about john@marsvenus.com that's M A R S V E N U S.com and now in the second part of the podcast, it's just you and me. I'll tell you how to use the paralyminal sessions in the MindTrax app to easily handle obstacles and move toward the success you want, especially as it relates to John's message. If you're new to the relaxing Paralympical audio sessions, they use breakthrough technologies to activate your whole mind in only 20 minutes to help improve any area of your life.

Let's get going.

Foreign.

Welcome to the follow on with my conversation with Dr. John Gray. He's the author of the Mars Venus series of books, a couple of dozen books, and a later work of his called Beyond Mars Venus. It's a more updated version based on the current situation in our societies globally. Powerful conversation. Absolutely love him. He's so brilliant. Once you get him going, I'll tell you the A dialogue with him goes way late into the night. Wonderful educator, powerful speaker, entertaining. Absolutely love being with John Gray. Now there are a couple of key ideas that came through. I tried my best to really pursue these but it as I thought about it afterwards, they really chunked into three major areas. The first, which you heard repeatedly in our conversation, know thyself, understand yourself, how you work, why you do, what it is you do. Second is in our relationships with others. And the third is how we find fulfillment in life and in relationships. So I've suggest, I suggest a couple of paraliminals in each of these three categories. I've been asked to give you just one. Just what is the main one? I'm not going to do that. I'm going to give you a couple in each area. So in the area of know thyself, certainly the self esteem supercharger comes to mind as an important way of really connecting within in a non judgmental way, a sense of self compassion be present to what's going on with yourself. The self esteem supercharger really is key. It allows you to live with a much more open hearted approach to the world around you. Secondly is really the title of this segment which is Finding Yourself and in the area Know Thyself the parallel Finding Yourself does what he and I were talking about at the end of the.

Program.

Which was this movement through developmental stages. And in the Finding Yourself paralleliminal I actually take you from where you are today back through those developmental stages, actually back into the womb. So there is this through line of coming to know the forces that shape your life and also what you now choose to do with the life you've lived and the life you're choosing to create. Powerful, powerful paralliminal. The third one is self love. Now if there's any relationship which is key, it is your relationship with yourself. Because your ability to love another is always going to be limited by the degree to which you love yourself. And this para liminal is so powerful because you get together with your younger you and your elder you and your present you and the three of you get together. It's a great parallel, exceedingly profound in terms of reconnecting with any parts of you that may have become disenfranchised, that you may have kicked out of the door. Or in Jungian terms, they got thrown into a long black bag that we carry around behind us. So we're really, really bringing our best qualities forward. The second area is relationship with others. And the paralyminal positive relationships is really about that. Session A on that is about handling conflict, interpersonal conflict. And the second session on that paralliminal is how to attract to you those kinds of people who can be your tribe, your close personal relationships, those people who really support you most. And John talked a lot about the importance of having that kind of a safe, compassionate place where you can speak your mind and know that you won't be judged or the experiences that you're having or the thoughts and feelings that you're experiencing. So very powerful positive relations. Session A and B relationships. And the second parallel, which may sound odd to you, but I want to explain why I think it's important here in our relations with others. I'm going to recommend instantaneous personal magnetism.

The reason that I'm suggesting this, this paraliminal is all about the way in which you charismatically present who you are in the presence of others. There's certain behaviors that we engage in that kind of take our power and energy out. But if we can show up authentically as we are in the fullness of our power and resourcefulness.

When you're around other people, people want to be around you. And the study of instantaneous personal magnetism goes back into the 1800s, the late 1800s. And this is a really cool parallel because you get to focus not only on what it is you want to eliminate from your own non verbal ongoing behaviors, but then it also reinforces the, the powerful and more charismatic traits about you being able to shine through. It was interesting because after the podcast he and I chatted a little bit about the tendency to have a lot of sitting time and people in front of a computer becoming kind of hunched over like this, that he's been doing some things to stand more upright and to get that hunch out. And, and I told him about the studies that I've been doing and how I've been working with posture as well with the help of colleague of ours, Esther Go Clay. And it, it was interesting because that's what got me to think about instantaneous personal magnetism because that was one of the key factors that is talked about in that is how we come with a calm breath that really energizes, oxygenates us and show up with this bright eyed, open hearted approach to the world. So in terms of our relationships with others, I think that that's, that's the other really good one. Now the third area I was talking about is fulfillment in life and relationships. Now fulfillment for you could be all kinds of different paralyminal titles. For example, three paralleliminals I recommend here. One has to do with the dialogue that he and I were having close to the end of our discussion. That's about self actualization. I made the point that Abraham Maslow was talking about a next level beyond the five stages of becoming self actualized. And that's the idea of becoming self transcendent. So while the, the emphasis that John Gray had was on finding intimacy in our relationships, that only through that being able to establish intimate relationships can we ever become fully self actualized. I said yes. And this next level being that self actualization is also partly linked to you becoming self transcendent. So it's, it was a nice bookend to the concept that we started with in our dialogue which was about interdependence.

So self transcendence is, I don't know it. I think it becomes a really cool way of thinking about the overall arc of the dialogue I had with them, the two other paralyminals that seem to fit what John was talking about as key for all of us. One was joy, being able to live passionately and the other is gratitude which allows us to be more forgiving of others and of our own foibles as well. So the three in living a fulfilled life, fulfillment in life and relationships is self actualization, joy and gratitude. Well, that's it for now. I hope you enjoyed it and do take a listen to those para liminals. Bye for now.

Thank you for joining me today. Today I applaud your willingness to maximize your potential. You can easily use the paraliminal audio sessions in the MindTrax app to stimulate your non conscious mind, I.e. your inner mind, to reduce any resistance in your life and to propel you toward the success you want. Go to www.mindtracks.com.

Go mindtracks.com.

Go these amazing audio tools have helped millions and I encourage you to bring them into your world today. Be sure to be back for more episodes of the mindtrax podcast. You'll find insightful conversations with authors, experts and thought leaders all devoted to improving your life's experience. Thank you again for being here on our MindTrax podcast.

Sa.