Feeling Whole

Hello everybody, welcome to another episode of Thriving Doctors Podcast. So it's, uh, just me again today. Um, I hope that's okay. Uh, yesterday we were talking about, uh, seeing our wholeness, seeing our wholeness. And today I thought, well, we need to go deeper than just seeing, don't we? So what's deeper than seeing? What's deeper than seeing that we're whole? What is that? It's feeling whole, isn't it? It, it's the difference between, uh, a change of mind and a change of heart. There's something more profound About something that we feel in our heart than something that we feel, we think in our mind, something that we see. So there's a there's a deepening, there's a deepening, and for me it sounds a little bit, it sounds a little bit like that a clash. with what we know, how we normally see, how we normally see understanding, right? So I think we normally— maybe I'm just speaking for myself here, um, I speak for myself— I used to see understanding as a 1 or a 0, as a yes or a no, as a black or a white. And, uh, so there's a real kind of left-brain, oversimplified, perhaps, logic to this. So I'm thinking about chemistry, chemistry lessons. For some reason, that's the, the metaphor that comes to my mind. So you've, you've got— we— so we used to— we had a real um, hard, the hardest teacher in the school, the toughest teacher in school, a real nasty piece of work, um, was our chemistry teacher. And he had a, you know, to do an experiment, you had to list, you had a list of, uh, instructions. Sorry, you had a list of equipment and you had a process to follow. And following that process would get you the outcome that was there to illustrate the scientific process. So you kind of, you learned the process and so you understood how to do the process or how you didn't do the process. Perhaps more simpler than that, and going back to earlier in my education, you learned that 2+ 2= 4, right? You learned, we used to recite our times tables. So you either know that 2+ 2= 4 or you don't. It's a 1 or a 0, it's a yes or no, it's a right or wrong. So when we, uh, see our wholeness, it's not like that. It's more like a, a spectrum of seeing it. So it might— we, we might see something for ourselves as as a new idea, but that new idea grows over time. It, it gathers momentum. It becomes more, more whole. And the idea that I'm thinking about here, the specific thing for, for me, is that, that moment when I had the— I had the outburst talking to A good— yeah, a great person, a lady called Sarah Kreutzer. And I said— this is 14 years ago, right? My birth mother didn't love me enough to keep me. She gave me the teddy bear as a consolation prize. Now, I didn't say it like that. There was a lot more venom behind it, and there was a lot more— there's a lot of swear words actually involved in that, mainly beginning with F. And she said, she said, I'm a mum, Simon, and I don't think it was like that. And, and at that moment, I saw that she was correct. I saw the truth. I saw that it was highly unlikely. that it was like that. And yet, 8 years later, when I read the letter from my birth mum to the social worker about buying me, I tell you, Ben, I felt the same. What I'd seen logically In my head, I saw— felt— see the trick? What I'd, what I'd seen logically in my head, and it felt fairly profound at the time, I felt at a profoundness level like way, way deeper than that. I don't know, 10 times, 100 times. Deeper. So to see the distance, there's, there's a depth, there's a, there's a change from, um, a, a theory, an idea, a concept, to a felt experience. That's what we're talking about here. Movement from a, from, well, yeah, from, from theory to practice. From abstract perhaps to concrete, from seen to felt. And it, it's that, that feeling of wholeness has for me infinite depth. So it's hard to put these this depth thing into, into words. So first metaphor that comes to my mind is the— is a, a, an ocean, right? So the— that there's the— there's a force 10 gale blowing. So we could see that force 10 gale as, as the, uh, as the trauma, maybe a metaphor for trauma. And yet we go the further, the deeper down we go into the depths of the ocean, the calmer and stiller it gets. And that would, that might be a great metaphor for who we are, right? We're on the surface. we're stormy, and at our profound depths, we're still. And isn't that what all of us want? We want peace. The other metaphor that comes to mind— not, sorry, not the metaphor that comes to mind— is this phrase by this guy, this, I think he was a psychoanalyst and also a spiritual teacher, like a Jesuit priest, Pierre Teilhard, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. And he said, his quote is, is used in, is expressed differently. The version that I think I see that I love is this idea of us, we're not We're not human beings having a spiritual experience. We're one spiritual being having 7 billion, 8 billion human experiences, right? One, right? So one spiritual being, one spiritual being having I don't know, 7 billion experiences. If we look at this in the adoptee sector, you'd say from an adoptee's perspective, we could say we're one spiritual being having— how many adoptees are in the world? 3 million? 5 million? We're having 5 million adoptees' experience. And in that experience is, is all the day-to-day stuff, right? So all our, uh, our, our thoughts. So that, that, that thought that runs away with us sometimes— why did my birth mother give me up? Or how can I find my birth mother? How can I reconnect with my birth family? So those thoughts, um, those inner experiences, the thoughts, inner experiences, the, the feelings, that, that, um, that feeling that we all have that we're not, we're not good enough, we're substandard somehow, um, that feeling, sometimes a feeling of anger. Sometimes the feeling we're going to be rejected again, and the project— like the projection of rejection. So we're, we're taking something that we perceive happened to us in the past and we're perceiving it forward into the future. So the, the human or the adoptee's experience has got essentially all the trauma. It's got essentially all the trauma in it, but it's not who we are at our essence. At our essence, we are one spiritual being. So There is— if, if we are just one spiritual being, um, there's, uh, then there can be only one. I mean, that's a line from, um, Highland, uh, a line from Highlander, there can be only one. So if there is only one spiritual being And so we talk about spirit. And some people don't like that word spirit because it sounds like religious. So we're talking about, you know, another synonym and a different word meaning the same is consciousness or awareness. So the awareness, the thing that is aware of the trauma, right, the context which is available Sorry, the context or the consciousness that is conscious of the trauma. So simple. Let me make this really— try to make it seem as simple as possible, right? So you've got the context, right? The space in which the content Right? The content of our mind appears, and our feelings and our thoughts. And the spiritual being, the awareness or the consciousness, that's whole. That's whole. So that is the fundamental— the essence of us is fundamentally unwoundable. Compared to our experience, that's where all the trauma, the, the, all the trauma is. So, uh, I've likened this recently to, um, us having a, a, a spiritual stab vest, right? So if we're wearing a spiritual stab vest— so saw something on telly last night, um, a butcher was preparing some, some meat, and, uh, I've seen butchers, my I've seen butchers. My wife's uncle was a butcher, great guy, unfortunately no longer with us. You see them wearing it like a chainmail glove, like, so a chainmail, it looks like something a knight would wear. Yeah. And he's got a glove, so when he's chopping with one hand and he's holding the meat with another hand, the other hand has got a chainmail glove on it so that if the knife slips the, um, the, the chainmail is going to protect the hand. The guy that I saw last night, butcher last night, he's what— he was wearing a chainmail, like a chainmail jacket underneath his butcher's apron. So if presumably maybe he was just ultra-cautious guy, or maybe his hand had slipped in the past and it, and it, and he'd been cutting so hard it slipped and Um, and it hit the table and, and like ricocheted off and hit him in the, in the chest. And that's where he, he wore a, like, a full chainmail jacket. It— if, if once we see our unwoundability, once we— perhaps, perhaps more specifically, once we feel our unwoundability, then we, um, I feel our unwoundability. It's like having that chainmail jacket. So who we are can't be cut by a knife, and if there's no cut, there's no wound. And this gets back to something that I felt for myself Very deeply, the first time, like 8 years ago, I felt I am fundamentally unwoundable. I have felt wounded, but I'm not my feelings. The essence of who I am, the essence of who we all are, is fundamentally unwoundable, and our wholeness is hidden by our trauma. Thanks a lot. Speak to you soon. Bye.