Dr. Kelly Brogan | The Spiral Path: How To Own & Love Your Self | Wellness Force #Podcast

I've just been enamored since you went on Rogan, and even, like, just in these past couple months, just learning about your journey. And we're going to talk about this understanding of what Vital Life Project actually is. And what I love the most is where you and Sergi, you talk about this spiral together. And I love it because we all experience this spiral in our life, whether we're aware of it or not. It's about expansion and contraction, right? Expanding and contracting. And so you've done a lot of expansion recently. And the one thing that's been pressing for me ever since I knew that we were going to have this talk was ownership, this question of owning one's life. The way to own our life is multifaceted, which we'll explore. But, man, just even the question of ownership, like, where did this come from for you? The lightning bolt of, like, oh, we actually must own ourselves in all ways in order to have a life well lived.

I think it comes from. Do you want me to answer that now?

Please.

Okay. I don't know if it was a rhetorical, like, food for thought thing. No, I think it comes from an impulse towards freedom. You know, I think some of us are really. We come in, we incarnate, really, with a focus on freedom and whatever that might mean. Although I have a sense there's a universal underpinning to that concept. And I've had this kind of like, you know, don't step on me energy since I was, like, a kid, you know, very, very independent, probably from, you know, a place of some wounding, that I needed to not be a bother to others and handle it all myself and not have any needs of my own kind of a thing. But that impulse towards freedom and sovereignty has guided my entire process. And I think, like so many people, I thought that it would look like having my shit together, you know, like, checking off all the boxes. And I did that. Literally checked off all the boxes, had my, you know, postcard life. This was probably back in 2013, let's say, at a booming private practice. I was, you know, married to an incredible loving man. I had two healthy children. I had doting parents who were very dedicated to helping support me and my growing crew. We had just taken out a loan the size of a small country's GDP so that we could have our forever house and watch our kids get married in the backyard. And I watched that entire house of cards fall. And with it fell the mask that I was wearing. One of them, I'm sure I'll be taking them off until the day I die. But one chief, one that had been kind of cemented and taped and wired into place for many, many years, certainly my whole adult life slipped, and I just couldn't keep it up any longer.

What mask was that?

It was the mask of my defensive structure. So in my case, relative to my patients, let's say my shadow material. Like the hidden recesses of Kelly, where she's lazy and she shows up late and she says stupid things and she's self lies and she might cheat and she might hurt somebody, you know, that Kelly is so buried so deep in the catacombs that I literally never knew she was there. I never felt shame. I never felt fear. I never felt guilt. I never felt these things. I literally never felt fear about anything. And it wasn't because I had some faith in God. I was a belligerent atheist, right? So I was so. It was like an abscess. It was so walled off and so effective, frankly, that I was able to continue to hide in my mind and my intellect and cultivate a sense of control over the dominion of my life and arrange all of the pieces exactly where I wanted them to be. And that included my professional life. I needed to be successful and be right about my ideas. And even in my early days as an activist, I came at it from that energy, you know, where I'm right, pharma's wrong, and I'm gonna win, God damn it. You know, that's kind of the vibe. And so it was in this state of total dissolution that I began to encounter the reality, which is there's no winning any war. There's no winning any war, and certainly not one within myself, not one without outside of myself. And so how can I begin to hold uncertainty, mystery, complexity? How can I begin to sit in that wincing invulnerability that attends collecting parts of me that I would rather have left on the side of the road?

You know, I think you might be from the future, honestly, like, the way, you know, the way you explain that, like the awareness that you've cultivated from an MD background, being a mother, going through this journey, like the path that you're walking is really rare because most people don't wake up to that till maybe their last week of life or, you know, they experience some kind of massive hardship that jolts them into greater awareness. But there's something about you that that has brought on this awareness. Was it the house of cards falling down? Like, where did the awareness begin to kind of glisten and wake up?

Well, Firstly, I'm not so sure that I'm having a unique experience. And I think even the fact that you understand what I'm saying probably reflects that you have touched these spaces. I think this is really archetypal. In the end, it's a universal kind of hero's journey, heroine's journey to begin to make contact with your essential self, which necessarily involves the death of the false and illusory self. Right. Which feels, for all intents and purposes, like death. It's not like, oh, look at how I'm growing and evolving. It is a nails on the chalkboard, ripping your hair out, endlessly vomiting in the toilet, your guts. It's horrendous.

Yeah.

From my experience, and by the way, the experience of hundreds of women I've had the great privilege of witnessing and standing by as they walk their path of transformation. Most of them have a very different defensive structure where their defenses were not that effective. And they ended up very actively fighting with their emotions all the time because society has encouraged us to do that. Right. And so in that fight, they ended up labeled with mental illness, medicated, and finally came to a point where they said, you know what? I'm gonna give this another shot, this me thing, another shot, and see who I am without these medications. And the dark night that attends that process very typically, more times than not, involves the resurgence of all this stuffed emotional material and having to grow that adult consciousness, that container, in order to hold it right. And let it kind of alchemize and swirl around. And in that process, you know, these women have no idea who they are. It's very, very harrowing. So, you know, for me, I didn't come off of psychiatric medications. My story really involves, I mean, my awakening, so to speak, preceded this particular cataclysmic event, but it was really just laying the groundwork for it. And that began with my first pregnancy when I pursued a natural childbirth, because I began to question the science that I had been taught and the origin of some of the consensus medicine practices and obstetrics. And that just opened up a whole Pandora's box where then I started to question, you know, my own prescribing practices, read Anatomy of an Epidemic and put down my prescription pad, you know, forever. And so that was kind of the, you know, reverse my Hashimoto's. It was like a whole process. But it was really when I fell madly in love beyond anything I could repress, suppress, or otherwise sublimate, you know, that I watched that house of cards fall and this relationship to my now husband Seyer is the greatest teacher in my lifetime. It seems perfectly designed to eviscerate me in all of the ways you know, that will leave me more authentically who, who I've always been.

I've. I've really enjoyed just watching this because one of the things that you wrote is, is your love has systematically decimated my ego, you say, and all of my control based reflexes striving toward emotional symbiosis as the only romantic safe haven. And you also said I'm getting better and better at recognizing this is cool, the opportunity to choose love over the reflex to defend my rightness. I mean, that right there goes perfectly into this concept of ownership. Because if I'm going to own my life, that means I'm owning the dark, the light, the crunchy, the soft, all of it. And a lot of times, especially for me and for many people we've had on the show, there becomes this like, reconciliation with self where we come to peace and really a loving understanding of that part of ourselves that's dying instead of being like, get out of my life or get out of my psyche, or like, why do these thoughts come? Or why is my illness here? Like meeting it with anger? Or it's allowing the war to stop and really just being resilient enough to handle it all. Have you seen this in your relationship? And can you see the dots that connect to your relationship, to everything else that you've done?

So I think one of the most powerful concepts in relationship, but also out in the social world is that of mirroring, right? So, okay, so we were just talking about how I was just on this silent retreat, right? And I think, I don't know if you'd agree. When you're in silence, but you're in a social setting, there is an almost subconscious yearning to connect to the other people, but you don't have any material with which to do so. And so I found myself so hyper judgmental that it almost was jarring to me, you know, like some guy would cough across the room and I'd be like, ugh, my mind. Like, disgusting. Why do you have to be so gross? Like, did you need to make that noise? Like, but this was a ticker tape for the first time, three days where I was constantly judging everyone. And so I made this practice of. Because I, you know, because I do this work, you know, I'm aware of this concept and certainly it's applied to my relationship deeply. So I made a practice of, okay, every time I feel a judgment of someone, you know, like, why did they. There were questions and answers, you know, why do they ask such a stupid question? They really needed to ask that question. They just want to, like, have time at the microphone or whatever. I would apply it to myself, you know, like, is there ever a time, Kelly, that you might have had a stupid question and you just wanted to kind of get attention at the microphone? Yeah, for sure. Was there ever a time where I thought myself that I was gross? Yeah, for sure. Like, so there's always the opportunity when we feel judgment. And Byron, Katie's work has deeply influenced me around this, that we can turn that inward, right? And see how there is something within us that we have displaced and projected onto another so that we can become aware of the rejection therein, right? So I can see, Wow. I find my body gross at times. That's why I'm finding this man clearing his throat gross or whatever it is in my relationship. It's so much easier said than done. It's not even funny, you know? Like, I remember one time not too long ago, post marriage, you know, where I sat down with sayer for, like, 10 hours in a day, right? And we were just in this rupture mess. Like, total impasse of life. Big, like, life perspectives, like metaphysical discord between us. So we just couldn't agree about how things were supposed to be, like, be in the relationship. And I remember knowing and being aware of the fact that I know how to speak to him. I know even maybe what to say. I know how to open his heart, right? I know how to soften him. I know how to bring love out of him. We've been together a number of years. I know how to do that. And I was literally sitting there, like, all chippy, knowing that I could choose to do that and instead being like, no, I'm not. You know, like, I'm just gonna wait for him to do the right thing while I'm over here being right about what I'm thinking, you know, like, and I was aware of it. I almost. I really felt, you know, compassion for myself because it's the best that I could do in that moment. And because I have moments like that, I understand other people who have moments like that where their small self just won't relinquish the steering wheel right? To the higher power within. And, you know, for every moment that I have relaxed into vulnerability with him, it feels like I'm sacrificing something initially. It feels like I'm giving him something that I need. And I think that that is the distorted Understanding and reflexive assumption that's at the root of all of our atomized living, like all of our, like every for himself kind of lifestyle. It's that showing up real vulnerable, uncertain. Right? Showing up, holding our thoughts and opinions lightly. It feels like it costs us. And it's not true. The opposite is true. That the power that comes through surges like a geyser through that courageous act is something we've never known. And that's why, for most of us, we imagine it doesn't exist. But the ways that I have felt, I literally grown stronger as a human being, able to endure and alchemize emotions because that's what we're afraid of. I almost left the relationship, literally. This is literally my beloved partner in this lifetime. I almost left the relationship because I didn't want to feel the feelings that I attributed to him that badly. Right. Like, it was just their feelings. These are feelings, literally. I was able to dismantle our entire relationship because I didn't want to feel them that simple. Right. Because it's ultimately not about being right or wrong. It's about, can we. Are we strong enough to feel the feelings that come with potentially being wrong or at least not necessarily being right? Right. Like, can there be two realities that coexist? And that's really what's served us pretty deeply in. In our current relationship, is that we allow our realities to be separate. Right.

This is so fascinating to me. There's so much to unpack on what you just said. I mean, that was like, listen to that again, y'. All. So when you talk about the spiral, this is what I hear you explain right now, which is continual expansion and then continual retraction. And I think what you said that really hit me in my own current relationship with Kerri Michelle, is, can I just allow this to be a spiral? Can I. Can I actually just consciously allow it to be a spiral? Because otherwise my unconscious is going to freak out when I'm in the contraction, I'm going to be like, this isn't for me. I'm out. My little boy's scared. I'm going to activate her little girl. Like, my higher self is, like, off having lunch somewhere else. So I think this is the journey that bleeds down to our health question, too. And for me, the big one is I bookmarked this, and it was the best way out is through. This is from Kelly's book Own Yourself, which it's linked right now in the show notes. You must read this book. And we're gonna give away Two copies on the show too. This is how powerful this book is. You said the best way out is through. And it's exactly what you and I are talking about right now. Because you say that commitment is this. Put your self care first and do that every day. From that space, everything gets clear and you find yourself the protagonist in the adventure of your most beautiful life. That applies to what you and I are talking about from a metaphysical, from an emotional, from a physical intelligence perspective. But. But this clarity that you've gotten here and own yourself, this clarity has come through bumps and bruises and bloodiness. Like, it's not like you were woken up one day with just ultimate emotional intelligence. Like this story that even allowed you to write this book. What bubbled up in you? What intelligence bubbled up in you for you to write this concept of owning yourself?

Yeah, well, actually I think it was Robert Frost who said, the way out is through it. And so many mystics have pointed in this direction, right? Like there's no distracting yourself from the deep reality of who you are and who you have always been. And I think like you said, this concept of linearity, whether it's in our health or in our relationships and is like the ultimate distraction, right. If we think there's some arrival point, which is. Alan Watts has an amazing lecture about this where he talks about how we are enculturated over the course of our educational life. First grade, then second grade, then third grade, and then twelfth grade, and then you get a job and then you. And he said the point of dancing, for example, is not to get from point A to point B. Like the point of listening to a song is not to get to the end of the song. Fast forward your favorite movie to get to the credits. So this concept of a journey is lost because we don't have the intent at hand, which might be to know ourselves, right? Self discovery. And that's become, to me, really the whole point of everything, right? So the point is not to have a happy relationship, to make lots of money, to make sure my parents finally love me the way I want them to. It's not any of those things. The point is to have deeply explored what it is that I am only me, right? There's no one. And that's not because I am a mother and I like to dance and I'm a doctor. It's none of those things, right? Like there is an essential signature energy that I bring to this collective that we are that's not unlike, you know, a very important role for each cell in an organ or something like that. And how can I best understand what that looks like? The best way for me to understand what that looks like is to perceive love. Where I don't see almost makes me, like, teary, right? Because the whole source of suffering is when we can't perceive that it's there even when it is, but we can't see it, feel it, or we don't recognize it. And that's what was really has been operationalized in so many of my relationships, but chiefly in my romantic relationship, is, you know, I had this aha moment where I was like, you know what? I know that Sayre loves me, like, deeply loves me. I know he sees me. I know he admires me. I know he respects me. So why is it that I feel that he's disrespecting me, that he's not loving me the way I want him to, that, you know, I don't feel admired? I can't remember the last time he opened my newsletter, you know, like, all this story. Oh, you don't even know the pettiness. Beyond all this, I tracked.

I know you didn't open last week's message.

No, for real.

I've done that with friends.

Oh, my God. And I just created all this evidence, right? Like, this body of evidence, like a litigator, to support my allegation that he doesn't love me the way I want him to, right? So how can I feel the reality, which is that I know he does even when I don't feel that he does, right? And it's not unlike coming to a place of acceptance, of death, really. Like, how can I feel a connection to a deceased loved one, right? So I have a new kitty, right? Who's, like, blown my heart open, right? And he. Before I went on this silent retreat, he disappeared out my back door. Oh, my God. I was apoplectic, literally. My children couldn't even cry until they got to school because I was, like, in histrionics, so upset. And I was convinced he would never. He was a little kitty. And convinced he was gone forever. And that was, of course, a harbinger of what I would need to work on during this retreat, which is, how can I. What if I never see him again? Okay. Right. Okay. I would be okay. Why? Because I could feel the love that's there, even if it's not there in the form that I would like it to be. And this has extended also to my parents, right? Like, how can I feel that they have indeed loved me my whole life, even though it was pretty much never in the way that I wanted them to. Right. So it's also a concept that floats our own integration of self. Right. Like how can I feel love, compassion and forgiveness for myself even when I feel disgusted self judgment, I feel like this recoiling from who I think I am. Right. Or who I presented myself to be or what did I do? I can't believe I did that kind of a thing. So if we relieve ourselves of the idea that there's some destination someplace where you're happy and healthy and whole. Right. Then we get to just be on this like weird wild carpet ride of a journey and everything that happens. This is one of the points of departure with me and Sare. I believe that everything that happens is highly personal. Right. Like it's saturated with reflective meaning for each individual. I personally don't believe that there is an objective random reality on any level. Right. And I know that, you know, that's not a common belief and in fact you could even argue that it's a bit self important. Right. So like everything that happens in my life is really about me. Yeah. If I care about it. Right. So like if I get a charge about it, then it's there for me. I generated the conditions so that I could feel that charge and finally grow strong enough to just like let the emotions be without having to like have a fit about it. Right. So it ultimately leaves me with a much more, you know, fundamentally peace oriented. Although this is clearly a work in progress because I wouldn't have, you know, been in histrionics over my kitty disappearing if I were fully enacting this. But I know it's like a north star for me, guiding me towards a state of really just successful accepting what is at all times. This is so simple.

It's simple, but yet it's not easy. Right. And that's the pathway for many things when it comes to emotional health or physical health. Because everybody knows people could read this entire book, Kelly, they could memorize it, but there's a space between knowing and doing.

Right.

So there's some kind of. At times it feels magic, at times it feels like a magic recipe. But I don't think it's really magic. I think it's just based on the recommitment of the cycle of doing the real work. Because people can know and not do all the time. I mean, one of my, one of my friends and somebody's been the show three times is Dan Pardee and he talks about this space between knowing and doing. You know, knowing without Doing is. Is almost exactly the same thing as not knowing. So in order for you to really empower people with everything that you have become aware of, you're really unlocking a permission slip of freedom inside of people. But freedom is earned. I don't. And I'm curious how you feel about this when we look at freedom. And I've been pontificating on this for, like, three days because I just had a massive download about what freedom actually is in a relationship. You know, I used to think that freedom was, I do anything I want whenever I want it. And now I'm realizing and waking up to the fact that true freedom is my ability to retrain my amygdala and retrain my nervous system to what I actually desire, to what actually brings me erotic connection, to what actually brings me joy. And a lot of that was like a death of the old Josh. I'll tell you what. Like, there was a massive death of, like, everything that I thought made me happy and what I thought freedom was. Long question for you here, because I get excited talking about these concepts, like, what actually is freedom and how do we earn that freedom so we can own ourselves?

I, too, have spent a lot of time thinking about this subject because I have had, as I think many of us who are self employed have struggles with authority like that have been like a cat in a bag kind of a thing. Like, nothing like, extreme, like, I've never been arrested or whatever, but. But that have been like this, like. Like, kind of like contained, you know, dissident kind of energy. Like, my whole life, even up until my residency and fellowship, I was, like, being called into the director's office, like, pretty regularly for behavioral, you know, complaints or whatever. And this is why you connect with.

Alan Watts, by the way, because he talks about the element of rascality, right? That's part of life.

Anyways. Yes, it's true. And I've had that, like, I will follow enough of the rules to, you know, get the man off my back, but then I'll subversively, you know, sort of fight with so many of them, even making my own life more complicated. I remember getting called into. I was in med school, getting called into the director's office because, like, I insisted on wearing green New Balance, like, sneakers with my clothes and my white coat and whatever, when they had. There was kind of a dress code and they wanted us to wear, like, whatever, black patent leather, girly shoes. I don't know what they expected, but they certainly didn't like that I was wearing, like, casual Clothing. And I just, like, kept doing it, like, defiantly on purpose anyway. That would translate into far greater dissension later on. But I do think that freedom, ultimately, at this stage, I would define it as an ability to access. Okay, I'm riffing on this. So it may not be a perfect definition, but an ability to access a state of inner peace and stability that is not contingent upon anything external, right? So that would mean that I'm an activist, right? Very distressed about so many things going on with the world and the way that conventional medicine is sprayed like some toxicant all over the planet, right. I used to live where I could rest when this bill was defeated. You know, we. We got this drug taken off the market. You know, the vaccine program was revoked or whatever. And in our relationships, right? So if my partner does this, this and this, this, then I will love him, right? Like, it's. It's transactional, ultimately. And that's how so many of us. You know, I call them ledger relationships, right? Like, so many of us were raised, like, do for me, then I'll do for you.

Oh, it's like love keeping score, which I'm not a religious man, but in the Bible they talk about love not keeping score.

It's a real phenomenon, right? Because if you don't. If you've never been introduced to this concept of love that comes from an overflowing rather than an exchange, it feels like fairy tale unreality. Like, it feels not relevant to human dynamics. However, if you've ever actually been in a state of true joy, which I've argued, I think is one of the hardest emotional states to capacitate as an adult, that level of expansion, it obliterates anything to its contrary, right? So when you're in that state of heart opening, you cannot hold a grudge, you cannot experience any of the distortions of love, right? Whether it's anger or sadness or shame, which I think most of us have kind of picked up on. The fact that, like, because we can go from love to hate so quickly with our partners, right, they're probably not that different, right? They may just be different tenors of the same emotional resonance versus apathy or flatness, which I've come to find that level of disconnection is what characterizes the hell that so many of my patients live in, off or on medication. So I think it's really about unhooking your inner okayness from your lived environment.

Wow. I mean, I've had to do an incredible amount. I've gotten to do so much work on my codependency because I was raised by a bipolar mother who was on lithium for two decades. So the mental health conversation with me is real close to heart. I mean, it plucks on my G string in my heart because it's a low level resonance that I always feel in our collective. There are millions, like, it's hard to conceptualize this sometimes. There are millions of people who are suffering from mental health and just to even think about that is almost too.

Much to bear suffering.

Isn't everyone suffering in some way? In some way I think we all are.

Like the nature of absolutely suffering. But you know, I've referenced and you know this, you know, from, from basically the thrust of the book, which is to reframe that suffering as totally normative. Right. And to invoke the Krishnamurti quote that says, you know, it's no sign of health to be well adapted to a profoundly sick society. Well, the more well adapted you are, arguably somebody like me whose defensive structure is very complementary to the dominant orthodoxy. The more well adapted you are, it's just the less in touch with the reality of your heart's response to what is misaligned. You are right. So it's part of these awareness campaigns, you know, whether it's like destigmatization efforts or making sure people have access to treatment efforts, part of it is still an othering machinery. It's still saying, oh, here are we normal people, we get to support those mentally ill over there.

Same thing with breast cancer awareness. Any kind of awareness program may is coming up mental health awareness, which I have a totally different standpoint on that, but please continue.

Right, right. It's an agenda. And that's fine because it took me a long time to get to the place where I could compassionately experience pharmaceutical industry and the FDA's collusion with those agendas as just kind of part of an expression of a certain machinery in cogs in the wheel of our greater collective consciousness. So it's not like they're bad, we're good. That is an expression of how we have seen it best to manage our fear, which is control and dominance. We thought that it made a lot of sense for many, many centuries, if not millennia, to manage our fear through ever increasing efforts towards control, dominance. Right. Well, now we're in this incredible moment in human history where we're actually seeing that doesn't work. We're actually feeling, whether you're conventional or holistic or integrative or whatever, you know, that the system is broken. Right. And I'm talking about the medical system, I could be talking about the educational system or the economic system. We feel the bankruptcy of these, you know, these ivory towered systems. And so we now can open ourselves to the pull the call towards something new. But it is the unknown. And that's why I love what you were referencing because I often, you know, I often talk about the Maya Angelou quote, which I paraphrase to say, you know, when you know better, you do better. And you know, in the, I guess speaking about my online program Vital Mind Reset, which is like the operationalized 44 day protocol that I've done with patients for 10 years, I've recognized, no, it's not just actually knowing better and then doing better. There's a readiness, this ephemeral readiness that I personally have not been able to coerce, inspire, induce, I don't know what it's made of. And the closest that I've come to is that readiness is, it's like a feeling of relief that you experience when you move in the direction of change. And until, and if that relief comes from movement towards change, you're going to stay where you are no matter how messed up it is, right? And so I find that if I've done anything for anyone, and we have some pretty powerful history making outcomes from my practice and online offerings, but if I've done anything, and I think people, almost everyone would universally agree with this for anyone, it's that I have simply given them permission to believe that nothing's actually wrong with them. Literally, that's it. You know, I have a former patient named Allie, right in her videos on my site and public knowledge that she has been a patient and she says that all the time, you know, that I was the first, maybe only person who ever said that nothing was wrong with her to begin with. Right? And so how can we bring her into her own alignment? And she was diagnosed with probably five different diagnoses on multiple medications, multiple suicide attempts. She was on her way to State Hospital. And I have had this for whatever reason. Maybe one of the gifts that I've been given is to be able to see that in other people. Certainly struggled to see it in myself for sure, but I have been able to perceive like the shrouds of nonsense and bullshit that are cocooning these individuals who are chiefly different than me. The patients that I've treated are just, they're different kinds of people than I am in a very important way. And my mentor would describe it in terms of autonomic dominance, you know, that they are what are called parasympathetic dominant and that I am a sympathetic dominant, right? So that they are folks who just like their hearts are just blown open and the exquisite agony of perceiving all of the pain and suffering, all of what is out of alignment in the world is something that requires like an elder's support or like some kind of tutelage or some kind of apprenticeship or something. And instead we say, fit your circular self into the square peg of society and do it right, or else we're going to call you broken and damaged for good and you're going to take this medication the rest of your life. Right? So the reclamation of that vital force, it necessarily gives birth to this incredible creativity. I mean, what I've seen come out of, you know, come from the chains of psychiatric medication based treatment is just humbling beyond anything.

It's such a different lens because in my experience, you know, being raised by a mother with that condition and seeing it in multiple families of friends, it's just something that I knew was the way it was. And I think so many people fall into this trap of like, well, yeah, you just take the medicine because there's certain biochemical synaptic pathways that you know are going to be drilled that way forever and you can't change them. And it is the way it is. But then it's like, well, is that actually true? It's the first question of Byron Katie's work, like, is it actually true? Do you know 100% that it's true? Because if you don't, there's a thread to an answer there. There's a thread to a loving solution. So my question for you around this amazing conversation, by the way, like, you, you're an amazing guest. Like, I really love the way that your mind can do the pinball, but bring it back home. It's fascinating my question for you around this freedom concept and how we own ourselves and how that relates to the question of medication and western dogma. If we were to be free, what would it look like, what would it feel like if we were to be free from the shackles of mental health?

I think it would necessarily involve a cultural capacity to hold seemingly negative emotions. Right. I think we are going to have to begin to become more comfortable with emotional states that we would label as rage or shame or grief. Because without that comfort with discomfort, we will forever indulge our reflex to fix what isn't actually broken. And imagine that if we fix it, provide solutions which often include psychiatric hospitalization, then everyone will feel okay. The Patient and society. Society and all of the folks who are endangered by their emotional state. Everyone will feel safe and okay. But in America, we know very well how we give up freedom for the illusion of safety all the time. All the time. It's what we do here. We're doing it right now. Right. Our freedoms are being sacrificed all the time so that we can indulge this illusory safety where we will ultimately be buried by the endless efforts to apply force to that metric. Right. And so I think that, you know, I don't believe in mental illness, period. I stopped believing that was even a worthy construct. Right. So I, you know, I don't use the labels other than to acknowledge, you know, the pattern behaviors that invoked these labels in many individuals and what it is to live a life where you're identified with a label of bipolar. Right. For example, or schizophrenia. Right. So there is a great power in that hexing, in that semantic hexing is not to be underestimated. But I don't actually believe that anything is really ever wrong. I know that sounds Pollyanna ish, but I believe that it's a matter of discovering what the body, mind and spirit are communicating. Right.

I think that your viewpoint is so needed and so powerful. And there's also duality too. Right. So what you're expressing is profoundly true. And on the other side of it, maybe the reason you're only expressing it is because it's what's most needed by the contrast of the duality.

Yeah. So again, this is something that Sayer and I debate a lot because we agree on like 99.99% things, and then the, like, 0.01%, it's like totally divergent and it could literally could explode our relations. But I think it's whatever you believe it to be. So this is my reality. This is not me. It's a single other person's reality. And in fact, there may be as many truths as there are individuals. It may be a total misstep to imagine that you and I are even really agreeing. Could I really possibly understand your perspective and what it is to be you and think these things?

No.

No, I can't. Right. I can understand, if I'm lucky, you know, the origin of my own belief system. And then I can kind of hold it lightly and see that maybe it'll shift and change and that's okay too.

Yeah.

Right. So how can I not over identify with my stated beliefs, but also understand that my entire experience of my life and my body and my relationships is informed by that belief system, right? So if I live in a world where the body is machinery that malfunctions, it's scary and bad, it's random and meaningless, and I need to run to experts and authority figures who know better than me about said machine, then I will necessarily invoke the conditions that will allow me to experience that reality.

Okay, well, I just. Something just came online in me because what we talk about in our programs is btfa, Belief, thought, feeling, action. Unless we approach the belief, nothing else is going to happen. And so, God, I love this how you're like, how could you possibly understand my reality? And how could I even understand fully yours? But there is universal threads, you know, there are things that connect all of us. Universal ways of being, universal experiences. We all know what it feels like when we look at somebody we love and we feel that feeling. But the belief of why this is all here in the first place, or even the belief of mental health being a thing or it not even existing, those beliefs are only fed by a narrative of love or fear. So if you're gonna bring a narrative of love to the world, I can't help but question like, well, is fear also something to be loved? Like, how do we love it all?

Basically, 100%. 100%. And that's where the, you know, this, this concept of creating a container which, you know, having, having done, you know, Zen oriented meditation, you know that it's that awareness, right? So can the container be a loving holding of what is right? What's in the container gets to then be whatever the hell it wants to, right? It can be rage, it can be wildness, it can be, you know, shyness, it can be, you know, any malevolence, it can be anything. It certainly can be fear. And in fact, I've come to the sort of somewhat recent conclusion that something that I help people really transform is what I call victim stories, right? So these narratives that put you as the damsel in distress, lead role in your own play, right? And so it's a sometimes subtle, but sometimes overt, poor me, wah wah, this isn't fair kind of a story about what's happening in your life, right? Whether that's health or relationships or somebody who cut you off in traffic, they.

All feel the same.

Sometimes they totally feel the same.

Why?

Because the signature emotions, I believe in reincarnation and I believe that we came here to feel emotions literally, it's like exciting and interesting and that's perhaps why we incarnated, right, to move through the human space of emotions and simply Feel what they feel like, right? And so if we can actually work with our victim stories while they last, because you can't just change your belief. You know that, right? So if my victim story is. Let me think of a recent one I've worked with, one for me in.

The past, was money causes pain, okay?

But what happened without, like, getting into the details, like, what happened that made you feel like, oh, this is terrible. What happened to me around money, my.

Little child psyche constantly gathered evidence that because of money, my mom was hurting and my dad was upset, okay? Because of money. So that hurts me. So money hurts me, right?

So money is this, like, big, powerful monolith that little. You can't possibly contend with. And look at all the bad stuff that it did to your family. That's terrible, right? So, like, you know, our victim stories are always dramatized with the kind of toddler psyche, you know, that says, I always look for. It's not fair. Like, if there's a signature, like, it's not fair, then you're probably in that victim story. But it's fear that drives the victim story, right? If you didn't feel afraid of what life was like, you know, under the conditions of limited financial resources, then the victim story wouldn't exist, right? It wouldn't have any impulse to live. So can we use our fear to really leverage those emotions into full expression through our victim story until and if we are ready to invoke what I call the adult consciousness, but in Zen would be just that awareness, that higher self, right? That. That part of us that is always undisturbed. When we are ready again, that elusive readiness, we can kind of like, woman up or man up and really begin to create our own container for ourselves so that nothing in the external world has to change, right? And that's a very, very powerful role for fear to play. So we can discharge these emotions. Where we get into trouble is when we feel fear, we have a victim story, but we don't have a cultural or social or interpersonal container within which to actually allow it expression. You know, watching that, that's what's happening, right? Like in that moment I told you about with Sayer where I just didn't want to love him.

You have the tools, but you were.

Like, no, I wanted to be mad instead. But there was a part of me that was watching almost smiling, right? Like a Buddha smile, right? That part of me ultimately came online and created the container for me to say, you know what? I know you love me, right? And so the fear of being disconnected from him was what was driving that victim story in that moment where I was saying, no, but I'm right, you know, and I'm right about how you've wronged me. That's normally how it. The form that it takes. Right. So can we cultivate the connection to the part of ourselves that is fundamentally unperturbed at all times and invoke that almost as a self parenting exercise? Right. In any moment where we've moved through enough of our fear induced crisis to have discharged the feelings that frankly simply wanted to be felt. Hopefully we can do that without translating into a bunch of actions. Right. And instead we can just, you know, put on music or journal or scream into a pillow or whatever it has to look like for.

You love this for so many reasons. You remind me of a conversation I had just two weeks ago with John Wineland where he had done a lot of Zen Buddhist training as well. And he said, look, we really don't know about this grand mystery. All of the things we're exploring, Kelly, they really point to the mystery. The mystery, the mystery. Honoring this mystery in the same way that, you know, in your wedding you were dancing with people and I think you, you had a name that you called yourself in your newsletter and it was about, how do you pronounce your Kundalini name? Which means, check this out, Bringer of harmony. So. So I love this because there is harmony in honoring the mystery. You know, if we can honor the mystery, then we don't have to know why. We don't have to have a fucking explanation for everything all the time. It can just be like, I'm going to honor that because that brings me harmony and peace and, and I think that's what we're all looking for. Like this path that you've put out in Owning yourself is really the practical tools and the ways of navigating this crazy world, sometimes literally crazy, like the Krishna quote, to really just unlock this peace and harmony within ourselves. It's not placation, it's not spiritual bypassing. It's none of that. Yet. So many attacks that you get are from people saying, she's spiritual, she's cloaking and veiling, she's fill in the blank. What do you, what do you. How do you lovingly respond to people that criticize your work?

Oh my God. I'm like, they say that. Oh, okay. I don't even know. I.

Well, I remember back when you're on Joe Rogan, you were talking about the robots that would post things against you and the grassroots movement, you know, so.

It'S very interesting because I used to encounter, you know, I've had death threats. I mean, I used to encounter. I've had aerial shots of my. My home, you know, with threatening memes made of.

You're presenting a different narrative that is really in power of most people's consciousness. So I would assume that these things would happen from time to time.

They used to happen, like, way more than they do now. To the extent where I can't even relate to caring. I'm somehow constructed to not really care, which makes me a good ambassador, I think, of this message because I really don't. I weirdly don't take personally at all any criticism of my work. People say I charge too much money, or I think I don't know what they say, or, you know, I don't know what science is. I'm just making things up. But whatever, I really don't care. But then if, like, one of my friends looks at me wrong, I'm, like, in the fetal position for a week. So it's not that I don't have these sensitivities, you know, or insecurities. It's just that for whatever reason, they're not, you know, they're not located in that realm. And I think. I think it's because in my work Persona, my defenses are so. My intellectual defenses are so powerful that I never feel any of that vulnerability. I just literally don't feel it. So I don't. I really don't care. And also, even if I were somewhat sensitized to it, I would recognize that I'm just a projection screen, right? So I'm just. You can throw it up there and look at your own stuff. And that it's not necessarily in any way, you know. And that's not to say, because Byron. Katie would say this, too. That's not to say that there isn't a kernel of truth, right? If somebody says, wow, she charged. I can't believe how much money she charges for a consultation. Yeah, that's totally true. I own that completely. And you know why? Because it's consistent with my value system. Right. If it's not with yours, and you'd rather spend your money on your rent or your gas or your Netflix and whatever else, so be it. So what I always find interesting about social media is how sometimes, unless they're bots, unless they're what's been referred to as astroturfs, people come onto platforms where they're totally not aligned and they want to assert their perspective on said platform. But the truth is that all of these little communities we're growing are really spaces of incubation. I think you'd probably agree, right? Like we're incubating very tender seedlings and it's okay for it to be with like minds, right? It's okay for it to be in an echo chamber preaching to the choir all the things that we use.

If you had a garden, you would protect it from a storm if you ever wanted anything to grow.

Exactly. So I have come to the. Because I'm up for a debate, but I have come to the conclusion that it's a total leaking of energy. And in fact I want to create safe spaces, which is something in my two communities that I'm very dedicated to doing, is how do I create an internally consistent safe space for the transformation of victim consciousness. And that involves not debating so many of the things that we have all agreed we're going to commit to. Right.

I want to talk about the Vital Life project because for me it's like a culmination of your books, your medical practice. You've squeezed everything into a very narrow path that can lead people to the most expansion they could ever want. But it's funny, it's not through the tools. It's through the tools that lead to the community. Like that's the big part of it all. And I also want to say that in just one minute here, we're going to let you go because so many people are trying to understand what it actually is to live their life well. So can you answer two things before you say goodbye? Can you answer wellness? This question of wellness. What exactly is wellness and how does wellness relate to this Vital Life project?

Yeah. Yeah. So it's funny because I had my protocol in my practice, then I brought it online and that's called Vital Mind Reset. It works. We publish data. It's a ritual for self reclamation that vectorizes enough of your attention because of the demands literally on your lifestyle, because of the cost, and because of the ways in which it challenges so much of what you would formerly have been able to identify as that it effectively deconstructs and sets you up for your own path of rebuilding. Right? And so I thought, well, that's the only way. Go big or go home. And it's the only way I had ever observed actually worked. But here I am on this spiral path now. For 10 years I did that protocol to resolve my own Hashimoto's long time ago. And there are still blind spots, right? Just coming back from this silent retreat My current reclamation project is around my cell phone where I am determined to reclaim myself from this device. I am ready to do it. I'm gonna do it. But it's so much easier to do that in a community setting, right? So Vital Life Project is what we created ultimately for people who don't need or don't want to take that deep dive, but want to do it like a little biohack at a time, right? Like one little self experiment at a time. So we do one little thing per month for a week. And I personally have found this model to be so powerful for me, I created it. You know, again, I make up the little challenges. Whether it's 15 minutes of your feet on the ground every day or going to bed at 9pm every night or. We just did. We're actually doing this week an eye gazing challenge. So you have to like 2 minutes look into your partner's eyes every day.

Oh, that's a good one.

A mirror, you know, or whatever. And it's just these things that, like, if you read it in a book or if you saw it in a blog, like translating it into action would be unlikely. How can you leverage the safety of a container to begin to explore yourself even further in this process that is constantly about revisiting to test for readiness? I know I should be drinking a lot of filtered water. Guess what? I don't. When we did that challenge together in Vital Life Project, I realized like, wow. The reason that I don't is because it doesn't feel good to me immediately and because I haven't made it interesting. Right? So because of my own program, you know, I bought a vortexer and I bought this like lemon or egg that swirls and structures my water. I made it interesting and now I do it right. So how can you learn about how to care for yourself in a way that is reverent, you know, like, how can you look at all the little things you do every day? It's why I love the life changing magic of tidying up that book. And, you know, how can we bring awareness and reverence to all the little mundane elements of our life and begin from that platform of sacred relationship to the self to begin to orient towards others, you know, in that same way?

Well, I think you just defined wellness and also vital life in the same sentence. Would you say that's true? Hopefully, pretty much. Well, Kelly Brogan MD is the website KellyBroganMD.com Kelly, I just want to take a breath for you and just dip my head in total honor of what you've created in the world. It's been a joy to follow you, and we look forward to having potentially another conversation where we can expand further. But until we see you again, we're all wishing you love and wellness and everyone that's been with us. So thank you for coming on the show.

Thank you for your beautiful energy. I really appreciate it.

Kelly, you gotta go. Go.