Life Transition

#23: What Is It Like to Be a Vampire with L.A. Paul

June 30, 2019 Culture, Life Transition, Podcast, Psychology, Science 00:53:41

“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—  I took the one less traveled by,  And that has made all the difference.”

Robert Frost, “The Road Not Taken”

Indeed, you may, one day, find yourself at a crossroad in your life. You are, possibly, once again, faced with a big decision, whether it is at work, or in a relationship, or shifting your ideological orientation. You play out different scenarios. What-ifs and maybes. Deep down you know that your choice will inform your experience, and based on the value of your experience, you may learn something new, grow, and transform.  

L.A. Paul is a professor of philosophy and cognitive science at Yale University. Her main research interests are in metaphysics, cognitive science, and the philosophy of mind. In this conversation, we look at how certain types of life decisions that involve transformative experiences, like having a baby or becoming a vampire, cannot be made based on evidence and rational thought. We discuss the value of exploring these philosophical questions and the wisdom that can come from embracing uncertainty. Laurie is the author of Transformative Experience, Causation: a user’s guide, and Causation and Counterfactuals. 

Highlights:

  • Metaphysics and Cognitive Science
  • Transformative Experiences
  • Limits of Rationality

Resources:

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Full Transcript

 

Thal:                

 Welcome Laurie to the show.

Laurie:              

Thanks for having me.

Thal:                 

Thank you.

Adrian:             

Laurie, we wanted to ask you, let’s say you were at a dinner party with a bunch of non-academics and they asked you to describe what you do for work. What would you say to them?

Laurie:              

I would tell them about the notion of transformative experience, which is something that I’m working on. Transformative experiences are big life experiences, in other words, they are experiences that change us, how we think it makes us make sense of the world and who we are personally. I’m super interested in these kinds of experiences because I think first they teach us a lot about the world, but they also teach us about ourselves. I also think that we can use them to construct ourselves in particular when we’re making certain kinds of decisions involving transformative experiences, what I would call transformative decision. They’re actually really important to us and they form us, inform our preferences and all kinds of interesting ways. Now I’m gonna use an example, one of my favorite examples is choosing to have a child because that’s an example where I think it’s a big life experience. It’s actually something that you have to undergo to really understand how it’s going to change you and that it does often change you, and it changes you in a very kind of permanent way. That’s an ordinary example of a transformative experience that a lot of people will contemplate. Some people undergo it. This sort of gives people a grip on the sort of ideas I want to explore.

Adrian:            

 When we were looking through some of the research you’ve done, I noticed there was an interesting convergence that it seems to overlap between, on the one hand there’s metaphysics that you’re interested in, and on the other hand there’s cognitive science. I’d love to hear how you describe, first of all, what is metaphysics?

Laurie:              

Yeah, I do not know what metaphysics is but I’ll give it a stab. I mean this is something that’s probably been debated well for a long time, but very roughly. I would think of it as an attempt to understand the way we think about what there is, which includes how we think about the (inaudible) and the internal world. And it’s a way of doing it that sometimes goes beyond the science, both the physical and natural science as well as a science of mind. When I say it goes beyond, I just mean that some of the questions that metaphysicians explore just aren’t things that admit of empirical assessment or maybe they’re more foundational. There are decisions or things you have to think even to undertake empirical assessment. There’s not just some answers your find in the lab or whatever and figure out what the answer is. You know, sometimes you have to think about, what do I take causation to be? Or what is a self? Or you know, what’s the nature of rationality? And you have to lay down some foundational answers to those kinds of questions before you can even kind of formulate an experiment.

Thal:                

 I mean these are very important questions that you’re exploring in an academic setting and it’s the same kind of questions that we also explore in depth psychotherapy and depth psychology. I’m just thinking about words that can be problematic like spirituality and soul. These are all slippery words. How can we talk about metaphysics without slipping into dogma on one side or words that don’t have a firm footing. Does that make sense?

Laurie:              

Yeah. I don’t think it’s easy to do that. I mean, the way that I approach it is by partly trying to proceed clearly and carefully and then anchoring a lot of what I’m interested in it too in empirical work. So when I think about causation, what is causation? I might say causation, maybe very basically, something that happens between events, when one of it brings about another event and we can measure it to some extent when we think about dependence relations. In other words, while if something hadn’t happened, if this person that hadn’t happened in the second one wouldn’t have happened and we seem to experience causation in our life so we can point to it in ordinary context and say, oh look, when the bat hit the ball and the ball was hit out of the park, well that the bat hitting the ball caused it to go out of the park.

When you play pool, like if you sink the eighth ball in the corner pocket, it was hitting the cue ball into the eighth ball at the right angle that caused it to sink into the corner pocket. When we start trying to use specific examples and also talk about things in ways that are related to measurement that that can help.The other thing, I think, that can help is just to sort of anchor some of these discussions to history of philosophical discussion. Especially over maybe from me over the last hundred years or so, but there’s a much longer history, you know what I mean? Contemporary Western philosophy at least 2,500 years, and so kind of embedding, embedding these discussions in a richer context also helps to define them. Just using the words like, especially the way they get thrown around in ordinary conversation or in a metaphysical way or in a metaphorical way. I think can be, unhelpful.

Thal:                 

Absolutely.

Adrian:             

On a more personal level, I’m curious, where this interest came from for you. How did you end up in philosophy and particularly these these domains?

Laurie:              

I mean I always wanted to think more about how we understood ourselves in the world and about the process of discovery. What I think of as epistemic or mental conceptual revelation, like how we respond to new things in the world and discover new kinds of properties or new ways of being or, and make ourselves in various ways. Like, I think this rushed in on me when I was in high school. I grew up in a, you know, pretty vanilla upper middle class suburban environment and didn’t have a lot of experiences. Then what happened was when I was sort of, you know, 18 and escaped that environment, I moved to the city and then I started discovering culture and I went to, to university and I discovered, all kinds of ideas that I had never really had access to in different kinds of people.

It was so incredibly exciting and amazing that I think having those experience and starting to have more and more of those experiences like over the years that followed made me feel that this is something that I need to spend my life understanding better. There’s a way in which I see a lot of people sort of have a grip on these ideas in the ordinary sense, but that they don’t get studied too much in the academy I want to study it in the academy because I think that’s the way to deepen our, our grasp on the meaningfulness of these mental changes and understand how to use them, as I said, in the decision making context and how to under the world of rationality and discovery and learning in a precise way as possible.

Thal:                

That’s something I struggled with, my background is in English literature and one of the things that I was struggling with at the time was, okay, so here we are studying English literature and it’s, but it’s also about the soul. Instead here we are just drowning in critical theory and all of that. It sounds to me that you are reconciling between the world of cognitive science and the metaphysical, which is a hard thing to do and you’re doing it in an academic setting. When you’re talking, I’m already seeing the connections between cognitive science, transpersonal psychology and metaphysics. It’s just exciting. I don’t even know what the question is, but I don’t know if you have more to say about that.

Laurie:              

So something that’s going on. One thing that I have really been doing, and I think I’m not the only one, but not that many people have been doing is bringing together in particular metaphysics and contemporary, so called analytic metaphysics, like the study of causation, the nature of time. What we take the self to be constituted by, right, and also a formal epistemology together with cognitive science. I’m doing that here at Yale. I’m doing it both by collaborating with people who work in kind of congnitive vision science, social psychology, and behavioral economics. I’m also doing it in the classroom. Next year I’m going to be teaching a Grad level seminar with a vision scientist on basically temporal and causal perception where we explore the metaphysics along with contemporary cog-sci in a very kind of robust empirical, but also theoretical kind of way.

No one’s ever actually taught a class like that at Yale, especially not at the graduate level. I don’t know if anyone’s taught it anywhere in, to be honest, in the world. It’s exciting to do it here because there are a lot of psychologists and lot of philosophers and others who do a lot of research in related areas. I think it is a pretty exciting new cross-divisional graduate level course, and it also fits in, we’re building actually a quite special dual Phd program in the same areas. I think it’s in philosophy, it’s opening up to be sort of a new area of research and philosophy and psychology. Yale, is opening up, I think, new areas of graduate study to do the research. We’re doing all of that kind of at once together. There’s more, there is sort of conferences plans, and that kind of thing. It’s a new and opening up area of search is the way to put it.

Thal:                 

Yeah, I mean, just one of the things that we struggle with in the transpersonal psychology field is…okay…we’re always arguing against the mainstream psychology. Transpersonal psychology is not quote unquote recognized by mainstream psychology. There is a shift right now that’s going on and the fact that it’s happening at Yale is so exciting for me to hear.

Laurie:             

I think you’re right, the challenge is to try to be clear about the topics and the terms.

Thal:                 

That’s true, the terms.

Laurie:              

I view it as the philosophers teaching the psychologist and the psychologist teaching the philosophers at the same time, and as we’re doing this, we’re trying to kind of establish, communicate like new kinds of communication and new ways of understanding each other’s work.

Thal:                 

I’m just thinking like at the root of it and if we’re going to think about sort of ancient knowledge, philosophy and psychology have always intersected and it’s really, psychology was born out of philosophy. Going further back, I’m thinking about mystics and sages of different traditions, have talked about the law of causation. I’m specifically thinking about a Sufi philosopher from the Andalusian times, Gazzali, he talked about causation and how sometimes it’s not linear and sometimes a cause doesn’t produce an effect, so then what do we do? This is showing up in quantum physics.

Laurie:             

I think especially before the 20th century, most philosophy eastern and western basically was tied to if not mysticism, various kinds of faith-based orientations. That was important, actually, because it was important to allow the mind to kind of range as freely as possible and explore lots of different avenues. There are many ways in which you can allow the mind to explore freely. (Inaudible) limits on what you have to constrain yourself to like what you can test in the actual world. You know, what you can kind of materially put your hands on. Although now I think, if we blend those more historical perspectives with the kind of contemporary focus on the empirical, you get a really interesting way to take bits from the earlier work, and from the earlier ways of thinking and then follow like the follow a line of thought, but then develop it maybe in an empirical way. So it’s a new way to explore the older ideas that we find in some of the history.

Adrian:             

Laurie, I would love to go into the weeds a little bit with regards to transformative experiences and maybe for listeners to lay a little bit of groundwork. I’d love to hear you explain the vampire thought experiment as a way to kind of frame these big life decisions. I know, I’ve heard you speak about these before.

Thal:                 

To go back to the empirical

Laurie:              

So one of my favorite thought experiments to illustrate first the idea of transformative experience and then second, the way that that can be important for big life decisions is to think of a fictional case because it’s like idealization in physics, you sketch an ideal situation, think about how to make sense of that and then you move to the more real life case and take the structure that you isolated in the fictional case and see if you can apply it in practical ways. I like to imagine that you were somewhere in Eastern Europe exploring a castle, and you’re down in the dungeons kind of checking out all these kinds of cool interesting rather scary bits at the dungeon.

Suddenly Dracula comes to you and he says, okay, I’m going to offer you a one time chance to become a vampire, and then he says, you know, it’s going to be irreversible. You have to make a decision. You’ve got until midnight tonight to make your decision to go back to your hotel room and think about it. If you want to become a vampire, I will come to you at midnight, leave your window open. Okay? This is obviously very exciting. No matter what you think, you will probably go to back your hotel room and think about it. So you go back to your hotel room and you start texting your friends, you call your mom, and say, look, you tell them about this opportunity. You say, what should I do, and as you start asking them questions, it turns out that they’ve already all become vampires.

This is surprising. I think it’s right to say, mom, why didn’t you tell me? Right? Then there’s some surprise there, but then you start asking the questions. What does it like for you to be a vampire? How am I supposed to make this decision? As you ask these questions, they start telling you things like, it’s incredible, it’s amazing. You get these amazing new sensory powers, strength and you know, fluidity and you look fabulous in fashion clothing. You can even make ugly clothing look fabulous, but there are some negatives. You have to live in a coffin. You can’t roam aound by daylight without kind of special thick sunscreen, that’s really awful to put on. You have to drink blood or at least artificial blood, and you keep asking questions to try to find out more about like what it’s going to be like because if you want to do it, right, the way that you would make this decision very naturally, think about what is it like to be a vampire and do I prefer or what I prefer to be a vampire to be human. You then ask more about it and say what should I do? They start to say things like, well, actually I don’t think I can really explain it to you. I can’t really explain it. There’s a lot of things that are there to explain. I couldn’t explain to you what it’s like to see the color blue if you’ve never seen the color blue and being a vampire is like that, but don’t worry, it’s amazing. It is something that you can’t understand until you have become one. But once you do become one, you will realize that only now does your life have true meaning. It’s just nothing like being a vampire. What are you going to do with that, right? You’re basically told, it’s going to be fabulous, but it’s not something you can understand in the relevant sense. You don’t know what it’s going to be like until you actually become one. So should you just do it?

I think there are, that’s the way, in other words, what’s going on is that the empire experience is as I would put epistemically transformative. It’s a kind of experience that you have to have in order to fully grasp that the nature of that experience, and it’s also going to change you profoundly, right? It’s going to change you so much that in some sense you’re going to be a new kind of being. A new kind of person. You want to say [inaudible] people, but it’s going to change some of your kind of core preferences, like what you really care about, how you want to live your life.

Okay? So that’s a transformative experience, and the problem is that if you’re going to make this decision, right, you have to make it in the absence of a certain kind of information, and in particular, you don’t know what it’s going to be like to be a vampire. All you have is a bunch of testimony from other people, and the it’s the way I described it, everybody thought it was fabulous, but if there were any naysayers, let’s say some people who you talk to [inaudible] I actually didn’t work out for me, but I’m trapped in this, then things got even harder. Right? So if you have diverse testimony, then you can be in an even more difficult position. There’s something else too, and that is when thinking about whether or not to become a vampire, if you just wanted to listen to the testimony or just to rely on what your mother said, there’s another factor to take into account and we can describe that as the endogeniety of the preferences involved.

In other words, what if there’s something about becoming a vampire that makes you want to be a vampire. What if, in fact, there’s a kind of Stockholm Syndrome that occurs, right? So that of course once you become a vampire, that biological process converts your preferences into wanting to become a vampire. But if that’s the case and it doesn’t seem like this incredibly unlikely to be honest, from what we know about vampires, then, the way that you evaluate their testimony is also is going to be corrupted. It’s going to be affected in some sense. If you want a real life example, let’s say that you were thinking about having children, but you’ve actually decided you didn’t really want to become a parent, but all of your friends told you, oh no. You might not want it now, but once you become a parent, it’s going to be amazing.

Right? So there’s a question there, right? Well maybe they’re right. Maybe they’re right. Maybe you wouldn’t really be happy, but what’s the ground truth for what makes you happy? Is it because right now you want to become a parent? Or is it just because there’s something about becoming a parent? It’s kind of Stockholm like so that you know, the process of becoming a parent makes you also really happy to have produced the child that you produce. I guess what I’m saying is the vampire thought experiment describes a certain kind of situation. It involves undergoing a transformative life experience, but it is a particularly difficult kind of decision because you don’t know what you need to know or to make the decision in a way that you ordinarily would if you were making an informed choice. So there’s a decision problem or how do you decide, and it isn’t as simple as just evaluating the testimony because there’s this endogenous element that makes even the testimony sort of mysterious.

So if you can’t look within yourself and know what kind of process it is that you are, how you’re going to change in certain kinds of ways from the inside, and if the testimony is also complicated by that fact, how are you supposed to make the decision in an informed way? How are you supposed to do it rationally, right? I mean like choosing how it’s going to maximize your expense value. As I hinted, maybe even more than intent, I think there are other life decisions like this and choosing to have a child in some sense can be really like this. I mean, maybe you don’t really, you’re not going to make it up. Maybe you just want to have a kid because your parents did, or you, anyone participating in this. But if you want to think about it in the way that I was describing, do I want this kind of life is this the kind of person I want to become, there’s a certain sense in which…there’s all kind of variables that you can’t pull aside.

Adrian:             

It sounds like you’re pointing at the limits of reason and logic, like we cannot rely purely on those faculties to make a decision like this so like changing jobs or other identity changes that are dramatic. So how do you suggest people approach these decisions if that’s not a reliable way?

Laurie:              

I guess what I want to say is I think we need to look at evidence. We need to look at testimony. It’s very important to do everything that we ordinarily do. The problem is that we shouldn’t think that that’s going to give us the answer. It doesn’t give us the answer, not because we haven’t thought hard enough. It’s not like, well, just think a little harder, try a little bit more, read more information, then you’ll finally find that missing piece. I don’t think it works that way. So I think instead you have to recognize that there are some things that language and testimony and other people can’t teach us. There are some things you just have to experience in order to know how they’re going to affect you. It turns out maybe some of the most important things in our lives are like this.

I’m not giving you an answer. I mean, it may be that there’s a kind of humility and a kind of wisdom that we gain by recognizing, using rationale, you using logic and assessment and maybe empirical information to discover that that’s the situation we find ourselves in, and then there’s a kind of acceptance and understanding that I think should come next. With that understanding other people and the decisions that they, when they have to make those decisions as well. I think this also ties to thinking about responsibility and blame and basically not blaming people in certain contexts when they make decisions when they couldn’t possibly have known. Somebody tells that they discovered after that experience.

Thal:                 

What you’re describing seems like a struggle for our modern mindset, to have to make a decision, despite the plethora of information that we have. I mean every time, I know personally, every time I want to make a change in my life, the first thing I do is I hit the bookstore. I’ve been in situations where the more I’ve read, I’ve, I was more confused and that I had to just take that quote unquote leap of faith and just make that decision. Then going through the experience was the learning and then whatever information that I collected was either confirmed or some of it was not. So…

Laurie:              

Yes. In some ways it’s a distinctively modern problem. So first we’re encouraged to think that various kinds of science are going to give us the answers. And again, I’m a big fan of both natural, social, and psychological science. It gives us lots of information, but there’s this assumption that, well, we’re going to actually get all the answers that way. Well then if we just go out there, so much information available to us. Right. And the Internet. And also just because now so much has been kind of recorded and written down and you know, several hundred years ago, obviously many people, you know, they didn’t have any access to the information even if they have the ability to maybe write and whether they need to. And so now we have so much available to us. There’s this thought that well this is, we have everything that we need somehow and that we’re only limited by our own laziness or our own inability to search everywhere that we should. And I think that’s a mistake and it comes from misunderstanding the way that we work as humans. You know it’s, there are some ways we get information that come from experiences and experiences alone, and understanding that I think really changes the way that we should think about certain constraints. A leap of faith. Well, sometimes I do think because experiences, they only answer, you either leap into the experience to buy the ticket or you don’t.

That’s the choice, the choice is to discover what that experience is like or not. Let me draw a parallel that I find interesting. So there’s a way in which you know, we can understand at a deep level that we can’t understand another person’s first person perspective. We can to some extent, I can learn, you can talk to me about your life. I can think about it. We can empathize and various kinds of ways. But there’s another sense in which, I don’t know, I can’t know really what it’s like to be you, either of you and you can’t know in a deep way what it’s really like to be me. There’s a lot you can do, but you can’t know everything. Okay. Once we understand that it’s, I think then we can take that and apply that insight into thinking about who we might have been, our other possible (inaudible) of ours.

The problem of other minds and there was really understanding someone else’s mind can come into play when you think about understanding your own mind, if it were changed in certain important ways, like through these experiences. So, you know, the, I have two children, the possible self who never had children. My children are 11 and 15. It’s been a while. I really don’t have, I can’t jump into the mind of the possible person, Laurie, who never had children. She’s just too different from me now. She’s like another person. I think recognizing that, that this person, this thing we know about other people’s minds can also apply to ourselves. Kind of helps put this other discussion to context about how it looks. Sometimes there’s just some things that we can’t know and the wise response is to understand that and work with it. I’m not trying to pretend otherwise.

Thal:                 

It sounds like, in some ways, understanding ourselves deeply helps us then understand other people’s minds too to a degree and inform our decisions that are transformative. As you had mentioned…

Laurie:              

I guess I would emphasize like understanding what we can know, what we can’t know, helps us to understand both ourselves better and also, that’s right, other people. Going back to parenting, which is a really useful example, it helps me to realize that there are things about my children that I can’t know and at this isn’t a failure. I mean it would be nice to know, I suppose when I have to make decisions for them about their lives. As they get older this is not important, but when they’re small, there’s a that you cannot know and you have to take chances, and sometimes you make mistakes.

Adrian:             

It just reminded me of a very sort of zen thing, like the don’t know mind. It’s sort of cultivating, being okay with not knowing, which is hard, you know, and the uncertainty that people have to learn to sit with.

Laurie:              

Yes. Well, epistemic humility. So a kind of humility in like what we expect ourselves and others to know and then becoming comfortable with uncertainty and not just uncertainty but unknowablility. So it’s one thing when I walk out of a room to be uncertain about what scene I might see, well, is it going to be, am I going to face a scene with some books in it or with a computer or with some trees? I could be uncertain which of those I’m going to face, but know that those are my three options. It’s a different kind of thing when I say if I open the door, I don’t know what’s going to be out there. So that’s an unknowability like let’s say I could be opening a portal to another world, right? Let’s go with that term, like that to kind of a radical kind of unknowability. Some of what I’m most interested in involves basically, if not as radical as like opening a portal to another world, a certain kind of unknowability like when you’ve never seen color, and all of a sudden you see colors and before you’ve seen the color, you just don’t know what it’s like to see color. It’s not about uncertainty in that case, and then you have to be comfortable even with unknowability.

Thal:                 

I was just thinking as you’re talking about that that there are aspects to that like opening the door and looking at the unknown. There are aspects that are hard to quantify from our human experience, like fear, guilt, shame, and these things can be associated with a decision, and there are also gut feelings. Sometimes you want to buy a house, everything looks good, but there’s a gut feeling that’s telling you not to buy the house. What can you say about that?

Laurie:              

I think what I would say is feelings and emotions matter, I think as much as the kind of facts about something. So I assigned value to the nature of an experience. Right? Part of what I’m saying is that what it’s like to live one’s life after the fact, the value that one assigns, which should actually incorporate this kind of subjective character. The other thing I would say is that part of what what you’re talking involves for me stuff about motivation. It’s one thing to know various kinds of outcomes like you might know how to map out all the different outcomes and what weights to attached to how likely those outcomes might be. Yet you might not be motivated but you might be afraid or you might have other kinds of emotions that come into play that would affect the way that you make a decision. I think that’s a place where rationality straws.

Adrian:             

What are your thoughts on using visualization? Is that sort of reliable to imagine with your mind using images or scenarios to imagine the home that you’re contemplating to buy in and sort of watching maybe perhaps how your body’s responding as information. How does that fit into your model?

Laurie:              

Good. Yeah. I think there are lots of different ways we make decisions. In one way we’d like to make decisions involves some kind of visualization that you imagine yourself in a situation. Sometimes what you’re doing is putting yourself in that situation messily and then trying to figure out what should I do, like what are my preferences. Sometimes though in virtue of imagining yourself in a situation you form your preferences, right? You might not even have had preferences until you actually are in that situation. The way this comes back to a transformative experience is that part of what I’m saying is that we use that tool often when we’re trying to figure out what to do, but if you don’t have the information you need, if you say, well, I want to decide, do I want to like put them on enchroma glasses and be able to see colors in the world or don’t I, maybe I will find it overwhelming and frightening and in disruptive or maybe I’ll think it’s fabulous.

Well, if you’ve never seen color, you don’t have the ability to imagine in an accurate way what that’s going to be like. So you can’t discover your prefrences. I think the same thing happens. Take somebody who’s been in prison for 25 years who’s never used the internet, who’s never used a cell phone. They’re up for parole. They have to go and face the parole board and describe how they’re gonna respond to and preparing themselves for various kinds of difficult situations to convince the parole board to let them out. There’s a way in which we’re asking you to do something impossible. It’s just, they can say things. I think people do say things, you get prepared and hopefully obviously they’re there and prepared enough to answer the questions, but I think often we’re actually putting a quite an unfair burden on this person because the (inaudible) changes so much in ways that they’ve had no experience. They can’t possibly perform from the kinds of visualizations that they would need to be able to assess what they’re going to face in the outside world and make the right decisions.

Adrian:             

Yeah. For some reason, I am thinking about Elon Musk and the mission to Mars, it’s like, if that was an option, would you like to move to Mars? That’s one of those scenarios where you just have no reference.

Laurie:              

Exactly. I think parallel cases are, say someone is thinking about emigrating, right, and there might be political reasons forced you to leave, and so maybe you don’t have a choice, but even then it’s a kind of opening a door to like another world. People will go because maybe they have to, but if you’re making the decision, maybe you have to make a choice between moving to one country that’s very different from the one that you’re in. Again, you faced this sort of problem, like it’s an unknown really how all the things you’re going to experience and how you’re going respond to how you’re going to change. What do I want to discover, what it’s going to be like or do I want to pass up that chance because even though there are opportunities there, it’s also going to change me and I value who I am now, and I think it can be totally rational to pass up the chance like that.

Thal:                 

One of the main reasons we started this podcast was to sort of address or walk around the issue of the meaning crisis that we’re going through right now. We feel like your work around transformative experiences can offer an answer or a prespective to that crisis. Is there anything you’d like to speak to about that?

Laurie:             

I’ve said a few things about revelation and what I think of as wisdom rather than truth. In other words, I think that first recognizing that experience is something where we, that we can use to learn about ourselves in the world in virtue of having the experience. There’s a way in which something is revealed to you. What’s revealed to you is in a sense how you respond to the world, right? So when you go out into the world and see color for the first time, what you really discovering is how you respond to various kinds of (inaudible) things like that. The way that you’ll experience beauty and so what beauty is then for you. I think parenting is like that as well. I don’t think there’s a right choice or wrong choice with respect to parenting. I think, often, becoming a parent carries as much suffering with it as joy. In fact, it probably carries more suffering with it, than it carries joy and the decision to undergo these kinds of experiences aren’t simple calculations and I don’t think they’re specially informed calculations when it comes to thinking about like pluses and minuses or how much joy or satisfaction or sadness you experienced.

It’s just rather, look, this is what it is to live it is to undergo some of these experiences. It’s not wrong to try to control them as much as you can because you want to have a say over them even if you don’t know what’s going to happen even if there’s both unknowability and uncertainty. So what you’re seeking is a kind of discovery and revelation and opportunity, not necessarily knowing what the truths are and then judiciously choosing the ones that are right for you and rejecting the ones that are wrong for you. That sometimes is what we do, but in many other kinds of context, that’s just the wrong way to think about the trick does that we’re making in the way that we’re understanding things, and all that then goes back to like philosophy and going back to what we said in the beginning about natural, like empirical sciences, like often empirical sciences are about uncovering truths, uncovering like what the road is like in, in various ways and getting answers to questions. Philosophy isn’t about that. Philosophy is about asking questions, discovering questions, and then sometimes recognizing that there are things that … that we can’t know or understanding like how we’re supposed to kind of face and understand the place of a person in the world, and that’s kind of what wisdom involves. There’s a contrast there and that’s fine.

Adrian:             

I’m reminded of our conversation with John Vervaeke and he mentioned the term existential inertia. There are these moments in our lives where there’s this stuckness because it feels like you just, you just can’t get going or can’t move. It sounds to me just hearing you speak, there’s a wisdom in continuing to just keep treading, like to not reach a point of stillness where you’re just not moving, and it could be because it’ll be really hard to get going again.

Laurie:              

I think that’s right. This goes back again and accepting unknowablitiy and uncertainty and not feeling like you have to act in order to eliminate in order to create certainty because sometimes maybe you do, but sometimes that’s the wrong impulse. Instead of thinking that you must eliminate all the unknowns, you must eliminate all the uncertainty, you can just allow it to be. Even when you do make choices, you don’t have to think about your self as always making the right choice as much as I’m just discovering basically a way that the world’s going to reveal itself to be more evolved in various kinds of ways and not thinking that we have to be in control in all respects of our life.

Thal:                 

What you’re saying too is like, it really just goes in line with a lot of the mystical language that I’ve explored in my life and just you saying that just allowing and surrendering and these are very important concepts. Sometimes we don’t, we can’t just tread along. Sometimes we just have to sit with the unknown, with the paradox and just allow things to unfold.

Laurie:              

I’m going to say it’s not giving up either. I think people feel anxiety when they feel that they have to try to create certainties and just kind of being and not controlling is actually a way of a kind of establishing a kind of control at a higher level. Being at ease with the way that things change is a response that shows kind of stability and a kind of understanding. In some ways the right way to approach the kind of anxiety of like all the different ways. It seems like we’re supposed to construct and control things.

Thal:                 

Yes, I mean it’s so easy to talk about, but really anxiety is like, we’re all struggling with it and I’m just thinking like someone listening to this and like, okay, I will sit with it but it really is about that and you know, trusting and allowing.

Laurie:              It’s incredibly hard and it can be really unpleasant. It is not like, “oh, I’ll just be uncertain. Let it all sit and everything will feel wonderful.” No, I think usually it often, I mean maybe things feel wonderful after awhile or maybe you get a reduction of anxiety in some ways, but that doesn’t mean that there are no unpleasant things to the endure.

Thal:                 

That’s part of the experience. I mean, it comes with the positive and it comes with a negative and it’s experiential work essentially.

Adrian:             

What can you tell us about, we noticed the book that you’re currently working on is called Becoming, I feel like this is a good time to bring that word. What do you mean by Becoming?

Laurie:              

I don’t actually know if that’s going to be the title. I hate to say this expression because apparently Michelle Obama wrote a book that has that title. I can’t compete with Michelle. Another title that I have sort of played around with is, “Who will I become?” What I’m trying to get at there is again, how we construct ourselves sometimes how we construct ourselves through making decisions to have experiences and sometimes we’re just constructed by experiences. I want to explore that in the book. I talk about transformative experience but I also talk about how, actually I talk a good bit about how embracing various ways in which we dispense with old selves and parts of ourselves and new selves can surface sometimes unexpectedly, through choices that we make or life experiences that we have to undergo. Sort of understanding that kind of ebb and flow of one’s own kind of first personal perspective, especially oer the span of a lifetime, and the other thing that I spend some time talking about is how we often I think make judgments about, whether we think it would be better or worse to be a certain kind of person. I think when we make those judgments, sometimes they’re good judgments, but sometimes they’re born out of ignorance and a failure to remember that kind of self can really be impenetrable and we have to respect again, we can’t know about other people and about who we could become after various kinds of experiences.

Thal:                 

And with that judgment, really, is rigidity and the black and white thinking and it’s not a good place to go to.

Laurie:              

We can uncover certain kinds of truths, but there’s a kind of humility that’s really important to recall and to say, well, look, I can think I know some things, but to assume that I know all the information that’s necessary, in these kinds of context when we’re talking especially about knowing other human minds and knowing other ways our own line could be, I think is just naive. There’s a kind of self-change that can be so dramatic that you simply can’t put yourself in the shoes of another version of you. If you think about yourself 15 years ago, for example, when I think about myself, there’s, I remember things about what it was like to be me then, but there is way where I can’t put myself back in those shoes 15 years ago, I had just changed too much. When I think about myself 15 years from now, or myself, 35 years from now, descending into dementia. Right? I mean, maybe not even 25 years, but let’s, let’s not go there.

Thal:                 

That’s black and white thinking right there.

(Laughter)

Laurie:              

I think it’s like reasonable to say there’s a way in which I can’t both put myself in those shoes as that future self and still be who I am now. There’s a kind of incommensurability in our mental lives that has to be recognized. So just assuming, oh yeah, I know enough about what I’ll be like then to make choices for that future self with full knowledge and full certainty is just wrong. We shouldn’t try to put that burden on ourselves because that’s the wrong way to approach the changes in the ways that life bring us and the ways that we teach our own lives.

Thal:                 

I have to say, I mean, I find your work fascinating, which takes me to the question I’m thinking about, what philosopher inspired you or continues to inspire you or what kind book that you’ve read that sort of transformed your life or changed your perspective and is there anything you specifically would recommend?

Laurie:              

Edna Ullmann Margalit is a political philosopher who wrote about various kinds of life changes and she talked about opting, drifting, and converting. There’s a paper that I would recommend. I’m also a fan of some of Cass Sunstein’s work on nudging and self change. Those are useful things to read. The philosopher that motivated me the most was someone David Lewis. He w,as a technical philosopher. He wrote hard to read and hard to understand books, so you really have to be committed if you want to read David Lewis, and his work, in particular, he wrote a paper called “What Experiences Teaches” and he’s written other work on decision-making and the metaphysics of selves that I love. You could read Thomas Nagel’s paper, what it’s like to be a bat, and you could read. I think I’ll stick with that. Yeah. A lot of my work, even though I’ve been talking about it in ways that I hope are accessible to non-philosophers. A lot of the work really is based on academic work in metaphysics and epistemology. My own book, transformative experience was written for philosophers, although lots of non philosophers have read it, and that makes me really happy. The book that I’m writing now is actually written for non-philosophers. So my hope is that people would read that book, to get a kind of a glimpse onto some of the philosophical issues, and then if they were really interested, they could read like my philosophical books or other works of other philosophers that I cite.

Thal:                 

When you mentioned that title, is how to be a bat? (inaudible) I’m reminded of Kafka’s Metamorphosis, and waking up as a beetle. That’s my literature mind, but I’m like, to make those connections between the different fields is fascinating.

Laurie:              

Great and actually in my new book, I talk about a number of different works of art in literature and connections. Another thing that you could read, philosophical discussions of Plato’s cave and how…which is an old dialogue where you have Socrates talking with Glaucon about people who are in a cave who are just looking at shadows on the wall and they think they’re seeing reality because they have never been allowed to kind of escape the cave, but actually there’s the way in which everything you’re seeing is an illusion. I don’t want to say that the external world is an illusion or anything like that. What I think is great about that example is that it’s a way of understanding how…what we see and experience is a reflection in some sense of how the outside world is affecting us. I think it is a really good mental exercise to engage.

Adrian:             

One final question, Laurie. If you could say one thing to your future selves, what would you like to say?

Thal:                

 I like that.

Laurie:              

I would say that I need to pay attention to what I’ve learned from my past selves to not forget about epistemic humility.

Thal:                 

Awesome.

Adrian:             

It was a real treat. Thank you very much, Laurie.

Laurie:              

Yeah. Nice to talk with you guys. Thank you.

#12: Reclaiming the Inner Teen with Avi Zer-Aviv

April 14, 2019 Culture, Life Transition, Mindfulness, Podcast, Psychology, Spirituality 01:06:21

“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”

Jiddu Krishnamurti

One of the most important aspects of healing is tending to our emotional wounds. We have all been hurt. It might look different from one person to another, but some of our wounds are deep and carry a specific age. When we are trying to work on our wholeness, we may have to pay attention to our inner child or our inner teen. Bringing back the lost parts of ourselves and integrating into maturity is the essence of self-development.

On this episode, we have a conversation with Avi Zer-Aviv, a Toronto-based Psychotherapist and educator. Avi is a member of the Canadian Humanistic and Transpersonal Association and a LGBTQI positive Practitioner. Avi’s holistic approach to psychotherapy is informed by decades of deep inner work and spiritual exploration. In this conversation, we discuss the role of psychotherapy in modern society and learn the tricky dance of working with activated “inner teens”. Avi shows us how our deepest wounds can end up becoming our biggest doorways to personal transformation.

Highlights:

  • Difference Between a Psychologist, Psychotherapist and Psychiatrist
  • Psychology of the Inner Teen
  • Healthy vs Unhealthy Shame

Resources:

Listen:

Poem Inspired by This Episode

Full Transcript

Thal:

Hello Avi, Welcome to the show.

Avi:

Thank you for having me.

Thal:

Thank you. Thank you for coming on. Um, we wanted to start today with, uh, your personal journey. Um, you have been a psychotherapist now for a few years. Um, please let us know how did you get there?

Avi:

I’ll give you the coles notes.

Thal:

Alright.

Avi:

Um never thought I would be a therapist. Never set out to be a therapist. I had a sort of an early awakening when I was a teenager, sorta grew up in the suburbs of Toronto up in York region and white picket fence sort of life. I’m not really religious. I’m very much consumer. And I started to find myself wanting more of probably around 12 or 13 starting to think about things that, um, mystery, the mystery of life, but I didn’t really have any one to bounce anything off of. Um, and um, I had an, I have an aunt and uncle were kind of at the time were sort of the black sheep of the family and they, uh, asked me up to their cottage up in a Bancroft Ontario and I spent 10 days there, and it felt like I found my tribe. I remember thinking that when I was teenager, like, oh, these are my people.

Adrian:

So how were they different from the rest of your family? How are they black sheeps?

Avi:

Uh, they were, they just didn’t drink the Kool-aid of, you know, what is your, what the program of life is supposed to be. They were travellers, they were um, uh, spent a lot of time in Asia. They owned, they owned a, uh, an Indian clothing store on Queen West and meditated and were vegetarians and just things that were off the beaten track. Um, and um, yeah, so I, I intuitively felt that I’d found people I could talk to about things that I’ve been really hungry to talk about and that was kind of where it all started.

Thal:

That’s awesome because those questions that you have at that young age, a lot of people do have those questions and don’t know where to go and sometimes that causes more anxiety.

Avi:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s, it’s very easy to get isolated. Yes. Yeah, for sure. Um, so I felt really lucky, but then I had to come back to my suburban life and the contrast made things even more painful. Um, so I became kind of a rebellious teenager and uh, just was counting the minutes until high school was finished so I could go traveling, which is something really wanted to do and that’s exactly what I did. I, I the minute high school ended I set off and lived in Asia for a year and I myself in India for six months, on a spiritual pilgrimage and meditated my brains out. Lived in south India, different ashrams. The Aurobindo Ashram, Ramana Maharishi Ashram, and I went pretty deep with my meditation practices. But when I got back to Toronto I realized that wasn’t really in my body. I was very much opening a lot of doorways, but I was kind of, my energy was going up and I sort of left body behind and um, that’s how I just might, my instinct was to just to meditate more and that just seemed to perpetuate this kind of feeling of ungroundedness and just feeling of kind of not wanting to be in the world, just wanting to meditate back to whatever source was/is. And uh, then I started getting panic attacks in my early twenties, which was the invitation to psychotherapy.

Thal:

How old were you when you were in India?

Avi:

18.

Thal:

And it’s usually at that age, um, and you know, you going after the spiritual path without the embodied part is what may have caused, um, you wanting to escape, escape your body.

Avi:

Absolutely.

Thal:

And, and so psychotherapy helped you integrate body and soul?

Avi:

yeah, it came very reluctantly. I didn’t really believe that psychotherapy was a valuable tool because of the sort of focus on content, on story and on narrative, on history. I sort of, from a, from a young sort of a this not in not integrated spiritual lens, that was just ego indulging itself and that wasn’t, that was just kind of getting caught in the web of you know, at the time when I called maya, or illusion and so I really didn’t come in, in an open hearted voluntary. I came in really because these panic attacks were getting worse so much so I would have them on the street and feel like I would just couldn’t interact socially. Um, and so I really came to just, I wanted someone to help me get rid of these panic attacks and I gave myself a year to get and get back to my spiritual practice. I could go and become enlightened [laughing]. You know, what is it now 20 something years later? For me, psychotherapy was a doorway into an integrated spirituality. So I didn’t have to leave my spirituality behind. What I did have to leave behind was an idea of spirituality, though that was really about not being here in the world, which in my opinion, any good spirituality is one that is of the earth and is in life. We’re here, we’re alive, we’re in this body, and so why not be here?

Thal:

Exactly. That’s very important to remember because even the word spirituality, a lot of people find it problematic or don’t understand it and assume that it’s about escaping when in reality, all the authentic spiritual teachings are about being in the world and enacting your humanity in the world.

Avi:

Yes, yes.

Adrian:

It sounded like you had your panic attacks and so it was when things were so bad that forced you to, okay, now try, try new things. And psychotherapy, you went into it somewhat skeptical. It sounded like you, you know, you didn’t really fully buy into the idea of it. Um, you even set a deadline in a year if you want to be fixed and then you can just continue on with your meditation. What changed? So what at what moment did it start to shift for you when you realize, okay, this is not what I thought it was and what was it? What, what did it become for you?

Avi:

I worked with a really interesting therapist who was very much all about the here and now. And I thought, oh great. The present moment. There’s nothing like the present moment. This is a spiritual approach. Yet I didn’t, I didn’t have a sense of how much I didn’t want to be in the moment emotionally and vulnerably that I wanted to be in the moment with lofty concepts of mysticism and um, uh, you know, big picture stuff. But to be finite in the moment, to be raw, naked, emotionally naked in the moment was not only painful but was… Opened the door to my deep wounds and all my… And so I, this therapist was really challenging, did not, did not really like it, did not, not so much like, but really challenged me to stay in the moment with him. And, um, that’s not an easy thing when you haven’t been, when you’re not steeped in that and when that isn’t the way you’ve been brought up.

Thal:

Absolutely. And this is the, um, I guess, psychological arm of this spiritual path. A lot of people, um, you know, seek spirituality as a way to bypass a psychological trauma.

Avi:

yes,

Thal:

You know, developmental trauma, whatever, the pain of being human. And um, and so it sounds like psychotherapy in your life was a tool to bring you back into your body.

Avi:

It was. But you know, it’s interesting, when I first started spiritual practices at a really young age, Yoga, vegetarianism, I was amazed at how much clearing happened. And I think it’s a very common experience for a lot of people that don’t, that have just kind of, it’s a great starting point, spiritual practices. And it really does have a way of. A lot of these practices have a way of clearing energy and opening energy and expanding energy. And so, um, you know, in the moment you can be a little bliss bunny because you go from living a humdrum, mundane life to all of a sudden having visions or feeling waves of energy. I, everyone has a different thing, but it’s very intoxicating and beautiful doorway possibly for a lot of people in it. I think psychotherapy is just the downward movement. So if you think about spirituality is an upward movement. This is just the, the integration of, so you could say cosmos and the mundane and the transcendent and the imminent.

Adrian:

Since Thal and I are both training to be therapist, we are commonly asked what is the difference between psychotherapy and seeing a psychologist or psychiatrist? There’s all these kinds of terminologies and credentials. Maybe this is a good chance for us to help kind of differentiate a little bit some of the differences and why you might seek one over the other.

Avi:

Sure, sure. Um, you know, psychotherapy up until the last few years has not been regulated in Ontario. So anybody could call themselves a psychotherapist and the focus of psychotherapists is psychotherapy, is counselling. It’s interventions around looking at people’s struggle, all of our struggle that the human struggle that we’re all in, but then our own personal struggles in our lives and essentially what gets in our way. That’s the, that’s the core of everything is what’s, what gets in our way of who we know we already are in how we want to live. And uh, the work of a psychotherapist is to help a client open to that and explore that and help the client get out of their way if they want to. Tt’s soul work. It’s the work of deep soul work. Now this is my lens of psychotherapy. Now there’s a lot of different types of psychotherapies. There’s cognitive behavioral therapy, which is more practical and psychoanalytic psychotherapy, which is more interpretive, but the kind of psychotherapy that I’ve been trained in and that has been my healing path is more a relational psychotherapy. It’s more psychodynamic, more, um, more opening to the mystery of self and without trying to fix or solve, but really taking the invitation to go deeper into the mystery. So that’s my unique experience and sort of how I look at psychotherapy. Now psychotherapy is now regulated in Ontario as of the last few years, um, through the college of psychotherapists, CRPO and um, uh, so to be, to call yourself a psychotherapists you have to be a registered psychotherapist. There’s a whole training involved. Um, do you want to know now that it’s sort of the distinction between…

Adrian:

I think it’d be helpful because some people have heard of, okay, I saw a psychiatrist and maybe they are also don’t know, is that psychotherapy? Right? Or a psychologist, you know, even looking at like in a very practical sense like insurance coverage, they might see, oh, I’m covered for all these things, but what’s the difference? They all start with a ‘p’ and I don’t know, you know, they’ll have psyche in it. They seem to be related to the mind because I, I’m sure there are lots of overlaps, but for a consumer who is new and is searching, it might be helpful to provide some guidance.

Avi:

Psychologist, it’s a doctoral program and they’re trained… The specialty with a psychologist is diagnosis. They’re very much trained around diagnosing mental health issues, mental health conditions, and they’re legally allowed to diagnose. Psycho therapist can assess, we can’t diagnose, but we can treat, um, whereas psychologists can diagnose and treat. There are a lot of psychologists that do psychotherapy in the sense of counseling and having these kinds of conversations with people. Um, the focus for many psychologists is diagnosis in that sort of their specialty area. Whereas the psychiatrist is a medical doctor who is trained in their specialty is prescribing medication. And um, uh, now, you know, a psychiatrist can do psychotherapy and psychologists can do psychotherapy, but psychotherapists can’t diagnose like a psychologist can and psychotherapists can’t prescribe like a psychiatrist can. So does that kind of clear up a little bit of the…?

Adrian:

I think that’s a great distinction. Having a sense of even the scope of what they’re trained to do and what they offer.

Thal:

I’m a second year student, a phd in transpersonal psychology. So, I definitely cannot prescribe or diagnose even because it’s not clinical psychology.

Avi:

Right.

Thal:

Um, it’s more, I would say it’s closer to the psychotherapeutic arm of mental health. Um, but a lot of people do also ask what does transpersonal mean? I’m from your description of psychotherapy. That’s, that’s the transpersonal, that’s the, uh, the, the, the space beyond the ego and um, and, and, and through my program, um, we’re able to sort of connect that with empirical research and I’m sort of, we look into how the brain functions during meditation and altered states and all that. So, um, and that’s all within the realm of mental health.

Avi:

The word transpersonal is misinterpreted heavily because the word itself, trans beyond personal beyond the self. Yes. There is an aspect to us that is bigger than ourselves, but it doesn’t mean we don’t get to take the self with us. It doesn’t mean the self sort of dissolves into nothingness and the spirit comes through and um, you know, is running the show without any. I like to the, the sort of adage that I really like when it comes to helping people understand what is transpersonal psychotherapy and what is just the transpersonal itself is, you know, do you guys know the saying it’s not the uh, you know, that whole idea of spirituality being like we’re like all like drops that drop into the ocean and sort of the ocean as the bigger, bigger consciousness, bigger, whatever your name for that is, whether it’s God or Goddess or whatever your thing. So I like to, when I, when I’m trying to explain what is transpersonal, I really like to say it’s not the drop that slips into the ocean, but it’s the ocean that slips into the drop. And that to me is what an embodied spirituality is. You don’t actually get to dissolve yourself, but you do get to take yourself along with, for the bigger ride that is bigger than you. It is bigger than your what do I want? What do I fear? It’s bigger than your wounds. So there is a place that’s bigger than our wounds. Truly. Yeah.

Thal:

And to get to that place, we have to understand her wounds and confront them.

Avi:

Absolutely. Absolutely. That is the price.

Adrian:

So on that note, since we brought up, um, you bring up a few things that are, I think are really important to highlight just so your approach to therapy as embracing the mystery of self, right? So really it’s a journey of getting to know parts of yourself that maybe you have either forgotten or didn’t place much attention and the wounded parts being probably a key part to actually focus on in the therapeutic relationship. Can you maybe share with us what that’s like for people that might not have experienced therapy? What does that process like and how might these old wounds show up in people’s current lives and how they experience the world?

Avi:

Do you mean how therapists work with wounds or how I would work with a wound as a therapist?

Adrian:

Maybe give an example for how it would show up for a person that might not be aware that these old wounds are affecting their experience of the world and that the way they interact with other people because it perhaps is not conscious yet.

Avi:

I see. I see, um, well wounds are a tricky business because to be alive is to be wounded. And what I mean by that is we’re our, our true nature is vast and spacious and wants to merge with everything. This is kind of like the true spiritual identity of who we all are. And so, and then we’re all tossed into this existence where you have a body and you’re called Adrian and we all have different names and you have a, you know, we have separate bodies and separate experiences and we’re sort of tossed to figure it out on our own. So that in itself creates an existential crisis that is just called life, right? This vast, expansive spirit trying to reconcile, living in a finite, um, singular experience. It’s William Blake, one of my favorite, a really great poet, uh, you know, he says eternity, which he’s saying like life source, eternity is in love with time and space. But to become, to go into the time and space, it has to be dismembered. It has to be broken. That pure vast spirit has to be. It’s like a shard of broken glass that you call it, that we’re all calling our separate selves. So it, you know, um, just to breathe and to take up space in a way is to be wounded. There’s a book called, uh, I think it’s called The Trauma of Birth and it’s essentially not, not birth trauma, but it’s just traumatic to be born in an existential sense.

Adrian:

It’s the price of admission.

Avi:

It’s the price of admission. So it’s, it’s a negotiation and um, you don’t have to have had a terrible childhood to… You could have a great childhood and you’re still in those waters. Now, for some people, like you said it, some people are more tuned into that level of, of their self, of their being, and other people are less tuned in and that’s okay. That’s, there’s no, I don’t think that, you know, at some point in life we all will struggle with this for a lot of people. It does come out around Midlife. It’s when a lot of people start to become a little more reflective, but some of us, and that’s all of us in this room actually, um, or just kind of have more of an orientation to introspection.

Thal:

And some people want to tune in, but have palpable wounds that maybe act as an obstacle. Um, and perhaps that’s what Adrian was trying to or was hinting at. Um, maybe developmental traumas or actual traumas. I mean, we’re not gonna go into the details of that, but that, those also can be obstacles or the tools. Yes. If confronted to, to, um, like tune in to the bigger self.

Avi:

Well, because our culture doesn’t give us enough tools, there aren’t enough elders in the culture to help us understand what these wounds are when they come up. The they come up through symptoms is, is because we don’t have enough elders to guide us. They do show up, but they come up through, you know, when I mentioned panic attacks in my case or it will be something different. Most people come to therapy for one of two things. Anxiety or depression or some variation of anxiety or depression means a hyper state (anxiety) or a hypo state (depression). And most, you know, the way, um, it’s like coming back to my story, just I want to get rid of this. It’s just that helped me get rid of my wound to help me fix my wound so I can go back and become spiritual person again. Whereas from an integrated, from an integrated psychotherapy and an integrated spirituality, those symptoms are the doorways to the gods. And what I mean by that is that in, in the exploration of what we’re calling wounds. What we’re calling our symptoms is not just pain and suffering, but is a whole ocean of, of who knows what, desire, longing, yearning, heartbreak, unmet dreams, unmet potentials. And if you follow that, it’s hard to follow that. To follow that means you have to really feel it. And, but if you can stay with it, if you can, if you can follow that thread, um, entire doors that were not there will open for you. So at the end of the day, it’s not so much, okay, I fixed my wounds. Now it’s more, the wound is an invitation into living a fuller, richer, more embodied life and having richer connections with people. I think the deep longing of the times is around connection. Um, there’s a deep isolation that we’re all of us experience and um, the instinct is to fill it with stuff, just name the substance that you know, just think about your life and what substance you go to to fill your need for connection. Right? And so this approach is like an alternative to just try and fill that place inside with stuff. It’s actually looking at the raw energy itself of the desire of the need and seeing how you live in your own skin and how do you, how do you feed yourself spiritually, how do you care for your own being? And a lot of that, that’s a mystery to a lot of people. How to just self care in the sense of …

Thal:

Inner work.

Avi:

Inner work and just being kind, being kind to self. That’s a mystery from..

Thal:

Self compassion.

Avi:

Self compassion, right?

Adrian:

I think a lot of people might actually be surprised to hear this, but even as adults, you’re walking around thinking, okay, I’m a full grown adult that we’re carrying with us many parts of self, including our child selves, right? Especially the ones who are carrying the wounds if these wounds happen early in life. Um, so we are walking with all these selves all the time and I think it’s a helpful language almost to even be able to name some of this stuff and start to just begin to get some clarity in the potentially messy experience that we’re having, you know, when, when someone is overwhelmed with anxiety to realize that, you know, maybe some of it is a longing or a crying for help and it’s coming from the inner child parts. Um, would you mind sharing with us what that might look like in a therapeutic setting where people are working with their, their inner child or. Sure. Or the term, you know, we often hear is reparenting, you know, when we’re learning to reparent these wounds.

Avi:

Something that you said just now, I’m sorta just, I just want to come back for a second to the cult, to our culture itself.

Thal:

Modernity.

Avi:

Modernity. Krishnamurti, a modern philosopher from India said, it’s no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society. And the reason I want to come back to that is there are people that are just more sensitive by nature and those are the people that often end up in therapy, younger. It’s all of you, all of us. And uh, you know, to be sensitive in a world that is on fire, on, in so many ways is a very challenging thing to be really awake in these times or environmental catastrophe. And crisis of meaning. It’s to really look at that, to really be open. It’s, it’s not an easy time to be an awake person and to be a sensitive person. So, um, I just want to say this because just to give people listening a compass here actually, if you’re, if you’re feeling wounded and you’re probably more healthy. So I’m being a little facetious, but what I mean by that is, um, it’s okay to. It’s okay to feel. It’s okay to, um, you know, struggle. It’s actually a sign that you’re alive when you struggle.

Adrian:

I think that’s so important to highlight. I mean in a, in a culture that is I think celebrates intellect and being able to rise into the cognitive parts of being that we lose sense of like it’s talking about the sensitivity through the body, through our emotions, and although it’s painful, it might actually be a sign that you’re waking up, that your beginning …

Avi:

And that you’re and that you’re part of you is listening to what’s happening around you.

Thal:

That you’re alive!

Avi:

Yes, that you’re alive! And reacting to what you know.

Thal:

Congratulations, you’re not a robot. [laughing]

Avi:

You’re not a robot, you’re not a robot. There’s such a fear right now of being impacted of impacting each other, that, that what you do and what you say in how he, God forbid that should impact me or God forbid what I do or say should impact you. It’s like we’ve come to a point now where it’s like, it’s that absurd, right? We’re afraid of impacting each other, where that is the whole point right here. That’s the whole reason of being alive is that’s the other word to say that is relationship. I impact you and you impact me. That’s the nature of relationship and so I’m coming back to being wounded, um, you know, using that as an invitation to what’s happening around you, what’s happening inside of you and all of your relationships inner and out. And so yes, we have Adrian about your question. We have relationship with parts of ourself that are at different stages developmentally, including a younger, more, um, a younger aspects of our own history, of our own self that live in us and we are in relationship with them. Uh, whether it’s our infant, part of our nature, pre-verbal part of our nature. I’m sort of more adolescent aspect. We, we do have relationship with aspects of self and I don’t mean that in a sort of defined sort of compartmentalized way. I mean it in the sense of who we are as a tapestry. Yes, just like life. And so we’re, we’re relating to different aspects of ourselves all the time. Unconsciously. Mostly.

Thal:

It is the complexity of being a human. We are not too deep, like, you know, there, there are so many layers to our existence and speaking of that, we’d like to go into the inner teen. That’s a term that we’ve heard you mentioned before. And um, what, what, what does that mean? And um, yeah, yeah.

Adrian:

How is it different from the Child?

Thal:

Exactly.

Adrian:

Yeah. There clearly are differences when we entered teenage years and how it affects us psychologically.

Avi:

So just coming back to what we’re talking about is the collage of our inner self. There’s different parts, um, were mostly encouraged to walk around with what we call an adult. If we are in adults, assuming we’re assuming chronologically we’re in that part of our life. And that could be different things too, but the idea is to be, you know, the adult part of us is autonomous and can make decisions for ourselves and is in negotiation with life, with prioritizing what’s important. And it’s, it’s kind of, you can think of it as a muscle in your, in your mind that, uh, is discerning and that knows how to respond to situations and people. And, and, and there isn’t, I just want to say when, because it’s very easy to fall into, um, perfection. We’re not talking, I’m not talking about any kind of utopic idealized sense. It’s just you could say the part of you that the part of us that knows how to navigate our life and knows how to, um, I don’t know, what’s the word I’m looking for is that knows how to.

Thal:

I’m thinking maybe like these are like bringing up these terms are just tools for us, like you said, to help us navigate our lives. Um, and uh, it’s not an end goal and it’s not. When we talk about the inner teen does not mean, okay, that means I have to grow into the adult. Yes. It’s, these are just tools for us to navigate our growth, our path in life.

Avi:

Yeah. It’s a lens to Lens.

Thal:

Yes.

Avi:

So this lens of adult is this lens of who we think we are mostly. And um, and then what do we do with the parts of us that come up that are more at a different developmental stage, the teen, the child. And so what is the teen? Uh, you know, it’s really interesting because there isn’t a lot of, we don’t often talk about our inner teen. You hear in popular psychology in books, the inner child is like, there’s hundreds if not thousands of books written on the inner child and how to work with the inner child. And that’s an easy concept for most people. Yeah. You got to have a young kid living inside of you. The kid feels things that kids feel it just named them. If the kid is, if the kid is a happy kid, the kid feels spontaneous and joyous and wants to play. And if the kid is not happy, the kid feels ashamed. The kid feels, um, maybe self-loathing, whatever it is. But it’s a very easy concept to grasp and most people can go, “oh yeah, yeah, there’s part of me that feels very young and shy and all these things”. But when it comes to the inner teen we’re getting into the weeds, because what happens when we actually move in our actual lives, when we move from being children to being adolescents, there’s a radical change happening in our bodies and in our minds and it’s a time where so much energy has to be mobilized to make that transition from childhood to adulthood. It’s a liminal intermediary time. And so the sort of life force us to really mobilize because if biologically, if we can’t do this, we really don’t grow up psychologically. And so there’s a tremendous energy that comes through in being an adolescent and we don’t, again, coming back to the culture, we don’t have a lot of guides for adolescence. Um, you know, there’s, there’s just such a lack of mentorship around what all these changes are. And so we’re, we, we’re often taught to shut it down and anything you shut down goes on the back burner and then it will show up later. And so a lot of us adults are walking around with a very activated inner teen and this inner teen is different than the inner child is not so much about the child kind of just wants to be nurtured in a very basic, elemental level. Children need gathering, support, to be seen, to be acknowledged. It’s very much about dependence needs from a childhood developmental level, an adolescent as a very different developmental need. It’s a time where you don’t want to be coddled and sort of held in that same way. It’s actually a time of… But it’s actually not a time where you want to be left to do your own thing either. In that liminal time it’s a time of rebellion, but even in their rebellion, you want to be there. There’s an energy that teenagers… I don’t know if anyone has teenagers in their life here…they want to be met often, even in their rebellion.

Thal:

My son is a preteen, so this helps.

Avi:

Okay. Well, especially boys, a lot of, a lot of boys with their mothers. Relationship with their mothers. It’s really a time that the psychological umbilical cord is cut and so on the one side that’s “get away from me, mom” but on the other side, on the other side, it’s “don’t leave me”, right?. It’s helpful for when the teenage knows there’s a place to come back to, to check in. So it’s an interdependent time, not a time of independence and not a time of dependence. It’s an interdependent time. It’s a very tricky dance and again, because the culture is very young in the sense of what to do with these energies. For many of us, we just bury that teen at the time when it’s happening, or spin out. You can bury the energy or you can spin out and act it out. So it’s that more stereotypical, rebellious teenager that tells everyone to F off and, you know. But even that it doesn’t fulfill the deeper need there, which is, um, “what do I… What the hell do I do with all of this life force channeling through me?” There’s an inner sexuality that’s being awakened. There’s um, you know, there’s an identity that’s being shed, but the new identity hasn’t been formed yet. So many, so many things happening. And so.. Fast forward later in your life, we all have an inner teen. I was a very rebellious teenager and just did what I wanted and didn’t really care. It’s a time of risk taking. I took a lot of risks as a teenager. Like I had a lot of luck. I didn’t get into as much trouble as I could have. And not everyone’s that lucky, but you know, I find that people that have been more on the Yang side of risk taking and acting out later in their life. Like I’m in my forties now and what I’ve been confronting over the last few years is an inner teen that is more quiet and shy. And that is a really unfamiliar territory for me because I was the exact opposite. So it’s kind of as when I tune into my teen he’s often really shy and I find working with people who have had the opposite experience kind of people that say “that oh my teenage years were fine. I didn’t really have any, you know, I was kind of just an obedient, quiet, good, good girl, good boy…”

Thal:

Yeah, you’re describing me! [laughing]

Avi:

People like you are fascinating because then they come to therapy and it’s like all this, all these jars just started opening and then all the, all the unmet, you know, all that life force. And it’s like, what do I do with it? So it’s good to create a podcast.

Thal:

Thank you Adrian! [laughing]

Adrian:

Even tuning into the energy of the conversation. I feel like this, you’ve mentioned the mobilization of energy. I’m feeling it as we’re speaking to, the teens are in the room now. You know, they’re mobilized. But I’m also getting… Kind of picking up on the importance of grounding that energy. And that sounds to be the key to this work is to find a way to work with that energy, not to diminish it and not to waste it.

Avi:

Yeah. The trick is grounding without shutting down because there’s a lot of talk about grounding and grounding is great, but you have to. We just have to be careful when it comes to the teen. The teen doesn’t want to… That energy does not necessarily want to ground. This is why working with our inner teen is not so simple. The nature of therapy is containment. You come in, you sit down, you have a conversation. Teenagers are future thinking. They don’t want to talk about what happened when they were five or what or what happened…Even when there are few…. it’s a drive. It’s visionary. A visionary energy. Therapy can feel like another suffocating place for an inner teen. So yes, that energy that you’re tuning into definitely needs grounding, but it has to be a very clever kind of grounding. Otherwise it can be instructive and it can come across as just someone telling me what to do.

Adrian:

Which is the last thing a teen wants to hear.

Avi:

So how to sort of, you know, trick somebody into grounding themselves. And it’s a, it’s like I love working with people’s inner teen because I know that place really well in myself and it’s not, it doesn’t freak me out at all. I actually find it really energizing and very… As a therapist, I’m learning a lot because I often get pushed back like, you know, “I don’t want to do that” or “God, I’m so sick of this”. Or “Oh God, you know, another therapist”. I don’t. “I’m sick of talking about my mom and dad”. Great. Because for me, I have to throw out the book of what I think I’m doing and I have to create a new therapy for this person by following them. And so yes, grounding, but on the teens’ terms. That’s where it gets complicated and tricky. Yeah.

Adrian:

Yeah. And, and the word sometimes I hear people use is transmute. So we’re maybe perhaps working with that energy. So by grounding it in where they feel like you’re trying to control them, it’s probably squashing it and we’re squandering this opportunity. I’m the visionary energy. It almost sounds it can be very productive. That’s going to actually, you know, it might be disruptive as it’s appearing in their life, but perhaps with the right guidance, it can actually be turned into a very productive transformation.

Avi:

Absolutely. Absolutely. I think so. And um, it’s only as we are seeing in the culture right now, it’s only young people that are going to be the leaders, to face the evolutionary crisis that we’re in right now. The environmental crisis and the crisis of meaning. It’s really young people that are going to pave for the way forward. And we just saw it in the United States with the midterm elections that just happened. All these incredible young people being elected, um, that are visionaries and are not afraid to put bold ideas that are necessary if we’re going to meet the sort of struggle of the time. And so it’s really, we need this energy. We need the energy. And yet we have to figure out how to help people, actual real teenagers, how to hold that energy because the life force in us is not. It’s actually transpersonal in the sense that it comes through us. It’s too big to hold. And when that kind of awakening starts to happen in people, it’s scary.

Thal:

It is. And when you say the word grounding, I remember that word. I like when I first started my own therapy. I was so annoyed with that word. I’ve been in the ground like “I’m done with being in the..” you know. Yeah. So, um, so even that word, like what does it mean to ground? Yeah.

Avi:

For me, what it means is to help somebody figure out how to be in what’s inside without shutting down and spinning out. And that’s tricky. And maybe channeling is a better word than grounding. I don’t know. But working with, working with the life force energy.

Thal:

Energy.

Avi:

Yes. I mean sometimes grounding could be a matter of just speaking the truth. I don’t know if you’ve had the experience of feeling sort of incredibly grounded after you’ve spoken the truth.

Thal:

Yes. Yes. It’s actually part of my journey to, um, uh, you know, express and, and heal that the parts that have been silenced or repressed at a younger age.

Avi:

Yeah. For anyone that wants some reading on the inner teen. There is one good book. There aren’t many books on the inner teen, but there’s a book called Brainstorm by, I believe it’s Daniel Siegal. The book is called Brainstorm and it’s all about the inner teen, but also it’s written for teenagers. I think it’s one of the better books on what this whole wild phase is or transitional phase is all about. And it’s a very practical book. So it would be a good one for your son.

Thal:

Oh, absolutely. And we’re going to look into it. Um, I also want to bring up age and also the word that’s coming up for me is shame. That people might feel like, wait, “I’m an inner teen inside?” And feel shame. There’s that. And then there’s age where, yeah, well there is biological age. There is psychological age, emotional age. Perhaps even spiritual age. So yeah, these are things to put into perspective and think about.

Avi:

If the energy of shame is coming up around the inner teen, that’s a really good clue that shame has happened.

Thal:

Oh, absolutely [laughing].

Avi:

So it’s not a coincidence. If you’re listening to this podcast and when you imagine inner teen, you’re going “ugh”, that’s a clue for you as to… Probably something in your own psyche. It’s really more about, you know, so that would be an invitation for somebody who does feel shame because not everybody does get shamed at this time of their life.

Thal:

And to be okay with it and work with it to have self- compassion.

Avi:

Well shame has two faces, right? There’s the healthy aspect of shame, which is a teenager needs to learn. They are limits. They’re are finite… there are limits to what you can do with time and energy and you can’t just, you want to go future, but you can’t conquer the world. There are limits to what you can physically do. And that’s healthy. It’s kinda good to know. Okay, and if I, you know, I’m just go and do what I want. It will have impact. It might have negative impact and I need to know what my impact is. So shame has a good side, but where a lot of us have been mentored in is the toxic side of shame. Where it’s about an identity. Shame becomes an identity and it’s not about teaching limits, but it’s about the whole sense of “you’re wrong”. You’re wrong for feeling what you’re feeling. You’re wrong for doing that or thinking that. If we live in a family unit where the emotions, the life force is not allowed to flow and our parents didn’t know how to ground and channel that energy in themselves then all of a sudden it’s coming up in us, we will be shamed on some level. And shame doesn’t have to look like scolding. It can look like just being ignored.

Thal:

It’s a feeling in the body too.

Avi:

Feeling in the body but just being ignored or being, you know, that could that deeply, that can be deeply shaming. So when shame turns into an identity, that’s the work then to work with shame.

Thal:

And from my own personal experience and experiences of like friends around me that shame actually causes a lot of stuckness in life. And, and you know, that question of what’s wrong with me? Why am I like this? It becomes a loop in the mind. And um, you know, all I think about is more compassion, more forgiveness towards self.

Avi:

You know, the first step with shame is an not necessarily compassion because they’re just wishing there isn’t compassion. The nature of shame is almost itself punitive, right? It’s the first nature. The first sort of thing to do with shame is to externalize it, to speak it, to have someone witness cause shame lives in hiding places. It’s that thing of I’m defective. “Something is wrong with me” and “I have to keep that a secret”. “No one can know that I’m flawed”, so I need to, I need to hide. I need to shut down. And when you start speaking it like I feel unworthy. That is the first step in the direction of healing shame. And um, later it’s really about going into the feelings around it and doing the deep feeling work. Um, but you know, the self-compassion will come later.

Thal:

I was skipping ahead. [laughing]

Avi:

Well, and that’s the thing is, you know, oftentimes people will get shamed in about being ashamed. Why are you so hard on yourself? You’re such a sweet, sweet person. What? Come on.

Thal:

I’ve actually heard that many times. [laughing]

Avi:

“Just be nice to yourself”. And if it was that easy we would all do it and it’s um, it often isn’t helpful to, to, um, to just let someone know that, you know, they should be different. So yeah.

Adrian:

I think that’s so important. Just you talked about… Like we need the courage, we need the courage to begin sharing, you know, and the healing that begins when you start to allow these inner things to come out into the open. I mean just personally this project of doing this podcast has been incredibly challenging because our own shits coming up all the time. We are stepping into a new territory or being exposed feeling more naked than ever. And so yes, like we are seeing it firsthand, you know, our own stuff is mixed in with this creative project and so we’re not just talking about it, you know, as some sort of a theoretical thing. It’s live.

Avi:

I can feel it through the whole…. I can feel a sort of an energy as we’re trudging along that is multilayered and has different aspects and feels strange at moments. And inspiring. There is a real energy here. So you guys are cooking whatever it is that you’re doing. You’re really in something here. And what I love is that you’ve decided to not be perfect in it and not try to get it right. It’s like, let it be messy. That’s great. Forget your perfect offering. Have you heard that? It’s a that Leonard Cohen Song, forget your perfect offering. And the next line is there is a crack, a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in. So it’s, it’s your humanity that will probably make this unique.

Thal:

And you know, and I just want to also highlight that this is a universal human experience. I was brought up in a different culture that’s a little bit more collectivist and a lot of, you know, my individuality or individuality in general is usually squashed. And um, but then half of my, more than half of my life, I’ve been living here in Canada and I’m noticing that, wait, even here the same problems. It’s literally exactly the same problems that I’ve encountered as a teenager in the Middle East, people encounter here and personally, for me, I just don’t see the difference. Obviously context is different, but the essence of our human experience, our human pain, our wounds, shame, guilt, all those things are similar.

Avi:

I agree. Yeah. And I think Toronto is a unique place to be doing healing work in 2019, but we are. This is the social experiment. Toronto is a social experiment and it’s by no means, um, you know, a perfect microcosm of a global village. But it is, in my experience as a traveler, one of the better models we have in the world. I really …that the consciousness now is that we are, we’re all in this together. No matter where you’ve grown up, it’s, we have to figure out how to be with each other. And I think Toronto is a really good place to be doing healing work at this moment of history. A: we have the luxury of not having physical wars here at this moment and B, there is a consciousness in the city. I think if you’re tuning in, there is an openness to, to, to kind of stepping into the new. So I feel lucky to be here at this moment.

Adrian:

Yeah, we just had a conversation a few days ago with, with Andrew Harvey and he talked about we’re going through a birthing experience collectively and it’s a birthing of a new human that he was sort of referring to and it’s, we don’t know what it’s going to be. That’s part of the surprise, the mystery and we’ve been going through this, you know, on this planet time and time again, you know, there was a period where most species were underwater and we were a bunch of fish swimming around and at some point that the water got so polluted that some fish had to take the risk to go into the unknown. And some of them ended up on the shore, on the sizzling shore, in air without the proper, you know, gear to, to survive. And yet some of them did and that created the new birthing of an evolutionary transition and it’s such a beautiful metaphor because I feel like this is kind of what we’re referring to you right now, you know, with this collective, a yearning for meaning and people try new things and pushing the boundary that we’re about to see an emergence of perhaps many versions of a new human being or new ways of being.

Avi:

No matter what you feel about the times right now, whether you’re more cynical, “we’re all gonna go to hell in a hand basket” type person or, or more of the, “Oh, you know, we can, we can save our planet” type person, wherever you fall in that spectrum. And we’re all on that spectrum somewhere. And it might change every day for you. Um, these, these are fascinating times to be alive. Forget about what might happen. It’s just a pure wow, we get to be alive in this… What are we in? It’s like, what? What is this chaos that we’re in? Yes. It’s interesting.

Thal:

Absolutely.

Adrian:

There’s never a dull moment.

Avi:

It’s not dull. It’s not dull. Sometimes we, I think we’ve, a lot of us sometimes the wish for the volume to get turned down just a little bit, especially in the last few years with on so many levels, but I think coming back to what Andrew Harvey was saying, the volumes not going down if anything, the volume is going up and um, we’re gonna have to find ways… And this connects to the inner teen. We’re going to have to find ways to stay present with each other and with the crisis that we’re in a evolutionary crisis that we’re in. Um, we’re going to have to find clever ways to stay present because you know, it, it’s just too easy to dissociate. Right now [laughing].

Thal:

And mental health is at the forefront because of those reasons. And we’re learning now that mental health is just not just the brain or just the cognitive side of things and that there is more to mental health. Then just, um, then just that. Yeah.

Avi:

I agree 100 percent. Yeah. Yeah. We’re going to have to find a new model of mental health. I think too, that goes beyond…

Thal:

Everybody should go to therapy [laughing].

Avi:

Whatever your therapy is, I just want to say, psychotherapy is a method. And honestly it’s worked for me and that’s what I do with my life. It’s, you guys are all here because it’s working or has worked in some way for you. If somebody comes in and it’s just, you know, for people listening, you try it out. If it’s not your bliss, if it’s not your path, find another method. There’s really, there’s, there’s so many other ways in. What I, what I really do like about therapy, a good integrative therapy is non prescriptive and so it’s the hunger of the times, uh, to, to not be so regimented and not be so “okay I just need to improve”.

Thal:

Yes, one solution-oriented. Right. And that’s important. Because I’ve like, again, I’ve had people come and ask me, “Oh, so then what? We all need therapy?” And that’s why I made that joke. Therapy is just a tool inwards, like you said, there are many different tools and if it means that you seek a therapist world for a little bit in your life, then so be it. And if, I don’t know, if you decide to start dancing, then so be it. [laughing]

Avi:

I think. Yeah, you’re speaking of therapy is not so much like a session but just, you know, therapy in the sense of, the true meaning of therapy, which is the word therapy comes from a Greek word Tartarus. Tartarus is the underworld in the Greek mythological lens and the underworld is where you go to, um, find yourself in a deeper way and it’s where you go under your body under, down. And so we, yeah, we all need therapy in that sense of I’m tuning in, connecting to, to ourself into the larger sphere. Absolutely.

Thal:

Yeah.

Adrian:

Avi, thank you so much for your time and happy suffering. [laughing]

Thal:

Yeah, thank you. Thank you Avi and may we, you know, conquer our fears and shame and whatever it is that we need to do to become attuned with our inner selves. Thank you, Avi.

Avi:

My pleasure. That hour went really fast.

#11: Living Your Personal Myth with Jean Shinoda Bolen

April 7, 2019 Culture, Life Transition, Podcast, Psychology, Spirituality 01:08:04

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” – Mary Oliver

On this episode, we have a conversation with Jean Shinoda Bolen, M.D., a psychiatrist, Jungian analyst and an internationally known author and speaker. Jean is a Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association, a former clinical professor of psychiatry at Langley Porter Psychiatric Institute at the University of California Medical Center. She has been a board member of the Ms. Foundation for Women, the International Transpersonal Association, and the C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco. She is the author of thirteen books in over ninety foreign editions.  She is an NGO Permanent Representative of the Women’s World Summit Foundation to the UN. She is in three acclaimed documentaries: the Academy-Award winning anti-nuclear proliferation film “Women – For America, For the World,” the Canadian Film Board’s “Goddess Remembered,” and “Femme: Women Healing the World.

Highlights:

  • Finding Purpose in the Second Half of Life
  • Archetypes in Every Person
  • How Children Carry the Un-lived Parts of Their Parents

Resources:

Listen:

Poem Inspired By this Episode

Full Transcript

Adrian:

Wonderful. I’m so glad this worked out.

Thal:

How are you?

Jean Shinoda Bolen:

I’m good. I emailed you, I didn’t know if you had a chance to read that. I realized that I was saying more in it than the questions I asked you on the phone.

Adrian:

I just had a read. Um with Mary Oliver and also a little thing of Lao Tzu. Yeah. Very nice.

Thal:

Oh she’s one of my favorite poets. Um, her passing away was a, um, it was like big news for me two weeks ago.

Jean Shinoda Bolen:

It was like losing a friend.

Thal:

Aw. Yeah. She helped me through some very dark times.

Jean Shinoda Bolen:

There’s, there’s the nature part of what she writes about, but then at the end of several of her poems, she just says something so wise.

Thal:

Yes.

Jean Shinoda Bolen:

So are we being recorded as is right now or what? What do we do? Please help.

Adrian:

So we are officially recording, but we, we can officially welcome you to the show. So thank you for coming onto our podcast.

Thal:

Thank you.

Jean Shinoda Bolen:

Well, it’s an adventure always to have a potential depth conversation with people who are interested in such things. And I never know where the conversation will go. And I often feel it in such conversations, words come out that have never been, never come out before and link things together. So there’s an energy field between people. Uh, I know in my office as a Jungian analyst, the geometry of the space, it’s like two equal chairs and, and in between. And the invisible in-between is really the larger self or our soul. It’s a Soul space essentially. And, and a creative space because again, it’s just, it’s a conversation between two people, but it’s different than what you and I are doing because what I do in my office is the other person provides the information and the dreams and the thoughts and the angst and the losses and, and I receive and comment and back and forth. So I’m hoping that out of this intriguing sounding, program that you have, Soulspace. I actually responded to that. I thought oh, I know about different varieties of Soul space. Let’s see where this conversation takes us.

Adrian:

Well it’s a real honor. I, you know, when I, when I reached out on email, I didn’t know, you know, how busy you might be and whether you’d agree to come on. So this is a real honor for both of us to have this conversation with you.

Thal:

Thank you. Yeah.

Adrian:

maybe, um, I’m thinking actually right now what I would love to, to hear from you is actually how your journey began. I’m really curious what you were like as a young girl and how that evolved into, um, just early in your career and how your path brought you towards the work that you’ve done, the books that you’ve written and, and your current life. So it just the early experiences and um, I know it might be difficult to kind of condense the story, but I’d love to hear some of that.

Jean Shinoda Bolen:

Well some of that it comes to me quite easily because I had been working on a memoir based book, which means I’ve thought about some of these questions that you raised. And my ancestry is Japanese American. Both of my parents are born in the United States of Japanese ancestry. So when World War 2 broke out, every person of Japanese ancestry on the west coast was to be rounded up and put into relocation camps or concentration camps. I had a very, uh, I had very good parents, uh, who knew something about making choices and, and gut and take going on paths that needed to be go going on in my, and my father and mother then worked to get us out of the state of California ahead of the martial law that Japanese Americans came under. And consequently, I didn’t, I wasn’t put in a concentration camp. They are referred to that. They were called relocation camps. Basically. They were camps in the desert with uh, armed guards and, and, uh, uh, hastily built tar and wood and paper barracks, really. So instead I left the state and we went to New York to Kew Gardens to Grand Junction, Colorado, to, to Blackfoot, Idaho, to Denver, uh, during the war years and returned back to California as soon as it was possible to come back. And that meant the war was over. Well, what has this done on many different levels is that one becomes as, as you might be as apparently Asians of… in Canada, you, and yet there’s this place of being, of the words I came across in my time in becoming a psychiatrist, somewhere along the line is the idea of positive marginality that you can, you can be with other people who are not like you and yet you’re not marginalized in the negative way. Because I was this upbeat kid, always. I was. I came in privileged to be loved and privileged to, well, just come in maybe with a sunny disposition. So I became in, in going from elementary school to elementary school during the war years, uh, I was accepted and yet, I was different. And so the consequences is that you kind of be in the space of, of positive marginality, which you then are able to see much more clearly because you don’t just drop into being unconscious with everybody. You actually are aware that you are different and yet it’s perfectly acceptable and the differences help you to make your way and to appreciate what acts on you and what is in you. And actually that’s a way into describing something about why I would have the vision I have of thattThere are archetypes in us, there are like talents are, I mean they are, they vary in strength and they act through us whether we know it or not. And if they are acceptable then we blossom. But what if what you have in you is an archetype that is not welcomed in your particular family or culture. Then you have… You’re caught between two. We all are between two, the archetypes in us and the projections and expectations on us. And essentially what the work of depth analysis is, is to find out from what the dreams are saying from what your life has taught you so far something about who you really are. And that combination of who you are inside and what you were expected to be outside. Being the conflicts that created growth experiences or real difficulties.

Thal:

It’s very interesting when you mentioned positive marginality. Um, I mean I am someone that comes from different backgrounds, um, African, Middle Eastern, Muslim, and I’ve been going through my own Jungian analysis the past two years and I’ve been thinking about those things and, and reading your books and just thinking about Jungian analysis and how it can also help people who are marginalized, but that there are not a lot of people that have explored that path that are from my background. So just listening to you, so reaffirming. Thank you.

Jean Shinoda Bolen:

You’re welcome.

Thal:

Yeah

Adrian:

I have to ask you, so which archetypes for you were emerging that maybe didn’t play nicely with the surroundings when you were growing up? You talked about possible friction or conflict. Where there any that come to mind?

Jean Shinoda Bolen:

Well the archetype that has been my strongest one is Artemis. Artemis is the Goddess with a bow and arrow and the moon. I mean, she’s the Goddess of the hunt and Goddess of the moon. And she is really the Goddess of Sisterhood. Um, she’s the only Goddess that all of her mythologies has a great deal to do with what the women’s movement is up to really because she looked after young girls, um, and during the time that they were under the protection of Artemis, they could, they could be free like an Artemis girl. They could, they didn’t conform to, um, early marriage and things for that one year that they were under her protection after which they were had to live up to conformity and all of that. But Artemis is the kid who starts out with this innate, uh, watching say boys allowed to do things that girls cannot do. The Artemis puts her hands on her hips, so to speak, at four years old and says, “that’s not fair!” There’s a sense of equality, there’s a sense of competency that is pretty innate. And in an Artemis person who also likes to go off the beaten path and has an innate sense of, of nature. Um, I was realizing my privilege, it is to appreciate nature. I was just in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and every time I go there, I think I should come here more often because it’s, there’s something of nature there. The sky, the vastness of the sky and the quality of the air and the panoramic views that art for me, it’s a soul energy field as where I live. I’m talking to you right now and let’s see now at over the Bay, I live on the south side of Mount Tamalpais in north of the Golden Gate Bridge and, and it’s beautiful. And there’s something about the archetypes that respond to beauty, and this is another one. This is Aphrodite who is mostly known for being the Goddess of love and beauty in ancient classical mythology. But like as patriarchy got more and more, um, judgemental about women and women’s sexuality, she got to be, she went from what was considered, uh, she was considered awesome and revered. Now you don’t usually think of Aphrodite as revered but in ancient days she was, and, and as Goddess of love and beauty, it was not just sensuality of the body, but it was appreciation of the sensuality of the world really in general. Moved by beauty. Not everybody is moved by beauty, but if you have the archetype in you, you are, and what happens with an archetype is you drop deeper into your soul space. That’s what the archetype does. Otherwise, you, you live, in Jungian terms, the persona. The face you wear for the world. And that is what needs to be acceptable to many families and cultures. Can you wear a persona that works? Well, I was able to do that. Um, I, I didn’t come up against, well, I was well brought up so I behaved myself. So it, and it didn’t innately just, uh, live from my archetype. There’s some people might and might get in for trouble with it as well. So archetypes in us, are patterns, like every talent is a human talent. Not Everybody has the same amount of artistic talent or, or mechanical talent or athletic talent. They vary their gifts. So I think of archetypes as basically as similar to the gifts that we come into and we either have an opportunity to develop them or we don’t depending on the possibilities of their main culture.

Thal:

Um, I think this is very important for us to understand as we had approached you where I’m coming from this new generation and there’s a lot of clashes that are coming up everywhere. So you talking about the role of myths and archetypes and helping us to drop in deeper and understanding ourselves better. I mean, even considering all the, um, the current resurgence in feminism and a lot of, um, sort of reactionary behavior, which a lot of it is also coming out of wounds that have not been, um, like not understood or not addressed. So, um, so how do you, how can we integrate mythology back into our lives? Um, in our current times?

Jean Shinoda Bolen:

The archetypes, uh, are patterns, human patterns in us. They conform to mythology in many ways, but they exist without us knowing any mythology whatsoever. It’s what you know deeply in yourself that’s true for you and such things as what are you doing when you lose track of time? What are you involved in when you are so absorbed in whatever it is that it seems like three hours have passed like 20 minutes or 20 minutes has dropped you into a timeless zone. I mean, there’s something about only the person who lives in you can know what truly deeply feed your spirit. Uh, what is a soul space? And they are related to the archetypes and the sense in Jungian psychology is first if there is that persona, uh, that many mothers are, are especially concerned about that our kids, their kids go out in the world and are well brought up and acceptable, et Cetera, which helps the child to navigate the early world. But persona is the layer in its, it’s the, in theater, there used to be in ancient Greece, the smiling face and the frowning face representing the faces of the …. And they used to put on masks and go onto the stage. A persona is a mask of sorts. And if you, if you have a persona that really reflects you, then what you inside and the mask is not mask like, but if you have to conform to a culture or family that expect certain things of you, no matter what, then you create a persona that is not exactly who you are. And the more you identify with a persona, the more distant you get from what you are inside. So there’s persona, then there’s ego and that’s the part of us that that makes choices and speaks from the word I. And then there’s the deeper level of the archetypes, which, and these, especially the archetype that has to do with, with um, spirit or soul, or what Jung call the archetype of the self. See human beings do seem to have an affinity … an affinity for divinity essentially, that there is something in the human being that has worshiped forever as far as back as we can see images on in caves from thousands of years ago. I was just learning a bit about Mot, the ancient Egyptian goddess. And uh, you know, they go back thousands of years before the, the Greek gods goddesses. And it seems as if human beings have had a sense of awe and then from that, worship and then they’d been, the question about you, whatever it is, it is, divinity is so much broader than a human mind can wrap around that, that somebody will have a genuine experience of divinity and then thinks that that experience is the experience. And then if it’s a powerful male running something or other, you have a patriarchal religion that says this is what God is. And, and one of the interesting things about words and all is that when you own the words, someone can have a experience of divinity and not consider that it was until much, much later because when they were growing up, God was defined as this and the idea even of goddess, that there’s a feminine aspect of divinity, not in many religions. So what do you do with the experience that you have inside when the world outside has no words for it? One of the things is the more you have words for something, the more you can feel it growing in you and I had um, my own life trajectory has a lot to do with, with coming in touch with a sense of, of whatever God is and feeling, uh, the mystery of it. I mean, interestingly the word mystery, it comes from the word mystes, which in ancient Greece was the word of the initiates, the initiates who entered the Eleusinian mysteries and had a sense of, of, of a goddess actually then no longer feared death. And that is one of the things that actually does seem to happen to people, especially as they grow older and connect with soul inside in a sense of divinity out. That it doesn’t seem to be well okay, well there’s something on the other side that there, and this is the basis of all religions. Mostly all religions… And so each of us has accessibility to this. We don’t need a particular gatekeeper, which mostly most of the religions seem to feel and insist that they are the gatekeepers. They are the only way to the truth when built into each of us is our own ability to experience depth and soul and love for example. Um, I remember when when explaining things to little children. How do you explain God? Well, how is it that they know the word love? If you say God is love, oh that seems to be much more easy to grasp and yet that is just as difficult to describe to someone who doesn’t know it as it would be to describe God.

Adrian:

Yeah, that was beautiful. A lot of things come to mind when you were just saying that, um, I think it was Michael Meade where I heard him talk about the pathless path and how at some point we have to drop whatever maps that were helpful initially and go on her own individual quest. Um, what would you offer as guidance perhaps for a lot of young seekers who are maybe self initiated, you know, finding themselves in times of transition and kind of confused and overwhelmed. Um, to be honest with, with the information overload that we have with the Internet and access to, you know, as much knowledge as we want. How do we, how do we receive guidance and, and make sure that we’re discerning. You know, I think discernment is part of that question too.

Jean Shinoda Bolen:

The Greeks had two words for knowledge, logos, meaning the mental apparatus, the intelligence and gnosis spelled with a g, like the Gnosis, but pronounced gnosis and knows this is what you know in your bones. So what to know at the soul level which is some kind of inner certainty or inner compass that says, oh, I feel at home here. I trust this person. And often we need to find some blessed solitude, actually, that’s how you kind of find your way. And one of the things about current culture is a bombardment of emails and there’s hardly any time unless you choose it to be by yourself or by yourself in nature. Um, and conversations. Who is it that you’re comfortable with without words? Um, where do you go to find peace? Where is your soul space? Now those are, that’s a gnosis thing. The intelligent mind, well, you know, can give you options and things, but only when you get to a place that feels safe, home, peaceful and then you stay in it. I didn’t do it. Meditation helps people who otherwise wouldn’t even create a space, but it’s also very natural for us, unless we have some heavy judgment in our head. And then the idea of concentrated meditation often allows a person to be in a space without the critic or the judge or the whatever that that makes internal comfort difficult. So there’s gnosis, trusting what we know in our bones about, about what really matters.

Thal:

This is definitely an important reminder. It’s like tuning into our internal compass to, to guide us.

Jean Shinoda Bolen:

That’s true. And the poetic side of us is the gnosis side, by the way. Left brain right brain. Left brain knows a lot and it has details then it, and it… but it’s poetry that speaks to what we know inside, at a soul level. And so when, when I heard that Mary Oliver had died, it did really feel that I had another friend who died. Now, I’d seen her in person in San Francisco when she first made her first trip out of her life at Massachusetts in the, she read some other poetry and she was interviewed on stage. So I did have a sense of her in person, but mainly I knew her through her poems. And, and every once in a while there are words that come from her poetry that just is such soul knowledge. Um, there was one poem in which she wrote, and I may be paraphrasing cause I didn’t set out to memorize your poems. It’s more that they sort of sunk in. And so I can have access to some of the lines. It really has meant something to me. But one that said, you do not have to be good. You do not have to walk through the desert for a hundred miles panting, you only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Now… What is that? What is that trusting…knowing…not confused part of us that we came into this world with and we got it diverted by so many dysfunctional families and dysfunctional cultures and especially for boys or is more than girls are trained to not be vulnerable. Girls, we make friendships through our vulnerability and from sharing things. Boys don’t. And so they’re much more apt to be cut off from the poetic side of their souls, or if they’re smart enough, they know to keep it sacred and not share it because somebody will belittle them, or will make fun of them. So they learned something who and with whom can they share their soul space? And often it is with a woman or if it’s a gay man with finally meeting another who has a soul space, as much as, as his own. So there, there is that. And then, then I’m remembering, uh, in one of my books, uh, Crossing to Avalon, I have a poem by Mary Oliver written, right, the whole poem is right in the middle of it. And it’s the one that is called The Journey. And it begins one day you finally knew what you had to do and began. That is when you start your individuation journey, when you listen to the inner compass. And I’m remembering also a quote from a man who rose to the top of, uh, his corporate work, he became head of Newsweek when Newsweek was very popular. And he wrote a line that said, he talked about the ladder that he climbed to the top and he got to the top of the ladder. He was made editor and chief of Newsweek and he said, I found the ladder had been put up against the wrong wall.

Thal:

Hmm.

Jean Shinoda Bolen:

Because climbing a ladder is sort of like going on a journey and, and then, uh, there is the end of the poem in Blackwater Woods in which Mary Oliver says, to live in this world, you must learn to do three things: to love what is more mortal. So hold it against your bones as if your life depends upon it. And when it comes time to let it go, to let it go. That is real depth, soul and psychological wisdom. And, and uh, what I have been doing workshops, um, past couple of years, I haven’t, not on my schedule right now, but I took a line from a poem called A Summer Day in which she ends up saying, doesn’t everything die at last and too soon? Tell me, what do you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? And I’ve taken the phrase “your one wild and precious life” as a way describe to describe, you know, being on your soul path. Individuating. Living the life you were meant to live. Um, as, as uh, with “wild” being what you came in with. I mean, uh, uh, wild is, is like a forest of virgin forest. Nobody has logged it. Why are these your natural instinctual itself? And so when you are in your second half of life, especially when you’ve lived the life that you were supposed to live and either succeeded at it or failed at it, I don’t know. But in the second half of life is when you start to wonder what really matters to you and will you have the courage to follow your heart. And courage comes from the word cor, meaning heart. And that goes back to what was innately you. That’s the wild part. What will you do with your one wild or you could say archetypal that would fit too, your one archetypal wild and precious. Precious is something you also have to really value that, that who you are and the energy you have and the time you have and the words you use. This is, this is all you have. Time goes by so fast. She, you really get to know it. As you get older, it’s zip! And you get to where you wonder, how did I get this old so fast? That happens through where I am right now. How did I get to be this old? Let’s see, I was born in 1936, so I’m, um, I’m 80… um I don’t like that. [laugh]

Thal:

[laugh]

Jean Shinoda Bolen:

So, so and yet there’s a perspective on this.

Thal:

Hmm. It’s just amazing listening to you, you know, um, you’ve, you’ve led such a soulful life, so it’s so inspiring for us. Um, just listen, listening to you talk. Um, but you bringing up poetry is so important because, I’ve always felt that there was a poet in all of us. And um, when I was younger I started writing poetry. I published some poetry, but then I started the path of the academic path. And I, um, uh, I have a degree in English literature, my masters and I found that sort of the academy like academic path moved me away from my soul writing and now path of yeah. And, and now that I’m in my, um, hopefully individuating and in the path of healing, I’m going back to poetry and hopefully integrating that side of myself.

Jean Shinoda Bolen:

When you listen to this or I do as an analyst to someone telling me something that is deeply meaningful and food are there and they have a vocabulary such as you would have with your academic background, what comes out is like poetry because it’s so true. And uh, in it unedited, we all tend to edit our stories as we tell someone else. But when you’re in analysis and you reach a deep place and you’re talking from your soul level about how awful it was or how deep it was or what the loss was like, it is like listening to a poet. Now I need to wait and stop for a moment because it says low battery. Okay. I need to go get a plug.

Thal:

Sure. No problem. No problem.

Jean Shinoda Bolen:

Okay. It’s good now. I didn’t think it would run out of juice, but it, you know, did.

Adrian:

That’s okay. That’s a good catch. Maybe it’s just the charge that we’re… Coming through our conversation. Jean, you talked about young boys. I mean, I can’t help it, you know, I was listening to you carefully there y’re about growing up in, in modern society and how we’re often encouraged not to be in our bodies, you know, the feeling body and be receptive to this poetic language. Um, and so for me, this is a very new territory. You know, it just within the last year, maybe two years to really explore, um, the essential aspects of being, you know, dropping out of my mind and the intellect, but not to demonize it. Right. Recognizing that’s been a gift along the way. Um, I love to hear you talk about the embodied spirituality. I mean, we, the new age movement has, has brought, you know, lots of different versions of spiritual life. And I feel like there’s something very important about highlighting the embodied spiritual path.

Jean Shinoda Bolen:

Well we get to be so out of touch with depth of body and the depth of body being not only having feelings but like the heart is usually considered in the body. Certainly and yet there is the heart chakra or the heart center, which is in the same general area as the physical heart. But the more you understand and feel in your body, what that Heart Chakra is responding to, you learn something about what really matters to you and you’re move by it and over years what happens is you either constrict it and lose touch with what is meaningful to you or you find it being like a receiver that grows over time, that becomes larger because you are, you can love more, you can feel more, you can, you can have a sense of connection with more that is. So those are the, those are, that’s an embodied part of us. But when you go out into the world as a little girl or little boy and you’re, especially if your family expects you to be an of themselves and not who you are, that’s where things really get into difficulties. Because if you are supposed to be living out the unlived part of a parent or to be socially acceptable because it’s a tight issue for them, then as you go out into the world you need to conform to be that person. And if you’re a little girl or little boy, it’s like there are certain qualities that that if you’re an extension of some hope for… if you’re a cute little girl, then that may be really emphasized. Or if you’re a bright little boy, that might be really emphasized. Um, and then you enter a culture of school and school is interesting because when you go into kindergarten or first grade and there is a difference between the school yard and inside the school room. And especially for the little boys, the bigger boys that are a year or two years ahead of you are bigger and stronger and they have… especially if they’ve come from homes in which they have been bullied, what kids do, boy, kids especially is they turn around and they identify with the aggressor at home by beating up on little boys who they can beat up on. And so a little boy with some sense of what you need to do to manage on the school yard learns about you go along to get along.

Thal:

Hmm.

Jean Shinoda Bolen:

And so that’s why you have like boys watching the bully picking on a kid and nobody speaks up because you don’t want to be identified with the kid is being made fun of. And you just might, you know, and this, this pattern is actually is sort of, it was difficult to sort of call that patriarchy, but it is, it’s exactly the same as a later on. I mean, I saw the movie Vice recently, about Dick Cheney and the kinds of things that went along in Washington DC and it was like bullies beating up on weaker people. And the culture of the school yard begins that story where the boy learns to go along to get along to not challenge authority. And what happens is if they didn’t have, if a little boy kept saying things that were not welcomed. He often feels a lack of worth as he grows up too. And one of the things that little boys seem to have, um, difficulty with is saying the truth about how they really feel about something. Fortunately, often they can do that at home. Uh, with some families, uh, they also, if they can have a good friend, I think it’s very hard to be kind of just one of the kids without a really good friend going through elementary school for girls as well. And yet, you know, it is through… The question is, if you have suffered as a child and nobody gets through life without suffering, you’ll get your, your share of suffering all along the way. But what, what you do, will it grow you? Will it grow you to have more compassion for other people and for yourself or do you deny it and want to disidentify with anybody who is suffering something that you suffered from in the past?

Thal:

Yeah. All that you’re saying is so deep. It’s resonating deeply within us really. Um, and you talk about the young boy and the young girl, um, I realized that part of my healing is to heal the feminine within me, but it’s also to heal the masculine. Um, I know that it’s very, it’s using dualistic language when I say feminine and Masculine, but the truth is, um, they’re inseparable to heal the feminine is to heal the masculine and to heal the masculine is to heal the feminine. I mean,f I would love to hear what you think about that.

Jean Shinoda Bolen:

There’s an interesting concept in near here in psychology about the tension of opposites. That the reason for often describing masculine and feminine as being separate and different is to be able to kind of label qualities. People, human beings seem to like to label things, but they’re all part of the continuum of being a human person essentially. So what is allowed on that big continuum? And uh, what Jung described as masculine and feminine in the unconscious, he called Anima and Animus. Uh when like when you’re a girl who, uh, girls these days are able to become whole people much easier than boys, at least in the United States for North America where education is so important and competition. I remember when my daughter went out for soccer at eight years old, you know, that’s a different … Teaching a little girl how to play soccer, play as a team member like competitively she is learning something, about physicality about teamwork and about the will to win, which is usually considered animus or male side. And, and um, education itself develops the whole right brain, left brain. And the more she goes up the the education ladder and in develops that side of herself and get some authority through that, the more she is, it isn’t her like, like there’s a place where you think “hey listen it isn’t my animus that’s doing the thinking. I am thinking clearly myself!” because you, you understand what the animus is when it takes you over, when is not who you are, when you are being defensive or something and, and you get out of relationship with the person you’re talking to because you really had been, there’s been stimulated. So then you are in your animus. I could recognize… I used to recognize and recognizing don’t do it as much when I’m in my animus versus when I’m just being me thinking clearly even though that is not probably my primary, uh, uh, I think I’m more feeling type than a thinking type, but the thinking type really get’s educated along the way. You cannot go through all the education I’ve had without really doing justice with the thinking type. And then that had happened then it happens to be who you become rather than some autonomous part of you taking over. That’s one of the things that are of value, to have an understanding of a concept that you could actually watch happen in yourself rather than watch happening in somebody else. But you can see it happening in someone else when they’re centered, when you’re centered and when something prods another part of you to come out and you behave in such a way that if you, fortunately have enough observing ego that you realize it’s happened at least afterwards, you can learn to change how you are behaving because you don’t happen to like that way of behaving.

Thal:

Thank you. That’s amazing. Um, I, I’m starting to slowly recognize when my animus is triggered. It’s pretty ugly. [laugh]

Adrian:

You mentioned, um, for females it might actually be easier in today’s society to be more whole. Um, can you expand on that a little bit? I’m actually curious, so, um, how, how is it possibly more challenging for males growing up in patriarchy type of a culture?

Jean Shinoda Bolen:

It’s because of the issues of power. And it being part of a culture. Um, I mean basically though the women’s movement and the education of women have made many parts of the world much more egalitarian in what a woman can aspire to and accomplish. This is fairly new and new on the other side that the gender with power, it has been men and so that’s been patriarchal. Well patriarchy is hierarchical and it’s a a sense of dominance. Who you have power over. It means that if you’re young and new at any of this and a guy, if there’s any part of you that is what has been suppressed in somebody higher up and you are showing what he sacrificed or judged badly and squashed in himself, he’s going to squash it in you too. And so the diversity within a person gets acted on by the family who can’t look at it and only likes certain qualities and culture says, you know if you, if you meet the stereotype, if you’re a boy who is naturally aggressive, who is extroverted, like this is an extrovert culture. So if you introduce a new ball or a game to five year old, six year old, eight year old little boys, it’s the extroverted kid who goes right in, wants to learn about it and the introverted boy. So he’s on the sidelines and watches and, and he’s nudged, he said, oh, what’s the matter with you? Why don’t you go in and play? His natural tendency and for the girl too is “I want to see what the rules are. I want to understand the game and I also want to figure it out by watching whether I want to even play the game.” But that is not acceptable in an extroverted culture when if you are there, if you wave your hand, “I’ll play, I’ll play, I’ll play!” and you go in and you play well and most of the games are pretty competitive and you do well then you really are a solid guy who’s gotten a lot of accolades for being an aggressive little guy and then the quiet guy who was taking it in and all doesn’t really see it. It’s like “what’s the matter? Are you shy?” Being shy is not a very positive word and yet the introvert has to be able to have some time out and time in in order to develop that side. So that’s some of the ideas of…

Thal:

it’s interesting when you, when you talk about the, you know, extroverted, introverted, and again, going back to the young boy and the young girl, I know I was brought up in a very patriarchal culture in the Middle East in the 80s. And I used to love to play soccer and I got into so much trouble because of that. And now that I’m a mom and my son is, I have a son, I tried to get him into soccer, but he just didn’t like it. He really refused and I kept trying for a good three years and he just does not like it. So..

Jean Shinoda Bolen:

Well you’re starting early to, to realize that, that what, what parents seem to want to do is to have their child be able to do those things.

Thal: Yes, absolutely.

Jean Shinoda Bolen:

It was a child and you’ve got a who has a sense of himself.

Thal:

Exactly. Yes, yes, yes, absolutely. What you had mentioned earlier too, the whole unlived life is really what started my inner journey and reading… Um, uh, I think it’s, I can’t remember his name, but reading a book on, on the shadow and parents carrying the unlived life and the children carrying that weight, um, really woke me up. Um, so… I don’t even know if I have a question around that, but you know, just hearing your thoughts is amazing. Really.

Jean Shinoda Bolen:

Yeah. The writing side of my life. Uh, yeah. Well they actually began with the Tao of Psychology: Synchronicity and the Self, but the book after that called Goddesses in Everywoman and Gods in Everyman that followed were the ones that made it possible for somebody to read about and relate to a particular pattern which had happens to have a Greek God or Goddess name. And then there is an insight like “oh, this is why I’ve had so much trouble with my father or my mother or why I am who I am” and, and the idea of valuing who you are and not accepting the other choice, which is to conform to what it is your parents wanted you to do. Up to a point. It actually is adaptable to conform up to a point. But then it’s like you get to Midlife, you’ve lived out the life you’re suppose to.. you see, you individuate earlier if you don’t manage to do it just right the way your family wanted you to do. If you happen to be the archetype or the psychological type that fits the pattern in your first half of life, everybody says good for you, good for you. You know, and, and it’s easy. Except that you get to midlife and the sense is “is this all there is? Okay, you know, I got my education, I’ve got a good job, I got married and got kids. Is this all there is because I feel empty inside and this is why Jungian work is often second half of life work. It’s because there is a whole unlived out part. But then if you are nonconforming, you couldn’t be the boy your father wanted you to be or the girl your mother or father wanted you to be like you were introverted in an extroverted family. I remember working with a, uh, a young woman who was quite herself introverted and she was in this large extroverted Italian family and it was pretty difficult to be her.

Thal:

Hmm.

Jean Shinoda Bolen:

Or if you, if you, uh, are interested in things, your, your, your family is all into sports and corporate advancement and you are into the arts, uh, well in certain families that’s okay. But in other families you drop it, you don’t follow and you don’t do that which you would naturally gravitate to and.. Or you fight to do it. And when you fly to do what you start to individuate early. If you cannot conform which many gay boys have found true, they could not confirm. They would have liked to have conformed. Some of them managed fairly well to conform, but if they didn’t conform just to be who they were and have other people pick up on it meant that they were bullied, meant that they felt terrible about themselves. Except that now the environment is changing. It’s like for women in the 70s, for the first time there was uh, uh, the, the first woman’s was second women’s movement really first women’s movement was 1848 with the, when there was a whole issue about voting, but it was, it really in the late sixties and seventies, when the women’s movement that we know of people like Gloria Steinem coming in and seeing and expressing and then opening the doors for women to do, uh, what has been unacceptable before you could do now?

Thal:

Hmm.

Jean Shinoda Bolen:

So the, the world has in, in in many places is a bigger world where we can grow into more of who we are and we can make more mistakes too. This is what happens to people also, when you have choice, you want, you can make mistakes or not. Maybe they were just, I like to use the labyrinth as a model for the path, not, not a straight line. And in the labyrinth you think you’re moving towards your goal and then, oops, there’s a u-turn. There was a block, there was a pain, there was a loss. Well, you’re still on the path and what will come next keep shaping you.

Thal:

These are very important things to, to um, listen to, especially for our generation because we’ve been brought up to just, you know, everything is so goal oriented. Um, once we are on the path, well, when am I going to become enlightened or when am I going to know myself better? Um, so keeping that in mind is, is very important.

Jean Shinoda Bolen:

Well, it’s important to remember, uh, when you’ve had it… it’s like if you can, if you can hold on to the best of each of the stages you’ve gone through, you know, you, you’d start out holding onto the kid self that had a sense of wonder, you’re going to hold onto wonder and take in a new experience or a person or something with a sense of wonder. And then you go into adolescence where were there really did a lot of idealism in adolescence. Can you hold on to that? Can, the maturity that comes later and the wisdom that comes along the way. The whole integrated person has an inner child, an inner adolescent, an inner masculine, an inner feminine, an inner wise person, a connection with divinity, however you define it. And with it, with that part of divinity, you have a sense… You have a sense of soulfulness in yourself. You have a deep sense that you matter of some level, there is something called grace. There’s something called the divinity. There’s something called mysticism that you have experienced and you have been blessed and all you can do is say thank you. And as soon as you have a sense of gratitude, of privilege that I, I now see that, you know, relative to say that the other kids in my family, or when you meet people who are disadvantaged and you start to realize that you’ve been privileged, you had no reason to feel superior, you have more reason to have gratitude. This starts to be soul shaping as well. And it could be that the whole work we have if we come into this world as a soul, and I think we do, I think we are spiritual beings on a human path rather than human beings who may or may not go on a spiritual path. So we come into the world as a spiritual being in a helpless little baby body into our version of dysfunctional family, in our version of dysfunctional society. And somehow this life that goes by so fast must be a major, major opportunity to grow soulfully to make a difference to others, to do something that makes you feel that you are doing what you came for and that sense of right rightness when you are doing something that you know is being true to who you are inside that is that you can’t, it isn’t a sustained thing, but you dip into it and you feel, oh this is who I am. This is what I came for. I am living my own soul journey. Which if you talked to Joseph Campbell in a way you’re living at personal myth and you are being true to it. And that’s a shorthand way of saying what individuation is about. Jung uses so many technically sounding words like individuation, anima and animus but underneath it all is such a deep evaluation of what it’s like to be human. And the opportunity for you have to be human, maybe, especially now, it’s the responsibilities of being human. I think about how I went through the nuclear stuff, uh, earlier when, when, when it seemed like people were right on the verge of pushing the button. Well, there are a lot more nuclear weapons in the world now than then, but now we’re looking at the environmental crisis, which could it end it for us as well. And so if you come into the world as a human being during a time of crisis, the responsibilities or the opportunities to make a difference are much greater. And for now, to be a woman at this time in history is both an opportunity and a responsibility. Like my major activism is to support feminism within the United Nations to have a fifth women’s world conference, and I now have a sense that it, that it will not, not be sponsored necessarily at all by the UN, but they will come into it, but it will be created in India in 2022. So I’ve had these buttons saying five WCW India 2022, because when you bring women together who have Artemis, the sisterhood architect as part of who they are, and we have the technical ability to communicate by all kinds of devices, we could have a, the rising up of a quality of feminism that feels like siblings with men, because this is Artemis also not patriarchal, but brothers and sister. Cause Artemis was the firstborn of twins. Apollo was her twin brother. And what she went in, her mythology she was concerned about she came to the aid of her mother. She came to the aid of children, um, and she did develop your own skills with a bow and arrow plus a sense of, Goddess of the moon means that there’s an element of mysticism. There is an enormous mystical element in nature if you tune into it. So I think that this, I would love it to see that, see more and more Artemis rising and so I’m doing that at the moment too.

Thal:

Amazing.

Jean Shinoda Bolen:

Activism is soul work when you’re doing it from a space in which it’s your journey and you’re doing, helping others.

Adrian:

That’s so beautiful. We just had the honour of chatting with Andrew Harvey last week and you know, he talks about sacred activism. So as you’re saying this, you know, it feels like there’s such a hunger right now. Um, I think for this type of energy to emerge in larger numbers and also for, for, for the elders, right? For, for the young seekers to connect with elders such as yourself and to make sure that there’s wisdom isn’t lost, you know, that we don’t have a disconnect with, you know, just this lineage of, um, of experience and wisdom that’s been passed down, uh, just to, to bring things to an end. Is there, is there anything you’d like to share as sort of last words, um, for, for the next generation, you know, of, of activists and seekers and, um, and, and, and curious souls?

Jean Shinoda Bolen:

Well, yes. In the last year I started signing off on my emails with “love, hope, perseverance, trust and gratitude”. And I think as it is, we kind of a mantra. Love then hope are certainly obvious energies. Perseverance seems to be required to do anything that really matters to you. To become a doctor and a Jungian Analyst or psychiatrist. I mean it took a lot of persevering through subjects that were hard or not interesting. Again, the Artemis idea that you have, if you could aim at a target that is far off, but if it’s your target and you aim for it, can you tolerate what it takes to have setbacks, to have to do hard work. So perseverance and then trust is much more in the spiritual world. It’s the word that means that you trust that it matters what you do with your one wild and precious life. You trust that there is a world of invisible spirits that you can call upon that support you, through some difficulties you can count on prayer, you can count on a sense that there is a divinity that has…that you have access to. Even if you don’t know very much about what it is that it doesn’t mean, it doesn’t exist. Oh, are there people that have died? Then the whole tradition of the other side, if there are there, what are they? Angels? Maybe they’re angels, but then there’s this whole world is cares about what we do here too. That is trust. And the last thing is the motivation that can make us appreciate what we have, and that’s gratitude.

Thal:

Thank you so much. That’s so beautiful to hear. Thank you.

Adrian:

Yeah. With gratitude. Thank you.

Jean Shinoda Bolen:

Thank you. Namaste.

#5: Embodied Problem-solving with Jonathan Varkul

February 3, 2019 Leadership, Life Transition, Mindfulness, Podcast 01:25:46

“What if your problem isn’t what you think it is?” More often than not we find ourselves stuck in our heads, and so we try to navigate through stressful situations using our mind. Sometimes all it takes from us is to loosen our grip a little and open up our heart. Sometimes we need to feel our way through a problem.

In this episode, we interview Toronto based executive coach Jonathan Varkul. He helps people in leadership positions address problems from the inside out. For over 20 years, Jonathan navigated the corporate world as a chartered accountant and a seasoned operations executive. Jonathan talks to us about his journey with anxiety, which sparked a profound transformation in his approach to life and work.

Highlights

  • Anxiety and Panic Attacks
  • Qualities of Yin and Yang
  • Processing Non-Cognitively
  • Executive Coaching
  • Cultivating Presence in Discomfort

Resources:

  • Workshop  Re-calibration: The Art and Science of Finding Clarity in a Noisy World

Listen:

We hope you enjoy!

Have you ever been loved like that? Poem inspired by this week:

Full Transcript

Adrian

Thank you for joining us, Jonathan.

Jonathan

You’re welcome. Thanks for having me.

Adrian

Yeah, I think one of the, for me, I feel like one of the challenges with these meetings is there’s no shortage of things to explore and that to me sometimes brings a little bit of anxiety. It’s sort of like, okay, what do we want to prioritize as far as, you know, time and that sort of thing. Um, but I’m sitting here and sort of just tuning into myself and I’m getting the sense that I am really drawn to hearing your personal story. Again, I know you’ve shared it with me, but I think that’ll be a good place to start for listeners to kind of bring in, um, you know, what it is that we’re going to be diving into today, but if you can share your journey as far as where you grew up and, and sort of the beginning your professional life and how that took some changes.

Jonathan

Well, wow. That’s, um, that’s an interesting question. Apropos your whole starting point with anxiety. Um, because it’s very much a story of, I think about anxiety. Um, it’s about not realizing I was ever really anxious. It’s about being very adept at all kinds of things. And so not having to deal with anxiety necessarily. Call it a functional anxiety person. Um, so I grew up in South Africa during the apartheid years actually, um, which may be why energetically there’s a fair amount of anxiety in the, um, in the space I grew up, um, and I grew up in Cape Town at the tip of Africa there and a really spectacular landscape. Really, really, really quite beautiful and I had in many ways an idyllic childhood because I mean, what did we do? We just went to the beach and went to school and I played sport and hung out with my friends and it all seemed really quite, wonderful. Um, and in 1987, my whole family, I was 19 at the time, my whole family moved to Canada. Things had gotten really unstable politically. There was a lot more violence and the economy seemed to be unstable.

Thal

Have you been anywhere else in Africa?

Jonathan

Yes, I’ve actually been to nine countries in Africa. Starting in a Kenya and going across to Uganda and then down. Um, mostly the East Africa. So Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, and the countries down below.

Thal

Yeah, my father’s is from Sudan. My grandma from Eritrea and my mother from Yemen

Jonathan

Wow, so you got the full.. Have you been to Africa?

Thal

I have been to Sudan in the late eighties and that was the one time I went there. It was ’89 and I got really sick and it was the one time. So I just wanted to share that. [laugh]

Jonathan

There’s something quite remarkable about the landscape in Africa and it smells and feels completely different to North America. It just really does.

Thal

It’s definitely part of your psyche.

Jonathan

100 percent. I can totally relate. In fact, what’s really weird is, I mean I have traveled a fair amount and spend some time in India as well and it was very weird because a lot of people would always talk about getting really culture shocked when they go to India. And for the weirdest reason, landing in India and just getting off the plane and walking out into the streets. Um, it didn’t feel culture shock at all for me. It was a very weird thing. And that’s not because it’s African in any way, but there’s something culturally about the space that kind of spoke to me in a way that just felt very, oh, this is, this is home in a way. I felt kind of quite home. It’s Kinda cool.

Thal

So then coming to Canada must have been a culture shock for you, which is interesting because, you know, you look a specific way and for you to have a culture shock here… [laugh]

Jonathan

It’s crazy because people say to me like, so did you have an issue with the language or language? So there was some culture shock, but nothing really, I’d say negative. It’s culture shock in the way. That’s weird how you do that. I mean, I remember one of the first things that, um, that I noticed that I thought was so weird was that just comes to me right now. It was just the, um, the newspapers were put in the boxes on the side of the street and you could put in a quarter or whatever it was to take the newspaper out and I thought we’d never have that in South Africa. Someone’s just going to take all the newspapers at once and then started selling them themselves. Like they would never have…

Adrian

The honour system?

Jonathan

Yeah. The honour system. It’s just very different. And um the African person in me was like, that’s nuts! How do you get away with that? And yet it absolutely worked perfectly. So that is really, really cool. So, um, yeah, the um, the culture shock wasn’t in a, in a way where I was 19, I was, went straight to university. So there really isn’t a whole lot for me to say about that in a sense that it was so impactful. I actually in many ways, um, fault a few things that were, what some people would have thought is weird is I felt more free, which is a weird thing because they go, “dude, you’re a white male from South Africa in apartheid. Like how unfree could you have felt?” But the funny thing is that genuinely I really did. And the question is, well, what kind of free did I feel because I don’t know, it wasn’t like anything I could totally put my finger on, but I’d say there was a lot of different little things and it all adds up. It’s the free that I didn’t have to be looking around me all the time. From a crime perspective. It’s the free that I, when I was doing a bachelor of commerce degree, I could choose breadth requirement courses and not just be only doing commerce degree as in South Africa at the time. Um, and it was the free that everything felt so possible. I remember the first summer and I went and got a job in the warehouse in shipping and receiving in a furniture warehouse. And it just felt like the easiest thing to do, there’s a process for it and you just can do it. And if you want to do something, there was something to help you get it done. And everything just felt so much more doable and easy and manageable.

Thal

It’s a shift from like a world where there were so many polarities really. And now you’re in a world where your options have opened up.

Jonathan

Significantly. Significantly. Absolutely. 100 percent. It was like either yes or no, black or white, right or wrong. And this was just one big thing of, well, why do you want to do? I don’t know if it’s right or wrong, whatever. And a very different experience for sure.

Thal

And inner liberation

Jonathan

Inner liberation, inner freedom, all of it. And so for awhile actually, um, life was amazing. It was great. I mean, I fed off that whole experience. And um, and then, um, I would say that I rode that wave till 2000 around the Y2K thing. I got it. I was in software, um, and um, we’d been doing a fair amount of system installation around the whole Y2K problem and everyone thought that planes were going to fall out of the sky and all that kind of stuff and people were putting cans of food and bottles of water in their basement thinking that everything…

Thal

It was the end of the world.

Jonathan

Yeah, so remember that. And I remember my, my ex-wife and I at the time decided we were going to go traveling and quit our jobs and sell our house and um, and we said we would do it after January 2000 because that’s when the planes would have fallen already and now we could go fly. [laugh] And so, um, we went traveling and that’s in that time. That’s really where I, um, did the nine countries in Africa thing. Um, before that having lived in South Africa, I’ve only touched on two other countries in Africa. And so it was interesting that I had to leave South Africa to then become more worldly and go traveling. And so nine countries in Africa was part of that as some of the, um, Southeast Asia and Europe. Um, so we didn’t have a specific time for when we’re going to come back. And I think what was really amazing was I was on this great trajectory before having achieved some management position in a consulting company and I thought, wow, my life’s going somewhere and it felt good and I built this whole thing. And yet it seemed like an exciting, fun thing to do that we could just take off some time and just go traveling and then see what happens. Um, and so there wasn’t …. interestingly enough, it was a time when there was a fair amount of anxiety that had cropped up because just before we went away, I started to have vertigo issues. Massive amounts of spinning, couldn’t actually function properly. And we’d go to the hospital every now and then to just get infusions of sa-…, like whatever the liquids were. Because I had basically vomited every single thing in my system. Because I couldn’t, I couldn’t actually function properly from the spinning in my head, so I was eventually diagnosed with this thing called Meniere’s disease, which is an inner ear condition. And suffice to say that I actually don’t know what causes it, don’t know what triggers it and don’t know if it leads to anything. So it wasn’t really a hope, but evidently an elevated system anxiety, which was one of the things that people seem to think triggers it. So obviously despite the fact that the trip was going to be very exciting and despite the fact that we were selling our house and had no ties in a particular kind of way and I didn’t have to work and there wasn’t really a financial pressing need. And despite all that, at some level there was obviously something deeply disturbing in going traveling even though it was the most exciting thing in the world, which is quite interesting. So, um, I went on the trip and had to manage the symptoms for a little while while going on a trip and it slowly started to subside while on the trip. Um, it may have actually been six months in India doing yoga that may have led to, uh, yeah, to, to shifting that a bit. Um, but we only came back to Canada a year and a half after we’d left with, because we’d never set a time period and felt like we were done, ready to come back. And um, after we came back, um, I didn’t know what I was going to do next and an opportunity presented itself where I would, where I was asked to help build the infrastructure of a company in the automotive space. And the idea was that, “oh, we’re smaller about 10, 15 people and we’re looking to grow really fast and we don’t have any infrastructure, we don’t have systems and processes, we don’t have people organize in a particular kind of way and you come in and see if you can help us figure that out?” And so that again, really exciting, really, really exciting. But yet again, the same underlying anxiety around, “wow, this is the next thing!”. On the one hand, it felt, um, really purposeful. Um, but on the other hand, it felt…. It felt at first no pressure and then suddenly after about a month end, it felt like I got to make something happen here and I started to feel the pressure of that. Um, and I can now remember biologically what that did for me was my whole system then ramped up. I actually remember that now. It’s really interesting. My system just totally ramped up, geared up. I went into that Corporate Warrior Mode, um, and, and I remember we had our first kid and our second child was on the way and I remember waking up one night in the middle of the night and I had, um, my arm was numb, completely numb. I tried to shake it out and um, you know, normally you get pins and needles and you shake your arm out and then suddenly what happens is, um, your arm eventually kind of starts to get the feeling that comes back and you feel good. So I shook my arm and nothing happened and it just wasn’t like the numbness wasn’t kind of going away. And so I started to feel a, that’s weird, so lay down and as I laid down I started to like break out in a sweat, like my face started sweating and all of a sudden I started to feel like the only way I describe it as really, really weak. Almost like I’m slipping away. Like I felt like I’m alone. I just felt myself slipping away and I’d like no energy. So I turned around to my wife at the time. And I said to her, “honey, I think I’m having a heart attack!” And next minute the paramedics are coming in. And I’ve been, uh, you know, uh, taken to Sunnybrook hospital and the doctors are looking at me the whole night I was kind of there. And you know, you kind of go into these experiences where I think I showed up there probably must have been midnight or one in the mornings by like the time they’d done all the tests and everything else. It was probably like seven or 8:00 in the morning or something. And I remember the doctor coming in and he said to me, “well, whatever you’ve got, um, you, it’s not going to kill you because we’ve done every single test and whatever the heck it is, it’s not deadly at this point”. It’s not physical or it’s maybe physical, but it’s not deadly physical because we only deal with this part of the medical system. We only deal with things that are going to kill you right now. And it’s certainly not going to kill you. Um, so say, “what do I do?” He said, well, you’re going to have to kind of tap into another area of either the medical profession or something else to help you deal with whatever this thing is. But we’re outta here. Like it’s not our thing. Right? And good luck for that. But at least on the one hand, there was this huge sense of relief that, okay, I’m not dead, I’m not going to die. Um, but in the other hand, there’s a sense of, well, I don’t know what I’m supposed to do about that. And um, interestingly enough, I went to see a Traditional Chinese Medicine guy because now I’m back on this thing again. Let’s say anxiety. What the heck’s going on? Um, by the way, this experience occurred a bunch of times before I went to the TCM guy. I kept thinking I was dying of a heart attack or something was happening. I was getting up from the office and walking over. I actually walked into an emergency room at a hospital downtown one day and the woman said to me, “what drugs are you on?” And I said, “none”. She says, “well, you look like you’re completely high on drugs”. And it was just, obviously something was happening in my system

Thal

In many ways. You were lucky to have someone to tell you that hey, the medical world is not going to help serve you. Like many people get stuck and just go see one doctor and the other. And really, their problem is not that. So in many ways you were given that permission to go explore.

Jonathan

100 percent. In fact, I had a great family doctor. He said to me, “look, I can give you something if you want. I mean, my sense is this is more closer to the realm of anxiety than anything else. Um, I can certainly give you something for it, but I think you should explore other alternatives to see how you can help yourself with that.”. And so that was kind of neat in a way. Um, I didn’t feel like I needed him to help fix me. And so I explored, I went and actually met with this guy he’s a TCM guy. Now TCM, I’d never had traditional Chinese medicine and what they do is I think he asked me to stick my tongue out and he looks at my tongue and then he feels my pulse because he pushes on it a little bit too and felt, I guess the different types of pulses that you do have. And he looks at me after a bit of this and he says to me, “um, you have almost no yin in your body”. So…

Thal

Wow.

Jonathan

Well, it’s interesting you say that because I just went, “So okay. So what? Like, give me something. Like what’s the big deal right?” He said “you have virtually no yin in your body”. I go, “yeah, so?” He looks at me. He goes, “no, you don’t understand you guys. That’s actually not a very good thing at all”. So I go, “why?” He says to me, “well, picture this,” he says, “you’re like this ball of fire. Okay? But there’s no substance to you in the middle. So there’s only a filament of flame on the outside.” And he says, “there’s nothing to you.” He says “when I push down on your pulse, I get nothing back. Like there is almost no life force to you. You’re basically just burning up! You’re just this Yang fire thing with nothing and burning up!” So at that point I was like, well that sounds kind of about right because I feel a bit burnt out and, and whatever, that feels fine. So I’m still at this point feeling like that’s okay.

Adrian

A burning corpse.

Jonathan

Burning, burning out. I’m okay. Big Deal. Like I’m sure you’ll fix it. And he says me, but he says “it’s not good”. I said, “why?” He says, “well, because if you don’t address it,” he said, “first of all, no one’s going to tell you this”. He says, “because if they take your blood and they probably have, they will not see it in your blood, and if they assessed you physically, it’s not apparent at the physical level in the way that you normally would assess your energy. But the reality is if you do nothing about it, what’s going to happen, and I can tell you what’s going to happen in a few years’ time and I don’t know if it’s five years or 10 years or three years, you’re going to show signs of some degenerative disease and I don’t know if it’s Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s. He says, “but what’s going to happen is people are going to go, ‘well, you’re the one in so and so at your thing, statistically.’ That’s what it is. And these are our treatments for it.” And he says, “okay, so here’s the thing.” The minute he started to say that, I started to really freak out more anxiety. Um, and then he looks at me, he goes, “but it doesn’t have to be that way!”

Thal

Because it doesn’t matter how it manifests is what he was trying to tell you that.

Jonathan

Yeah. So yeah, absolutely. And so he said “it doesn’t have to be that way.” I said, “okay, well I’m very much listening to how it could be if you if you telling me. And what he did was he shifted my attention to a landscape where I got to view the world in terms of Yin and Yang. I’d never viewed anything in terms of Yin and Yang. I’ve viewed it always in terms of I want this and this is how I get it and this is how it go from here to there. And all of that. But he changed my relationship with the world to viewing the quality of things as they are rather than what they are. Um, because you can have water that’s boiling or water, that’s cool. And so the quality makes a big difference to whether it’s a Yin or a Yang. And I could be speaking in a meeting and I could be highly animated and agitated and filled with Yang or I could be speaking in a much slower and more connected and calmer pace and that could be more yin and starting to understand that the quality to things is relevant. I didn’t even know it was there nevermind relevant. And so it changed my relationship with the space and with myself in terms of now being aware of something I had no idea about before. Um, and so for, for a couple of years, I, um, I shifted my attention into looking at things through that lens and it really changed the way I engaged in group meetings and with people. And I started to find that I got 10 times more done with 10 times less effort. It was the weirdest thing. It’s almost like the organization, the infrastructure part and the operations, but it just built itself. And all I did was almost hold the space for it while it did that. And I didn’t know that that’s what I was doing at the time. But it was what came out of the experience of having faced some anxiety. Where I had someone tell me this is something that you need to deal with because of the anxiety that you have.

Thal

And it goes back to that quality versus quantity, which is so simple when we say it, but for you like your experience shows it at a very, um, embodied level really,

Jonathan

Right. A very embodied level. That was I think the very key, I discovered later on that the whole anxiety piece was really just the body screaming, come home, come back, come back. And with an obsessively focused Corporate Warrior attention on my objective, I for the longest time would not hear that until it had to send signals like the Meniere’s disease or the anxiety attacks or panic attacks. Um, for whatever reason, I’m a little dense and I’m very tuned in and goal oriented and focused. And people would say, wow, that’s a good thing. You’re a goal-oriented, results-oriented kind of guy. And that’s great. The problem is that to be so, to such an extent, it almost eliminates any ability to see what’s really here while you’re trying to achieve your goals. I think it certainly drained me of energy and limited me in terms of my potential. And so that was the first inkling that there was some…

Adrian

So what were some of the things you explored to bring some Yin into your life? So he had the observation that you were like a flaming ball and with no core. So what were some of the first things you explored?

Jonathan

So two things that are interesting was one is diet. Some foods are Yin and some are Yang and I was very much into the sugars and the processed foods, um, which are very Yang predominant. Into the red meat, it was very evidently Yang predominant. Um, and so what he said to me is you just got to eat more, first of all, fruits and vegetables and less processed things that are cooler. He also said to me to eat a lot of stews and things that just sit and that are hardy, they will give you some substance. And it’s weird because you think, oh, it’s, we think of that, that um, fruits and vegetables in terms of a component of something, but it’s more the energy of it that has the real, the real impact. So diet was, was one piece. He gave me some herbs that were Yang predominant, obviously extracted from things that are more the frequency of that energy. Um, the other piece was more activities. He, he kind of steered me in the direction of more… I was doing yoga and the yoga that I had been involved in, in practicing a form of yoga called Ashtanga Yoga. It’s a yoga that was very vigorous and very Yang predominant in a way. And so he guided me to shift into, um, into exploring activity that was much more Yin predominant. So there’s Yin Yoga itself, there’s recuperative yoga and more to spend time in the meditation realm to slow it down at night and spend time just sitting. Um, so those two things, the physical activity side and the diet side was a big piece and I think just being aware that there’s such a thing of Yin and Yang, that’s the mental aspect. I think that that really helped as well.

Thal

A paradigm shift in your life.

Jonathan

A paradigm shift in my life. 100 percent. Absolutely.

Adrian

Yeah. It sounds like a helpful framework. It’s just so simple because there’s two sort of poles to look at it. But then I get the sense that it’s finding harmony between those two. So it’s not that one is better than the other but having this awareness that, oh, there’s a quality to the way you are and the way other people behave and the interactions and even bringing in food and things we consume that also affect this quality.

Jonathan

Correct.

Adrian

And so that sounds like a very helpful model.

Jonathan

You’re 100 percent correct. I love what you say, you know, I noticed so much of the conversation today and in all walks of life is very binary. Which is in my, in my case, I happened to have a massive yin deficiency. So the focus was build up the yin. Um, some people would hear that to say that Yang is inappropriate or bad or not, right? It’s like, no, dude, you have so much Yang, you don’t need to focus on it right now. You don’t really need to cultivate that. It’s like you’ve got oodles of it. Rather just focus on the yin and then you will come, as you say, into balance where your Yang will be supported by the Yin and the Yin will be brought into its fullest potential by the Yang. And to have that come into play was really where things started to take off for me. Absolutely.

Thal

And to see it positively. If you have that much Yang, then that means you can actually develop that much Yin to match the Yang that you already have. And, and we do, um, we like we can acknowledge that our culture is Yang-oriented. And that just talking about Yin, like a lot of people would benefit from slowing down. Doesn’t mean that living the way that we’re living is pathological. It just means that it needs more integration. More of a whole holistic approach to living. Really.

Jonathan

Yes. Yang is agitative in nature. And what I found is that because we’re so familiar with it, we overlook the biological signals of agitation that call our attention away from what we’re currently focusing on that’s inappropriate. And so we miss the biological signals that are guiding us in the challenges that we’re facing. And so, um, it’s very much a part of the work I do at the corporate level. At the so called, Yang-predominant world,,um, is to help people tune more into the signals that they’re experiencing biologically, to help them extract the wisdom out of what’s appearing right now that they’re unable to see because they’re caught up in focusing on something to their detriment.

Adrian

So, you were beginning to see a shift in your own quality, as you said you were going into these new practices and the diet changes. Um, and you also mentioned you’re actually sort of paradoxically more productive but not as depleted as you were able to do that. What were you starting to move towards after that? What was changing in your life at that point?

Jonathan

So, it’s a really interesting point. I think what a couple of things was, I don’t know if I was moving towards it, but circumstances were changing where the business had grown to the point where the next phase became much more structured and formal and I was asked to play a much more structured role as opposed to the role that I’ve played before was much more of a, “well just float in and out of wherever you need to be to build whatever it needs to be built to deal with whatever is here to be dealt with.” Um, and the role changed into, “well, we’d like you to be the VP of operations and manage the operations. You can’t just waltz into accounting even though you are an accountant. But that’s for the accounting guy to deal with. You stay in operations and you have to kind of manage this piece very well, and then trust that everyone else will manage it and then you’ll have to kind of meet and integrate with them at different points.” And the truth is that’s a great role for someone who’s built for that, but it wasn’t something that I really felt drawn to or comfortable with. And I started to feel very much tied down. I’m constricted. Um, and so I started to feel more anxious, again. I’m bringing it up again and this time, no matter how much are you see, you can’t Yin your way out of that one! You know what I mean? [laughing] Like, so this, so in this case, the anxiety in the one hand that first, you know, um, maybe due to before, before the yin, whatever the anxiety was at that point moved into being the anxiety about not enough yin. Now the anxiety was about something completely different, which is, “where do I fit in the world? Like who am I? Where do I really belong? What should I be doing next?” And I didn’t know what to do. Um, I, I really struggled with that one. And I had to, um, I actually took myself off and I went and spent I think two months in Ireland in little retreat center just hanging out, walking around and the fresh air. Just trying to figure out what I wanted to do next because I really didn’t know. Um, I remember in Toronto, they were building the Tiff Bell Lightbox building downtown Toronto on King Street and we were right across, right across the street, um, and I, my office looked out over that gaping hole in the ground that they were building and it took them about a year to build that. And it took me about a year to watch it being built and just sit all day staring at that building. I’m trying to figure out what my next thing should be.

Thal

How old were you then?

Jonathan

Um, I must have been around 40.

Thal

Would you consider that a mid-life crisis in a way?

Jonathan

Well, it’s a wonderful thing because it truly, truly the timing spectacular. I mean, you definitely can nail that one down as a mid-life crisis for sure. There’s no question about it. Mid-life in so many different ways. And so I watched this thing built and when the building was built, you know, kind of became clear to me that I’m not going to make any headway here. I have to leave in order to figure it out to something we were talking about earlier, the whole courage thing in terms of stepping into something you really don’t know what’s gonna come next. And someone asked me a little bit later as to what it was that led me to do that. And the only thing I could come up with at the time was, um, the pain of staying where I was was greater than the fear of stepping into the unknown. That’s the equation, right? And that was all it was and it was like, I can’t do this anymore. And so I left not knowing what I was going to do next. And I spent some time really just sitting with the, um, the angst. I’m trying to “figure out” what the next piece should be. That was a very, there was a very interesting, interesting piece and I think the executive coaching, I didn’t know that that’s what I wanted to do at all. In fact, what I actually did was I took the time to look at everything I’ve ever done between my chartered accountant days that Ernst and Young and software consulting days and the infrastructure build operational days. And I looked over it and just decided to be incredibly hardcore evaluative, if that’s the word, to see if I really look at everything I’ve done, “where have I gotten results as far as to where people have kind of said, ‘wow, what you’ve done is really good’!”. And I could clearly know that it was good. And then “what did I do to get there and “what, of what I did, is absolutely the same across the board?”. In other words, that never changed no matter what. I want to know what that core thing is. So what fell by the wayside because all the jobs, all the jobs were different was I knew about this or I knew about that or I could do this or I could do that because that job didn’t require it. And all I came up with was when people came into my space, they left my space feeling better than when they came in. That was it. And I was horrified. I was horrified because I had to get honest with myself and when I got to that point of honesty, it was like horrifying because I thought, Holy Moly. Like what am I going to do with that?

Thal

You distilled your values to just like the core.

Jonathan

The core thing. It’s like, who really cares about that? How can I possibly monetize that? So took me a while for a few weeks. I actually was just like stunned in a way. Like okay, my actual feeling was one of worthlessness because there’s like, I don’t have anything. All I’ve got is a stupid thing that when people come into my space I feel better when they then when they, they leave feeling better

Thal

You know that that’s everything! [laughing]

Jonathan

So it was a weird thing. So I sat there and then what clicked over, I had to sit with that for awhile and then what clicked over was, well, “it can’t be that bad if that’s the thing that resulted in all the things that actually got the results!” I hadn’t at the time I was, I was so freaked out by the fact that it was that simple and that kind of benign in a way like, well, nothing that I, um, I missed the point that I’d started out by saying, but it’s the thing that actually got the big results. So at that point, that’s when I realized, okay, it’s the thing that got the big results, but it’s a tiny thing that doesn’t really have substance to it at this point because I haven’t cultivated it in any way. And one of the things I’ve learned from the president of the company, who I had helped build this with, he had always guided us. He was a successful entrepreneur and built lots of businesses. And he always said to me, the only thing that matters is value. He says, I don’t build a business for any other reason. I look to see where’s the value and if I can see value, then don’t be scared that other people can’t see it. He says, if you can see value, then your role then is just to “do you want to just cultivate it?”, and he said that’s a very difficult thing because there’s nothing at the time that’s going to prove itself out at the stage. He said, but the funny thing is is if you spend enough time cultivating the value, what’s going to happen is eventually other people are going to see it and he says, and when they’re going to see it, they’re going to want it and it’s worth a lot more than when you originally started cultivating it, so then that’s how you build businesses and then sells them because then they’re worth a lot more he said, but the cultivating values a very difficult thing. No one wants to do that. It’s scary. It’s challenging. That’s never been done before because it’s in its infancy and we don’t know how to do it and…

Adrian

It can be slow. It can take time.

Jonathan

It can take a ton of time, you don’t know, and it takes a fair amount of courage to do that at the deepest level. And I decided, “you know, what, everything I’ve done up until this point had been, um, surface driven in a way, but the anxiety that I’d been feeling was an existential angst around my place in the world and it felt like if I’m going to find my rightful place in the world, I better start with what’s the core piece of what I’m here to…what I can offer people of value. Otherwise I’ve got nothing to offer. It’s all just learned.” And so I actually just started to meet with people. I went down and chatted with people and spoke with people and after a little while people would say to me, you know, it’s really interesting. I get a really good feeling that if you could, could you do me a favour and come in and speak with, Pamela in my organization. I just have a feeling that she’s going through something. If you could just spend some time with her. Um, it would really help her and I think it would really, you know, she’s got so much talent but she’s just missing something in someplace and my sense is you could really help her based on the way I’m hearing you speak. And so I would say just fine not a problem. And that turned into wow, she’s really turned around, what did you do? And I’m like, I don’t really know. I just kind of sat and listened and spoke. And I don’t know what I’m doing. Um, and so over time started to have these engagements with people in a corporate setting and only corporate because I didn’t know what other setting really to hang out in because that’s kind of where I came from. And so people would have these experiences where they became more productive or they became better at what they were doing or they understood their problem better or whatever it was. And it became more clear to me over time that, oh right. They feel better after spending time with me because they became more clear about something. And that’s what made them feel better. So that really the value is in providing clarity to people and so that’s when I put up my website, which was clarity, guidance, results. I didn’t call myself an executive coach. I didn’t know what the heck I was doing. Um, and I had no formal training. I didn’t kind of have a certification or anything, I didn’t know what that was all about. And so I started to cultivate this value, grow this business, meet with people and connect with people over time and eventually discovered that what I was really doing was thing called executive coaching. And so that’s how that came about. The cool part about it was that because I’d never taken a course, I never had a paradigm to work with, I just got to work with people as they are and synthesize that information into my own body as I am. And so I got to discover some really cool stuff about the things that hold people back because all I would do all day would be sitting with people and all they would tell me was what’s a problem? Where do they want to go? Why they can go there? What’s in the way, what’s not in the way, what they wish they had. And, and unpack this with every single different type of person you can imagine in the context of what they consider to be the biggest problem or challenge that they’re facing to date. I learned so much you cannot believe it. I mean, I couldn’t believe it because what it felt like was that they were paying me to discover what’s inside of me that’s holding me back.

Thal

That’s amazing.

Jonathan

Oh, it’s ridiculous. I mean, it was unbelievable.

Adrian

The Yang part of me is like, “okay, so what’s the code?” Like you clearly have cracked the code and let’s spit out the 10, you know, secret…. right?

Jonathan

It’s so interesting…

Thal

The yin part of me wants to just sit and enjoy this. [laughing]

Jonathan

This is awesome. It’s brilliant. It’s so awesome. So, it’s actually funny, it’s the two together that actually has the thing. There’s only one, there was only one. There’s no 10. That’s the really cool part. And um, what I discovered is that in facing our challenges, we overlook our biological experience. And so what I realized was there was a significant amount of people that I was helping bring them back to the biological aspect of their challenge, not the conceptual aspect of their challenge. They’re all very, very strong conceptually. I mean these are people who have gone through university and programs and all kinds of things that are able to conceptualize and think through very complex things. So they thinking mechanism is perfectly fine and they were struggling with a problem because the problem has an aspect of it that isn’t thinking related. And so to assist them to process information in a non cognitive way is completely at odds with that landscape. And so the piece that was missing was really, I would say, is the connection to one’s own sense of self or presence. And that gets heard in a conceptual way. Um, it’s nowhere near like what people actually hear it to be. Um, so that’s when I changed my website relatively recently to ‘What if your problem isn’t what you think it is?’ Because most of the things that we’re doing are all about how we’re framing them up.

Thal

It’s more experiential.

Jonathan

Yeah. Yup.

Thal

And in a way it’s like, I’m so tempted to say this, I’m going to say it. Um, it feels like you’re humanizing the corporate world because a lot of time people just make it sound like, oh, the corporate world. And it’s like very, you know, it’s, it’s as if this entity that’s not, but it is a human world. It is. And we need more of that. We actually, like, there’s no way we’re going to dismantle corporations. I mean that’s what we’re made of. This is our society, this is our culture. So how do we humanize that world? It feels like this is part of what you’re doing.

Jonathan

Yes. And what I’m discovering is that what’s great about it is that the approach that I’m being led to take is not in the cerebral realm. So it almost, doesn’t get caught up with or get trapped in or get tied up in all the trappings of the complex thinking dynamic because it leaves it alone to be as it is. So I don’t mess with it. Um, and what I’m really doing is expanding the perspective around a problem to say, well, that’s great that you’ve described your problem as… The fact that you don’t have enough resources to do this particular job, but tell me what does it feel like in your body when you think about that problem? And the first thing is, is most people don’t even know how to even answer that because they go, “what’s my body got to do with it?” And the answer is everything because you’re the one that’s been tasked with solving it and your body is intelligent and it has information for you to solve that particular problem actually, because I wouldn’t be doing this if I didn’t want to help you get a result in solving that problem. But the reality is that you’re missing a ton of information and your body can offer it to you. Just like it offered it to me each time I was having these panic and anxiety attacks that I was kind of so bluntly and blatantly ignoring. And um, so that’s an interesting process to take people down.

Thal

Absolutely, thinking with your body.

Jonathan

Yeah. Literally, I would call it processing with your body, and so people learning to actually process information rather than believing the only way to process information is through thinking, um, and, and see what arises as a result of that processing. And it’s been quite remarkable. Mostly what I’ve found is that a big chunk of it is people’s inability to be with biological discomfort. And so we short circuit the biological discomfort by latching onto ideas that we can play over and over and over again as somehow a promise that if we kind of figure them out, then the discomfort will go away. But the reality is we’re suppressing and masking the discomfort. And we’re not opening to the information that the discomfort is sharing. So we can become better delegators because we’re terrified to delegate. You’ve learned all there is to know about delegating and you’re still not delegating well. Why is that? Well, because it’s biologically uncomfortable to delegate. You want to have executive presence, but the reality is standing in the feelings of agitation in a meeting where people are sharing information you don’t agree with is too uncomfortable for you to do so therefore you talk when you shouldn’t talk or you interrupt when you shouldn’t interrupt and therefore you don’t have any presence and it’s because you’re too uncomfortable to experience the discomfort of presence. And so people starting to really having to learn that actually, um, they have to become more aware of themselves biologically so that they can actually shift beyond the limitations that their current tolerance level is. I’m holding them.

Adrian

It sounds tricky because if one is used to this strategy against you know, minimizing the discomfort by turning away and I’m hearing in you a suggestion that perhaps it’s actually towards or there’s a relationship with the discomfort that needs to be explored there. But that must be so hard. Especially somebody going an intense anxiety experience and their body is numb and there’s pain and then, you know. Um, so how do you, how do you coach somebody to…

Jonathan

Oh my God, that’s so much fun! Oh my God, that’s the best part! So the thing that I’ve discovered, the thing that I discovered is that there are two components to information. Um, there’s the thinking component and there’s what I would call the charge component. The component is the part of the information that’s being conveyed or you’re being experienced that you feel it on your cells in your body. It’s like electricity almost. And that charge component could be positive, negative, and it could be really very intensity, positive or really intensely negative. But it’s there. So if I said to you, how’s that assignment coming? I’ve said, “how’s that assignment coming?” And that’s like four words. But the truth is you felt a whole lot of stuff. When I say that you and depending on what was going on, you’d feel a different thing if you’d completed your assignment and going really well, you’d feel different to, oh, I’m behind the gun on that or something bad’s going to happen. So there’s a charge component to that. The problem with us is that people don’t know, and aren’t aware of that charge component, and it’s that charge component that sets in motion the focus to really want to fixate on the thinking part of the problem and what happens is that when we do that, because the charge can’t be processed because we’re using the wrong part of our brain. What we do is we cover up that charge with thinking and we pretend it’s really about some thoughts. So you would say to yourself, if let’s say someone said to me, Jonathan, you didn’t get the promotion. There’d be a charge component to that information and the cover up of that charge component would be thoughts like, “I didn’t want it anyways” or “what a bunch of assholes this company is” and “they never liked me anyway” and “I don’t like them” or whatever that is, which has nothing to do with the verbal side, which is simply you didn’t get the promotion. It could be a million reasons, but my brain is now putting that all into the space because it’s really converted charge, trying to pretend to be relevant information masquerading as verbal things. It’s kind of noise in the way. So when I’m having a a session with someone, what happens is they are experiencing these two things together, which is why they’re struggling with whatever problem they’re having. Part of their problem is that there is verbal information that’s relevant and then a ton of verbal information that’s completely irrelevant. That’s really unprocessed charge and so in a coaching dynamic, what I have to do is I’ve got to sit in the space and I have to process the charge on their behalf. So what happens is as we’re having a conversation, I can feel that charge because I’m feeling it in my body, not in their body. I can feel the uncomfortable situation and my role is to to be connected to the sensations of that charge in a way where I don’t go cerebral. So what really happens in this case is a bit bizarre to share with people because it would seem like I’m not really doing a lot or it’s very dangerous, but there’s chunks of space where people are talking to me and I’m not interpreting or listening to a word they say in the traditional sense, but I’m absolutely 100 percent present to what they’re saying, but it’s being processed non thinking wise until what happens is something that they say hits my brain in a way where I go, oh, that makes sense. Now I can talk about that. And so what often happens is someone will speak to me for 20 minutes and say a whole bunch of complicated, complex things. That’s really all kinds of stuff and I’m just sitting in processing the charge and what happens is when something comes in terms of the verbal thing that makes sense, it’ll make sense to me. Otherwise it won’t make sense to me. It’s all noise. And when it makes sense to me and I share it with them, they go, “how did you just get that from everything I just said? That’s exactly what I was trying to say, but I couldn’t say it with everything that was there!” The crazy thing is it always kind of nails it because as long as I’m trusting the fact that I just stay away from everything that’s charged base and just process it, then what’s left is obviously relevant in some way. Don’t tell white way and then we can work with it. Now what happens there is because I’ve found the one piece of relevant information, all the charge can then no longer come up because what’s going to happen is as they start to work with that, they’ve trek’d a little deeper into their problems so they’ve gotten a little further than where they were before. Because before they were at some point in the process where all that other information seemed so relevant. So now they’re further along in the process because now they’ve got a piece of information that’s much more relevant in all of that and so then what happens is all of a sudden if they don’t know how to process charge within a day, an hour a week or whatever, what’s going to happen is the new more charge is going to come into this space. It’s going to make that progress where they have feel like they attract again and so unless they know how to process the charge of their experience, they are constantly behold and almost to someone who’s going to process it on their behalf. Which is why I started to put together workshops and programs to help people process their own charge, calling it …. I don’t even know what I called it, but it’s something that says recalibrating… ‘The Art and Science of Finding Clarity in a Noisy World’.

Thal

Because you’re trying to use language to describe something that’s nonverbal.

Jonathan

Yes, and the thing is, is in the actual part of the brain, it’s the parietal lobe that actually processes nonverbal information and the frontal lobe processes verbal information, and so you actually, by being in the sensation of something can process nonverbal information and by processing it I mean move it away from the frontal lobe that has been burdened by it. It’s almost like cleaning up the malware on your processor and so then it gets freed up and it goes, wow, I can do all this stuff that I couldn’t do before because it’s no longer submerged under a whole bunch of malware, for example.

Adrian

So this ability that you discovered to filter relevance sounds like is a trainable muscle because you just mentioned that you have developed workshops to try to enhance that. What’s coming to my mind is I’m curious around how you discern what is relevant and what is not relevant. What is noise? What is signal?

Jonathan

What such a great question! Well, um, so it took me awhile to really get clear on what are the fundamental things, but there are four signals that you can tap into biologically that are guaranteed to tell you that right now you need to process at a nonverbal level. The first one is agitation. So you’d say to me, no, come on Jonathan. If I’m agitated, there’s got to be something… the truth is 100 percent. If you’re agitated, if you are biologically agitated, you should be processing nonverbally. If you are constricted in some way, you should be processing nonverbally. If you’re tense in some way, you should be processing non verbally. If you’re euphoric in some way you should be processing in a non verbal way. The the first three are tough for people, but they get there because they can relate. In some ways, euphoria is tougher. One the most difficult ones. The last one is if you’re feeling any dissociation, you need to be processing non-verbally too.

Adrian

And how does that… how does one experience that? Can you describe dissociation?

Jonathan

Very, very difficult to know because the dissociative process is one of making you believe that everything’s okay because you’re genuinely not feeling anything because you’ve genuinely cut off from the feeling. Let’s call it up and out. That’s exactly how I would describe it is up and out. And so the thing is, is what I’ve found is giving people a paradigm doesn’t help. It’s almost like that’s the one way they need a reference point in the coaching. To be with someone where they experienced themselves up and out and bring them ever so slightly back to a particular sense of being and then to feel what that feels like to have a reference point for it. And it’s very, very difficult to work with. Um, and so those are the people that, um, they’re often considered uncoachable in the leadership realm because people don’t like their behavior, but they can’t recalibrate to adjust their behaviour because they’re too heady. And so, um, and they find themselves moved into spaces where they are much more working on things than working with people. Um, in, in some ways if there are working with people, they do it in a very, very highly evolved cerebral way that makes them seem like they’re very smart and figured out because their brain has figured out how to outmaneuver any way of feeling anything biologically. So they appear really better at being in tune than anyone else. But the fact is that 100 percent attitude, they’re the most dangerous people in that space because everyone will think that they really got it going on.

Adrian

It’s like a very evolved compensation.

Jonathan

Very evolved compensation. And I can relate because I’ve been there. So takes one to know one. And so I can call it out. And I’ve made the mistake of calling it out. And the thing is that’s not going to work because no one’s going to get it, right? But the thing is, what I have learned is not to co-create with the interference of the verbal. So if someone’s giving me all the legitimate reasons for whatever, that’s absolutely fine. Don’t have to add my perspective into it verbally. It’s not part of the process, it’s not what I do. Um, so, so that’s, um..

Thal

it’s interesting that you use that word non-coachable. It’s very interesting because you know, then it’s probably another realm that they need to experience or maybe other issues to address.

Jonathan

There are some people who are coachable in that realm, but that’s normally where you’d find a lot of people who are considered uncoachable. That’s where they fall in that category where people just throw their hands up at some level.

Adrian

Can you share more about the nonverbal? I’m interested in that level of processing. So maybe in the context of making a decision. So someone’s got a really tough scenario and a decision needs to be made and then they have those experiences, I forget which ones…agitation was one of them.

Jonathan

So okay, maybe how about we do this. I’ll take you through something and you’ll see if you can do it. So, um, if you put your hand on your lap right now with your palm faced upwards. If you put your attention on the sensation of your hand, you can feel the sensation of your hand. I would assume. That’s biological. You can feel the sensation. Now when you’re putting your attention on the sensation of your right hand, what’s actually happening is you’re activating neurons in the parietal lobe of your brain because the parietal lobe is where you feel sensation. Different parts of your body feel different sensation. It feels sensation based on where they are connected in the parietal lobe. So if you’re putting your attention on your right hand, you will activate the sensation neurons in that area of the brain. Now what you can do as an experiment is think about a scenario that you find highly challenging or agitating. So do you have one that you can think of?

Adrian

Just even the project of this podcast, like there’s certain challenges to it.

Jonathan

Yeah. Okay. So when you start to think about it, what does it feel like in your body when you think about that challenge?

Adrian

Well, I noticed the moment I started talking about it I actually forgot about my right hand. So that was the first thing I noticed. The loss of connection.

Jonathan

Yes. And what happens to your body?

Adrian

A little tighter around the chest.

Jonathan

Okay. So perfect. So as you think about the project, there’s some tightness in your chest. Now the tightness is some form of constriction. So the first problem that we have is most people aren’t aware that they’re tight in the chest, so people have to become more self aware and you have to start practicing. And so we’ll talk about that in a second, but I’ll take you through this and I’ll bring you back to what you can do to practice. So if you now put your attention on the sensation of your hand and I say to you okay, we’re going to play a game. What we’re going to do is your role is to stay focused on the sensation of your hand at all costs, so it is the primary attention. But while you’re doing that, bring in the idea of the challenge you have around the project and see how the two can coexist to the extent that you have to stay in sensation and see what happens. So tell me what happens when you start to do that.

Adrian

I’m starting to notice that I can do that. So I’m maintaining focus on my right hand. It’s, it’s a little cool. I can feel the air. I’m starting to run through scenarios of the stressors about this project and deadlines and that sort of thing, but I have contact with my hand.

Jonathan

How does your chest feel?

Adrian

That was actually interesting. So not as tight. So when I was noticing that, when I turned attention, it was actually just occupying more volume.

Jonathan

Okay. And so while are you staying in the sensation of your hand so you’re putting attention on it, what is your relationship to the challenge that you had before compared to your relationship to the challenge?

Adrian

Now it doesn’t seem as as big of a challenge.

Jonathan

Okay. So what you’ve done is in that process, as long as you’re processing the charge of the challenge, because if you’re not processing the charge of the challenge, feel what happens if you take your attention away from your hand, the charge will come back to the challenge related, and you will start to feel the constriction and your possibilities will narrow. Now if you want to face the challenge, you want to expand your possibilities of what’s there and so you’re going to have to process the charge like we spoke about you have to literally be in a nonverbal thing. It has nothing to do with the problem as you think it, but everything to do with the problem as it’s being experienced in the body, your body. Now what happens is now you can actually face your challenge. So the big problem with this is that first of all, people aren’t aware that they’re either agitated, constricted, or tense in their body to begin with, and so you have what has to happen is they have to build up. They have to start a practice of strengthening the muscle that would alert them to the fact that they actually are agitated, constricted, or tense, and so the way they would do that is they could sit for five or 10 minutes in the morning when they get up in the morning, the first thing they do and sit and put the attention on the sensation of their hands or their feet and just feel sensation and do that for five or 10 minutes before you go to bed at night, just before you go to sleep. Now, what’s remarkable about that is that that activates neurons in the brain in the parietal lobe. What it’s going to do is if you do it for long enough and for regular enough, it starts to form neurosynaptic connections, which means that now you start to actually form new neural pathways and those neural pathways are like your muscle building and so you will start to feel things you’ve never felt before. it’s weird, I’ve had clients who say to me, “dude, okay, that’s great. Three weeks ago you told me to do this practice, and what I can tell you is that since I’ve been doing it, I felt nothing but agitated and anxious and it’s making it worse.” What I often say to them, or almost all the time is, well, what it’s showing me is not that it’s making you agitated or anxious. It’s that you finally aware of how agitated and anxious you actually are in the thing you’ve now raised your level of awareness to something you weren’t aware of before. So now you may not like it, but the fact is you’re now at least in contact with discomfort that you were completely not in contact with. So then the other pieces is to include that and to expand the practice to maybe every hour for a minute, have something beep on your phone or something and say sensation and you feel a sensation for a minute. And then the other pieces during activities such as driving your car or going for walks or you know, watching TV, see while you’re doing it, if you can be in sensation while it’s occurring. What I often do is I take people through a real quick exercise to show them that nothing bad’s going to happen because when you’re in sensation, you’re not actually interfering with your frontal lobe. So your frontal lobe can process perfectly fine. So if someone goes to sensation, stays completely in sensation, I could say to them, what’s 10 times three? And they have no problem with answering 30 while in sensation. At first, they’re binary, I often catch them, they go “30!” and I go, “you left sensation didn’t you?” And they go, “oh my God, I didn’t realize that!” And so at first you have to get to sensation. But what they discover is that there isn’t a time when they’re in sensation that their frontal lobe become stupid or can’t process or they forget how to drive or they don’t change lanes at the right time. Actually things improve because the charge component that’s masquerading as relevant information isn’t there, so they become a better driver and they’re cooking food or making tea or doing something or vacuuming the house in a way that’s much more cohesive and integrated. Be in alignment and enjoy it. They start to feel more enjoyment but not because from the outside it’s making them any happier. It’s just that there’s less stuff pushing on them.

Adrian

Yeah. So increasing the vividness of their sensations.

Jonathan

Correct.

Adrian

So both painful and pleasant.

Jonathan

Getting real!

Adrian

Right.

Jonathan

Getting real with yourself and learning ultimately to accept the reality of whatever is here, but not cognitively because cognitively I could talk myself into accepting it, but the truth is I don’t really. My body is agitated. So why don’t I accept that reality and just be with the agitation in a nonjudgmental way, but not nonjudgmental in a way we think about it. Nonjudgmental in the way where you’re not thinking about it at all. It’s not judging it at all. You’re just really processing it so it’s not for everybody because that takes courage because you only going to kind of do that if ‘a’ it’s very clear to you that this is something that’s relevant and it doesn’t promise anything because it’s not embedded in the realm of the cognitive that says, well, if you do this and this’ll help and then you’ll get here and then you’ll speak to him, and then this’ll, um, it doesn’t do that. It really just offers you an avenue beyond what you’ve tried for however many times you’ve tried it and realized that wasn’t working. And so you’ll try something else?

Thal

I feel like someone listening would say, well, what’s the point of going outside of my comfort zone if it’s gonna hurt.

Jonathan

Right. And so the only analogy I have for most of my clients is the weightlifting one or the gym where two people could walk into a gym and they both want to get stronger. And so that’s kind of the point. They both pick up the weights and one person goes, “that hurts” and the other person goes, “that hurts”. And the second person, when it hurts and they go, “ugh, ooh” and they put it down and they go, “that’s not for me.” Then the other person goes, “well, you’re telling me that if I keep lifting this weight, my muscles are going to get stronger.” And I go, “yes”. And they go, “but it hurts”. I go, “what’s going to happen is if you keep doing it, your relationship with the pain is going to change. That I can guarantee you that if you keep lifting those weights and doing that, within a short period of time, the pain will still be there, but the way you feel it will be very different. And so you’re almost will start to enjoy the pain and the pain is no different. And in fact what’s going to happen is when you start to get stronger and that weight becomes lighter, you’re going to want to put more weight on to get more pain”. And they go, “really?” I go, “that’s how this works”. So this is the same thing.

Thal

And results!

Jonathan

And results. So the idea behind wanting to face your pain/insecurity, whatever those agitative, biological discomfort is that at the at the behind your biological discomfort are the things you deeply desire or want at the deeper level, not at the level of like one more money, but at a deeper level of I want more of myself in the world, that one more of whatever that thing is that I’m trying to track towards and I can come into alignment with it because I’m blocked and I know deep down that I would be a better leader and I know deep down that I know what to do. But the truth is I’m scared. And the thing is absolutely. So scared would mean you’re agitated. You constricted, you’re tense. You need to process the charge that’s commensurate with you being scared so that you can ultimately experienced a little bit more space to inch your way forward into the land that you would normally never go into. And that’s the way you will get the results. But to paint some wonderful map that’s cognitive will not yield the result. Because the minute you feel uncomfortable, your brain will short circuit and tell you why, you know, today’s not a good idea to go there.

Adrian

Yeah. And just to piggyback off that analogy with exercise, this is coming to mind the importance of having different ways to approach the practice and finding one that suits you because there are many forms of exercise and maybe running on a treadmill isn’t enjoyable, but perhaps you know, doing stretches and lifting weights might actually be your jam. And so as you’re describing these practices, there seems like there’s overlap with this mindfulness popularity. And in that, like exercise, there are many offerings, many techniques, many different traditions. Is it intentional that you didn’t want to use that word ‘mindfulness’? Because I know there is a current phenomenon happening with the popularity and the commercialization of it.

Jonathan

It’s a good question. Um, you know, I started, funnily enough, a little while ago, I started to kind of jump on the mindfulness bandwagon thinking that that was where I was going until actually worked with someone who helped me get a little bit more clear about where I am going and what came out of that is this idea that for me at least, it’s not about a concept like mindfulness. It’s about my own journey. And so what was the answer that I got was for me, it’s beyond mindfulness. Not because mindfulness is irrelevant but because if I started getting stuck in the concept of mindfulness personally for me, it would hold me back because then I’d be beholden to mindfulness as a thing and I’d have to become an expert in mindfulness and I don’t want to be an expert in mindfulness. There are plenty of those. I just wanted to kind of do my weird and wacky thing and learn from it and share. And if there’s something useful that comes out of it, then people will take it and go, “this is exactly… I can see what you’re doing. There’s so much commonality to mindfulness!” In fact, I’ve had a lot of people say to me, “now I get mindfulness, whereas I never got it before. Now I can see the relevance of it”. I’m like, great, awesome. Go play in mindfulness, go playing whatever you want to play in. For me, it was much more simple as to the fact that it’s more about simply finding a way to access a part of yourself that you’re overlooking while you’re struggling with something.

Thal

And like for me, it’s so tempting. I’m connecting it to different traditions. What you’re saying, I’m connecting it to psychology. When you talk about the charge and how, you know, when you don’t process the charge, it’ll come back. It really is about our unconscious patterns and our complexes is what it is. And like, you know, when you talked about the non-coachable or uncoachable people, well I’m thinking maybe it’s time for those types of people to explore psychotherapy and go deeper and then come back to the coachable world. So, you know, these are the connections that I’m making, but it’s just so important to see the experiential side when you talk about it, like it being embodied and practical and um, because a lot of people look at meditation like that’s a waste of time. But when you talk about go into sensation, take a break while you’re working, go into sensation. That’s meditation in a way.

Jonathan

No, totally is. It absolutely is. It’s much more in alignment with the, I think it’s the Vipassana meditation where it’s around feeling and being tuned in at that level to your breath and your sensations. So absolutely. I love what you said. When you were just talking right now, I was really loving it because what you’re sharing is about the relevance of everything! And that’s what I love is this idea that somehow one thing is better than another. It’s like “no, one thing is more appropriate for Bob because he needs that right now. But Sally needs that right now”. And the more we can learn about all the wonderful things that are out there, the more we can kind of find the perfect meal to suit the perfect body that in that way, um, and each person’s completely unique. And so that makes it a complete crap shoot if you think that somehow we’re going to take completely unique people in completely unique situations and put on some kind of thing that says, well, this is the way in which we should approach things. Um, it’s no fun anyway. It’s much more fun to play in a more magical way to say, “well, let’s see what’s going on and let’s see what’s out there”.

Thal

And people become overwhelmed by all these ideas and concepts and just turn away. And it’s such a waste because there’s an opportunity for everyone to grow and live an authentic life. Really.

Jonathan

Someone said to me the other day, I was talking about how I’m going to, um, someone said to me, well, you should be speaking. And I said, well, I don’t quite know what to say and what’s the message and where to speak. And they said, well, um, why don’t you just hire a coach and follow the breadcrumbs? And I think the ‘follow the breadcrumbs’ was the piece that really is what you’re saying is there’s people are scared. And the truth is because we all wanted to kind of have it planned out and know how it’s gonna turn out. And the truth is sometimes you have to kind of maybe do some yin yoga before you find out that it’s meditation that’s your thing and you have to go through trying out a few things before you discover that maybe psychotherapy was the answer and not the medication, but you have to take some medication. Then you have to do this and then you had to do that and you find your way there. And it’s not because medication was bad. It was because that’s how you had to figure out what the next thing you had to do and sometimes you figure out that it was good until it wasn’t anymore. Was relevant until it’s not. And so when we stop being so binary about things in a way where things have to be in or out and if they’re out there bad and if they’re in they’re good, we can start to be more… Just so much more at ease with… expansive …and allow things to kind of come into our space and leave our space too when they’re not relevant. And not to say, well no, now I’m onto the new thing and it’s wrong. It’s like, no, I’m onto this because it’s where I’m at right now. Not because where it should be.

Thal

Yes. “could, should, would.” [laugh]

Jonathan

Totally. Totally, totally. Yeah.

Adrian

Just this conversation right now, I’m taking moments to check into my sensations as I’m listening to… When you guys are speaking and I’m just sort of…

Thal

I’m buzzing. [laughing]

Adrian

Yeah. And there are moments where actually I’m also reminded that there are moments where nothing needs to be said either, right? So like sitting in that silence and just sort of processing the body sensations. It’s like, “actually, yeah, I don’t need to add anymore right now.” Right? And how important that insight is that I’m just connecting right now. Maybe in like a brainstorming session, you know, you’re with a group of friends and you’re trying to brainstorm ideas and sometimes it’s to not always be providing input and adding to it, but it’s just to kind of hold that awareness, open that perception, you know, bring in more information and sit with it.

Thal

And as you were saying that, I was thinking about something you had mentioned, Jonathan, earlier about wanting to be like more of yourself in the world. And that’s so important to be fully present, to be more of ourselves and to get there, yes, courage, but also, it’s going to sound very cheesy, but to really love ourselves, to allow it to come out into the world.

Jonathan

Yeah. What I’ve discovered is part of loving myself is being honest with myself about what I hate about myself. Because then I can at least be acknowledged and felt and it can be aired. And what a lot of people misperceive is that loving themselves is telling themselves positive things about themselves all the time. But what I’ve found is being ruthlessly honest with ourselves, um, and having the courage to allow for that is probably the greatest self love we can direct towards ourselves because it’s the deepest acceptance of whatever is really here as opposed to sanitizing what’s here in favour of what I think I should be or what’s appropriate for me or trying to be better than where I was two minutes ago. The truth is we’re only as good as what we are in the moment.

Thal

Absolutely. And being honest with ourselves. It goes both ways. It doesn’t have, it’s not about being harshly critical or just sugar coating everything.

Jonathan

“I’m scared”. “I’m embarrassed”. “I’m ashamed.” “I’m concerned” or “I’m worried” or “I’m happy”. Some people… Can’t believe …they don’t want it….they’re scared to be happy. And some people, terrified to be scared and it’s just because we don’t necessarily… Everyone’s got their own pattern. And so we can really know. It’s not typical to know what the thing is, but what it is is whatever the pattern is this hold back from feeling what is legitimately deep down already being felt at some level. For some people, feeling joy is actually a profoundly uncomfortable experience because it’s different and it’s unsafe and it means that I’ve taken my eye off the ball and I haven’t been whipping myself hard enough and something bad’s going to happen. So it’s for some people, you know, feeling joy would be appropriate, but then again, for other people they’re caught up in only feeling joy because there’s a sense of if I’m not feeling happy or joyfully pleasurable experiences, then there’s something bad going on. And so they shy away from feeling a negative experience and owning it all, experiencing and sharing it with the world or themselves at least first.

Adrian

Is there anything you want to share with listeners as far as, um, because we started this conversation with your story and there were so many juicy things that we dove into, but now also a, I kind of want to bring this story mode back and, and just a place that you feel comfortable leaving the audience.

Jonathan

So I think, um, what comes up for me is that if I think about where I’ve been and the journey I’ve been on, things I’ve learned on the journey, it’s um, it’s all really about being with whatever is there and allowing it to reveal itself fully. A lot of what we try and do is almost like project out in an abstract way. What I want and how I think I’m going to get there. And you know, I do a lot of strategic planning for the organization. It’s not a bad thing, but sometimes if what’s underneath is agitative or constrictive or tense, are we feeling depressed about something? So I’m going to now, while I’m in my constricted, depressed state, I’m going to try and project out where I want to be in the things I think I’m going to do when I’m depressed, it takes away from the experience of what I’m actually occurring inside. What’s actually occurring, I don’t get to experience it. So what I would say is in addition to the strategic planning and the figuring out where we want to go, which has absolute relevance in this world, let’s not get that wrong, we can include in that process a willingness to be with biological discomfort and the sensations as they are where we are in that moment just for a little bit more than what we would normally be with. To see what in that being with it, arises, what opens up, what, um, what transpires five, 10 minutes, 15 minutes. See what happens. Because that five or 10 or 15 minutes, it’s five or 10 or 15 minutes longer than you’ve ever done before. And so you’re giving your sell five or 10 or 15 minutes of a possibility you’ve never had before and then we don’t know what will come up in your brain in terms of giving you more strategic direction or what you think you could do next. Um, and that might be the very thing you need to have revealed in order for you to be inspired.

Adrian

Sounds beautifully terrifying. I love it. Jonathan. Thank you so much for joining us. It was a real pleasure.

Thal

Thank you.

Jonathan

You’re welcome. Thanks for having me guys.

 

#3: Psychology of the Unconscious with Jungian Analyst Christina Becker

January 20, 2019 Culture, Life Transition, Podcast, Psychology, Technology 01:04:56

Some of us wake up one day to realize that we have been living someone else’s life. We leave parts of ourselves in the realm of the shadow, which may sneak in on us through unconscious behaviors, tensions in our relationships, various addictions, and neuroses.

On our third episode, Zurich-trained Jungian analyst and registered psychotherapist, Christina Becker (@JungianPath) talks to us about our unconscious. She even guides us through a live dream interpretation. Christina shares her journey into becoming an analyst, a calling that came to her when she was in India in search of meaning in her life. Besides psychotherapy, Christina has a background in music and is currently a consultant for the nonprofit sector. She is also the author of the book The Heart of the Matter: Individuation as an Ethical Process. After all, authenticity is about the heart – the meeting place of the individual and the divine.

Highlights:

  • Depth Psychology
  • Individual and Collective Shadow
  • Functional vs Dysfunctional Personas
  • Dreamwork
  • Recurring Dreams

Resources:

Listen:

A Kernel of Truth, inspired by this week’s episode:

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Adrian

Welcome Christina.

Christina

Thanks. Nice to be here.

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#1: Searching for Meaning with UX Samurai Jay Vidyarthi

January 6, 2019 Culture, Life Transition, Mindfulness, Podcast, Technology 01:18:01

Ever wonder what it would be like to quit everything to find more meaning and purpose? Our first guest, Jay Vidyarthi (@jayvidyarthi), did just that when he and his wife abandoned their city life and moved into a monastery. They came back with some life-altering surprises.

Jay is an award-winning UX or “User Experience” designer and researcher. Named by Forbes as one of the “top 10 world-renowned meditation tech experts”, Jay specializes in using a human-centred approach to creating useful products, services, and systems. He led the design behind Muse, a brain-sensing headband that introduces mindfulness through real-time neurofeedback. Jay helped launch A Mindful Society – an annual conference in Toronto where leaders discuss how to integrate mindfulness and compassion into society.

Highlights:

  • Living with Intention
  • Experience of Monastic Life
  • Questioning Our Inner Stories

Resources:

We hope you enjoy!

Listen:

Clear Space: a poem by Thal (inspired by this episode):

 FULL TRANSCRIPT

Adrian

Welcome Jay. Welcome to the show.

Jay

Thanks for having me.

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