Psychology

#15: From Ecstasy to Remedy – MDMA Therapy with Anne Wagner

May 5, 2019 Health, Podcast, Psychedelics, Psychology, Science, Spirituality 00:53:03

As the so-called third wave of psychedelic renaissance unfolds, the notion of self-improvement has taken a new and deeper meaning. After a long slumber, the field of mental health is waking up to the therapeutic potentialities of these powerful tools in relieving symptoms of depression, PTSD, addiction, and fear surrounding terminal illness. Targeted towards beginners, Michael Pollen’s book How To Change Your Mind, published in the summer of 2018, propelled the conversation around psychedelics to the forefront. Whether it is MDMA, LSD, psilocybin, ayahuasca, or others, the potential for consciousness expansion and psycho-spiritual growth is immense.

The FDA recently granted “Breakthrough Therapy” Designation to MDMA for the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and is currently in phase 3 clinical trials. Popularly known as a recreational drug, and as the main ingredient in ecstasy, MDMA is paving the way for the possible near-term legalization of psychedelic therapy.

On this episode, we talk to Anne Wagner, a clinical psychologist and one of the lead investigators involved in the MAPS funded clinical trials of MDMA + cognitive-based psychotherapy for PTSD. Anne tells us how she ended up working in the cutting edge of psychedelic science and what these studies offer for the future of mental health. In her clinical practice, Anne applies a cognitive-behavioural and mindfulness-based approach to therapy and she also offers preparation and integration of psychedelic and non-ordinary state experiences. We got to connect with Anne at her new clinic, Remedy in Toronto. 

Highlights:

  • MDMA + Cognitive Based Conjoint Therapy for PTSD
  • Leading Psychedelic Research
  • The Future of Mental Health

Resources:

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Full Transcript

Thal

Welcome Anne to the show.

Anne Wagner

Thanks so much for having me.

Thal

Thank you.

Adrian

Yeah, we’re sitting in your space, Remedy in Toronto. No, actually that’s one of the things we do want to ask you about is to learn more about the work that you’re doing here. Um, but before we dive into your current work. We tend to like to go backwards and just learn about your journey and how you got interested in the intersections between psychology, psychedelic science and specifically the MDMA studies and how did that all come together for you?

Anne Wagner

Sure. So it was not a planned path, that’s for sure. Adding these things together. So I knew pretty early on that I wanted to pursue psychology. So within, you know, the first two years of my undergrad degree, I decided that psychology was something I found really interesting. And the thing that I liked the most about it was just the breadth and depth that you could have within one field. So you could be, um, learning how to run studies. You could be seeing clients, you could be investigating all kinds of different things that have to do with the human psyche and our experiences in the world. So, uh, that to me, the ability to be able to have a life where I got to ask lots of questions and be constantly learning and changing seemed really appealing. So I started that in my undergrad and then decided that, you know, clinical psychology was probably the right route for me. And I started Grad school at Ryerson in Ryerson University in Toronto and I started that in 2007 so I started my master’s and my PhD at Ryerson and then my internship at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health. And then I went back to Ryerson and did a five year post doc and it was during that post doc that I really, uh, developed a really strong love and interest in working with trauma. And that would have been something that I had always been interested in. And I’d done work in my PhD, uh, working with my mentor Candice Monson, uh, around treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder. And then in my postdoc that really got honed into how do we work with and improve the treatments that we have or potentially make new treatments for PTSD. So, and the reason why I found that so compelling was that the treatments we have, they worked for some people some of the time. And that’s amazing. When they work, you see such incredible change for folks, especially with PTSD. Feeling like that feels permanent or like people are totally changed from how they were before. And, um, the idea that someone can really have their world open up and be able to have a new future after that to me was absolutely compelling. And, um, you know, I tell the story sometimes that my, I think my interest really started in that given my grandfather was a World War II vet and he worked with Veterans Affairs Canada as an under administer of veterans affairs. And, um, he really, really believed in supporting the veterans in terms of their experiences. And at the time, you know, we didn’t have a word for PTSD after World War II, but he knew that there were lots of people who were struggling after their experiences. So I kind of grew up understanding that this was after really challenging and traumatic experiences oftentimes that people have no choice whatsoever in the circumstances in which they’re placed, um, that we owe our brothers and sisters, you know, the ability to help work through, move forward and heal in different ways. So, um, that all kind of started to resonate and coalesce when I was in my post doc and, uh, I was working with Candace on some studies around this treatment that she developed a called Cognitive Behavioural Conjoint Therapy for PTSD. And so it’s a couple’s treatment and that to me was so interesting and fit with my values in terms of being able to work interpersonally with folks and seeing the impact not just on the person, but on their relationships, on their families, on their communities, in terms of how trauma impacts us. So we were doing work with CBCT and testing that in various ways when Candice was approached by the team at MAPS around it, which is the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies about potentially collaborating. And the MAPS team had been looking at the use of MDMA for the treatment of PTSD, uh, for many years at that point, over a dozen years. And, uh, with, you know, the steps before that having taken, you know, another 15 before that. So there was some conversations and I was really lucky to just kind of parachute into this conversation right at the beginning with Candice and we decided to be open minded and give it a go. And so, um, the really exciting piece for me was that I have no idea about psychedelic use in psychotherapy at that point. Like zilch.

Adrian

What year was this?

Anne Wagner

Uh, this would have been in 2013. So I went from literally no knowledge to now running clinical trials with MDMA. And it’s been the most impactful transition for me, um, in terms of my own trajectory and growth and as both a person but also as a researcher and a clinician. So a lot has changed in six years, that’s for sure. And, uh, yeah, at that point, that’s when we started to work on this pilot study of Cognitive Behavioural Conjoint Therapy plus MDMA for the treatment of PTSD. And that started off by Candice and I getting to have our own MDMA therapy experiences through a study for therapists that gave them the experience of understanding what that feels like. And that for me was the thing that convinced me that this was going to be worth my time and energy and putting a lot of love behind this work. So yeah, that was the starting point. That session would have been in spring of 2014 and it’s been kind of history since then in terms of getting this going. So, yeah.

Thal

Um something I’m thinking about when you’re talking about PTSD, um, a lot of people connect it only with veterans. Granted veterans have, you know, they go through a lot and they see all kinds of horrible scenarios. But there are also different types of PTSD, complex PTSD. Um, there are people that, you know, due to childhood trauma have PTSD. So maybe we can, if you can just talk about PTSD a little bit.

Anne Wagner

Sure. Yeah. So PTSD arises from a whole number of different traumatic experiences in people’s lives and they can be, it can be for repeated experiences like a childhood abuse experiences. It can be from repeated exposure to adverse details. For example, first responders are prime for that experience. It can be from single incidents, like it could be from an assault or an accident or witnessing something really traumatic happening to somebody else. Um, and it can be, as you said, for veterans from the experiences of war. It can be from displacement, it can be from all kinds of different aspects of conflict. So yeah, the idea behind PTSD is it can come from all these different things. Um, but it often looks the same in terms of its presentation in terms of what it looks like and people feeling like their need to avoid things that remind them of the traumatic experience. Whatever that experience is. There’s the re-experiencing of thoughts and memories associated with the event or events. There’s a hyper arousal that goes alongside of it. So that feeling in your body of being constantly on alert or constantly activated in some way. And then there’s numbing that goes alongside of it as well. So you may have either really strong emotions and really challenging cognitions or you may end up having a numbed out experience where you’re not feeling much at all. And so all of those, that constellation of symptoms, if you will, or things that happen, they all form to make up PTSD. And, uh, the differentiation, you know, between complex PTSD and PTSD, um, is, you know, it’s one where I think people find it really helpful to talk about complex PTSD, to think about the extent of the experience that they’ve had. Um, and what would I find in the research is actually that the treatments that we have for PTSD as just PTSD work for complex PTSD as well. So I think that, um, for me, I, I would get questions around complex PTSD and what I think about that, and you know, I’ve, I’ve done some publishing actually around challenging the construct.

Thal

That there is no real difference.

Anne Wagner

Right. Yeah. And it’s simply because if we really whittle it down, what matters most…

Thal

Is the experience.

Anne Wagner

Is experience. But it’s also, if we’re going to differentiate, it’s usually because we want to figure out how to best help and best treat. And so therefore, if how we treat would be the same, why would we differentiate between the two? I mean, I’m a fan of parsimony, so.

Thal

I like that. Yeah.

Anne Wagner

Yeah. So he was very open to however, however you want to interpret your experience, 100%, that’s, that’s in your hands. Um, but how it guides how we formed treatment, I think is a different way.

Thal

I think the main thing is that because a lot of people who are suffering from PTSD and they’re not veterans, they don’t legitimize their, you know, they feel like, you know, or, or they perceive like, “do you really have PTSD?” Like you, yeah, we’re not in a war zone or something like that.

Anne Wagner

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I do think that helps in terms of, or can I notice it more actually in terms of, uh, folks having a broader understanding of their experience if they feel like they identify with one term another and yeah. I think whatever means to be able to own and accept the experience is useful. Yeah.

Adrian

I put a flag down when you mentioned, um, having that experience with, with Candice the first time you were sort of, sort of convinced that you wanted to do this research.

Anne Wagner

Yeah.

Adrian

Are you comfortable sharing what that experience was like?

Anne Wagner

Sure. Yeah. Um, so yeah. Okay. So the experience of having an MDMA therapy session, uh, so the way it was designed in that first, the thing I participated in, we had one active session and then one placebo session of course that you don’t know which one you’re going to get first and uh,

Adrian

But you’ll pretty quickly know which one… [laughing]

Anne Wagner

Yes. Well, I figured it out, although it was pretty funny about an hour in, I wasn’t, I was not perceiving any effect at that point. And I thought to myself, I was like, “you know, this is probably placebo. All right. Like I’ll have to wait.”

Thal

“Oh, no it’s not!”

Anne Wagner

Oh yeah, exactly. Yeah. Like within 10 minutes. You know, it’s funny, everyone else had seen my blood pressure spike, but I had not seen the, um, the recording side. I had eye shades on and they were all, you know, waiting. And then I’m like, wow. Yeah. Um, so that experience for me was, uh, it was so interesting. It was the most impactful therapeutic experience I’ve ever had. It felt like I was able to check in and all these areas in my life really quickly where without any extra layers on top of it. Like it took away my own judgment and shame and guilt around things. And it let me literally just go through all the areas of my life and go, what do we think about this? What do we think about this? How about that? And it felt like I wasn’t particularly intending to check in these areas, but it allowed me to do that. And it felt like I reached my conclusion easily and readily. And even if that conclusion was ambivalence about something, I was like, great, I’m ambivalent about that. That’s the answer. So it let me not second guess a lot of things that were happening in my internal world. Um, and I found that, that the effects of it lasted for a really long time. I mean, it, it literally that session I felt like I was integrating and processing for, you know, weeks if not months later. But the overall impact for me has been, yeah, well it really, it changed my life and a lot of ways, not just because of the therapy, but also what it had then led to. And I think that that sense of that deep investigation and exploration can really help to shape your trajectory. So, um, yeah, so that was, and I was actually great, really grateful to have a placebo session next. Cause then I just got to integrate the whole experience a few days later. Talk about it going like, wow. All right, so all this stuff happened in that session. I get to chat about it. Now.

Adrian

I guess at that point then, um, what were the next steps after having the experience and then you can ask to go go ahead with the research. Was that the deciding point to, to move along and then to move ahead.

Anne Wagner

Yeah, it, yeah, it certainly was for me, I think we went in pretty open minded, like, you know, curious to explore it, but using that as a, uh, a test to see did we think that this might have value or could you see this working? Um, and so after that we ended up.. Initially we were thinking a lot about, okay, so we’ll go into the experience. So she had these questions in mind and we should think of that. And then as soon as I got into the MDMA experience, I was like, forget it. I’m just having my own experience. I’m not thinking about methodology for study. Right. We basically, we both chose to use that week just to have our own experiences and think through that. And then with time, you know, I quickly made the decision that I wanted to use this as a tool for therapy, but we then gave ourselves a bit of space to then actually start thinking up what that would look like in terms of a treatment and a protocol and things.

Thal

So, so you guys combined the MDMA therapy with uh, you said CBCT. That’s right. It, can you talk to us about that please?

Anne Wagner

Sure. So, um, we use, so CBCT Cognitive Behavioural Conjoined Therapy for PTSD is a 15 session treatment that’s designed for two people to go through the treatment together and uh, those two people could be in any way in relation with each other. It’s generally speaking, is romantic couples who choose to go through treatment together, but it doesn’t mean it has to be. Um, and so within that treatment folks are taken through kind of three main phases of therapy. The first phase is really understanding PTSD. Um, doing some psychoeducation about what PTSD is, what it might look like in your relationship, how it’s impacting you as well as talking about, uh, how anger and aggression can impact the relationship and just beginning to understand what those look like in the relationship and building some skills to counteract that and cope with. And then moving into phase two, we go more specifically into other skill building. So communication skills, like paraphrasing and some problem solving skills and beginning to approach things that the couple has been avoiding. And so we designed these approach tasks with the couple to help them be able to live a life of approach where they’re, you know, engaging together and doing things that they may not have been doing otherwise. And then the third phase specifically moves into making meaning of the traumatic event. And so thinking about areas where each of them, and together they may be stuck around the trauma, um, and thinking through some core themes that are related to trauma. So acceptance and blame are a big one. A control, power, trust, esteem, intimacy, um, post-traumatic growth. So using those. And then, uh, so that’s the framework of CBCT. And then what we did when we added MtMDMA to it was, we put it in strategic places in the protocol where we thought, uh, you know, if we were going to want to boost the effect of what we’re doing, we’d maybe want it in these two places. So one was in right after they’ve learned the communication skills. And so being able to have those skills as a bit of a template to be able to work with the experience together, both during and after. And then again, we placed one right in the heart of the trauma processing. So they’d started some and then we put the MDMA session to allow them to see what else could unravel in that moment and then work with them to integrate it after.

Thal

I think he had mentioned that it’s not only romantic couples, right. Have you guys had different types of dynamics?

Anne Wagner

So in the pilot with the MDMA, it was only romantic couples. Uh, we were open to, the recruitment was open for any type of diet, but it was only couples who came in. Um, but then in case studies that we’ve worked with outside of that study, we’ve seen, um, parent-child, we’ve seen, um, good friends go through it together and trying to think who have had siblings. Yeah. So there’s been a few different constellations.

Thal

And, and do you think the impact of the therapy would be different if it was just singular? Like, just like the person that’s suffering from PTSD without the conjoint.

Anne Wagner

So, I mean there are other therapies…

Thal

Yeah, cause I’m just thinking about the difference between both. Yeah. Um, but I, I do see the benefit of the relational aspect.

Anne Wagner

It’s definitely a different frame in which to conduct the therapy and, um, you know, the individual treatment. Um, for example, Cognitive Processing Therapy, which is going to be the next pilot study that we’re running with MDMA. Um, it is an individually delivered.

Thal

Oh, so you’re going to do that okay.

Anne Wagner

Yeah and the work that’s been done up until now, so, uh, that the MAPS team has been running, has been an individually delivered treatment and it’s with an inner directive supportive psychotherapy for PTSD. So not, uh, specifically one modality, but kind of allowing what comes up. Uh, so partly one of our goals with doing the know the CBCT and now the CPT plus MDMA was to use treatments that have already been tested for treatment for PTSD. And to see when we add MDMA, do you have even broader or stronger effect? Uh, so they’re giving us a different starting point in terms of the evidence in which to see if it’s effective.

Adrian

I wanted to ask if the subjects who were part of that first pilot that you were involved in, were they diagnosed as treatment resistant PTSD? Have they tried other forms of treatment prior to the study?

Anne Wagner

Yeah, so in this, in the pilot we ran, they didn’t specifically have to be treatment resistant, but they all were. Um, so it was, it just so you know, it people are not necessarily jumping the gun to do this without having tried many different things. So yeah, everyone had had lots of different treatments in the past.

Adrian

I’m so curious. Um, yeah, there’s so many, so many questions. Yeah. I’m thinking a juicy place to dive into is their first experience, you know, if you can share with us perhaps maybe what their experiences were leading up to it and, and the, what the day looked like, when they had it for the first time?

Anne Wagner

Sure. So, um, so folks had some preparation ahead of time, so obviously they’d gone through a consent process. And lots of conversation about what this whole treatment was going to look like. And then they’d had some intensive days or a day and a half, basically of CBCT. So we squished the equivalent of five sessions into a day and a half of CBCT. Um, and so, and some of that day was in the morning of their MDMA session. So they were, uh, mostly quite nervous before their MDMA sessions. Especially a lot of them were either psychedelic or entactogen naive or the experiences they had had where like 20, 30, 40 years ago and you know, university at some point. Um, so never in this context and never with the presumption that they’re going to be talking about trauma. So, uh, yeah, so there was definitely anxiety ahead of time, which we work with and a lot of the partners were quite anxious too, cause you know, they really, okay,

Adrian

They’re coming along for the ride.

Anne Wagner

So yeah. And everyone went through with it and did it. And, uh, so the way the room is designed, when we were doing the sessions, uh, there would be two recliner chairs. And so the couple would sit in those recliner chairs and be able to either have the option of sitting up or lying back, not completely flat, but you know, quite reclined. And then the two therapists would be in the room with them and facing them. And then if people were feeling really activated and they want some support from the therapist, we had like small camper chairs that we would sit beside them on the recliner chairs. So, um, they could have, it’s a little bit space or closeness and, uh, they were close enough to each other that if they reached out, they could touch hands or hold hands or can choose not to if they wanted to as well. And so the way the day was, there really was no structure to the day other than, um, you know, we would encourage them to spend time as we deemed it inside, which means, uh, with headphones on, eyeshades on and just reflecting internally and that experience and other times where they’d be talking with us, talking with their partner in sharing the experiences that were coming up or reflections. Um, so, you know, we’d go through different periods of time inside time outside, and we learned how to better orchestrate interaction between the couple in terms of, you know, at some point someone’s ready to talk and the other one’s deeply in process with something else. So we would, um, we learned how to kind of check in with one or the other, maybe jot down a note and say we’d hold that, that thought for them. And they could go back inside and we’d raise it again when everyone was, you know, out in the room. Yeah. So that’s basically what it looked like.

Thal

What about the role of music.

Anne Wagner

Music plays a very important role and kind of assisting the process. So, you know, allowing for an arc in the experience and having, um, supportive music kind of at the beginning. And then active music as you kind of getting peak effect and then, uh, music that helps with resolution and closer to the end. Um, but you also need to, you know, we had, we were flexible with the music within it. So, um, Annie Mithoefer who is one of the investigators and she’s a great Dj. So she was our DJ for all the sessions, which I’m going to have to learn how to do when I’m running the sessions here and, uh, yeah, so both members of the dyad would have earphones on and we’d also have it playing in the room so everyone could hear the music. And so we had splitters to do that and then at times we turn the music off when they’re talking and yeah.

Thal

I was going to ask like do you turn off when they’re talking?

Anne Wagner

Yeah or turn it down. Just mostly so it’s easier for everyone can hear each other.

Adrian

How many couples were there in total in that study?

Anne Wagner

Yeah, so it was a small number. So we ran six couples through it and it’s really, originally we were thinking of going up to 10, but, uh, for a number of different reasons, including time and money. And, uh, but also the main reason was because our effects were looking very good. We decided to stop at six. Um, to be able to kind of had enough evidence to show we can do it. It’s feasible, it’s safe, people tolerate it and people improve. And as enough of a signal to say, we need a larger study. So in designing the larger study that would have a control condition.

Adrian

I imagine all the internal experiences vary greatly between participants. But were there any commonalities you guys noticed, um, in, in those, uh, in the six that you, you were sitting with.

Anne Wagner

Uh yes. I mean, one thing that I think was very interesting as someone who does a lot of trauma therapy with folks outside of a MDMA work is just how consistently people would go into their trauma memories and recount the experiences unprompted with MDMA. And so that was fascinating and I’d heard that that had been the case, uh, with the other studies, but that it, like clockwork would happen every time. And um, you know, it was no priming no asking people to go into the memory. We don’t even actually require that at all if people in CBCT to actively go over the memory. But it happened for everyone.

Thal

It’s like they went through the files of…yeah, amazing.

Anne Wagner

Yeah. That analogy is used a lot actually like putting files in a row and you know, I had that experience myself of like checking in. It’s like checking all the files and then other people with PTSD when they’re going through this you know, checking through the files, the memories. And so then the role of the therapist, um, is really the major role is pre and post the experience. Like during the experience of course you’re holding the space for the, for the clients, but it’s, it’s, it seems like from what you’re saying that it’s like, um, self guided in a way. Yeah. The MDMA session itself, we’re definitely there to hold space and to help when people are stuck. And so I think that piece is also very important. Um, and you know, sometimes when we think about like being non directive, in fact there’s moments where we’re actively working with folks in session to help the experience or if people are feeling particularly stuck in a thought or a memory we’re there to help them work through that and you know, gently, you know, be socratically questioning, you’re asking different things or exploring. But the massive chunk of that work is before and after.

Adrian

So what happened after the first session? What’s the next stage in the protocol of the study?

Anne Wagner

Yeah, so they’d gone through equivalent to five sessions of CBCT before and then they had the MDMA session and then the next morning we would talk about experience, integrate it a bit and set them up with out-of-session work for the following week. And then they would do the equivalent of four sessions of CBCT. In this case we did it over video, um, simply pragmatically, cause we’d all didn’t live in the same place. And then they came back together about three weeks later, I had another day where they did two sessions of CBCT and then they had a second MDMA session. Integrated that and then finished out the protocol, which was four more sessions of CBCT. So they received MDMA twice this whole thing. Yeah. It took about two months to get through everything.

Adrian

What were the results? Sort of dying to hear the summary of the findings.

Anne Wagner

So they are not published yet, but I can let you know. So we actually published a case study last week. Um, so that has the first results are out in the world.

Adrian

Congrats.

Anne Wagner

Thank you. Very exciting. It’s in the Journal of Psychoactive Drugs, so that’s good. Um, so yeah, overall the results were very strong. We had really good results for PTSD, both from the report of the person with PTSD, so their self report as well as the clinician rated report. And so that’s an independent rater. So not the people who treat them, it’s from someone who doesn’t know where they are in treatment and whatnot. And they also, we saw significant improvements in relationship satisfaction as well. And that was really interesting because not all the couples were distressed coming in. And I think that’s important because a lot of the time, you know, we think about actually how PTSD lives in relationships. People have to make sense of it and therefore, oftentimes they accommodate the other person as we all do in our lives. We accommodate the people we love. So it’s, you know, you’re trying to make it okay and especially when something’s not okay in a system, it creates a very difficult system. But that works for some people. And so that can be a challenge sometimes when things change, the system disrupts because everything’s been, you know, trying to hold tight to keep it together. So the fact that we saw improvement for folks who even already we’re starting okay. Which meant there might’ve been some accommodation was really interesting. Yeah. So more to come.

Thal

So it’s not really couples therapy, it’s, it was, it’s conjoined therapy, but um, that the, you know, the couple’s therapy is like that bonus part that came.

Anne Wagner

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I mean the way we structure it, I mean it really, it is a couples therapy. Yeah. It could be any version of couple that you think of. Um, but the idea is the relationship is actually the client in CBCT. So it’s not the person with PTSD, it’s not the partner. It’s the couple or the relationship. And having that be the focus is really useful. So that one person doesn’t feel like the other person is their other therapist or that they’re responsible for the person, they’re doing it together.

Adrian

Are you, are you able to share any of the self reports by the subjects, um, things that they shared with you, whether it’s during the study or afterwards that you might want to share with listeners?

Anne Wagner

Sure. So, um, I mean, people spontaneously had really incredible, you know, things that they wanted to say or share. And, um, I’m, you know, feeling like they’d gotten their lives back or that they felt renewed hope for the future. And, um, you know, in the session itself, you know, I had people say that, you know, this is really, it felt like they had gotten their marriage back or that they now have a sense of feeling connected. Um, I got an email a few months ago, which marked like a year since one of the couples had started the study and it was just a reach out of gratitude and thanks. And reporting that they felt like they had a completely different life and they were very grateful and that they just thought it was all really cool. So that was a really neat thing to receive.

Thal

It’s amazing. How rigorous was it for you like to go through the daily experience of going through the study and, yeah.

Anne Wagner

Yeah. It’s a labor of love doing the clinical trial, that’s for sure.

Thal

I can imagine.

Anne Wagner

It’s, you really have to want to do it. And, uh, I remember, you know, Candice once told me, this is not for the faint of heart. I’m like, no, it was very, very true. It’s a lot of details and a lot of planning. Um, it a ton of work for a little bit of data, but it’s in my mind, so worth it. And you know, the days when you sit in the sessions with folks, um, and you see them change right there in front of you and you were like, wow, this idea we had, I think it’s working like this. That’s unreal. Um, that feels, that feels pretty cool. And, uh, so yeah, it’s, it’s, I found working on this particular study to be incredibly inspiring and so that certainly helps drive all the rest of the work and is now shaped what I’m doing going forward,

Adrian

If I remember correctly, most of the subjects, if not all, had improvements in their symptoms of PTSD. How, how did they do afterwards? Post study? What was the timeframe for the follow up and checking in on them?

Anne Wagner

Yeah, so the vast majority, well, I mean, there’s only six couples. The majority, not everyone, uh, a resolution their PTSD, but most did and those gains were maintained through six month follow-up. So that’s the, the most, the furthest data we have. Yeah.

Adrian

That’s really cool. Yeah. I mean, one of the things that we often hear a lot in psychedelic research and, and, and, um, just discourses the integration after these experiences. Can you share any wisdom that you might have gained from this study about how to better integrate or, or to tie back to their daily lives?

Anne Wagner

For sure. I think a big piece is that integration isn’t just like your next session with your therapist. Integration happens over time as you begin to put the lessons you’ve learned into action and it might shape your approach to something or how you feel in general. Or you might have an echo of it, you know, a year later and go like, oh, yeah, so it’s, it’s being open to that being the case, I think is the key thing with integration as you go forward. And we certainly saw that, you know, in some cases we saw people continue to make gains over the six months afterwards. And that for us was really interesting because that means that they’re still learning and growing. And that is ideal because you’re basically setting people up for a new baseline, a new place to start from. And that happens often when people find success with treatment without MDMA. Um, but it was particularly highlighted for me when the use of a psychedelic or entactogen.

Thal

I’m thinking about a psychotherapist listening to this wondering when will legalization happened. When can I start training?

Anne Wagner

It’s a good question. Um, so what is looking like right now? So all of the movement to have MDMA legalize as a treatment for PTSD? It’s, it started in the US because that’s where all of the studies have happened so far. It’s looking, we’re hopeful that it will be within the next few years that it will be legal. Because right now there’s a phase three study, which is a drug development study happening in multiple different sites across North America, uh, sponsored by MAPS. And they at that point they will, after phase three, it’s possible that MDMA will get the indication to be a treatment for PTSD. So that’s the doorway to it being legal. Um, and so the hope is we would quickly follow suit in Canada using the evidence for the US. So, I mean my fingers are crossed that it’s going to be within the next few years. Um, there is also in the states there’s something called Expanded Access where when things are demonstrating strong effect and people are at risk for death, that you can potentially be using um, a medication that’s still being investigated for specific cases to be used. So, uh, the training that’s happening right now for folks to become MDMA assisted psychotherapist is for this idea of Expanded Access or those of us who are studying it you doing through the research. Um, so that, I mean, could be as soon as later this year we’re expanded access could be available in some places, uh, in Canada. We’ve different regulations around that. So it may not be as straight forward, um, but potentially could still be a possibility. And then of course, I mean the psilocybin work is another area where, um, you know, we’re seeing fast movement in terms of potentially there being indications for treatment-resistant depression and other things. So that might be another area where we might be seeing the potential legal use of psychedelics and treatment.

Adrian

Yeah. I know everyone’s got their fingers crossed, right? It’s like, it’s, you know, it seems like this is the opportunity but also not to mess it up. And so it definitely, you know, important that this time around this renaissance that’s happening is to do it properly so that it is sustained.

Anne Wagner

Exactly. It’s extremely important that we don’t squander this opportunity over here. Uh, this, there has been so much work that has gone to this place and so many have been paving the way for this to be the case. And, um, I’m very conscious of just how measured we need to be and just how careful and thoughtful around all of this use.

Adrian

Can you talk about the other studies so that with the CPT plus MDMA that is.. Is it currently underway?

Anne Wagner

It’s in development right now. So I’m just finishing the protocol for it. Uh, so our hope is that we’ll be recruiting in the fall for that study, but that’s pending a bunch of different approvals that need to go through. Um, so that study design is very similar to the couple’s study. Um, it’s going to be, but it’s an individual treatment and using CPT. So cognitive processing therapy, which is one of the most widely used and most widely researched and has some of the strongest evidence for the treatment of PTSD. And it’s usually 12 sessions. And so right now we’re just, you know, we’re finding exactly where we’re going to place the two MDMA sessions within the protocol. Um, but it will likely have a similar structure in terms of having a masked dosing of treatment before the first time. Do you may session spread out over three weeks, second MDMA and then finish it out. And this time, not over video cause we’ll do it here in person.

Adrian

How is, um, how’s the recruitment for that? So how do people, uh, if they’re interested in joining the study or being a participant, how does that happen? How does that work?

Anne Wagner

So right now we’re not, we don’t have open recruitment since the study isn’t approved yet. Um, but if people are interested in it, uh, if it will be for PTSD. So it is specifically for PTSD and people don’t have to already have a diagnosis of PTSD because it will end up, you know, they will have to go through assessment through the study. Um, but they can always contact us at Remedy and, we have a contact us button on our homepage and can be added to a list to learn more. And so that would, uh, it doesn’t guarantee anything, but it just would allow folks to get updates as to, for example, when the study is starting to recruit or updates along the way as we get going.

Thal

Awesome. So maybe, um, then talk to us about Remedy?

Anne Wagner

Sure. Okay. So Remedy, um, it’s where we’re sitting right now. So Remedy is a center for mental health, innovation in Toronto. And, uh, the idea behind remedy was to have a home where research and practice really live together. And the idea that we want to be continually open to growth and exploration as clinicians, as researchers, as people who are working in mental health. And that includes our own growth as well as the growth of the field. Um, so the idea here at Remedy is everyone who’s involved as invested in the idea of innovating mental health. And that can be in a whole host of different ways. So, uh, for example, one of the ways we do that is going to be through MDMA research here. Uh, but also we have folks who are innovating how we manage a practice, how, um, you know, we run trauma-informed Yoga, how we do care for folks that’s integrating different types of treatments together. We have all kinds of different things. Someone is going to be writing, you know, pop psychology book based on evidence. So it’s innovating how we think about an access, mental health and, and thinking about it in a broader way so that we don’t feel stuck or stymied in how we do that. So we offer a clinical services, but also we do research here and we collaborate with different likeminded group to create a community who are all with the same vision.

Adrian

I imagine it’s part of the vision, um, to consider post legalization and what that might look like. Can you share a little bit about your vision for once it’s legal, what the clinic might look like and how it’s offered to the public?

Anne Wagner

Yeah, absolutely. So my vision for that will be, we’ll have basically two tracks. We’ll have our research stream, which will be running and testing interventions, uh, which you know, is where my love is there and that I’m also a clinician and I want to be able to offer this in terms of people being able to come in and receive MDMA psychotherapy for PTSD in the practice here. So it will be either people can participate through research or through being able to come in. And you know, have that treatment. So, uh, yeah, we’ll be set up here to be able to offer that given that war already going to be set up to run the research. And so we’ll be ready and opening our doors to that the minute it’s legal. So yeah, we’ve got a team here who, uh, actually I just took a team down to Asheville, North Carolina for the most recent MDMA therapist training and so we’ve got a team who are raring to go.

Thal

That’s awesome.

Adrian

I’m just imagining if, if you had infinite funding and resources from a, from a research side, what would excite you as far as future research studies that you might want to explore and go into?

Anne Wagner

I’ve already designed my next big one. So it would be a randomized controlled trial for the couples study. So it would be, um, CBCT plus MDMA in one condition and then with a placebo control and the other maybe a crossover design at the end. So, but that would be the, we really need to test it out with more people and more diverse sample. I think that was a massive thing is, you know, in the pilot study it was heterosexual Caucasian folks in that sample. And that is not representative of …

Adrian

The globe.

Anne Wagner

The globe. We are here in Toronto. And um, you know, I think particularly, I’ve done a lot of community work in queer communities here and I think, you know, expanding especially what that looks like in terms of our, you know, constellations of folks participating in the treatment and as well as the therapists that they, we have, uh, we’re really excited about what that’s gonna look like. And when we test it on a bigger scale, like what’s it gonna look like for everybody.

Thal

Yeah. It’s going to look very different. Hopefully it’s going to be legal very soon. It’s going to look different when it’s, you know, out there and different people are accessing it.

Anne Wagner

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Thal

Can’t wait. Yeah.

Adrian

Yeah. We’re super stoked for your work. I mean, you’re right in the trenches, so it’s, it’s a real honour actually. Yeah. To be, to be in your space and to get a glimpse of the journey so far.

Anne Wagner

Aww thank you.

Thal

Any more questions? Feel pretty good there. Yeah. Is there anything that you’d like to add, something that you have not been able to share in other lectures or other interviews?

Anne Wagner

Um, that’s a great question. I think, you know, it’s a really exciting time for this work. Um, I think it’s the, the possibilities for growth and exploration are also huge when it comes to psychedelics and entactogens and I don’t want to lose sight of that. And I think oftentimes when we are focusing so much on the clinical work and the clinical indications, that sometimes feels like maybe gets pushed to the side when, you know, there’s so many cultures around the world who’ve used psychedelics as forms of ritual, as forms of growth and learning and healing that, um, you know, this is not new. This is not new at all. I want to honor that.

Thal

In fact it’s ancient.

Anne Wagner

Exactly, exactly. Yeah. Just so happens that we’re conceptualizing, it’s used right now with how we understand this particular version of how we present …

Thal

And in our modern context, which is fine.

Anne Wagner

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So I think I want to make sure we know that, that this, you know, while it feels “cutting edge” it is completely ancient. And this, we’re not, uh, coming up with new ideas particularly, but, uh, but really honored also to bring it forward into the here and now. So there’s that piece. Um, yeah, I think that’s a biggie. That’s on my mind.

Thal

Yes. And, uh, hopefully that will, you know, um, rev revolutionize mental health, which is, you know, the thing, you know, coming up now.

Anne Wagner

Yeah, I think so. Yeah. And I think we have so much possibility there. You know, I do think we’re at a time where folks are far more reflective about their own internal world and the possibilities for that and that this might be one tool to really assist in that.

Adrian

I guess just one final thing to a, I’m reminded of, um, the way Michael Pollan shared just the excitement beyond the pathological use or, you know, addressing pathological, um, experiences and just for the betterment of, well-people, I think it was the way that he was putting it and I think yeah, starting to redefine mental healthy on sort of the, the sort of, the highly stigmatized, um, cultural perspectives that we have.

Anne Wagner

For sure. Yeah. I have hope that one day we’ll be able to offer, um, you know, MDMA assisted psychotherapy for couples, right? Just not because there’s PTSD, but because you know, people want to explore and grow together and understand the relationships and their dynamics or for individuals and you know, still thoughtfully and with precaution and all the good context of set and setting and a good container. But the idea that that would be a tool would be lovely.

Adrian

Thank you so much for your time today.

Anne Wagner

Thanks so much.

Thal

Thank you.

#14: Spiritual Inclusion with El-Farouk Khaki

April 28, 2019 Culture, Leadership, Podcast, Psychology, Spirituality 00:58:59

The concept of spiritual inclusion becomes an important lifeboat for minority individuals who struggle to reconcile their expressions of identity be it sexuality or gender with their religious beliefs. Not everyone wants to throw the baby with the bath water.  Today’s guest self-identifies as a spiritual activist and places spiritual inclusion at the forefront of his cause. 

On this episode, we are joined by El-Farouk Khaki, a refugee and immigration lawyer, public speaker and human rights activist. We explore the toxicity of dogma and how religion can be used as a form of spiritual violence. El-Farouk shares with us his vision for a more inclusive and tolerant Islam. In 1991, El-Farouk founded Salaam: Queer Muslim Community and in 2009, he co-founded the El-Tawhid Juma Circle, Toronto Unity Mosque. El-Farouk speaks publicly on issues including Islam, LGBTIQ and human rights, refugees, race, politics and HIV. He has served in diverse capacities in groups and boards including Africans in Partnership against AIDS, The 519, & the Canadian Ethnocultural Council. He has received numerous awards for his work in spiritual activism and social justice. He is currently working on his first book exploring issues of sexuality, social justice and spirituality.

Highlights:

  • Spiritual Abuse and Violence
  • The Need for more Inclusion and Tolerance in Contemporary Islam
  • Sufi Practices

Resources:

Listen:

An Original Poem Inspired by This Episode

Full Transcript

Thal:                 

El Farouk, welcome to the show!

El Farouk:         

Thank you. Nice to be here.

Adrian:             

Actually, I wanted to ask you right off the bat is the meaning of your name and how to properly pronounce your name?

El Farouk:         

I pronounce, my name as El Farouk, but I think it’s proper pronunciation would be more like El Farook, and it comes from the Arabic word ‘furqan’ for criterion. El Farouk is the one who can tell right from wrong.

Adrian:             

It sounds like an appropriate name.

El Farouk:        

It is sometimes burdensome.

Thal:                 

Yeah, I hear you there when the name is like, you know, there is a lot of expectations.

El Farouk:         

Absolutely. It has forced me to always measure my actions or my omissions with this premise that I have this capacity or this ability to distinguish what I’m doing and whether it’s correct or incorrect or appropriate or inappropriate.

Thal:                 

We’d like to start maybe with your early experiences with spirituality and religion, maybe spiritual orientation and childhood, if any. Sort of…how did you end up doing what you’re doing?

El Farouk:         

My family is Muslim and Islam has always been a very important part of our identity as a marker and also as a practice. My family is of Indian origin, but we are from East Africa, so we are … and my family’s historical roots are as a small Shiite community. So we are a minority within a minority, within a minority. So I grew up, I was born and spent the first seven, eight years of my life in east Africa, which is predominantly black. The majority of the black folk were Muslim, are Sunni. So we’re at diasporic, immigrant origin and Brown, Muslim, but not even majority – a Shia minority, Shia community. Maybe at that time I didn’t quite didn’t understand that, but I think over the years we left when I was about eight years old and lived in England, and then moved to Canada and to Vancouver specifically.

 I grew up basically with very limited sort of Muslims around me. You know, if we would go to our places of worship there were Muslims there, but most of them kind of looked like me. My day to day life was really not connected to those people. I grew up with people of all skin colors, all racial backgrounds, and all religious backgrounds. When we first landed in Canada, we were in Toronto for 10 days, and the first religious celebration was at a syngogue. That’s the kind of background that I came from and my family was very open and inclusive when it came to diversity in terms of race and religion. One thing that was always present was this notion of a spirituality.

 That religion wasn’t just about ritual, but it was about spirituality, which I understand as connection and connectivity and often spirituality is understood as a connection between an individual and the divine or to a higher power. I think that for me, part of my evolution has been this notion of spirituality that actually connects you to other human beings and to the rest of creation. The tradition that I grew up in didn’t necessarily embrace that or integrate that. That has also been a fed by my politics, my anti-oppression work, as an activist, as a lawyer who represents refugees, people fleeing persecution. Most of the folks I represent are either queer folk or women fleeing some kind of gender or domestic violence kind of a situation. My notion of spirituality started to evolve that it needed to address all of these injustices. It wasn’t just simply enough just to feel connected to some higher or some divine power, but it had to be transformative. It had to be transformative for me, but it also, someone had to transform my relationship to the world around me. I often call myself the accidental activist because I didn’t often find spaces that I found wholesome like that embraced the fullness of who I was. I would walk into, I would be an activist circles, but they didn’t have the spirituality or you know, you’d walk into political circles and you know they talk the talk but they didn’t really understand intersectionality and so on and so forth. A lot of times, I was in these spaces and going, but there’s more, there’s more, there’s more. And so in 1991, I started Salaam here in Toronto.

Toronto was the first time that I met other Muslims or other people who were Muslim identified and who are also queer and or involved in anti-oppression, social justice and human rights work. Salaam was my attempt to create a social support network for lesbian and gay Muslims because this was back in the nineties and you didn’t really talk about the bi- or the trans- stuff back then. At that time I wasn’t even ready to deal with the theology. I didn’t feel that I had the, the material, the capacity to deal with that. That has been part of my own sort of growth and my journey. I have even come to this conclusion that a lot of our social justice movements and our political movements are unsuccessful because they don’t actually embrace our spirituality and the notion of our own transformation as we are working to transform the world around us.

If you’re starting out as a hollow vessel, how can you fill anything else and so this, entrenched me even further into seeking a spiritual connection that embraced all of these sort of different elements of myself, which includes, you know, being a social activist and a human rights advocate.

Adrian:             

Yeah. Beautiful connection to, we did an episode with Andrew Harvey recently and he coined the term, I believe, sacred activism. And so looking at activism that’s not divorced from a spiritual connection, you know, sort of fueled by spiritual practice in something that is acknowledging the mystery that is also underneath all the great work that’s coming out of the activism but not forgetting that there is that connection that you’re pointing towards. How did the first few years go for you when Salaam was created, I’m really curious, the early challenges, what were some of the big obstacles when you had the idea to actually opening the doors?

El Farouk:         

The challenges were multilayered. Technology was a challenge, right? This was back in the early nineties. Not everybody, there was no cell phones and you know, people had these little answering machines at home that you had to press and play and you couldn’t retrieve them from somewhere else and so on. At one point we had a contact list of about 60 to 80 people and you had to phone each one of them in order to tell them about some activity or some event that you were hosting. There were people with varying degrees of outness and different living situations, you would have a note attached to the phone number as to what you could say and who you could say it to, and you know, you couldn’t leave on the message and so on and so forth.

That was a technological and an outreach. First of all, how do you let people know. What media do you actually use in order to get the word out? How do you keep in contact and how do you inform people, especially people who are sort of scattered and at various sort of different levels of autonomy. People living at home, people not out and all of that sort of stuff. Those were some of the challenges. I think one of the ongoing challenges is the toxicity of institutionalized religion. A lot of people have given up on their spirituality because religion has been such a toxic influence in their life. For me, that never works, I’ve never been able to do that.

 Never wanted to do that and always believed that I didn’t need to do that. Sometimes when you’re organizing these kinds of spaces and you’re reaching out to people and people don’t actually want to know about the space or don’t actually want to even walk into the space because they’ve got so many barriers to it. I think that ends up creating a lot of disconnect like a spiritual schizophrenia, if you will. I think that a lot of our issues that we face are that people have disconnected not just from religion but also from spirituality because often spirituality is vested in a religious tradition or in a religious path. When that spirituality has been stripped away, all your left with is religious toxicity. So even convincing people that this might be a safe space or a healing space for them to try to connect their histories and their stories and that they don’t have to make a choice. It continues to be a challenge even, even now.

Thal:                

 How do you reconcile that … because people who find themselves identifying in sort of alternative identities find themselves either having, especially those who are brought up in the institutional patriarchal and monotheistic traditions find themselves either having to throw the baby with the bath water or become paralyzed in dogma. How, how can they reconcile?

El Farouk:         

Oh dear, that’s a heavy question. I think that’s a journey that everybody has to take. I think that in some traditions there has been some opening up. We see that happening in, and I don’t think it’s just a problem with monotheism because you see it in non-monotheistic traditions as well. Whether you look at Buddhism and Hinduism, they’re also often plagued by dogma and by misogyny. I was in Bali and every Hindu temple had huge signs that prohibited people who menstruated from entering.

You know and I was shocked because despite all of the, the menstro-phobia in Islam or in Muslim communities, I’ve never seen a sign like that on any mosque. Yet, here are these Hindu temples, and we have this notion that Hinduism is so inclusive and so embracing with female gods and so on and so forth that you wouldn’t encounter this and yet, lo and behold, here it is. I think that everybody has to go through that journey. Certainly, like if you look in the West, the geopolitical north or however you wanna define it, certainly some Christian traditions have been grappling with some of the issues around gender and sexual diversity for some time. there are both internal and external influences and pressures in Islam today that tell us that Islam is a monolith. Even the people who have been oppressed by this notion still cling to this notion that there is only a singular ahistorical Islam.

 Which is actually counter-intuitive even to the whole message of the Quran and even to the symbolism in the Quran, right? I mean Allah in the Quran is constantly telling us to look at nature and to the passage of time and to the cycles of nature and the moon and so on and so forth, which integrates change and growth and development as being integral to the religious experience. Yet the religion itself, supposedly we are now being told is unchanging and unresponsive. It doesn’t respond at all. We are supposed to conform to this. Yet who defines what this is? It is certainly not us who defines it.

Adrian:             

I remember you bringing up the term spiritual abuse, spiritual violence. I think it was in a Ted talk you did. Could you elaborate what you mean by that? I love the wording because it seems so appropriate.

El Farouk:         

I heard the expression spiritual activism a few years ago from a friend of mine, a gay man from Jamaica who described him as being a spiritual activist. I went “bing” you know, and ended up talking to him about it and sort of started to sort of identify with that term myself. The notion of spiritual violence for me is how religion or spirituality is actually used as a weapon against certain kinds of people. For those of us who may not conform because of our views around gender or because of our sexual orientation or our gender identities or expression or just our politics.

Right and how religion under the guise of spirituality…and I think, you know, contemporary Islam is kind of really devoid of spirituality. It’s been reduced to a set of do’s and don’ts. And if you do this, then you’re Muslim enough. And if you don’t do this, then you’re not Muslim enough. And that’s violence, right? Because who is determining this…this who is judging this? In the Sufi path and in Islamic tradition we have the 99 most beautiful names of God. God is the judge, not you, not me, not somebody else. There’s a whole body of tradition and literature that dates back to the Prophet that talks even about diversity of opinion and practice even at the time of the Prophet. All of these narratives are, you know, unpopular to the contemporary discourse and so they’re pushed aside, they’re not discussed and they’re marginalized, because they’re just not convenient. The whole idea of spiritual abuse is how religion is used to bludgeon us rather than to liberate our hearts.

Thal:                 

There are so many layers to this. I’m thinking also about the psychological layer. For people to be so complacent and to just download and accept and not question is one layer. Then there is the just the black and white way of thinking. It seems like if there is no spirituality, then people have no sort of direction of growth. There is no spiritual growth, then there is no psychological growth, and so then there’s no emotional growth. I really don’t know where I’m going with this but…it’s it’s paralyzing.

El Farouk:         

There’s a whole notion of being unworthy. I was recently talking to a friend of mine who comes from a South Asian Muslim background and I said, do you celebrate Eid? She said to me I don’t practice and so I don’t think I deserve to celebrate Eid. So I said to celebrate Christmas? What makes you worthy to celebrate that? Right. It’s really so interesting how people compartmentalize, you know, and so she can’t celebrate Eid because she doesn’t fast, but she’s got a Christmas tree and you know,

Thal:                 

Maybe also the notion of the Divine as, you know, someone up there that’s going to zap you. Yeah. You’re not worthy of connecting to that God is also problematic and psychological and spiritual abuse too.

El Farouk:         

Now we get into language around decolonizing and decolonizing our faith tradition because the notion of God anthropomorphized into a male human form is not something that’s actually intrinsic to Islam, right? Even the word Allah has no gender, even though Arabic is such a gendered language. The word itself has no gender. It’s an irregular word formation. The notion of God as male is not something that comes intrinsically from Islamic theology, right? Maybe it’s part of our colonial legacy. Even the way we understand certain words like the word Taqwa, which in the early translation, English translations of the Quran, which all happened during the colonial period. 

Taqwa is translated as God fearing as opposed to God awareness or God consciousness. Right? Yet this notion of fearing God, which may or may not have come from a Christian European sort of paradigm is now so much embraced by people within the Islamic tradition, and I don’t think it’s actually intrinsic to our tradition, but it’s just adopted, embraced, and unquestioned.

Thal:                 

It’s like a tool that’s used for self abuse almost. Speaking of the divine name and gender wasn’t it Ibn Arabi, one of the early Sufi that referred to Allah as ‘hiya’ and you can him “howa”…you can call her or him.

El Farouk:         

He did and within variety of different Muslim traditions over the years, particularly within spiritual explorations the feminine quote unquote aspects of the divine, have often been embraced or talked about and theorized over and so on. Even with the 99 names, the Tao of Islam, is an interesting book. I found it very, very heavy reading. It embraces and explores the notion that the 99 names, and this is an old historical tradition within Islamic history that the 99 names are the names of beauty and the names of majesty and the names of beauty have what we would traditionally describe as more feminine qualities and the names of majesty as more traditionally masculine qualities. We’re projecting our own binary limitations but what it does is open up is this notion that God is not male, and that God has no gender.

That’s at the unity mosque, we’ve made an explicit choice in our English material to refer to God in a diversity of genders. In our format we tend to prefer feminine pronouns for the Divine simply because any pronoun you use is going to be inaccurate and insufficient. Everyone’s insufficient and inadequate in one side, Islam is very big on the ‘mizaan’ and on the balance. We’re just trying to balance it out by using another pronoun, which is equally inadequate.

Thal:                 

Right. I feel that this concept can serve well in the mainstream circles. I think if people open up and embrace these different…uhmm…it’s not even different. It is intrinsic to Islam. Lots of forgiveness will happen.

El Farouk:         

Absolutely, I think that what we have been experiencing is a growing intolerance of diversity within the Islamic tradition. I don’t want to have this sort of rosy image that our precolonial or pre-European colonial because we also have an Arab-colonial history as well, right…that it was all perfect and so on. We can see today, historically, that even today there are all these different traditions, but the dominant face of Islam is one of monolith and patriarchy. I use the examples of the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan that they survived a thousand years plus of Islam, but they didn’t survive 15 years of the Taliban.

Thal:                 

It is the toxicity of dogma.

El Farouk:         

It’s toxicity of dogma. It’s the same thing with the Sphinx and the pyramids. You know, these are, these are pre-Islamic monuments. These are iconography. There was no intention or desire to destroy any of these. When the Muslims went into India, they didn’t destroy Hindu temples. They didn’t prevent people from practicing their traditions. Yet, the intolerance that we find today for diversity and I actually think that if anything, historically, in the Muslim tradition, Muslims had been more intolerant of non-conformist Muslims and non-Muslims. Even within the Islamic tradition, there has been a notion of embracing diversity. I think that’s being eroded and I think that has been willfully eroded by political forces.

Adrian:             

I think I mean as a non-theist, like not really identifying with any particular religion. I see this pattern show up in places like science, like scientism, right? Where there are certain beliefs and ideologies that are becoming dogmatic and people are using that as a form of control to say, this is the authority who says this is the correct thing to believe in science and this is incorrect or, and so it seems like it’s the church of certainty that people are ascribing to in this modern world.

El Farouk:         

This happens politically too, right? I worked in political staff at Queen’s Park and I’m like, wow, this is their religion and it’s very dogmatic, you know, it can also change very quickly if it’s politically expedient for it to change.

Adrian:             

I think you’re absolutely right when you say it’s the tolerance for diversity, but it seems also for the mystery, for not knowing, to admit the uncertainty that, hey, we might actually not really know what the answer is and to sit in that space and have a capacity for that.

El Farouk:         

Sit with the unknown…but that’s also what drives us, right, is our intellectual and spiritual journeys are driven by wanting to know the unknown. What did somebody say to me, I read somewhere the other day and I thought it was magic is something that science hasn’t found an explanation for yet. I’m a believer of magic and I do.

Thal:                 

That what was very interesting too…when you had mentioned about activism as well, because there’s also dogma within the activist communities and it is almost interesting to see that because activism, I feel, at its heart is sacred work. If you’re asking for justice and pointing at the wrongs that are happening in the world, how can you not work on your inner-self?

El Farouk:         

Well, I think we get swept up with anger. Was it last summer or the summer before, one of the women who was part of the Unity mosque here asked me to speak at a rally and it was like, you know, an anti-racism rally and stuff. I agreed to do that and I went there and I listened to some of the speakers before me and they were all so angry, you know, we’ve got to crush this and we’ve got a crush that with him to stop this and we’re going to stop that, and I just couldn’t do it, you know? I spoke about transforming and building a better future so that all of our kids could live together and have a world to live in and live in harmony with not only each other, but with creation around them and that was the world that we had to create it as activist. I’m not sure how the message went over in a room full of anger, a space full of anger.

Thal:                 

I mean, I can ask you that question. How are you not angry with all those intersections, El Farouk?

El Farouk:         

I do get angry. I do get angry but at the end of the day, my anger is not going to change anything. If you’re empty on the inside or you’re filled with anger on the inside, how do you change something on the outside and what do you change it with? And where do you fill that space with? Right? At the end of the day, the work has to start with yourself. I often speak, the anger is righteous. We have every right to be angry. Now what do we do with it? Right? Where do we go from here? How does that work? And if you’re just stuck in the anger, there’s no movement. There is no transformation. You just replace one structure or one leader or one ruler with another, and then you just keep replicating that same, that same paradigm. 

We’ve seen this in revolution after revolution. We were talking about the Arab spring before we started our formal conversation today and we all had such great hopes. I was talking to some clients of mine who are from Iran and I said to them, you don’t know in Iran before the revolution and the revolution was something that was filled with hope and it brought a million people into the streets of Tehran from a variety of religious and political traditions. It was filled hope, but it got lost and it got lost in religion that became toxic. It didn’t embrace the human condition and it became stripped of spirituality in its need to have political and social control.

Thal:                 

Absolutely.

Adrian:            

I want to ask you, what fuels your work in terms of practices. What sort of daily or regular practices that seemed to really help keep you going? I imagine you’re met with all sorts of resistance and challenges and you need something to keep that energy going.

El Farouk:         

Yeah. I have Zikr playing constantly. I have sacred music playing constantly. Mostly Sufi music and native music that seems to calm my soul. I need to hug more trees.

Thal:                

I recommend that.

El Farouk:         

It’s a little bit difficult when it’s minus 30 outside. I’m a West Coast Kid, right? So that’s what I aspire to. We just came back from Costa Rica and I’m like, I just want to be here, you know. Be at the beach and walk through the forest and look at the birds and the butterflies. That’s not always possible. It is my connection to the sacred and it’s the music and the chanting that really hold myspace for me. Hmm.

Adrian:             

I know you regularly attend Dargah with Hoiking doing some of the Sufi practices. I’ve never actually gone to one. I’m actually curious to hear what’s involved in those meetings and gatherings. And I’m quite interested in the practices themselves.

El Farouk:         

Well, when we were talking earlier, you talked about breath, right? You actually need to be at a Sufi Dargah because breath is so important and all life starts with breath, right? The Koran says that all life starts with water, but creation starts with God’s breath being blown into us. I really like the Dargah space because I end up, like with the unity mosque and other spaces, I often end up being sort of a central to that space. What I like about the Dargah is I can just be a student in that space. Was that your question?

Adrian:            

I was curious to hear you describe what it’s like to attend one for listeners that have not had experience either.

El Farouk:         

The Dargah is basically the school of our teacher. In some Sufi traditions, the teachers is called a Sheikh. In the Rifai tradition, we call our teacher Baba, which means father, and we begin by sitting in a circle and he delivers his sohbet, which is a lesson or a teaching. He always tells us that this is the most important part of the evening because it’s basically where we are toned and brought into common space right through his teaching. Our Baba is fairly informal. Other communities are more formal or more vested in cultural or a ritual and so on and so forth. He’s quite open to people asking questions and we laugh and we, you know, engage in conversation, but he’s the teacher. We are in class and that lasts for about two hours. Then depending on the time of the year it is, we will then say our communal prayer, our ritual prayer, Muslim ritual, prayer and after that we begin Zikr.

Zikr comes from an Arabic word that means remembrance. Allah in the Koran says prayer is good, but remembrance is even better. A dervish is called upon to remember God at all times in all things. To see God manifest in all things all around us. And so the Zikr is the chanting of the Divine names. We chat La Ilaha Illallah, which means there is no god but God and I think essential to that is the understanding that small god is not just an idol or an icon, but the idle and the icons that we hold in our heart.

So whether it’s our money or it’s a person or it’s our job, our art or whatever it is, those are the idols or the icons that we hold in our heart. We have to break those idols and those icons because there is only One reality and that we’re all joined in that reality. That’s the foundational remembrance. There are other remembrances so we chant Allah as the name of God and Hu which Arabic means He, but it is the remembrance of the breath. The sacred name of the Divine that we remember each time we breathe. It’s orchestrated as part of the practice so that it is done in community and ritualized and then we do that for about 90 minutes and then we eat because by then you worked up an appetite. That’s part of my therapy, right? So I find the Unity mosque to be very therapeutic, but because of my position and location within it, it’s a different space for me. Then when I come intothe Dargah where I’m a student and I can just actually sit and just be present without having to be active, you know.

Adrian:             

Does everybody do the whirling or is it just the dervishes that are performing?

El Farouk:         

The whirling is a ritual that’s present in some Sufi traditions and not present in others. Our teacher, our Baba is part of a sacred lineage from two different Sufi traditions, the Rifai and the Jerrahi. The whirling is a ritual, a historical ritual component of the Jerrahi lineage. We used to have whirling, but not very often. So our Baba’s son and his wife, they both whirl, but we didn’t have it very often because we didn’t have a lot of people within our community who were, who knew how to whirl and that’s changing because now there’s more and more people. We get people who go for classes, and they are offered every Saturday before the Dargah. We’re starting to see it happen more within our Zikr ceremonies.

Adrian:             

I’m so curious because to me it seems like the movement practice is like sort of the yoga in other practices where the body and the mind actually there’s a component.

El Farouk:         

So Muslim ritual prayer is yogic, but we don’t recognize it as such. I’ve had friends who practice yoga who’ve come into Muslim space and joined us in prayer and said, this is very familiar. This is not foreign, this is, but Muslims don’t conceptualize our ritualized prayer as being a yogic practice. I think that’s our loss. The practice of the Zikr depending on which community can also have movement and that is combining the body, the spirit, and the mind in movement. The whirling for me is very interesting. Thal you and I were talking about Umrah and Mecca, and when we went in 2011 and we were staying at the hotel and we were overlooking the Haram Sherrif, the mosque in Mecca. There was never a moment in the day when there were people who were not doing their Tawaf. They’re circumambulation of the Kaaba. I remember thinking and because people are wearing a lot of the men are wearing white and some of the women are wearing black and then other colors.

I am a sci-fi fan. I looked at this and it was like Oh My God this is like looking at the Milky Way. It’s like looking at a galaxy that’s constantly whirling, right? It’s whirling around the central point…this black box that’s in the middle. It could be a black hole in the middle of the universe or the middle of the galaxy, and it’s all whirling around that. The Dervishes when they’re whirling, they are whirling around their heart as the center point, because the heart is where God sits. Right? So all of these movements, whether it’s the dervish that’s whirling or the pilgrims that are going around the Kaaba or the earth going around the sun or the galaxy spinning, we’re all turning towards the heart. We’re all turning towards the core. I really see a connection between what’s in the universe out there and the microcosm that is in the Dargah and the further microcosm that’s within each of us and within our bodies.

Adrian:             

That’s beautiful. Spirituality is underneath that is the connection and seeing the connection from all scales, whether it’s the large Cosmos to you as an individual, just even looking at your body as a cosmic representation. In our bodies, and actually Baba often talks about this as well. Our bodies are so complex. They are a universe in and of themselves. We don’t recognize that we take our bodies for granted, abuse it and neglect it and forget it and do all sorts of things with it.

Thal:                

 That’s true. How can you get angry if you think you want all those things?

El Farouk:         

I think anger is part of the human condition. It’s where we allow it to take us and how we bounce back from it.

Thal:                 

Yeah, absolutely. I’m thinking about, you know, who young are Muslim people that identify as Queer and who are really struggling mentally and probably thinking about walking away from the religion because they feel they’re not accepted. I mean, what kind of advice would you give those people?

El Farouk:         

Don’t let other people tell you who you are or what you are? Learn to define it for yourself and embrace your spirituality which is innate to us. Why should we have to choose because it doesn’t fit with somebody else and so I would say to people you know, look within and find your own path because it is possible to do.

Adrian:             

What is your vision for the future of unity mosque and beyond and I guess all the other manifestations that branch out of that.

El Farouk:         

I want to subvert the planet.

Adrian:            

 What’s your master plan?

El Farouk:         

The idea for me of the unity mosque is to transform the face of Islam, not everybody’s going to end up at the Dargah. It’s always been that way. Not everybody has a calling to a center stage, a spiritual connection, right? But everybody has spirituality. Everybody has a need for connection. I don’t think it’s a small coincidence that a small number of people who come to my Dargah actually started coming to Unity mosque first and some of them don’t come to Unity mosque anymore but they found their way from there to the Dargah. My hope for the Unity mosque is that it’s a vision of inclusion and of a shared humanity and a cohesive spirituality is something that continues to be disseminated and that similar spaces start coming up in different places. I’d like to see this as a globalized movement and we’re starting to see more and more spaces like this coming up in different parts of the world. 

Of course, in some parts of the world is not actually safe for these spaces to exist or to exist publicly and it’s not going to be possible, which is also why our sermons, our Friday services are broadcasted through Facebook live and we actually have an international congregation and every Friday there’s people from Kenya, Ireland, and places in the states and across the GTA who for some reason can’t get down to the physical location and so on and so forth, who do access the service and because the service is then…the recording is kept on the Facebook group. I will often go back and check and see that something’s been watched 200 times or 150 times and so on and so forth. It’s my hope that people’s mindset and their understanding is also being transformed. One of the things that I always say to people is that if you want to try to start a community in your own physical location, we’re here to help you start that. The Protestant reformation started with people taking back their Christianity, and so the unity mosque is hopefully a vehicle for people to take back their Islam.

Thal:                 

One of the interesting things that you had mentioned because we attended the Unity mosque prayer last Friday and one of the things that you mentioned that there are a lot of Jewish people that practice too, right?

El Farouk:        

 Not everybody who comes to the unity mosque is Muslim identified. For me it speaks to the potential transformative capacity of a space like the Unity mosque because we are not trying to convert people. I would like people to come and feel better about themselves and find their own connection and if that connection is through Islam, that’s fabulous and if it’s not through Islam then you know, well, Allah in the the Koran says not everybody’s meant to be Muslim and that even religious diversity is part of God’s plan.

Thal:                

 It is mentioned that, “or else I would have created you all just one type of people.”

El Farouk:         

Absolutely. So I don’t actually know when people come to the mosque, whether they’re Muslim or not. Yeah. Unless I happen to know them. Right. Most of them are but some but of them are not, and some of the folks come from a mixed religious backgrounds or mixed families or have Muslims in their extended family. Some of the folks who I spoke about, who come from Jewish backgrounds, some of them are converts to Islam, some of them come from mixed Christian and Jewish homes, and you know, if you come from a mixed Christian and Jewish home, then Islam is really a very good solution.

Thal:                 

It is like the end of the narrative.

El Farouk:         

Because you don’t have to, you don’t want to have to give up Moses and the Torah and you don’t have to give up Jesus. You find them both? You can. Exactly. You know, I said it jokingly, but it’s actually kind of true. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, and it has appeal for people, and remember during the time of the Prophet in Madina, Muslims and Jews used to pray together. Yeah.

Thal:                 

Yeah, there are many stories.

El Farouk:         

We’re not doing anything new. We’re just reclaiming our past that other people have tried to pretend it never existed, and at the same time, move forward. I think this is the element or the essence of Islam that I think the fundamentalists forget that it is organic and it is responsive. Even the history of Islam, the Quran was revealed over a 23 year period to the prophet Mohammed because it was in response. It wasn’t here it is, now conform, which is what we are told Islam is today, but it is not the history of Islam. It is not even how Islam came into the world. It came into the world as a response and a response to the need of people and of society.

Thal:                

 I think people confuse the concept of surrender with conformity.

El Farouk:         

Yeah. Who is the surrender to is the question because usually the people who are telling you that you need to surrender. They’ll tell you to surrender to God as they understand God and to God’s word as they tell you to understand it.

Thal:                 

Whereas, you know, true surrender is a very deep way of being and it’s about a connection with your self, really.

El Farouk:         

Well, if Allah is closer to you than you’re own jugular vein, then you know, you need to look inside as well as outside.

Thal:                 

Any thing that you wanted to talk about that you haven’t had the chance to talk about or any questions that you would have liked to be asked because you’ve always been out in the media for like 20+ years.         

El Farouk:

We talked about psychotherapy and so on. I think that a large part if the crises that we see and the dependencies that we see in the world around us, I think it’s comes from this schizophrenia, this compartmentalization of our physical, sexual, spiritual, and emotional beings. The name for the unity mosque, it is tawheed, it is unity, it is oneness, but Oneness is not sameness.

I think that whether you find it in Islam or you find it through any other tradition. Finding that sense of balance and that connection to yourself and to the world around you, I think is what’s missing for many people and it’s what causes all this dysfunction in the world around us.

Thal:                 

Absolutely.

Adrian:             

Thank you. Beautifully said.

El Farouk:         

Thank you.

Thal:                 

Thank you very much for your time.

Bonus Material: 

El Farouk:

In my work as a refugee lawyer and I primarily represent the majority of the cases that I represent are either based on sexual orientation or gender identity or expression or gender. So everything from, you know, for the gender stuff, it’s forced marriage, domestic violence, a lot of female genital mutilation, but it, over the years of doing this work and listening to people’s stories, and I represented people from about 120 different countries, so from all religious and non-religious and racial backgrounds and so on, is how religion and spirituality are used as, as these weapons to bludgeon people. We talked about that within the Muslim context, but I’ve seen it sort of universally women. I think that, you know, not all gay men are visibly gay, but all, most women are visibly female from birth.

 The way patriarchy, misogyny, and religion intersect as how women’s bodies are controlled and how women, girl children are controlled and limited, and told that they’re not worthy. You’re not worthy to lead prayer. You’re not worthy to be in this space. You don’t have the capacity or the ability, and so this kind of gendered hierarchy is created within our theology and within our religious spaces, and to me, that’s abuse. That’s a form of violence right there to say that you are not worthy, that somehow you need to be confined in a particular space.

Thal:                 

Even women’s voices…

El Farouk:         

Yes, your voice cannot be heard, and so on. To me, even if you don’t recognize this as abuse or ss violence, it is. I just presented a case today, my client is a Muslim woman from West Africa. I remember having this conversation with her because it’s a question I have to ask my female clients who are alleging domestic violence is if they were raped during the marriage and the notion that they can be raped by their husband is actually something that they sort of look at me and go, what? If your husband forced you to have sex against your will, that’s also rape. It’s your body and you have to consent, and yet even within some Muslim theological constructs, there’s no concept of marital rape. To me, that’s a form of violence. These are the kinds of things that sort of have informed me in the development of my own theology and how our relationship to God and to ourselves and to religion and our spirituality has to be transformative and has to liberate because this is violence and surely our spiritual tradition doesn’t teach us violence as a vehicle for closeness to God’s creation.

Thal:                 

Yeah and shouldn’t be a source of pain and separation and trauma. Sort of take away people’s lives, really, not allow people to thrive as human beings.

El Farouk:         

That’s exactly what it does, it suffocates our growth as human beings, and if we are all created in God’s image, then how does this violence allow us to reach our fullest potential? It doesn’t, in fact, it constricts us and confines us and denies us that growth.

Thal:                 

Keeps us small…

El Farouk:         

And separated and the separation is also a separation from ourselves and I think that’s where all the anxieties and depressions and the mental health issues that arise.

Thal:                 

Yeah, not only in the queer communities, it’s everywhere now.

El Farouk:         

Pervasive.

#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.

#7: Mental Game with NBA Strength Coach Drew Cleary

February 17, 2019 Leadership, Podcast, Psychology 01:07:37

To be in a Flow state is to be in that moment where you lose all concept of time and become engrossed in the activity at hand. It is that moment when you even lose your awareness of yourself. Many artists, writers, and creative types concur. 

Flow state is also accessible to athletes. It becomes this meditative state that players competing in a sports game may find themselves in – totally attuned to their skills, and to their teammates. After all, sports are about being entirely in the moment: embodied, focused, and highly aware.

On this episode, Adrian does a solo interview with Drew Cleary. Drew worked as a Strength and Conditioning Coach in the NBA for 18 years. In his career, he has worked with over nine Hall of Famers and personally trained athletes like Scottie Pippen and Monica Seles.

Enjoy!

Highlights

  • Working in the NBA
  • Coaching Flow State
  • Scottie Pippen Stories
  • Veteran Mentorship for Rookies
  • Changing Attitudes Toward Mental Health in Sport

Resources

Listen:

An Original Poem Inspired by This Episode

Full Transcript

Adrian

Drew, welcome to the show.

Drew

Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Adrian

Yeah man I’ve been looking forward to having this conversation with you so we can talk hoops, performance and life in general. But actually one thing I never asked you personally is from one basketball fan to another, when did you first develop your love for the game? You know, what was that like when, I’m assuming it was early in your life?

Drew

Yeah, I’m from Australia originally. I grew up in a very small town, about 30,000 people south of Sydney in Australia and I was a soccer player when I was a little kid and um, every team in Australia, every town has their own home team and that team has an American or two on it. And so there was an American that came out at the time I was about 11 or 12, his name was Dennis Caron and he lived with my family for a year and had a profound influence on me making me have an appreciation for basketball. My mother and father were involved in basketball, but I played soccer and he lived with us and he became like a big brother to me and that’s kind of what turned me into loving basketball more than anything else was, you know, I have two older sisters but I didn’t have any brothers and it was like a bonding experience for me to have this person in my life and that’s kind of how I got started into basketball. I gave up soccer and started playing basketball and then when I was 18, I got a scholarship to come over to the United States and play basketball. That was kinda where I got my start and how things come to evolve for me.

Adrian

That’s awesome. So he was clearly one of your heroes or mentors growing up. What was the age difference? How much older was he?

Drew

He would have been in his 30s at that point. Um, you know, when you’re a little kid, you know, you don’t really, you don’t understand that you’d like to play golf. And uh, I played a lot of cricket and so I was a wicket keeper in cricket and so we had this big field next to the basketball stadium and he would go out and bring these golf clubs out there and he hit golf balls towards me and I would catch the balls with my wicket keeping gloves, you know, probably probably child abuse today, but you know, they’d be these balls flying out towards me and I would catch the balls and put them in a bucket and collect the balls. It’s like a little brother, you know, like, just happy to be along for the ride and you know, he found ways to include rather than exclude me like saying “get lost a little kid” , you know, he was very friendly and you know, to the point where he was, he’s always remained in my life. I recently spoke with him we haven’t lost contact. He’s always been a piece and a part of my life. Not just my life, but my family’s life. He lives up in Vermont and I went up, visited with him a few years ago and I know his kids and his wife and it’s a relationship that’s lasted several decades, obviously 30 years. It’s a, at least a 30 year relationship. So, very influential on me and the reason that I went into basketball for sure it was because of him.

Adrian

That’s beautiful. So you were playing basketball in college and I guess at what point did you set your focus on working in sports because you later went off and did a masters in sports science. And so when did you know you wanted to get into the field professionally?

Drew

Oh, I didn’t really know to be honest with you. I never.. I came to the United States with obviously with the aspiration of playing in the NBA because every kid thinks that he can play in the NBA, you know, like, I know there was an assistant coach that I work with in the NBA told me one time that every kid that starts at a D1 program in the United States right now thinks he can play in the NBA. Well, there’s like 300 D1 programs, so that means there’s 1500 kids today that think they can play in the NBA when this 60 slots in the draft, you know, of which 15 are going to be foreign, you know, like the probability of you planning the NBA is astronomically small. But you know, I came with aspiration but I’m never really had a inkling of playing in the NBA. Like once I started playing in college I realized that I wasn’t going to be a pro and education was going to be important, but I enjoyed the training component of it. The performance component of it. Really the most… the point in my life where it turned was when I was finishing my master’s degree at Boise State University and my father who was a president of a university in my hometown, a very influential person in my life, had two PhDs and education was a big part of his life. We had a phone call, I had a phone call with him one day and I was confused. I didn’t know what I wanted to do and, and he had always told me when I was a little kid that if you can turn your hobby into your occupation you’ll never feel like you’re going to be at work and if you never at work then it won’t feel like a job. And so he had said to me, I’ve always told you from the time you were a little kid, you know, like you need to turn your hobby into your occupation and you know, like, I’m going to ask you a couple questions, like, what do you like to do? I said I liked to play basketball, lift weights. And he said then you should find an occupation that involves playing basketball and lifting weights and now he had no idea of anything about strength and conditioning or athletic training or sports performance or any of those things because like you need to figure out what you can do. And it was like, you know, do those jobs exist? It’s like, well you know, there’s strength coaches. He goes “if I was you, I’d start at the top. What’s the top?” I said, the NBA. He goes, “what’s the next?” I say college. “What’s next?” High school. “If the NBA don’t want you, go to college. If college don’t want you, go to high school. If high school don’t want you, you have, you need to figure something else out”. So I wrote nine letters to nine western conference teams because I was in Boise and I told them, you know, like at the time the Seattle Supersonics, the Portland Trailblazers, the LA teams, the Sacramento team, Phoenix I think was one of them. I think I wrote to Chicago. So there was one eastern conference team and I just told them my story. Uh, you know, I’m an immigrant. I came to Australia. I played basketball in college and I’m done and I have a Master’s degree in Exercise Physiology and I’d love to come work for free, you know. I’ll throw myself at the mercy of… I just want to learn the trade, you know, and, I’ll survive somehow some way because I always have been able to do that and you know, just let me come learn from you guys. And surprisingly, I got six responses from the nine teams and one of the teams that I got a response from was the Portland Trailblazers and the guy that was there at the time, his name was Mick Smith. I literally packed my stuff up within a week and just jumped in a U Haul truck and whatever I had I took with me to Portland and I started working there for free. You know, and I was only there a very short period of time. He had said to me, “hey, perhaps you’d like to come to summer league with us because it was around may or June and Summer League is around that timeframe, June or July. So maybe I was there two months. At the time Summer League was in Salt Lake City, Utah, and he said to me, you know, like, we can’t give you any money but you know, you can fly over with us and we’ll give you a per diem. Per diem in those days was like $60, which was a ton of money to me. Like I’m good. 60 bucks a day man I’m good. Now, per diem in the NBA is like $140, but I literally lived off per diem for that couple of weeks. And while I was out there, I had an opportunity to meet with the owner of the team at the time, who recently passed away Paul Allen. And then, um, he asked me if I was interested in working with a friend of his Monica Seles who is a Hall of Fame tennis player. And I said, yeah, of course. And so that’s where my career started. I was literally an unpaid intern for a couple of months and two months later I was training a hall of fame tennis player on the road with her. And that’s how my career began.

Adrian

Wow. So what was your responsibility with Monica Seles? Were you the main personal trainer?

Drew

Yeah, I was a personal trainer, she had a very well known incident at the time. She had been stabbed by some crazy guy during an event and she had sat out of tennis for a little while when she was looking to get back into shape. So through that relationship with Paul, I went down and met with her in San Diego, La Costa, very nice country club then where she was playing in a tournament. And the agreement was I train her for a week. And if she liked me, I’d stay and if it didn’t work out, I’d go back to the Trailblazers and be an assistant back there. And we kind of hit it off. And I just continued to travel with her for quite a while. It was a really fun time in my life, I got to go to all different places in the world with her. She’s probably one of the nicest human beings I’ve ever met. She was, you could tell that she was a great person, not by just my interaction with her, but how the general public received her. She was was very well received by the public and the fans, you know, she was just adored like a princess, and she was a very easy person to talk to and communicate with. I really enjoyed my time with her. She was a very competitive, intense person that, you know, was very easy on the side, very easy person to deal with it. It was a great time in my life.

Adrian

What do you feel like you learned during that time working with Monica that really prepared you for the NBA because you returned back to the League after that?

Drew

Yeah. She taught me a lot of things. First of all, her skill level was incredible. Um, she could do things that you would never see in real life, you know, on the television or when you watch her play. She showed me one time we were in Atlanta and she liked to like fine tune her skills by hitting the ball against this wall. And I’d never seen anything like this. Just her ability to stand three, four feet from a wall and off the volley off the half volley and side-to-side. It was a 15, 20 minute display of hitting a ball against a wall that your jaw was just dropping. She honed those skills in a very small town in Yugoslavia. She was originally from Hungary a little town called Novi Sad. And she used to hit the ball against the garage door. Her eye- hand coordination was, you know, her ability to pick up a ball at very short distances was something special. And just her competitiveness, you know. I remember we were at the Trailblazers one time and I took it into the back and show her the video room and stuff was where they break down film and stuff like that. And I asked her just casually like, do you watch film of your opponents? And she just matter of factly was like, “no, why would I watch film of my opposition? Like they need to watch film of me.” And it wasn’t swag, it was real confidence, you know, and she had told me before, the only time that she ever really watched film was when she felt like she wasn’t playing well, so she’d break out some old tapes of when she was at Wimbledon and you know, just to see herself performing at a really high level to get her confidence back, you know.

But other than that she didn’t really break film down of anybody or watch her opposition at all. So just her competitiveness and her self confidence of who she was as an athlete. And she was unbeatable. Which translated male, female basketball, tennis. It didn’t matter. That translated into the NBA. And when you saw players in the NBA, the really good players, there was a level of confidence that they had that they didn’t see the opposition really at all. They just went out and competed at a really high level because they were really confident in their own ability. So that was one of the things that I saw that translated very quickly was just to, you know, she’s a hall of fame player, she’s a hall of fame human being and I saw that translate from her to basketball very quickly and very easily. It was something that they both had in common and one’s a man, one’s a woman, one’s in basketball, ones in tennis. But the mindset was the same.

Adrian

Yeah, I definitely want to explore that with you. Fascinated with sort of the mental edge that some of these human beings seem to have that are you know, extraordinarily. But before we go there, I kind of want to go back and just have a chance for you to describe what exactly is a strength and conditioning coach. For those that might not be familiar, what is that role? And maybe walk through sort of the day, a day in a life, you know, what it’s like during the season and what does that job entail?

Drew

There’s two distinct days. The first day obviously is a game day and if you’re not on a back to back, if you haven’t played the day before, you go in in the mornings for shoot around and contingent on you know whether you’re on the road or at home. will determine the time. If you’re at home, usually you shoot from 10 to 11 and if you’re on the road you’ll shoot from 11 to 12. In that period of time, the players come in, they don’t get taped or anything like that. They just come in and watch a little bit of film on who we’re going to play and then they go out onto the court and depending on where we are in the season, earlier on in the season you may get some shots up, but later in the season it’s really just going over your offense and then going over whatever the other team’s going to run, what you’re going to see and how you’re going to defend it. Different players you give different looks to that. There’s three different types of looks on a screen: a hard show, an even show and then a soft show like someone that can’t shoot the ball very well, you go underneath the screen on them, so you kind of encouraging them to shoot the ball. But somebody that’s a really good shooter from the perimeter, you’re gonna try and put more pressure on the top of screen and rolls and most of basketball these days, uh, uh, looks out of screen and roll situations. That’s kind of why the Chicago Bulls success was a little bit different because they ran a lot of other different stuff, but the majority of basketball is running a pick and roll situations and so they kind of really just going over personnel and how are we going to defend different personnel and different situations. They’ll show it to them and film first and then they’ll go out on the floor and kind of go through it physically. I think athletes have a desire or a need, whatever you may want to call it, to feel the sensation of it and see it physically. It’s not just showing it on video or drawing it up on a whiteboard. It’s going out and kind of feeling what it’s going to be like, not at full speed, but just to go over, just to walk through it. Then the players will leave and go home or we’ll go back to the hotel and eat or whatever you kind of on your own. And then they’ll come back in the evening and depending on who you are as a player will determine where you where and what you do in the slots of the game itself. So the game is at 7:00, the first players will arrive around 4:30 4:45 and if they’re not going to play a lot of minutes that night, their time on the floor will be earlier. And then as you get closer and closer to the tip off the players that are going to play the majority of the game or do the majority of the heavy lifting, so to speak, they’ll have slots in the court where they go out and shoot for 10 to 15 minutes, usually alone with a specific coach that works with them on their game and they get specific shots that they’re going to take in the game and they try and get ready to play. From my capacity you know, like everybody’s kind of got a different programming. First of all, you’re working on what may be deficient within their system. Uh, so there’s some form of range of motion evaluation that we’re going to try and treat some kind of compensation pattern first to make sure that your symmetric and then if you’re a player that doesn’t play a lot, then there may be some component of actually trying to build something inside you because we can put a little bit more force through you because we know that you’re not going to take a lot of force tonight on the court. Um, and then the players that are going to play significant minutes, we’re more interested in making them feel good. The range of motion component becomes important and make them symmetric on both sides and feel good about themselves. And some players will actually like to lift before the game and when I say some, the majority of players when I was in the league, like 50, 60 percent of the players that played a heavy amount of minutes, will do something in the weight room before every game. Um, some more than others, but nothing like you would visualize at a health club or anything, you know, like one set of a push, one set of a pull, some form of shoulder stuff, bicep, tricep, something for their hip and their trunk, you know. Then you know, some form of stretch or PNF or forced eccentric, something to get the tissue to cooperate. You really just trying to make them feel good. And that was reciprocated a lot, you know, in the NBA a lot of the teams that had weight rooms in their arenas would let you come in within a certain timeframe to do that work. And we would tell the players that wanted to come in like, “this is the window that we’re operating in”. And they were very good at coordinating themselves to get it in if they wanted to get it in. So that’s kind of the schedule. That’s the way it’s set up. And then, you know, when 7:00 come, 7:30 comes. It’s showtime.

Adrian

Yeah, I know in sports, you often hear people talk about how it’s 90 percent mental, 10 percent physical or whatever the, you know, something along those lines. The term being “in the zone” is often used, right when people are performing at their peak, or the flow state. This is something that you studied in your master’s thesis. Could you talk about what the flow state is and how or what seems to contribute to it?

Drew

Yeah, when I wrote my master’s thesis, I used Chelladurai’s Leadership Scales, and Susan Jackson had written some flow scales. The flow scales are from a guy called Csikszentmihalyi, who kind of documented, I think there’s nine states of flow. It involves losing yourself in something, not having a concept of time and being completely indulged into this thing. And surprisingly enough, the place where most humans experienced this, the most often is reading when you get into a book that you really enjoy, next thing you know, you look up at the clock and an hour has passed and you don’t have this concept of time. You don’t have a concept of hunger or you don’t have a concept of distraction thinking about something else. You completely indulged in the act. Whatever the act may be. And the most commonly experienced place, like I said, is reading a book. Now in sports, when you get into it, um, there is a physical component to it. Like everything feels easy physically and you don’t, like in a basketball sense, you don’t see a defender, you’re just the, the hoop looks like a 10 foot circle and you’re throwing a tennis ball into a pool basically. Like you just feeling in this very confident place. And what my master’s degree was about was I was looking at collegiate basketball players, both men and women. And I was using Chelladurai’s Leadership Scales to determine how in alignment the athlete was with the coach’s message. Were they down with what the coach was talking about or were they not down with what the coach was talking about? And then using Susan Jackson’s flow scales from Csikszentmihalyi, trying to see if there was a correlation to the players that were in alignment with their coach’s message and how frequently they experienced flow and was there a correlation to players that did not understand their coaches leadership style and were they experiencing flowing less often. And obviously that’s not rocket science to figure out which ones experienced flow more often so this human interaction, this human performance was being dictated essentially by what connection I was having with this other human being. It wasn’t something that was insular within the individual. It wasn’t me just sitting there reading a book and getting indulged into this book and experiencing this flow state. What was creating this flow state in the individual was actually a relationship with another human being and in this case that the relationship between the player and the coach. Now I didn’t delve into the relationships between all of the players, which obviously could have also had some form of influence on this psychological and physiological state in the individual itself. But, essentially what I was looking at was, how do we motivate players to experience a high level of performance, this flow state, based upon this relationship. Like what it is that we’re talking about and some of the coaching that I had seen in the past, you know, the old school coaching where you “get into somebody! Toughness!” You know, “we’re soft!” All of those things that we’ve heard in coaching. The coaches are trying to make you tougher and make you play harder. But the reality of it was players didn’t really want to respond to that. So what I’ve found in the, leadership scales was that certain players would experience flow at a higher level if they were in tune with what it was that you were saying to them and how you were saying to it, how you were delivering what the message was and how the message was being delivered. And it was really interesting to see. It’s not rocket science to think that if you’re yelling at me and calling me names and pushing me down physically and emotionally, I’m probably not going to experience high performance states at a very high level. There is a fine line between that.oObviously I. I do understand that if you’re gonna, if you’re gonna make an Omelet, you’re going to have to crack a few eggs. I get that concept. It’s not all going to be hugs and kisses. We’re not going to make it to the finish line in that capacity. There are going to have to be moments when criticism is going to be alleged at people and you’re going to have to have some form of mental toughness to take that guidance. But within the parameters of that, all of the successful coaches that I’ve seen in the end that I’ve seen in college and not individuals that berate people and talk down to them. That’s not how you have success and that. That was kind of in alignment with what the research showed that that having some form of empathy and care towards somebody was going to improve or arouse their performance sensations. I was really lucky to work with the hall of fame coach and Orlando. His name was Chuck Daly, won a couple championships with the Detroit Pistons and I clearly remember we were at home and we had lost to the Clippers who were not very good at the time. Um, and we were walking out, I was just a young guy and we were walking out of the locker room after game and he’d gone into to greet the players, you know, like after the game. It was a bad loss, you know, we had really planned on winning that game and we did not win and we did not win convincingly. And he’s like, “all right, bring it in”. You know, like “tough night tonight”, you know, “let’s bring it back tomorrow. We got a game again tomorrow and let’s strap it up tomorrow and let’s go after tomorrow”. So the players brought it in and you know, “Magic on three, ooh ooh ooh” and we left. As we walked out, I said, “man, coach, I thought you were going to yell at them. Thought you’re going to go off on him”. And he’s “like, oh let me tell you something young fella. They know they messed up. There’s going gonna be times in the course of this that I’m going to have to get into them. There’s an 82 game season and you can fire off 8 or 10 bullets a year. One game out of 10 you can fire off a bullet at them. You can’t yell at him all the time. This is not a situation where I need to yell at them. They know that they messed up tonight. They know that they made some mistakes tonight. They know we should have won tonight. This is one of those situations where you’re holding the bullet back.” It was an eyeopening experience for me to understand that you don’t have to verbalize everything. You know, they did feel horrible because as a strength coach, you’re in and around the team, you know more about the team than anybody because you’re with them all the time, all the time and they’re in the weight room and that humans want to tell you things. They want to interact with you, they want to have a relationship with you. So as a strength coach you knew more about the players and more about the team than anybody else in the organization potentially. So there was a very eyeopening experience for me to understand that you don’t always have to berate someone or tell them that they made a mistake. They know when they’ve made a mistake. So he was really good at getting the most out of people. You know, he was a hall of fame coach, won a couple of championships. He had a lot of success. I felt really blessed to have been around him and seeing how somebody at a really high level like that conducts themselves more than anything else. He was a consummate professional and did he yell at players? Of course he did. Did he get pissed off in time outs? Of course you do, but at the same time did he lift people up? Yeah. And so that’s that dichotomy of relationship that I’m talking about knowing when to be aggressive and call someone out, but at the same time know when to lift somebody up and they’re the two things that, you know, seem to be shown in research in my master’s degree that if I’m in alignment with what you’re talking about, I’ll experience peak performance more often.

Adrian

Was there ever a time when you can recall when the entire team experienced flow? So not just the individual player but as an organization almost like an organism functioning at a very high level.

Drew

Yeah, when you get on a roll. You know, I got a couple of instances on that. First one, I was with Scottie Pippin for four years as a personal trainer and I remember asking him about the ’96 Bulls one time and he told me that, because that was the year they won 72 games, and he told me that they’d be warming up, he would look across the other side of the court and in his mind he’s like, “man, we already won”. He could literally look across the court and see the fear and intimidation in the other team and it was a supreme confidence and the supreme confidence didn’t necessarily come from an arrogance or confidence knowing that we’re just better than them. It was knowing that the cohesive unit, what they had on their side of the floor was unbeatable. He talked in depth about how people like Phil Jackson, the practices was all dedicated towards running their offense. And when they got out of practice and into the game, it was just such a natural extension of what they had done in practice. You know? So they didn’t have to create anything in game because they’d already seen these things in practice. It became like a mechanism and the trust that they had for each other, which turns into a special bond. And that special bond allows you to rely on your fellow teammate at a very high level, which creates this massive confidence and ability. You start winning 8, 10, 12 games in a row. You win games just on confidence. And I experienced that with a couple of teams. When we had Gilbert Arenas in Washington, you felt confident that we were going to win because we got Gilbert. I’m talking about Gilbert in his prime. When Gilbert was rolling, you know, it didn’t matter if it was end of quarter situations, low shot clock situations. We had a guy that could score on anybody at any time in any given moment. And you win a game just on his brilliance. And then that translates into confidence into other players. And next thing you know, Antawn Jamison’s scoring 50 points and Caron Butler is getting 35 a night and all of a sudden the whole team, the thing starts to get going and start to get rolling and you start being teams just on confidence, you know, and “the other team’s getting paid too! They’re all pros too! Down the hallway”, famous Flip Saunders line. Like “they’re pros down the hallway too! They’re getting paid too!” Everybody’s good. It’s not like a team that’s only won five or six games and another team has won 20, doesn’t have any talent on their team. They got tons of talent. They’re pros too. They got drafted too. They played at a high level in college too. Like there’s nobody in the NBA that’s not playing at a high level. So it really comes down to not the physical things, but you know, the mental things. Like what drives the physical? What kind of CPU you got a your computer? That’s what it really comes down to. When you look at the anthropometric numbers of NBA players, they’ve all got really long arms. Guess what? On average 6’7″ tall and they’re 7’1″ long. They’re four inches longer than their height on average. And when you see guys that played a very high level, the Pippins and the KD’s and the Kawhi Leonards, they got extraordinary anthropometric measurements. Their wingspans are 8, 10 inches longer than their height. They got extraordinarily large hands, you know, like they have anthropometric measurements that normal humans don’t have. Not to say that they’re the things that made them successful in the NBA because a lot of, a lot of NBA players have those things, but they’re the things that separate them from the rest of the crowd. What separates you from your own, um, union, the group, the NBA players? What separates them from those groups is the brain. How do I buy into what coach is talking about? How do I buy into what the general manager’s talking about? What does our team message, how do I buy into what it is that I’m trying to accomplish? You know the teams on the front of the Jersey, but it has Jordan on the back and there’s Pippen on the back, like they own half of that jersey. What is their take on how things are going to operate. Some guys are selfish, some guys are team guys, and how do we bring all of this together and it’s a really interesting dynamic that you have from the front office to coaching to players, to the support staff, the people that are around them and travel these guys and take care of these guys. How you’re either giving to the pie or in some capacity taking away from it. If you’ve got enough guys taking out of it doesn’t work and it doesn’t take much to get it off balance. So there’s a lot that goes into it. As you know, it’s a long year. Your season starts late September and if you go all the way it doesn’t end till the end of June. That’s a long time to spend with people and it’s every day. You know, I tell people all the time, you want Christmas off? This job, ain’t for you. You want Thanksgiving off? This job ain’t for you. You want New Years Day off? This job ain’t for you. You’re going to work every single day. And you know, it’s a great job. Like my father told me, turn your hobby into your occupation. I got to work in pro basketball for 18 years. It was a lot of fun. It was a lot of work.

Adrian

I guess on the other side of flow, when a team is struggling, like they’re going through a slump, you know, maybe 10 games, 15 game loss, what have you seen that can really turn things around? To bring you out of the slump. Maybe from a mental aspect or from an organizational or cultural standpoint?

Drew

Um, yeah, you’re going to have to do it together. We’ll have to pick each other up. Um, sometimes you need a little luck. Sometimes you need a guy that can just get hot and sometimes a guy wins a game on his own, you know, like, which creates this togetherness like all of a sudden. I remember we were playing the Lakers in LA and Gilbert scored 60 points in LA and it was just amazing. He just won the game on his own and then the next night he scored like 50 in Phoenix. Just won that game on his own. And then that builds confidence. Like sometimes it can be an extraordinary individual performance. Sometimes the coaches can come up with a great defensive plan that really mutes someone on the opposition that was having a lot of success. Um, sometimes there’s a trade of some sort. All of a sudden you got some fresh blood in there, you could infuse new energy and bring a new view on culture to the team. There’s not just one way that you can break out of it. It’s a myriad of things that can take place during the course of a year. Because there’s so many things moving in so many different directions. You have 15 brains headed in so many different directions and that’s the biggest challenge in coaching in the NBA is to try and understand how do I get these brains headed in the same direction? How do I get them pulling for each other and if you got guys headed in different directions, it’s not successful. It can be the strangest of reasons for why things aren’t working out. You know, it doesn’t necessarily have to be that we’re just not good enough because that’s usually not the case. Usually there’s enough talent. It’s just we haven’t put it together correctly or it’s too young. I remember there was a coach that I work with in Washington, he was with the Warriors. At one point he was working in the front office and he use to say to me “yeah, you know, Drew, when I was working in the front office, I used to say to the coaches at the time, ‘put the young guys in. Put the young guys in,’ And now that I’m sitting on the bench and I’m coaching, I always saying ‘put A young guy in! Because when you go to like the younger guys, like, yeah, they bouncy but you’re not going to win many games with young guys. You’re going to win with vets and guys who know how to play and when you’re in the front office you want to see those young guys evolve and when you’re in charge of it and the records on your back, it’s like put A young guy in. Sprinkle in a couple of young guys. Let’s play the vets.

Adrian

Speaking of young guys, you got to watch a lot of these essentially boys become men. I mean, these 18 year old rookies coming into the machinery of professional sports, you know, with the money, the fans, the cameras… what have you noticed are common challenges that they go through in that transition when they’re forced into the machinery of the business.

Drew

Yes, there are 19 year old guys coming in. If you’re fortunate enough to get some first round pick guys that are lottery pick guys, the chances are they’re one year college guys in there into the league, you know, they, they are young. And how, what kind of habits did they start creating? You know, if you come onto a team where there are bad habits on that team where guys party a lot and go out and they, you know, they’re into some things that maybe are not more in alignment with a professional kind of viewpoint. Then they can quickly be dragged into that life and you can, you can see guys struggle and maybe not, maybe not reach the levels that they were hoping to get to and that as an organization hope that they would get to it because they become enamored with this lifestyle, you know, so at the most important thing is to have them come in and to start to have a veteran guy that knows how to prepare and cares about his body. What he eats, what he drinks, how often he sleeps, does he work on his game? Like a lot of the things that you don’t see that you only see on the television is when, when guys come to practice in the morning, if you’re a pro, if you want to have a long career, you’re going to come back at nighttime and you’re going to shoot. And I’m not talking about pump fake one dribble, pull up jumpshot and make 500. I’m talking about going in and making 500 shots from 15 to 18 feet just to keep your touch. My time there when I was with Scottie, he would go back to the gym every night, every night, we’d be back there if we weren’t playing and making 500 shots and he wasn’t, wasn’t at a full blown sweat, but this guy, he genuinely cared about the game when we were at home just kind of hanging out and he watched NBA basketball, he watched college basketball, he was a student of the game. You know, so you’re picking up pieces of, you know, tendencies of the opposition in tendencies of the other team by not just watching them from an analytic standpoint in film sessions with coaches, but you’re, you’re watching the game at home as a fan and because the way in which he sees the game, he’s able to pick up tendencies on guys that at some point during the course of the season he’s going to play against and realize, Oh man, I know the style. He likes to go left and she’d pull up shots going left. Wasn’t necessarily something that he learned from a film session. It was potentially something that he learned from just being a student of the game. You may see a move of that somebody does and be like, Oh wow, I like that! Back that up. Let me take another look at that and put that into your game. Gilbert arrays was notorious for that. He had this whole list of different things that he would work on. And he had different names for it. The Steve Blake Crossover, you know, the Michael Jordan had big hands and he had the ability to Suction Cup the ball. So instead of crossing over and like carrying the ball, like Allen Iverson did. MJ would suck the ball up and literally like lift it and put it over into a different spot, will give what I big hands. So he would come in and work on those things and those things were picked up, not necessarily in a team environment but in an environment of wanting to understand the game from their own self. So go back to the young guys, the young guys that are coming in. Do you surround yourself with a pro that really cares about the game and watches the game and is informed on the things that he eats? And do you surround yourself with that guy or do you surround yourself with the guy that likes to go to the club and get drunk and stay out all night because the one guy will have a much more profound, successful career than the other guy will. So how do you surround yourself as a young guy coming in with individuals that care about your professionalism? That becomes really an important aspect of your development. And I’ve seen both directions. I’ve seen guys that came in with a ton of talent that got caught up in some things that ended up kind of shortening their career and I’ve seen other guys that have come in and really surround themselves with, with consummate professionals and try to learn from frozen and had great careers as a result of that. So you see both sides of the. You try to encourage guys on organizations, try to encourage guys early on. Where they put guys lockers? That’s thought out. They’ll say, we’ve got this young kid coming in like let’s put him next to Antawn Jamison. Antawn Jameson was one of the most professional guys I was around. So got a young guy, a young draft pick coming in? Put him next to ‘Twan. ‘Twan will teach you how to eat right and come in and get things working and get his treatment and do the things that needs to be done. Lift weights, take care of his body, like will do the things that are going to be required of being a good pro. So there were a lot of things. Where they sit on the plane, you know, they try to match guys up, you know, big brother, little brother kind of situation. They try to encourage guys to be together. They try to create environments where that relationship can flourish. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t for whatever reason. So it’s very important. And the NBA, the league itself has recognized that. So they’ve been, they’ve encouraged teams to continue to use veteran guys by giving teams financial breaks for signing. Those guys know it’s cheap, but assign a guy that’s been in the league 10 years to a minimum deal than it is to sign other guys that you’ve been breaks on the salary cap because they’re trying to encourage this. This mentorship, this brotherliness where we can teach young guys to be successful and the best leaders on your team are not necessarily your best players on your team. You have the guys that galvanized teams are not necessarily your best players. When I was in Washington, we had a guy, Trevor Ariza that was a very galvanizing player. He had the ability to talk to all the players on the team and play as listen to what Trevor said and and he was very influential on them. Maybe he wasn’t our best player. You know Beal or Wall and those guys were probably more productive in terms of points per game and shots taken per game and all of those things. But in terms of who had the most influence in the locker room, Trevor had a very big influence in that locker room and so those guys become very important. They become kind of foundation guys in your organization to help you be successful down the line because when something goes wrong during the course of the season, coaches and general managers can’t always fix that. Sometimes the players have to fix it themselves and when you have guys and you’d seemed like that it can fix things, then they become very valuable to your organization and if they can play there even more valuable. The less they play, the less influence they usually have. So the whole thing is kind of, you know, it’s like anything else, like a family, you know, your little brother, you got to take care of your little brother and hopefully your little brother will grow up to be a productive member of the family and the society. But if little bro is, is hanging around the wrong people, then it doesn’t always pan out to be what you want it to be.

Drew

From the outside looking in. A lot of these pro athletes are revered as gods. I mean people, fans are worshiping these celebrities. As somebody who spent years in that world, can you share about the reality of the celebrity lifestyle, perhaps like the shadow side of that world that we don’t. You know, fans on the outside don’t typically appreciate.

Adrian

Yeah. They’re humans man. There’s a lot of different instances that I bumped into in regard to that. They like to have fun. They goofy. Some of them are more serious than others, but at the end of the day they’re just people that have an extraordinary talent and what I say that they have an extraordinary talent. What I’m really saying is that they had some physical gift that enabled them to be who they are, that they spent an inordinate amount of time honing that skill. You don’t just fall out of the womb and play in the NBA. You have to put an inordinate amount of time in to play at that very high level. And with that comes this level of fame and fortune, you know, part of that is debilitating. Because you can’t really do the things that you want to do, but because you so famous, everywhere you go. you’ll know you’re revered and in some cases hounded on some level. I remember it was Christmas Eve in Chicago and Scottie had gone back to Chicago for his last year. He called me and said, come on man, let’s go buy Christmas presents at the water tower place, which is this mall in Chicago. Like “it’s Christmas Eve!” Like “you’re going to see a thousand people following us.” So he shows up and he’s got this little hat and these glasses on and I’m like, “what do you think that hat and glasses are going to do?” “If it fools one person, succeeded if it fools one person!” We went into this mall and I turned around. At one point we will build into the Sharper Image. I’ll never forget this. The security guard was like “nah bro, you ain’t coming in here” because there was like 5,000 people chasing behind us like “Scottie!!”. So the environment that he lived and he lived in a bubble. It was very hard for him to be a normal person, particularly in most cities, but most particularly in that city, you know, in that timeframe, he was a god. He was a legend and he still is one of the best human beings I know, one of the best people I’ve ever been around. Generous and caring and you know, I saw him be a big brother to several players in the NBA, like most importantly probably within the timeframe that I spent with him was the relationship that he had with Zach Randolph and Zach just followed him around like a little puppy dog. Zach was a rookie, a year in Portland. It was around 2000 when he came into the league. And, uh, what Zack was able to take from Pip was important. Work ethic, being in the weight room and taking care of his body and being the best player that he could possibly be. Those relationships become really important. The fame part of it is just a byproduct of the skill level that you have. If you’re super skillful and you’re super successful, then there’s going to be a level of fame associated with that. How that manifests, how you deal with it, you know, that becomes part of it also. So, I dunno, the fame part of it, they’re just regular people, man. They have an extraordinary talent, but usually they have that extraordinary talent because they put an inordinate amount of time. One of the biggest misconceptions that people have is that the Scottie Pippen was a great basketball player just because he was born a great basketball player. There’s no such thing is that he put so much work and I saw it on a daily level, the amount of work that he put in and I was working with him towards end of his career when he was really just trying to maintain health and wellbeing to, to continue to play in the NBA and know when he was younger. He, the amount of time and effort he put in had to be immense because the time that I saw him putting in to putting it, putting in towards the end of his career was. It was crazy. You know, he was, he was dedicated to the game and it wasn’t always about being on the floor and and shooting baskets. It was watching film and being a student of the game and loving the game. If you love the game, the game will love you back, you know, and you had an immense amount of knowledge. It was fun to talk to him about different players and different teams and he saw the game differently because he, he was somebody that had an immense amount of knowledge about the game. That itself was a great historian, uh, you, you’d say, man, this guy is better than that guy and he’d be quiet for a second and then he’d go, no, no, I need to give you 10 reasons why that guy wasn’t better than the guy that you just said at the end of like, yeah, okay. Maybe he’s right because he was a student of the game. Um, the fame, you know, dictate that the fans dictate that, you know, what, how they perceive you, how they know that’s not necessarily up to you. So you got to put the time in. That’s the bottom line.

Adrian

Yeah, that’s such an important point. It reminds me of a quote I read in a book and it’s “to over idealize is to dehumanize” somebody, right? So really treating these people like humans and last year was kind of a big year where two of the star players in the league, DeMar and Kevin Love opened up quite publicly about their mental health issues. And that’s an interesting trend that we’re seeing, you know, as they’re setting this example for other professional athletes to possibly come out and humanize the image of the star athlete because they are like everybody else, you know, some of them also are dealing with things that are not always obvious outwardly. Why do you think this is happening right now?

Drew

I think as more guys come out, you know, it’s like anything else, you get comfortable. Guys were uncomfortable talking about this. “It’s not manly!” Like “I’m a punk, if I talk about that.” “You don’t have kinks in your armour when you’re the man! I’m the Mamba!” You know, like, “I’m impenetrable, I’m Zeus!” You know, like these things that we build about guys. To show any form of weaknesses, that’s showing your underbelly a little bit. “We don’t have any weaknesses, we’re impenetrable, we’re strong”. And I think as more guys come out and explain their struggles in their life, other guys potentially will have the confidence and the capacity to come out and share some of the things that have happened to them, um, in, in terms of just mental health and not just mental health, but other things in their life that have had profound influences on, on the direction and shape of their career that, that show them as humans more than anything else. It’s more about confidence than anything else. If you’re, if you’re terrified that you’re going to be ridiculed by your peers who will stay quiet no matter what, no matter what we’re talking about, whether it’s mental health or whether it’s something in your life, monetary or doesn’t matter what the issue is in your life. You’re going to tend not to talk about the things that are going to create ridicule within your peer group. As the peer group becomes more open about things that are taking place inside themselves. I think others tend to be more confident in sharing their experience and it becomes even more prominent if it’s from an individual of high stature. When we’re talking about DeMar DeRozan, and Kevin love, these are all stars. You know, these guys are meant to be the most impenetrable people, the most indestructible people. These guys are the Creme de la creme and when they come out and say, “you know what? Sometimes I’m down. Sometimes I need therapy. Sometimes I need medication. Sometimes I have periods of time that I’ve been very difficult for me where I haven’t wanted to get out of bed and guess what? I’ve had depression.” When people come out and a confident enough to share those experiences and they are. People are very high levels of gives other people confidence to come out and do the same thing and and, and share their experience, whatever it may be. So the more it happens, the more I think you have a free flow of information and hopefully our society will, will begin to less demonize it. You know, guess what, you do go through tough times in life and how you respond to those times and knowing that those times will will always be a part of you, has shaped who you are and how you respond to things later in your life will dictate how you’re able to deal with those things in and having a peer group and a group of individuals around you that are supportive of view and understanding of what’s going on. It’s less likely to have a disastrous effect. Whether it, whether it be through suicide or homicide or whether it just be through the inability to perform at a high level anymore and through anxiety, you end up not being able to play anymore. Creating these mental states that you can’t play anymore. So I think it’s very important for the peer group to recognize that these states exist and everybody goes through it. There’s points in your life where people pass away and your family and people leave your life. Whether it be through divorce or whatever reason it is, that people leave your life and how you deal with those things. Become really important.

Adrian

Yeah, I mean you’re pointing towards the importance of accepting the messiness of life. I mean just normal human life.

Drew

Yeah. Not just the messiness of it, just that no matter who you are, you going to deal with stuff, you know, and so being able to accept that those things are going to be part of the story and how do you respond to those things. That’s important because it’ll shape who you are as a person.

Adrian

What was some of the best life advice you’ve received while working in the NBA? You know, something that transfers to everyday life.

Drew

Um, yeah, like the, like I touched on before with my dad there, the turning your hobby into your occupation is probably some of the best advice I ever got. Um, you know, start at the top, you know, if you believe that you’re good at something, then pursue it at the highest level, whether it be through, I’m trying to get an internship or starting your career at the highest place, but indulge yourself in whatever it is that you’re trying to accomplish at the highest level. And read as much about your occupation or whatever it is that you love, that know as much as possible. You never know when that information is going to come in handy at some point, whether it be, you know, sharing a live situation with somebody that draws them closer to you, that then makes them think, you know what? I really liked her. I’m going to go spend some more time within which turns into that athlete coming into the weight room and wanting to spend some time in the weight room like maybe it was a conversation that you had with someone, a life experience that you had with someone, a human interaction with someone that helps you generate a more positive attitude from that person towards you that makes that person want to be around you. Try to know as much as you possibly can about your occupation and and you’ll learn things from the strangest of places. You’ll gather information and stories, instances from the most unusual places and try and keep those experiences within you to just share with people in our hope that you can mold the people around you and help the people around you. If you just want to be a constant giver, then you’ll have success and I think for me in the NBA, the reason I survived so long was my relationship with the players. The players were surrounded by people that wanted to take from them, whether it was money or tickets or autographs or jerseys or shoes. A lot of people tried to take from them and my objective, the whole time that I was in the NBA was to be a giver and to give to them like, I want to help you take care of your body. I want to help you make more money. I want to help you get along the contract. I want to help you be a better player. I want to help you make more jump shots. I want to, I want to help you. There’s nothing that I want to take from you. I don’t want your money. I don’t want your autographs. I want to help you be better. Be a better person and be a better basketball player and I think that enabled me to stay around in the NBA longer than most we we’re able to because because I gave to them unconditionally and if you give to people, then it will give back to you, so that’s probably the best advice that I could give to people to try and turn your hobby into your, into your occupation, trying to learn as much as you can about your occupation and really live your life as much as you can in whatever that thing is that you love and then unconditionally give to people. Try to help people in as many ways as you can because the people that you see on the way up are the same people that you’re going to see on the way down and if you’re mean to people, they’ll be mean to you. If you give to people in times of need, those people were genuinely give back to you and it will help you stay afloat and it’ll help you cruise through life. You have a brilliant life. If my life ends tomorrow, I have no regrets. You know, I came from a very small town in Australia and got to play college basketball and spent 18 years in the NBA, worked with nine hall of famers. I have had a blessed life for sure and I think a big part of why my life was so blessed was because I tried to give to people. I try to be generous to people and that’s definitely paid dividends for me.

Adrian

It was a pleasure.

Drew

Thanks. I really appreciate you having me.

Adrian

Thanks for coming on.

#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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