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MaryCatherine McDonald: The Trauma Response Is Never W...
For centuries, we’ve been taught that being traumatized means we are somehow broken—and that trauma only happens to people who are too fragile or flawed to deal with hardship. Instead, says Dr. MaryCatherine McDonald, the trauma response proves our spirit cannot be broken. In this podcast, Tami Simon and “MC” (as her students call her) discuss her new book, Unbroken: The Trauma Response Is Never Wrong—And Other Things You Need to Know to Take Back Your Life, and how we might as a society begin to update our understanding of trauma and its healing.
Tune in for this inspiring conversation about the impact of trauma on the narratives that make up our identity; recalibrating the nervous system after trauma; memory and the hippocampus; relearning a sense of embodied safety; dealing with loss in our grief-phobic culture; trauma defined as “an unbearable emotional experience that lacks a relational home”; the unconscious nature of triggers, and how to raise awareness around them; the miracle of your adaptive brain and body; trust and community in the healing of trauma; reconciling life’s ultimate vulnerability; finding resilience and strength in these uncertain times; attunement, holding space, honesty, and other elements that provide a relational home; realizing an anchor in the “tiny little joys”; the healing power of… Tetris?; healthy regulation; and more.
Iain S. Thomas & Jasmine Wang: Can AI Answer Life...
Mention to someone the words “artificial intelligence,” and chances are you’ll get a very emotional response. For some, the thought of AI triggers fear, anger, and suspicion; for others, great excitement and anticipation.
In this podcast, Tami Simon speaks with technologist and philosopher Jasmine Wang along with poet Iain S. Thomas, coauthors of the new book What Makes Us Human? An Artificial Intelligence Answers Life’s Biggest Questions. Whatever your view on AI, we think you’ll find this conversation profoundly interesting and informative!
Listen now as Tami, Jasmine, and Iain discuss the artificial intelligence known as GPT-3; holding an attitude of “critical techno optimism”; finding kinship with digital beings; the question of sentience; the sometimes “hallucinatory” nature of generative AI; the three main aspects of deep learning technology—classification, recommendation, and generation; AI as a creativity compounder; bringing a moral lens to the development and deployment of AI; the central human themes of presence, love, and interconnectedness; acting with intent and living with meaning; and more.
Note: This episode originally aired on Sounds True One, where these special episodes of Insights at the Edge are available to watch live on video and with exclusive access to Q&As with our guests. Learn more at join.soundstrue.com.
Growing through the Peak of Your Pain
A doctor of Chinese medicine who was a famous bonesetter in China once said to me with a heavy accent, “Here, you [meaning Americans] don’t like to feel pain. You don’t like to suffer.” He said this as he wrung my neck as one would a chicken’s, snapping it back and forth in a way I had never experienced. I screamed as if he were breaking my bones.
For a month prior, I hadn’t been able to move my head to the left or right. My left arm was nearly immobile. I had just started a new job that probably should have ended the moment my body locked up. I went for acupuncture, then pain pills; used ice and hot water bottles. I went to medical doctors, and they X-rayed the area and gave me more pills and a brace to keep my head still—the kind used for whiplash. I later tried one of the best chiropractors in the city, and she gave me the number of a neurosurgeon, thinking I had a herniated disk and would need surgery. I did not seek out the surgeon and stayed in pain for weeks. Finally, a friend from my job gave me the number of her doctor, the famous bonesetter mentioned above. I called him at 10:00 pm that night. That’s how much pain I was in. To my surprise, he answered the phone. He said, “Come in. I wait for you.”
I said, “Now?”
“Yes!” he said. “You have pain, come now.”
Wow, I thought. Now that’s a healer. It didn’t matter that it was the middle of the night.
My partner at the time drove me across the Bay Bridge to San Francisco, and I met my friend from work at the healer’s office. She had come to translate from Mandarin to English. The place was tiny, with photos on the wall of city dignitaries and other famous people who were his clients.
“Hi.” The bonesetter smiled like a boy. “I’m Dr. Fu.”
I sat down in his small room and showed him my X-ray. He threw it on the floor without looking at it. He took the brace off my neck and threw that on the floor, too, right next to the X-ray. Then he twisted me into a pretzel. I howled, yelped, screamed, and hollered.
All of it. No wonder he had me come when no other patients were there. He told me to breathe, and I did my best. Suddenly, at the peak of the pain, I felt my muscles release in my neck, shoulders, and back. It was in fact a miracle to me. I had suffered so long.
I carried my brace and X-ray out in my hands. It was as if I had never been in pain or unable to move. The night sky filled with stars made me feel like I was on another planet. I was in bliss. When I returned to work, everyone was shocked. Was it a miracle, or was it the ability to withstand a greater amount pain to be free of the pain? I would have never imagined that I needed to go deeper into the pain, deeper into the darkness of it. All I had wanted was out.
We are averse to pain and suffering and understandably so, given our American sensibility. We have access to a large market of remedies, products, spiritual paths, and, yes, gateways to the freedom from suffering. I wonder how many times we have diverted our own freedom when we have discovered there is more pain, more trouble, more darkness ahead and we keep adding on remedies. What is the mindset, along with fear and terror, that causes us to avoid our suffering rather than go deeper into seeing what is there? Yes, I should have quit that job on the spot when the pain started, even though I had been there for only a few weeks. I didn’t know at the time, but the pain that was deep inside was because I wanted something different for my life than the job I had accepted. The pain was my impatience, and it was at the same time physical pain in real time. I didn’t wait to allow that“something different” to be revealed in the darkness.
Since all paths—religious, spiritual, or without name—intersect in the place of darkness, darkness is the place where the mind is forced to detach itself from whatever it has grabbed onto in life. And in that nothingness, in that dark place, we awaken.
What of darkness terrorizes us so that we run from it, rather than go deeper into it? How can we bear dark times, or, more explicitly, horrifying times, with the skill of an awakened one? Misery, struggle, and sorrow are not the sole intentions of this life. Yet we can respect our interrelationship with everything in the world, including the suffering in, around, and between us. Is there a way to live in unsettling times that we have forgotten?
Excerpted from Opening to Darkness: Eight Gateways for Being with the Absence of Light in Unsettling Times by Zenju Earthlyn Manuel.
Osho Zenju Earthlyn Manuel, PhD, is an author, poet, ordained Zen Buddhist priest, teacher, and artist, whose diverse background, education, and experience all provide a unique integral and cultural perspective within the space of religion and spirituality. She is the author of The Shamanic Bones of Zen, The Way of Tenderness, The Deepest Peace, and more. Manuel is a native of California and now resides in New Mexico. Learn more at zenju.org.
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6 Principles for Befriending Yourself: Part II
Enjoy this second installment in our new mini-series of Befriending Yourself, written by Jeff Foster and Matt Licata. Want to go deeper? Join their free webinar on Wednesday, June 5! Be sure to register here.
In our previous excerpt (which you can view here if you missed it!), we discussed the first two principles of befriending yourself:
- STOP TRYING TO BE HAPPY (happiness is not something you can “do”)
- TRUE MEDITATION IS NOT WHAT YOU THINK (it’s what you are)
And now, we move on to Principles 3 and 4…
3. “ONE MOMENT AT A TIME” (this one idea could save your life)
Don’t forget, befriending “what is” can only happen one moment at a time.
Actually, that’s all we ever have to face. A single present moment. Life is never truly bigger or more overwhelming than that. Present sounds, sensations, images, urges, impulses, fantasies, feelings, thoughts… we only ever have to process, digest or “deal with” a single instant of life.
Nothing more, nothing less.
Take some time to become curious about what you’re experiencing in a given moment of activation or trigger or stress, instead of shaming or blaming yourself (or others). Don’t abandon the moment when you need yourself more than ever.
Slow down, breathe deeply, open your senses, and acknowledge that you’ve become hooked, triggered, or thrown off center. You have to start by telling the truth of the moment, even if that’s humbling (which it often will be!). Start with, “I’m feeling overwhelmed,” or “I’m feeling really sad,” or “I feel completely lost and exhausted.” Know that this, too, is a holy moment, an invitation to meet yourself in a new way and to flood your experience with loving awareness. An invitation into that alchemical middle territory where the opposites (good and bad, right and wrong, sacred and profane) dance, where we discover the wisdom of immediate experience, and open to a new more creative response.
This “new, creative response” – choosing differently in a moment of overwhelm and activation – is what in neuroscience is referred to as neuroplasticity, that capacity of the brain to form new synapses, to encode new pathways, to rewire. Slowly, over time, as we familiarize ourselves more and more with this middle territory in between the extremes of denial and flooding, finding an “intimacy without fusion,” we begin to make new choices, fostering the miracle of neuroplasticity and the unlimited capacity of the human person to renew itself. This process, while having a scientific foundation, is in fact sacred, the expression of an outrageous sort of grace.
You don’t need to “be present” all day. Or even for a few minutes.
Don’t make “being present” into any kind of goal.
You only need to be present to a single moment.
Now.
It is essential to remember that staying with yourself for very short periods of time is what brings lasting transformation and change. We don’t need to “get in there” and resolve or root out our difficult experience, transcend, or purge it from our systems. This urge to “get to the root of it” (and quickly) is usually an enactment of earlier patterns of self-aggression and only reinforces in the nervous system that there is truly “something wrong.” By “very short periods of time,” we really do mean for a few seconds. For in that “few seconds” a revolution is born.
Over time, that “few seconds” very naturally expands, grows, and evolves on its own, organically as a byproduct of tending to ourselves in a new way, not from an urgent sense that something is wrong which must be fixed or healed very quickly. Trauma and other difficult experience can only unwind in an environment of love, of slow tending, of kindness. Yes, we can push ourselves a little, for a second or two more than might seem comfortable, for this will help us to build our tolerance and craft a scaffolding of love. But no more than that. Otherwise, we’ll just send ourselves outside our “windows of tolerance” and into overwhelm, retraumatization, all the while reinforcing the requirement that we meet future experience with fight-flight-freeze responses.
In other words, when you resist your experience, even very subtly by “trying” too hard to “be present” with it or even “accept” it, you’re still telling the body, there’s an enemy here, something I’m trying to get rid of. When you slow down and go baby steps, moment by moment, you’re telling the body, it’s okay, I’m safe, this is uncomfortable and intense but I’m present with it, I’m safe. Once this requisite safety and resourcing is built into the nervous system – which happens slowly, one second at a time – then we can more organically, effectively, and compassionately begin to open our hearts to our pain, touch it with deeper levels of warmth, presence, and love, eventually even discovering that our pain is a true friend, an ally on the journey. But we cannot skip stages! We cannot just move straight to acceptance, forgiveness, and love from a field that is unsafe. It is an act of kindness and self-compassion to remember this and to honor where we are. While the mind may tell us, “Oh, just one or two seconds, big deal, can’t you do more than that? That’s not enough, you’ll never heal, you’re going too slowly, you’re falling behind, you’ve failed yet again,” in the reality of the nervous system and the heart, one second is the fertile soil of revolution.
Healing is not a competition. Remember, there is never any goal. There is no urgency on the path of love.
In the field of trauma, “titration” refers to tending to our difficult thoughts, feelings, and raw bodily sensations for a few seconds at a time, then stopping and shifting into a moment of self-nourishment and self-care, and then returning later, when we are ready. Pushing ourselves just a little, nudging ourselves gently into the dark and scary places, but not so much that we fall into overwhelm and flooding or dissociation.
Baby steps are courageous in this work and the material of revolution.
Moment by moment, even our dark and scary experience is bearable.
We cannot tend to the next moment’s pain and intensity, for that is truly overwhelming! We cannot “bear” a future moment of grief or loneliness. Just as we cannot experience or surrender to tomorrow’s sunrise, we cannot tolerate tomorrow’s – or even the next moment’s – fear or sorrow or pain. But we can come to see that this moment’s experience is workable. We can come out of tomorrow’s sadness, the next moment’s depression, and next week’s heartbreak into what is truly here now, which may be a lot more workable and tolerable than you think, not as devastating as you imagine, and in reality only a part of you that longs for a moment of your loving awareness.
A great inner confidence and trust and even joy can build from this. The joy of being alive and knowing we can meet anything life throws at us with courage and breath, slowness and presence. The joy of knowing that the Now is our true home and refuge. The joy of knowing that there is no such thing as a truly “unbearable” moment.
4. SUFFERING IS OPTIONAL (but sometimes pain and grief are inevitable)
What is worse, our pain… or our attempts to escape it (thereby making the pain into an internal enemy, mistake, or error)?
What is worse, our loneliness, fear, or sorrow… or our longing to be free from them, to get rid of them, to purge them from our being?
What is more painful, our pain, or our resistance to it, our refusal to experience it, the ways in which we hurt ourselves (and others) trying to numb ourselves from it? Abandoning ourselves in a moment when we long for true care?
What is worse, our difficult feelings, or the conclusions we’ve come to about what these experiences mean, the voices in the head about what these feelings say about us as a person (“I’m weak, I’m broken, I’m flawed, I’m damaged, I’m not whole, there’s something wrong with me…”) – the ways in which we judge ourselves for being the way we are?
What is worse, the rain as it falls, or our refusal to get wet?
We have come to believe that very ordinary human emotions, thoughts, and urges are in and of themselves the cause of our suffering and struggle. But is it the mere appearance of anger, sadness, disappointment, jealousy, uncertainty, or confusion that is really the problem? Or is it the abandonment of ourselves in the moment when these experiences arise? The shaming and judging of our authentic experience? The habitual conclusions we’ve come to – from our families, cultures, even our spiritualities – about what these very ordinary human experiences mean about us, our value, our worth, our progress along the path?
To take some time in our lives – in our inquiry, meditation, journaling, pondering – and really explore – this is a great gift we can give ourselves (and others). Just what is the source of my struggle and suffering? Is it true that I must convert my sadness to joy, doubt to clarity, rage to happiness, disappointment to gratitude, etc. in order to know true freedom, or is it a more radical invitation I am being called to? To not take anyone’s word for it – including our own! – but to become an alchemist or archaeologist of our own inner world and see.
It can be incredibly liberating and life-giving to discover that the freedom we are longing for is not found from these difficult experiences, but actually in them, at their very core. We continue to be amazed, astonished, and surprised as we witness those we work with as they go into their experience and illuminate this territory – and can be awed at the transformation that many are discovering in this inquiry. As Rumi reminds us, “The cure for the pain is in the pain” – this is a very profound alchemical truth that the ultimate medicine we are seeking is found inside the very wound itself. No, we cannot understand or make sense of this with the mind. But the body knows. The heart knows.
We need not “get rid of,” cure, transform, shift, or “heal” our immediate painful experience in order to be fully alive, connected, and free. When we come to see that it is not the thoughts and feelings, but the process of self-abandonment (turning from ourselves in a moment of activation, stress, or overwhelm and falling into the extremes of denial, repression, dissociation, or engaging in habitual or addictive behavior to cover over our pain) that generates so much of our unnecessary suffering, a new world opens.
Remember, difficult feelings and thoughts are like quicksand. The more you struggle against them, the more they suck you in. As we all know, we can quickly fall down the “rabbit hole” of cascading and looping thoughts and feelings, linking them together and weaving a very convincing story of how we’ve failed, done it wrong, are unlovable, and how there is fundamentally something wrong with us. But slowing down, pausing, feeling our feet on the ground, breathing deeply from our lower belly, we open into a new world. Gently allowing the thoughts and feelings to be here, breathing into them, even if they are intense and uncomfortable. Yes, it may feel counterintuitive to do this, but with some practice, you may come to experience them within the context of a lot of space. Even if they do not “go away,” somehow they release you from their grip when you call off the war and allow them to come and go, as they will by their very nature. Strangely, they may actually be your path to freedom. Release through relaxation, not endlessly “working on yourself” and turning your life into one unending project of self-improvement. We can start to see how even our spiritual and therapy goals can be yet another expression or enactment of a deep and core belief in our unworthiness, where “more” work on ourselves, paradoxically, begins another way to abandon and avoid ourselves as we are.
Of course, a certain amount of pain – physical and emotional – is inevitable, as long as we are alive. But begin to investigate how much of your pain is actually unnecessary. How much of your pain is actually resistance to your pain, thinking about your pain, ruminating on your pain, judging your pain, and judging yourself for having pain. How much of your suffering is actually self-created? You only have to deal with a moment at a time.
We hope you enjoyed this second installment in our new mini-series of Befriending Yourself, written by Jeff Foster and Matt Licata. Want to go deeper? Join their free webinar on Wednesday, June 5! Be sure to register here.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
JOIN JEFF FOSTER AND MATT LICATA EACH MONTH IN THEIR NEW “BEFRIENDING YOURSELF” MEMBERSHIP SITE: www.befriendingyourself.com
MATT LICATA
Matt Licata, PhD is a psychotherapist, writer, and independent researcher based in Boulder, Colorado. Over the last 25 years, he has been active in the ongoing dialogue between depth psychological and meditative approaches to emotional healing and spiritual transformation.
His psychotherapy and spiritual counseling practice has specialized in working with yogis, meditators, and seekers of all sorts who have come to a dead-end in their spiritual practice or therapy and are longing for a more embodied, creative, imaginative way to participate in their experience, in relationship with others, and in the sacred world.
Matt’s spiritual path and exploration has been interfaith in nature and includes three decades of study and practice in Vajrayana Buddhism, Sufism, Daoism, and Contemplative Christianity. His psychological training and influences have been in the larger field of relational psychoanalysis, Jung’s analytical and alchemical work, and Hillman’s archetypal psychology, to name a few. He is the editor of A Healing Space blog and author of The Path is Everywhere: Uncovering the Jewels Hidden Within You (Wandering Yogi Press, 2017) and the forthcoming A Healing Space: Befriending Yourself in Difficult Times (Sounds True, 2020). His website is www.mattlicataphd.com
JEFF FOSTER
Jeff Foster studied Astrophysics at Cambridge University. In his mid-twenties, struggling with chronic shame and suicidal depression, he became addicted to the idea of “spiritual enlightenment” and began a near-obsessive spiritual quest for the ultimate truth of existence. The search came crashing down one day, unexpectedly, with the clear recognition of the non-dual nature of everything and the discovery of the “extraordinary in the ordinary.” Jeff fell in love with the simple present moment, and was given a deep understanding of the root illusion behind all human suffering and seeking.
For over a decade Jeff has been traveling the world offering meetings and retreats, inviting people into a place of radical self-acceptance and “Deep Rest.” He has published several books in over fifteen languages. His latest book is The Joy of True Meditation: Words of Encouragement for Tired Minds and Wild Hearts (New Sarum Press, 2019). His website is www.lifewithoutacentre.com
Sera Beak: Bringing Your Soul Home
Sera Beak is a scholar of comparative religions who has conferred with shamans, monks, and mystics the world over. She is the author of The Red Book: A Deliciously Unorthodox Approach to Igniting Your Divine Spark and Red Hot and Holy: A Heretic’s Love Story. With Sounds True, she has most recently published Redvelations: A Soul’s Journey to Becoming Human. In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Tami Simon speaks with Sera about the fragmentation of the soul and the journey that Sera undertook when she realized that pieces of her own soul had gone missing. They discuss the passage of core wounds between lifetimes and Sera’s experiences of remembering and reclaiming Sarah, the forgotten daughter of Jesus and Mary Magdalene, as a lost part of her own soul. Sera describes how she reckoned with her experiences—first wanting to not share them with anyone else, and then growing into the realization that to not do so would be to abandon a key part of her essential self. Finally, Tami and Sera talk about how to embody true, divine love and how this eternal love transmits through “the organic lineage” of all life. (61 minutes)
Ram Dass: Soul Land
Last week, the Sounds True community was saddened to hear of the passing of Ram Dass, one of the great lights of American spiritual inquiry. Born Richard Alpert, Ram Dass (meaning “servant of God”) rose to the forefront of psychedelic exploration and the movement toward Eastern philosophy in the 1960s and ’70s. He wrote the all-time classic Be Here Now in addition to many other published works, including Sounds True’s Walking Each Other Home. This special edition of Insights at the Edge presents an interview between Tami Simon and Ram Dass from 2012. During this conversation, Ram Dass and Tami discuss a deeper exploration of the self and the individual soul. They talk about experiencing the guru Maharaj-ji living on through the bodies and teachings of his students. Finally, Ram Dass considers the everyday experience of the atman—what he calls “the mega soul” beyond all others.(64 minutes)