Tami Simon: Hello, friends, my name’s Tami Simon, and I’m the founder of Sounds True. I want to welcome you to the Sounds True podcast, Insights at the Edge. I also want to take a moment to introduce you to Sounds True’s new membership community and digital platform. It’s called Sounds True One. Sounds True One features original, premium, transformational docuseries; community events; classes to start your day and relax in the evening; and special weekly live shows, including a video version of Insights at the Edge with an after-show community question-and-answer session with featured guests. I hope you’ll come join us, explore, come have fun with us, and connect with others. You can learn more at join.soundstrue.com.
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Hello friends and welcome. Welcome to this special edition of Insights at the Edge. I’m here with Dr. Gabor Maté. Gabor is someone whom I consider a friend and someone whose work I find incredibly illuminating, and I’m so pleased that he’s here. A year ago, we had a conversation together when his book, The Myth of Normal was published. And I felt, at the end of the conversation, that we weren’t quite complete. In fact, we’d only gotten part way through the many things that I wanted to talk about. And at that time I said to Gabor, “Would you be willing to come on? We’ll put some time in between, but could we have a second part to our conversation?” And he gracefully said yes at the time. And now here we are a year later. So much has happened in our worlds and in our lives, our respective worlds and our shared world, and I’m very grateful for Gabor for coming back a year later, fulfilling the promise that was spontaneously made live on the air.
Gabor is a physician, author, and speaker who is world-renowned for his expertise on the interconnection of trauma, stress, addiction, illness, and the journey of healing. And it’s the journey of healing, particularly, that I want to highlight and emphasize in our conversation that we’re going to have here. His books include In The Realm of Hungry Ghosts, on trauma and addiction; When the Body Says No, looking at stress and illness; and as I mentioned, The Myth of Normal, which explores trauma, illness, and healing in a toxic culture. It’s a book that immediately hit the New York Times bestseller list and a book that I have to say, look, if you haven’t read it, please just read it. It’s a kind of book, first of all for me, what 500-plus pages? And I went through each page marking things, absorbed in a page-turning, involved kind of way. I was so impressed by the book.
Also, I want to let you know that with Sounds True, Gabor has partnered with Dick Schwartz, who’s the founder of IFS, Internal Family Systems, and the approach to healing that Gabor now teaches called Compassionate Inquiry. Dick and Gabor explore together in an online series called Embracing All of You, how Compassionate Inquiry and IFS relate, look at things similarly and differently. They also both offer demos working with students. Gabor engages in the Compassionate Inquiry technique in the Embracing All of You series, so you can learn more about that at soundstrue.com. All right, Gabor, welcome.
Gabor Maté: Thank you, Tami. Thanks for the intro and for the welcome.
TS: Here’s what I’d like to start with. You are very forthcoming. You’re a super-real person. You share yourself in a very truthful way. And a lot of times, when people ask you about healing, about what works, about what works in your life, you’ll share, “Look, I’m a work in progress. I’m still figuring a lot of this stuff out. I’m still dealing with this, that, or that.” And I wanted to start there, because what it brings up for me is this question of a gap that I often feel in my own life between understanding and real embodiment, especially when it comes to the healing of trauma. And I want to understand how you deal with that gap, how you understand that gap.
GM: There’s much more to healing than just knowledge or awareness. If it was a matter of intellectual awareness, I would’ve been healed a long time ago in terms of what I was aware of or what I could tell you. But embodiment is the word, and trauma happens. The disconnections that trauma imposes happen in the body and in the nervous system and in the immune system and the gut and the nervous system. And for healing, all of that needs to be worked through. And we can get to states of awareness and knowledge long before we’re fully healed. In a certain sense, it’s a matter of catching up to ourselves.
Now, recently I was introduced to a song by Leonard Cohen, it’s called “Come Healing.” And there’s a wonderful line, it begins with, “Oh, gather up the brokenness, bring it to me now.” But later on in the poem, or I should say the song that has been said to that poem, he sings, “Oh, troubled-ness concealing an undivided love,” which means underneath the troubles that we experience on the surface, there is an undivided love, which we may not be always in touch with, but it’s what guides us. And then he says, “The heart beneath is teaching to the broken heart above,” so that we can be broken-hearted on one level, but there’s a whole, full heart that’s teaching that broken heart. And it takes a while for that heart beneath to get through to the broken heart above. And that’s the process of healing. And all I ever do is when people ask me is I signal where in that journey from heart to heart do I experience myself?
TS: From a somatic perspective, working with the body, what have you found is effective to connect with that underlying full heart that’s underneath our broken heart? Because I don’t hear you talk that often about body-based interventions that you use yourself. And I’m very curious about that.
GM: Well, actually, Compassionate Inquiry is very body-based, and we engage more with people’s state of being rather than the material that they’re carrying in their mind. And so to bring that—
TS: I’d love to understand that more.
GM: To bring that to myself personally, my mantra, one of my mantras is: wherever there’s tension, it requires attention. If we’re discussing a political topic, like what’s happening right now in the world, and if I’m noticing a lot of tension in my body, then before I continue that discussion, if I want that discussion to be one that connects us, I better pay attention to what’s going on in my body. If I experience tension inside, I better just notice that and put attention on it rather than just try and push my way through it.
I think it’s what Gendlin would’ve called a felt sense of actually just being present to what’s happening in the body and not to try and elide it, not to try to move through it or move past it or to ignore it. If I were to check in with myself right now, what am I experiencing? There’s a fair degree of calm, I’m in a safe space talking to a friend, and there’s some tension, perhaps anxiety. Will I live up to my billing? Will this hour that we spend together be worthwhile for the participants, and so on. So I would say I’m aware of both. I’m calm and there’s some bit of tension in the middle of my chest. That’s what I would report. And I need to pay attention to that.
TS: Just to go a little deeper into it, because I notice tension a lot in my body, a lot. And it’s one thing to pay attention to it, but you seem to indicate it’s not about focusing on letting it melt away or dissolve or using the force of gravity so that it sinks into the earth. What are you doing when you’re paying attention to tension?
GM: You’re noticing it, because that’s all it needs. That tension has nothing to do with the present moment. Let’s talk, say, about my anxiety that this conversation won’t be as useful as I’d like it to be. OK, so what? Do I have to be perfect all the time? Can I be forgiven if this is my third teaching session of the day? What if I’m not at my best? I’ll still be good enough, so what’s the tension about? It’s an old fear of mine—it’s got nothing to do with the present moment—of not being good enough. Now, that part of me that fears not being good enough is the child part. All that child ever needed was attention—didn’t need reassurance, just needed to be held. I don’t have to make it go away and tell myself mantras or spiritual techniques or anything to evaporate it. I just have to, “Oh, there it is. Well, here you are. I notice you. I see you. Thanks for showing up.” That’s all.
TS: OK, Gabor. But I’m going to dig in here and I’m going to be confessional at the same time, which is you’ve shared from your own, I hope this is good enough—lives up to the billing. And I remember when you and I went to lunch not that long ago, and I shared with you that I was nervous about being with you, and I’m nervous about having this conversation. And in our conversation, you identified that I was projecting something about my relationship with my father where I needed to earn his affection. And I’m very aware of that, so I’m aware of that coming into this conversation. I have the insight. I know that’s exactly what’s going on. I know that. And it hasn’t actually helped reduced my anxiety. I’m just aware of it.
GM: Well, I’ll tell you what I would say, arrogant as it sounds, you just haven’t had the right kind of therapy yet. I know you’ve been in therapy forever, we all have been, but it’s something that hasn’t been… Let me put it non-negatively, that you haven’t done the right kind of therapy. Let me say that there’s something you haven’t worked through yet. You’ve understood it intellectually, but you haven’t worked it through. So in the moment, is there tension there for you?
TS: It’s interesting, because I don’t want to make it only just about me and about you, and I want to make sure that our listeners are tracking with this. I noticed that in sharing it—
GM: Nice try.
TS: It’s deflection, I know. But I noticed in sharing it, there was a dramatic reduction in in tension, and that naming it really helped. I think that’s an important point.
GM: Well, I think that’s the key point actually, because what are you doing when you’re naming it? You’re just accepting it. You’re recognizing it, which is all you ever needed as a child, but you didn’t get it. You weren’t seen, so you give yourself that scene. If you want that tension to go away, you’re basically saying to a part of yourself, go away, leave me alone. In other words, you’re rejecting yourself, which was not necessarily ever your father’s or your mother’s intention, but it was your subjective experience of not being seen, of being demanded more of than you could provide. If you can see yourself and just name it like you just said, of course the tension will abate. Now, what if you were to do that on a regular basis? “Here you are again, you’re still afraid, aren’t you? Well, I got it.” I think noticing and being with it is the working through.
TS: Link this to the approach of Compassionate Inquiry and, for people who are hearing about Compassionate Inquiry for the first time, if you can, give them an introduction to how it works.
GM: Well, fundamentally, along with my friend Dick [Schwartz], although I formulate it differently, I do believe that all aspects of ourselves, whether we like them or not, whether we judge them or embrace them, that they’re there for a reason, that none of us are broken fundamentally. And my view is that if we’re curious about all aspects of ourselves and of our experience, or that of our clients, and if we’re curious in a compassionate way, then all will reveal itself, and we get to integrate it.
If I said to you, for example, I could ask you a question, why are you tense? Now, is that a question or is it a statement? It’s a statement. I notice you’re tense, and I don’t like it. I want you to be different. What if I said to you or to myself, “Huh, I notice this tension here, what do you think that might be about?” Well, that’s the question. The issue is, can we approach ourselves with a sense of compassionate inquiry?
And furthermore, my belief is that we all carry the answers within ourselves. We actually do. I just read and reviewed Peter Levine’s upcoming autobiography. It’s entitled An Autobiography of Trauma. And let me just actually quote something from it, if I may, because Peter’s one of my mentors, and he says it so beautifully. He says, “In working with thousands of adults and many children over a period of more than 45 years, I have found that all children and most adults, with their younger Self still intact within, have the same innate pull of curiosity and exploration. It is this very vibrant impulse that can be harnessed to support our healing.”
And so I believe, along with Peter, that as long as this curiosity about ourselves is alive, we can still grow. My approach is simply, there’s nothing wrong with you. Every aspect of you came along for a reason to support your survival at some point. It may no longer be there to support you. It may now get in your way. You stumble over it rather than being helped along by it. But let’s get curious about it. And then the answers will be within yourself. The truth is within yourself. We all carry the truth within ourselves. And with the right compassion, the right curiosity, that truth will reveal itself. Or to quote the great Jewish boy from Nazareth, Yeshua, who said, “That which you shall bring out of yourself will save you.” And so it’s just a matter of helping people bring out the truth of themselves.
TS: Gabor, in my confessional moment, you said in a way that stung a little bit, but I also appreciated it, especially the way you reframed it, that there’s something you haven’t worked through yet, which is why this is still an active thing, and that Compassionate Inquiry would help. And my provocative question to you would be, how come the Compassionate Inquiry method hasn’t, in your own life, delivered more of the results that you would like it to deliver? What do you think is that gap? Which comes back to the original question I asked, which is really what I’m trying to tell myself the truth about, about my own life and trying to understand deeply.
GM: Well, first of all, you’re putting words in my mouth.
TS: OK.
GM: When I said that you haven’t fully worked it through yet, I didn’t say anything about Compassionate Inquiry. All I said was you haven’t worked it fully through yet. There might be any number of ways of working it through. Internal Family Systems might be one of them.
TS: Sure.
GM: Peter Levine’s Somatic Experiencing might be another. EMDR might be another. Psychedelics might be another. I never said—
TS: Sure, fair enough.
GM: I do believe it would help you, but I never said it. And I certainly never said it in exclusion of other modalities. I don’t claim it to be the be-all and the end-all. That’s the first point. The second point is, in terms of myself, well, Tami, did you know me ten years ago personally?
TS: No, I didn’t.
GM: Are you in a position to tell me where I am now as compared to where I was ten years ago?
TS: No, I think it’s a beautiful point and
[CROSSTALK]
TS: No, I hear your point, but I think it helps me appreciate my own journey too, because where I am now is not where I was ten or 20 or 30 years ago, even though there’s so much more growth that I wish for myself. But it’s a deep way of being kind to ourselves to see it that way.
GM: Fair enough. If you ask me, am I complete yet? No, I’d say I’m not complete. However, I’ve often said this, pardon the repetition of a joke if it’s tiresome for you, but I’ve often said, well, in a month and six days, I’ll be 80 years old. And I say, thank God for growth and development, because I’m almost 80, and I wouldn’t want to be as young and stupid as I was when I was 78. It’s an ongoing process, and I’m not looking for perfection. I’m just looking for growth. In fact, it’s helped me a lot. I’ve come a long way. And the other thing that’s helped me is that I know you’re in a loving relationship with somebody, as am I, and my partner does not want to tolerate the gap between what I know and what I present and teach and then how I live my life at home.
I’m constantly being called upon to walk the talk. And so both my own personal journey, which involves that compassionate questioning and other modalities—including yoga and meditation and reading all kinds of great teachers and occasionally reaching out for help and also being called to act what I know—all that is contributing to myself being far more present, far more accepting of myself, far more capable of getting to that heart below the surface than I ever used to be. That’s where I’m at, so I’m very happy to report that.
TS: I just want to thank you, Gabor, because I think this is an important appreciation of growth that many of us can have in relationship to ourselves. I noticed it’s helping me soften, so thank you. Towards myself.
GM: Good.
TS: And I also just want to check in. You and I, we’re OK, right? We’re good?
GM: What makes you ask that?
TS: Because we had a fiery exchange.
GM: Is this what you call a fiery exchange? Oh, boy.
TS: Oh, boy.
GM: You haven’t seen me in fire exchanges, if you thought this is fire. I thought this was one of the most gentle discussions. I’m wondering what you were experiencing during this exchange. I wasn’t experiencing any fire. I experienced a disagreement, but so what?
TS: Very good. Very good. OK. You quote, A. H. Almaas, a friend of ours. And there’s several times that you quote him in The Myth of Normal that really got my attention, really helped deepen my understanding. And I’m going to pull out one of them here: “Lack of compassion is a suppression of hurt.” And I thought this was really an important light bulb for me that went on in times—even here, when I’m talking about not being compassionate towards my own development and how long it’s taking me to grow in certain kinds of ways and the frustration I feel underneath it, I’m just like, I’m just so hurt. I can’t believe I’m still going through all of this. Lack of compassion is a suppression of hurt. I wonder if you can explain that more for people.
GM: Well, Almaas, as you know, and as we have discussed, is one of my great teachers, mostly through his writings. But I’ll quote another teacher of mine who’s no longer alive, sadly. His name is Jaak Panksepp, P-A-N-K-S-E-P-P. He was an effective but also affective neuroscientist, which means he studied the neuroscience of emotions. And he points out that our brains are wired for a whole slew of emotions. We have brain circuitry for various emotions, which include grief and fear and lust and anger and caring and curiosity and playfulness and so on. We’re born with these systems in place in our brain. They need to develop, but they’re there and we share them with other mammals.
Care, which is, if you want to put it in different words, the compassion for the vulnerable, because that’s what helps a parent look after the helpless infant. It’s something that’s wired into us, so it’s unnatural for it not to be there. What happens? Caring is vulnerable. If I care for you, then if you suffer or die, or let’s just say suffer, that hurts me. For caring, there has to be vulnerability. But what if I was really hurt when I was small, so hurt I can’t stand being vulnerable? Then out of self-defense, my care system will shut off. Then the capacity to care and then be compassionate is, to that degree, limited. And in the case of psychopaths and sociopaths, it’s even totally obscured and disabled, all because of vulnerability.
And it’s very interesting, what I can tell you about people who have committed murder. If you go into prisons, I don’t know if you’ve done this or not, but I brought in a number of projects that go into prisons and work with lifers who’ve killed people. Once they work through their stuff, they become the sweetest, most gentle people in the world. Unbelievable, but I’ve seen people in death row like that, so have others. Anybody who’s worked with prisoners will tell you this.
Now, what does that mean? It means that they’re very shut down of caring, to the point where they could kill another human being. It came out of a deep hurt. And the more sensitive you are by nature, genetically, the more hurt you’re going to be. Some of the worst criminals are the most sensitive people in the world. And by sensitive, I don’t mean that they’re aware and care for the feelings of others. I mean that they were born so sensitive that they were hurt much more easily than others. They felt more. When they were hurt, they felt more. The more they felt, the more pain they felt, the more they had to shut down. The more they shut down, the less compassionate and the more cruel they became.
Those of them that can work through their pain and their trauma actually become very sweet and loving people. And I’ve seen this repeatedly and so have many others. That’s an example of what Almaas was talking about, is that the lack of compassion is a hidden hurt, is based on a hidden hurt.
TS: Gabor, do you believe, it sounds like you do, from what you’re saying, that we’re born with different levels of sensitivity, that some of us are genetically more sensitive than others? And what is the research behind that?
GM: Well, that’s the research, that some are just born more sensitive than others. And that means certain chemical messengers in their brains are differently configurated. And it means that these people, when they’re well-treated, they become creators and artists and leaders and shamans and whoever—joyful. But when they’re hurt, they’re traumatized all the more. And there’s, I think a Canadian-born, but now he’s working in California, a pediatrician called Tom Boyce, who wrote a book called The Orchid and the Dandelion. And one of them is the very sensitive kid. And the less sensitive kid, they can endure a whole range of experiences and not be so hurt by it. The more sensitive ones, they’re more hurt, so I think that’s what’s genetic.
When the people talk about genes for addiction or mental health issues, no. But they’re actually finding is genes for sensitivity, which means that the environment acting on those sensitive genes will create more pain. And all addictions and all mental health conditions, in my view, are ways of coping with pain. And so the more sensitive you are, the more prone you are to fall into one of those diagnostic categories, not because the genes dictate those categories, but because the sensitivity potentiates the pain that you’re trying to escape from. That’s my understanding.
TS: And do you think you’re one of those people who has hypersensitivity genetically?
GM: I don’t know. I see people… Well, I truly don’t know. I see people far more sensitive than I am, far more affected by what happens, far more overwrought when things go wrong. Now, maybe I have more defenses in a way. I certainly am sensitive. I do feel and see things that other people often don’t, but I wouldn’t put myself in the most sensitive category, not compared to some people that I know.
TS: I think the question that comes up for me is, I’ve heard a lot of people use “highly sensitive person” language to defend or explain why it’s so hard for them to make healing progress in their life or this or that. And I wonder how to not use that information or that possibility as a kind of excuse for all kinds of things.
GM: It should not be a limitation. It should actually be opening for more liberation and more creativity and more joy and more freedom, actually, properly understood. Neither are genetically determined temperament, if you like, nor should what’s happened to us ever be used as an excuse for just staying static and stuck in a certain pattern. The more sensitive you are, it also means when the environment is more supportive and you take on a task of healing, you’re also more capable of growth. It should on no account be an excuse.
TS: Let’s talk more about this full, complete, undisturbed, if you will, heart—the full heart underneath our broken heart. How do you experience that when you do experience it? Describe it to me what it’s like for you.
GM: I can’t, because so rarely, if ever, I’ve fully experienced it. It’s a knowledge that I have that’s below the level of conscious experience. Now, I don’t regard myself as a spiritual teacher of any kind. The spiritual teachers who are worth their salt have all directly experienced this. A. H. Almaas, Hameed Ali, Thomas Hübl, perhaps, Eckhart Tolle, Adyashanti, these people have experienced that in a conscious level. I can’t say that I have. All the more remarkable that I completely accept the truth of it. I don’t know. On some level, there must be some experience there, but I can’t give it to you in the kind of words that somebody with that direct experience could.
TS: OK, I appreciate that honesty and the interesting point that you can still state its facticity, if you will, without even knowing it wholly in your own experience. And I wonder how you can do that.
GM: I don’t know. It’s just what happens for me. Also, I read a lot, and I believe people. I don’t believe everybody, but I have a good sense who to believe and who to not. When Moses sees the burning bush that is not consumed by the flame, I’m seeing a truth that it logically doesn’t make any sense, but it sustains itself. And when the Buddha talks about his experience or Thomas talks about his experience or Eckhart does or Hameed Ali does—I’ve talked to Adyashanti—I believe them. And nothing in me mistrusts what they’re telling me when I read Hafiz or I read Rumi. I believe them. I sense they’re coming from a place of deep truth. Something in me senses that. Perhaps I’m influenceable that way, or more likely what they’re saying and how they’re saying it resonates with something inside me deeper than the intellect can comprehend.
TS: In the final section of The Myth of Normal, you devote yourself to looking at these paths to wholeness, approaches to healings. And you offer a description of six different A’s. We won’t go into all of them, but you talk about—people should read it in the book—authenticity, agency, anger, healthy anger, and then also acceptance. And then later in the book, you add in activism and advocacy, and how these are all parts of what it takes, if you will, to activate our principles of healing in our life. And in my language, I would say something like being true to who we really are, mobilizing our—this is my language—mobilizing our soul’s force, moving it out.
And I wanted to talk to you about the activism and advocacy component, because I think often, people wouldn’t necessarily associate that with personal healing. How does that connect? And I know you’ve been very active, very vocal, a full participant, global citizen in what’s been happening in the Mideast recently. And without going into the details of the Mideast conflict, what I want to look at instead is just this whole notion of activism and advocacy as an element of our healing.
GM: Yes. Well, those are not prescriptions, they’re guidelines. Some are called and some are not. My friend Nan Goldin, the photographer, great photographer whose photography has been exhibited in museums from the Met to the MoMA to the Tate in Britain and so on. But she also used to be an opiate addict. And at some point, she realized that the Sackler family, the family that funds so many artistic institutions or medical schools, also the same ones who profited off the marketing of OxyContin as a less addictive or non-addictive opiate, and tens and hundreds of thousands of people have died. And so far for Nan—there’s a wonderful movie about Nan Goldin that’s actually available. You can watch it online, I think it’s not Netflix, but Apple TV or you can look up the title of the movie. It’s something with “all the beauty” or something—it escapes me. But for Nan to say—she had sit-ins and lie-ins in the museums saying, take this name off. These people profited off the death of tens of thousands. She would not have been true to herself if she had not engaged in that activism. For her, the healing process involved activism following an inner call. It’s not a duty that somebody imposed on her, it’s an inner call that she obeyed.
It’s the same with my activism in the Middle East, like you say. We’re not going to go into my views on what’s just happening or what’s been happening for a long time, but I made the decision a long time ago that I feel so strongly about this issue that if I don’t express myself, I’d be doing violence to myself. And so that I would express myself regardless of whether my family liked it or not.
At some point, my views on this, actually in 1967 after that war, my views on that at the conflict got me kicked out of my father’s house. And I could understand why, my parents being Holocaust survivors as was I as an infant. But I made this decision that for me, the activism, the advocacy, the truth-telling publicly was more important than any of my personal relationships. And that’s a calling that I had, something that was calling me there. And not to have obeyed that call would’ve been to suppress myself. Activism and advocacy are not prescriptions for everybody, because not everybody’s called that way. If you’re not called that way, don’t do it. Don’t force yourself into anything, but if it’s there, I suggest you pay attention.
TS: It actually sounds like, if anything, the quote unquote “prescription.” And I realize you’re an MD that doesn’t give out prescriptions in this kind of conversation very often, but it has to do with not suppressing ourselves versus the form of expression that is true for us. It’s like, oh, the key is don’t suppress. Is that fair to say?
GM: Which goes back to authenticity. And there’s all kinds of reasons why people suppress themselves. And you and I may have discussed this in our conversation last year, is that there’s this tension that so many of us grow up with where we want to be attached to. We want to be connected with. We want to belong, held and loved. But we also just need to be ourselves. And sometimes, all too often, I think perhaps in your growing up and in I growing up and in a lot of people’s growing up, they found that if they were truly authentic and express themselves, the acceptance wasn’t there. Then there was this tragic conflict, what I call authenticity on the one hand, an attachment on the other.
Ideally, you and I can be true to ourselves, express what we believe and feel and still remain friends and supportive of one another. That’s the ideal. But what happens in a relationship, very often early in childhood, but even later on in life, where if I’m being myself, that is to say, if I’m expressing myself, you’re not going to love me and accept me. Now I have a decision to make. Do I want attachment still? As an infant, I had no choice in the matter. Or do I want authenticity? And I often say to people, being pain-free is not an option, because you can have the pain of suppressing yourself, or you can have the pain of not being accepted. If that’s what’s on the table, then you have to decide which kind of pain you would rather have. Some people would rather have the pain of suppressing themselves and still being accepted. Some people would rather have the pain of being themselves and not being accepted. Now, ideally, we’ll find situations in life where we can be both. That’s what we’re working towards. But temporarily, we’re going to go through some pain in one way or the other. The question is, which pain would you rather have? And nobody can tell you which one you should choose.
TS: You said this statement, that I wrote down and have referred to very often, in our last conversation about disillusionment: “Would you rather hold onto your illusions or go through disillusionment?” And I think this notion that there’s a way to possibly be in the world that’s pain-free—is it fair to say that that is an illusion?
GM: Well, I don’t know if the Buddha still experienced pain after his enlightenment, but until I get to that point, I can’t answer it except to say I can’t envision a world in which pain doesn’t exist. On a sheer physical level, pain is always going to exist. On the emotional level, I think it’s… Do you know anybody who’s at all emotionally alive? And I don’t care which side of the political spectrum they’re on, but if they’re emotionally alive, do you know anybody whose heart is not broken right now about what we’re witnessing and what we have been witnessing for a while now? Again, I’m not making the political statement. I’m saying that I don’t have any option of not feeling pain, so what?
TS: I’m bringing it forward because I also pulled this quote from The Myth of Normal: “Healing is about unlearning the notion that we need to protect ourselves from our own pain.” And I thought that’s such a powerful statement, because I can see how I do protect myself from pain. I try to all the time and it doesn’t really work, but it’s just like a natural instinct. Of course I’m going to protect myself from pain. I don’t want pain. Who does?
GM: Well, I forget who wrote The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, a Tibetan—
TS: Sogyal Rinpoche.
GM: —who, as we know, was one of these characters who could convey beautiful and deep and very inspiring teachings, but he didn’t exactly live the life that was consistent with those teachings. But nevertheless, what he spoke was absolutely beautiful. And he said at some point, don’t run away from your pain, because don’t be known that all our attempts to run away from the pain will only create more suffering and then we won’t know what life is to teach us. I’m paraphrasing him now. It’s a beautifully stated maxim that he expressed in that book. And he says, don’t run away from your pain. Protection from pain, he says, it doesn’t work.
TS: Now I want to go back for a moment and not lose track of these different non-prescriptive six A’s that could be calling. Because you spoke beautifully about authenticity. And then agency is something, especially as you’re talking about the heartbreak of our time, I think a lot of people, and then there’s also acceptance, I think there’s a lot of confusion here. Do I accept what’s going on? I feel helpless. I don’t feel like there’s anything I can do. This relates to my own health. Do I find some way to find an agentic position?
GM: Acceptance does not mean resignation or tolerating something. It means accepting and that’s how it is right now. Not resenting it, not railing against it but saying, this is how it is. Now, how would I like to approach reality? That’s what acceptance means. It’s not, my partner beats me and I’m going to accept that. That’s not acceptance, that’s tolerating or putting up with or resigning yourself. Acceptance says, my partner beats me, what would I want to do about it? If I had agency, what would I do? Acceptance just says, this is how it is. Now, how do I approach it?
And Eckhart says in one of his books, whether it’s the myth… The Myth of Normal. He only wishes here wrote that book. Sorry. I meant The Power of Now or—
TS: A New Earth.
GM: A New Earth. He says in one of the books that in the situations that bother you, there’s only three things you can do. You can leave it, you can try and change it, and, if you can’t do either, you might as well accept it. You and I live in Vancouver right now. We might as well accept that it’s going to rain here in the winter time. We may wish to travel away from it, but there’s no point railing against the rain.
And as Eckhart says in one of—he’s so funny sometimes. He says in one of his talks that there’s something in the mind that will even make the traffic jam wrong. It’ll make you superior to the traffic jam, because you’re resenting the traffic. Well, if you’re going to be in a traffic jam, you might as well accept that you’re in a traffic jam and not generate a lot of tension. That’s what acceptance means, it’s not tolerance or resignation.
TS: Can you just connect a link for people about when we suppress, whether it’s our authenticity or our healthy anger or whatever, our emotions, we might be suppressing, bottling down, how that leads to health challenges, disease? What’s the mechanism?
GM: Well, that’s very simple, and that is laid out in The Myth of Normal. It’s also the subject of my book When the Body Says No, which is very simple. Let’s say you take healthy anger. I said that we were wired for anger, which we are. Our brain is wired for anger, so is the wiring of a cat, wired for anger. You look at a mother cat and try and interfere with one of her kittens, you’re going to see mother anger. And so healthy anger is simply a boundary defense. It says, you’re in my space, get out. You’re hurting me. Get out. Get out. That’s healthy anger. It’s in the moment. It’s protective. It sets a boundary. That’s all it is.
Now, the role of healthy anger is to protect your boundaries. The role of emotions in general is to let in what is nurturing and healthy and welcome and loving and to keep out what isn’t. By and large, that’s the role of our emotional system. Now, if I asked you a trick question, it would be this. What’s the role of our immune system? Oh, it’s the same, to keep out what’s not healthy and dangerous and toxic and to allow in what is nurturing and supportive. That’s all the immune system does. In other words, the immune system and the emotional system have the same roles. Can you see that so far? Can you get that?
TS: I can, yeah.
GM: Now, here’s the news that is only news to those that are not aware of the science, which means most physicians, who are not aware of the science. They’re not taught this stuff. But from the scientific perspective, the immune system and the hormonal apparatus and the nervous system and the emotional system in our brains and bodies are not different systems. They’re one system. And the science that studies that is called psychoneuroimmunology. It’s not even vaguely controversial.
And so when you suppress emotions, guess what? You’re also interfering with the immune system. And when you look at all the people with autoimmune disease, multiple sclerosis, Crohn’s, colitis, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, what else could I mention? Rheumatoid arthritis, systemic lupus, scleroderma. If you look at their life patterns and personalities, they’re all people who suppress themselves, not because they wanted to, but because in childhood there was that tension I already talked about between authenticity and attachment. To stay attached, they had to suppress their authenticity. And they’ve been doing it all their lives because that’s what they’re programmed. And that emotional self-suppression then plays havoc with the nervous system because it’s the same system. It’s really that simple. People that repress healthy anger have diminished activity of their immune systems.
And there was a study that I mentioned in The Myth of Normal, which is, by the way, why women get more autoimmune disease, much more—70 to 80 percent of autoimmune disease happens to women. Because between the genders in this culture, which was the one that’s expected to suppress themselves, suppress their healthy anger, serve the needs of others, ignore their own? It’s by and large women. And that’s where they get all this autoimmune disease. And there was a study out of Massachusetts that looked at 2,000 women over a ten-year period. This is really interesting to me. Those women that were unhappy, married, and didn’t express their emotions in that ten-year period were four times as likely to die as those women who were also unhappy, married, but they did express their emotions. Self-suppression. We pay a heavy price, because the mind and the body can’t be separated. That’s the connection.
TS: Very clear. Thank you. One last thing I want to talk about, Gabor. This is something that I feel you and I have in common, to some degree at least, which is this, I would say, deep love of the truth, of truth telling. You already shared with us about your commitment to authenticity, even when it meant serious challenges within your family related to the Mideast conflict from many decades ago. And in my own life, Sounds True was called Sounds True for a reason. And when I finally made a little audio program to share my heart with people, I called it Being True.
And I was like, that’s the one thing I can stand by is that I want to be true. It’s so important to me, and I will sacrifice for that and I will speak up even when I may appear this, that, or the other way that I’m concerned about. I’m still going to do it, because I have to be true. I have to. I have to. I have to. And I know that in you from our interactions. What do you think that is? This is their touchstone, their thing. I just have to be a true person. That’s my thing.
GM: I can’t rightly answer that question for you. I think that drive is in all of us. Let me go back to quoting Peter Levine again, if I may. He’s talking about this capacity for truth seeking, and then he says, “Sadly, this primal, instinctual energy is all too often forced underground by oppressive over-socialization. We’re overwhelmed by toxic stress and trauma. Nevertheless, this powerful resource lives deep within all of us and lies in wait, ready to be awakened at the right moment in spite of this pervasive trauma.” He says, “I believe this creative curiosity and inner sense of vitality and exuberance was always present in my life. And what helped to take me from there to here.” He’s talking about himself.
Now, I think that if I were to try and wrap my head around this question that you just posed—we both suffered, but I don’t think we suffered so deeply that we had to completely give up ourselves. There was something in the environment that both made us aware of our suffering. And I think about the unfairness of the world, but there was enough support somewhere that allowed us to retain some connection to ourselves, which is where that search for truth emanates from. I think it’s a combination of both suffering and some degree of support that allowed that suffering not to overwhelm us. That would be my answer.
TS: And in your own life, though, just speaking for yourself for a moment, how would you answer why being true, not my word, but however you would describe that, is such a priority for you? I would say it’s one of your number-one orienting principles, at least in my conversations with you.
GM: I don’t like how it feels when I’m not that way. When I lie to my wife or manipulate or try and hide some truth or betray what I know to be true, I don’t like what it feels like. I don’t like it. I like it when I can be true and open and free. It’s a preference that’s there for me. It’s more than a preference. It’s imperative for me, which is not to say that I’m always true to it, but this is to say that it never disappears, and it keeps calling me back when I stray from it.
TS: All right. I’m going to sneak in a final question. I heard that you took two weeks off from digital engagement as part of a personal reset. What was that time like for you? How did it affect you? What’d you do?
GM: Well, it came at a time of high stress. I’d just been through a difficult year for me. And I’m not going to go into the details, why. When I say difficult, I mean emotionally challenging. And then I had this long intensive, more intensive than I would’ve chosen, speaking and healing trip in Europe. And I came back really bagged. Then I was talking to a friend of mine, you might know her or of her, Eve Ensler, or the former Eve Ensler, V, the playwright who wrote The Vagina Monologues and a wonderful author—and talk about activists. And she said, “You should turn everything off for two weeks.” And so I did. And I turned off everything digital, didn’t check my emails or messages or the ranking of my books on Amazon or who said what about who. And I actually devoted time to meditation and yoga every day and just taking care of my body, being with my wife.
And it was quite an education about how I sprinkle myself all over the place, unnecessarily, habitually spending time with things that don’t make any difference at all. And so it was a real healing time for me. And it hasn’t left me. And as long as I keep the practice up, to a certain degree. I found out what any spiritual teacher worth their salt says almost right off the bat, that you’re never going to find satisfaction and fulfillment from the outside. And as Almaas says, that drive for the outside, to get satisfaction from the outside, is actually a wound to the self.
If I have to check several times a day how my books to do on Amazon, which is quite irrelevant actually, because doing what they’re doing, checking doesn’t make any difference. But if I need that external validation, then it’s an assault to the self as Almaas points out. Because I’m saying to myself, I’m not enough without that external buttress. Now, that’s a wound to the self, and we all wound ourselves that way. Our society inveigles and seduces us into betraying ourselves that way, to think that we’re going to get it from the outside. Well, in those two weeks, I found out just how much liberation there is in not looking to the outside. And that’s what all the spiritual pathways are, I think, here to teach us anyway.
TS: Gabor, I want to take a moment to thank you and to celebrate you. Join me if you will, if it’s authentic for you in this moment, celebrate our connection. Sounds True celebrates the work you’re doing with us, the program we made with you and Dick, and the other contributions you make on our platform. And I just want to say the fact that you’re alive doing what you’re doing, it inspires me and so many people, so thank you. Thank you, friend.
GM: Thank you so much. And thank you, my friend. Thank you so much. It’s a pleasure.
TS: And if you’d like to watch Insights at the Edge on video and participate in the after-show Q&A session with our guests, come join us on Sounds True One, a new membership community featuring award-winning original shows, live classes, community learning, guided meditations, and more with the leading wisdom teachers of our time. Use promo code PODCAST to get your first month free. You can learn more at join.soundstrue.com. Sounds True: waking up the world.
