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Tami Simon: Hello friends, my name’s Tami Simon and I’m the founder of Sounds True, and 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.
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In this episode of Insights at the Edge. My guest is Sah D’Simone. Let me tell you a little bit about Sah. He’s a meditation teacher, a mystic and an artist, an award-winning filmmaker, a bestselling author and speaker, and a spiritual guide. Sah leads a heart-based healing movement in which joy and authenticity illuminate the path to liberation.
When it comes to being a spiritual guide, I have to say, Sah D’Simone is the only person I’ve ever seen transmit a teaching while wearing high heels and dancing backwards. He’s a tremendously innovative teacher who breaks through whatever needs to be broken through to directly reach our hearts.
He’s the author with Sounds True of the book Spiritually Sassy and the host of the very popular Spiritually Sassy podcast. I call Sah a mega-boss, and he’s also the author of the new book Spiritually, We: The Art of Relating and Connecting from the Heart. Sah, welcome.
Sah D’Simone: Oh, thank you, Tami. What a beautiful introduction. Thank you so much for having me, and you are the mega-boss, darling.
TS: All right, here we go. Your new book is a type of love explosion, and I want to know what has happened in you, in your life, in your heart over the past few years that became encoded in this book, which anybody who picks it up will feel. What was your inner journey?
SD’S: Yeah, thank you. That’s such a great question. Well, many things happened in the last few years. I got engaged and then the engagement was broken off within a month after, was living outside the country and had to rush back here. And I think the biggest one was my mother died and it was really heartbreaking, and it’s still devastating and I’ve been collecting myself together in this last year. Three months after she died, Lama Zopa died, who was my root guru. And then three months after that, my boyfriend who had broken off the engagement the prior year then decided to officially break up.
And so the combination of all this loss really informs the depth of the book. I think grief is a really good teacher. I think it’s the greatest teacher of all. I never fully understood what it meant to stay heartbroken and still keep living. I think grief has been my greatest T-shirt and has really taught me paradox. I think Mark Nepo says something that I find really beautiful. He says, “Everything is beautiful and I’m so sad.”
And that’s kind of like the background of my life now and just open to living in a state of paradox there. Here I am with Tami Simon, here I am launching a new book. Everything is beautiful and I’m so sad. I don’t have my mom to call. Yesterday I was with my supervisor at the hospital for my chaplaincy training, caring for the sick and dying, and she was reading to me my final evaluation and it was such a beautiful things that she shared with like, “Hey, you really have the tools to be with the sick and dying. You can really offer support to them.” And the only person I wanted to call in that moment was my mom. And yeah, it’s hard. It’s really hard.
So to say the very least, grief is how the book is informed. Grief is what has supported the depth and the wisdom, and the playfulness, because when you get too mopey with the grief, it also becomes boring. So we need a little bit of humor, even to how ridiculous it is that three grown kids, all they want, grown adults, me, my brother, and my sister, all they want is their mama. We all just want our mama back and she’s not coming back. So every day that struggle, every day that wave passes through.
So, when we think about friendship and friends who will go out of their way, fly across the country or fly across the world to be with you at your mother’s funeral, I remember I called my friend Gabriel an hour or two hours after my mother died and I said, “My mom died. Can you be here tomorrow?” And I didn’t say be here at a cafe in Los Angeles. I said, “Be here in Brazil,” he lives in Miami. He says, “Yeah, I’ll be there.” He literally stopped everything he was doing and got on a plane and came to be with me at the funeral. So what the call forth in the book is to invite people to cultivate friendships like this, the ones that can hold you and carry you.
A little while ago I’ve been having psychosomatic symptoms because of the grief and some of them were so intense that I had to go get an MRI and a CT scan and I asked a friend to come with me. We need to have friends who will be there with you when you’re getting an MRI and a CT scan or you’re going to chemotherapy. So the book is a call to that. It’s not only let’s end the loneliness epidemic, but let’s really end the surface level friendship that’s so many people live with. I want to share the statistics that I put in the book, but just here’s a little intro to why the book is new. Trauma changes you, that’s the most awful thing to say, but pain and grief really has changed me completely.
TS: And I want to talk more about that and we’ll get to liberatory friendships, as you call them, in a few moments. But first, I want to know in feeling heartbreak and grief, and you’ve given some examples, sharing from your own life, your actual story in your own life over the past couple of years, that I think lots of us can relate to at different times. In our life in experiencing that very physicality of heartbreak, you teach something that you call The Sah Method. Right? Somatic Activated Healing.
SD’S: Activated healing.
TS: How did you do that with yourself? How do you use Somatic Activated Healing with heartbreak?
SD’S: Well, I’ll tell you a little bit of the back story. I had been meditating, chanting mantras, eating vegan, doing all the holy things, but I did not realize that I was doing all the holy things that were being really helpful band aids. But what they were really doing, they were distracting me from feeling. Whenever a big feeling would come up in my body, I would chant the mantra, [foreign language 00:08:48]. A very holy tantric Buddhist mantra that you have to have an initiation for and all the things.
But I was doing all these things. A big feeling would come up and I would immediately go and visualize my guru or visualize the Buddha, or visualize the best case scenario for my life, or go on a run, or I would eat a bowl of green vegetables. I would do all the right things you one would think, until one day, a teaching from I was going to say Tenzin Palmo but it’s not, someone who is similar to Tenzin, Pema Chödrön, about letting go of the stories and coming into the feelings.
That teaching, I had struggled with, it’s still around but not as intense. And I’m giving a sort of a bigger answer because I think people could understand the context of what I’m saying. I have always struggled with shame. And the shame narrative for me was, “You’re a bad person, you shouldn’t be alive.” It would always catapult into suicidal ideation.
And I had done all this work just to have a level of sanity. So all the meditating, all the chanting, all the running, all the things, until this morning I was living in Bushwick, Brooklyn and I just remember saying, “Okay.” I had read something that Pema wrote, I forgot what book it was, or if it was a talk that I was watching maybe. And I just remember sitting down, noticing the stories playing in my mind, “Oh, you are bad person. You shouldn’t be here.” And instead of doing the thing that I would normally do, chant a mantra to offset the impact of it, I said, “All right, stories, I hear you. Thank you for showing up. Let me go to the body.”
And I went to my body with my mind’s eye, I brought my attention to a place in my stomach where the shame felt like a pulsing ball. It felt like a hot potato that was stuck inside my belly. And I brought my attention there and a miracle happened. I started to notice this ball, it was kind of dissolving and moving around through my body, and then all the way up and sort of came through in the back of my head. And I had never experienced a passing sensation where I was actually witnessing the changing nature of a passing sensation, which is a feeling and emotion. I think I intellectualize all this until that very moment.
And then I remember going out on the streets, I live deep in Bushwick, so you got to walk through some really hard sites in the morning to get to the subway. It was a 20-minute walk. But I remember just smiling at everybody being like, “Oh my God, I’m alive,” because a weight had lifted. Something had lifted, left my body. It was almost like I lost maybe 10 pounds in a meditation. And that was what started the process of the Somatic Activated Healing to become what it is today.
And then I was dancing in my living room a little bit here and there, but I would always use a little pot, a little wine, all the sort of, what do we call it? The things that we’ve normalized doing, like smoking pot and drinking wine on the daily, we’ve normalized that. So I will do a little bit of that and I would dance.
Okay, fast-forward, a few years later, 2014 I took refuge, so it’s going to be 10 years to the day in November. Now we are in 2015, I am in Bali at hut in the jungle going to an ecstatic dance party and everyone is sober. So that experience of the sitting down to be with the feelings in Bushwick in New York, connected to this ecstatic dance in Bali. These two things together were like, “Oh my God, I’m so alive. I have a whole nother way of understanding myself and my body and what freedom really is.”
And then one thing led to another, I started to post these videos online and then Deepak Chopra’s people found my videos. And then that’s when I was brought in to lead the Somatic Activated Healing practice next to Deepak. And then through the pandemic, I was teaching it regularly on Instagram Live.
But essentially, Tami, what the work is, is for us to realize that our stories only have power because of the feelings attached to them. And healing, in my view, it really is about disentangling emotions from the stories so the stories that haunt us no longer have weight and no longer dictate the quality of our minds and our words and our actions. And the only way to do that is by feeling the feelings. And where does the feeling happen? In the body.
So the Somatic Activated Healing method is, in collaboration with a friend, we channeled these postures that each of them have an emotion connected to, a symbol, a sigil, and we go through sort of an emotional ladder from shame all the way to enlightenment. And each move, with the partnership with the breath, creates an energetic flow that enters the body and goes to the areas in your body where tension is stored. So with the intention of these moves are the sigils for the release of these emotions, stuff is moving, stuff is working like that.
TS: Tremendous body-based release. The release part is the part that really impresses me, that you felt like a weight was lifted from you. Now, you mentioned feeling this sense of freedom and this notion of friendships that can be liberatory, and going all the way up to enlightenment. And in your book Spiritually, We, you actually say, “Let me tell you what I mean by liberation.” And I was like, “Oh. So, bold man. All right, great.” Freedom from our conditioning, freedom from the delusion that we’re separate, and freedom to rest in the present moment with a fresh mind and an open heart.
So first of all, thank you for offering these three inquiries that we can look into. And as I read that, I thought freedom from the delusion that we’re separate. I think people intuitively get that at different levels, of course, of the depth of knowing that. But I think people get that and that’s why they’re drawn to a book like Spiritually, We. People, I think, resonate and intuitively get that. Freedom to rest in the present with a fresh mind and open heart. I even think people can do that for moments and then they go back, which gets me to the one I want to talk about, freedom from our conditioning. I want to know what you’ve discovered about this and how more of us can be more free from our conditioning. Conditioning, things we inherited from many generations, from our early childhood, what have you learned about this?
SD’S: So the conditioning part, we can look at esoteric data, which is karma, or we can look at scientific data, which is transgenerational trauma. And they both, if you lean more towards the esoteric, regardless of which side you lean into, we need to first realize or understand that we don’t show up earth side without a backlog of stuff.
I think all of us want to believe that we come in with these very innocent minds and bodies, but a lot of us come with a very compromised biology and compromise mind. And therefore, the soul, the spirit the has a lot of unraveling to do, depending the kind of conditioning that you have.
And when you really start to observe your own lineage, you realize that we all have the abuser and the abused in our lineage. We all have the person who was the Mother Teresa kind and the person who was this really awful dictator who was hurting people regularly. We all have that.
The conditioning in my lineage has been a deep-seated one of shame. It’s something that my mother experienced, something my grandmother experienced. And what I can trace back to, and this is only my realization, right, that my grandma is not here anymore, my mother is not here anymore, so I can’t fact-check what I believe. But having talked to my mother about it at length and one of her siblings as well, I believe that this might be the culprit of it.
My grandmother had a son who was dark-skinned that she had before she married my grandfather. And when she married my grandfather, he didn’t like that he was dark skinned, he was brown, he was a brown man. So when they married and they had other kids and they would have a Sunday brunch at the house, my grandfather would ask grandmother to take her son, Orlando, into another room, into a closet, family portraits and family gatherings. He wasn’t allowed to participate.
And fast-forward, he died when he was 27 of a skin disease. The psychosomatic implications of being told verbally and non-verbally that you’re bad because you look a certain way. And then my grandmother, when my mother was 11, takes her own life and my grandmother taking her own life, what everybody in the family thinks it is, is it has to do with the guilt that she felt, that she couldn’t stand up to her husband to say, “Enough with this. This is my son, I love him unconditionally, and this biases is your work to do.” She couldn’t say no. And I think a lot of people in our lineage haven’t had the chance to stand up, roll their shoulders back and say, “Enough with the pain, enough with the struggle, with the harm.”
So, my mom then grows up with this already compromised biology and already compromised psyche. And then when my mother was pregnant with me, she had a very, very extremely hard time with my father’s sisters who were all bullying her in a variety of different ways. So, when we look back at what conditioning could mean, I’m pointing towards this. So the empirical, scientific, I can trace all this back.
Now, we then open up to the esoteric data, and then we can look at past lives, what the version that predates this version of Sah, the version that predates this version of Tami. We can look at that and have some information to what our conditioning is. And it may be helpful for some people if they’re more into esoteric explanation, do a past life regression, there’s so many tools for it these days.
To me, I don’t really spend a lot of time entertaining that, but I find that I have enough data of pain from my family lineage that it’s enough to inform where my path to freedom is. So, if I can feel that sense of guilt and shame that predates me, that doesn’t have context in this reality, that the context is mothers and grandmothers and back and back, if when that shame narrative strikes, I can do my very best effort to drop the stories and engage with the feeling in the body, slowly, slowly, every time we meet a feeling in the body, we start to remove the blanket of guilt from our entire biography. We start to remove the blanket of shame from our entire biography.
I think a lot of people think that they have to heal this trauma and that trauma and this pain and that thing. And they have a list of things they bring to their therapist, “There’s 11 things I want to heal in this lifetime,” or, “11 things that happened to me in my childhood that I want to heal.” When you really look underneath the surface, the stories are different, but the felt sense of it is very much the same. It’s anger, it’s fear, it’s shame, it’s guilt, it’s regret, it’s rejection.
So, instead of focusing on trying to heal each specific narrative, when you bring that tension into the body and feel the feelings associated with those narratives, you will be doing, we say killing two birds with own stone, but I’m saying feeding two birds with one seed. This is the realm that my work lies these days. It’s very much less about changing your mind, but really changing how you feel. And when you change how you feel, the mind immediately relaxes.
I think in the past, I was very much into the space of self-empowerment of really talking myself into another state of being. And that’s helpful, but there was always this resurfacing feeling. And through silence practices, through retreat time, I have been able to arrive at a place where I’m not afraid of how big a feeling is. And then through that, the realization comes that feelings can’t hurt us, what hurts us, how we relate to them. So I don’t know if I answered your question, but that’s what came through.
TS: And what’s so powerful for me is that in Spiritually, We, you make this connection between if we’re feeling something like shame, that’s what’s keeping us actually from feeling bonded and heartfully related and lovingly generous with all of the people in our life. And there are seven chapters in the book and you devote a whole chapter to shame, which I thought was so powerful.
Here’s just one other point I want to make, Sah, and then I want to turn it over to you, which is you introduced this term that we can discover our unstruck goodness. Unstruck. And I thought, “Where did Sah get that word, unstruck? I’ve never heard that.” I’ve heard people talk about our pristine nature, our unalloyed goodness, but unstruck goodness.
SD’S: Unstruck goodness, and it kind of ties perfectly well with the shame chapter, why did I devote an entire chapter to it, it’s because I believe that our greatest wound, we all have all the reasons why we believe we are messed up and we need support and whatever, which is true from one perspective. But I believe that the more we examine and we get more and more and more and more subtle, our biggest culprit is a sense that we are bad.
So the entire work becomes around, “What can I do to be a good person? Who can I be around? What can I do to be reminded that I’m good?” So all of our addictions, all of our tendencies, to me, stem from that sense that this background noise, that there’s something inherently flawed with me and I’m the only one that’s experiencing it.
So I believe our greatest core wound is that we believe we are inherently bad. And the polar opposite of that is this unstruck, benevolent good nature, that is there’s no way of breaking it, there’s no way of tainting it, there’s no way of poisoning. It exists. It’s benevolent, it is always there, always free, always peaceful. And the work began, it’s very much around, “How could I have people, place and things in my life that can help me remember that I have this benevolent nature inside of me, this unstruck nature inside of me?” And this is the friendship part.
And this is where Dr. Lisa Miller in the book speaks about this. She says, “We have to see people in the world as souls, souls on earth.” And when you think about a soul, you immediately think about something that’s benevolent and peaceful and beautiful perhaps. And she says, “When we start to train our capacity to enter a room and see people as souls on earth, we’re then able to interact with them without this superiority or inferiority complex where, ‘What can you give me and what can I give you?’ And this sizing people up.”
We are entering the room and just with a radical friendliness that everyone here is worthy of love and care because they are souls on earth. And that tackles this inherent, acute shame that I write about in the book. And the unstruck goodness is a way, if you don’t know your own, and I think for me it was like this too, and I want to emphasize on this. If you can’t touch your own unstruck, benevolent good nature, that part of you that’s never broken, never poisoned, even though you may have lived a very unskillful life, there’s a part of you that is untouched by the unskillfulness.
I think entering rooms and truly trying to see. And there’s something else in the book about common humanity. This is a common teaching in Buddhism about, “Just like me, they suffer. And just like me, they want to be happy.” And you can start there to equalize the playing field, that everyone here, no matter how they look, they suffer and they want to be happy. Two things we want, to not experience suffering and to be happy.
And then you can go a layer deeper and say, wow, everyone here has this unstruck benevolent nature. And then what happens is you start to realize your own benevolent nature, too. So if you are like me and it’s hard for you to touch your own benevolence, to touch your own point, that space inside of you where you connect to this unwavering, loving nature, then open the field and look outside and that will shower you back. Does that make sense?
TS: Yeah. And I know that you’re a kinesthetic person, kinesthetic learner and teacher, and I share that with you, Sah. And one of the things I’m curious about is right here in this moment, if you were to share with me in feeling language, what it feels like to be connected with that unstruck goodness right here in this moment, what does it feel like?
SD’S: Right now, I notice a lot of things. I notice that my breath is short, that my mouth is parched, that my contacts are a little dry, and I am wearing this really tight shirt, so I’m a little restricted.
TS: It looks good.
SD’S: Thank you. It’s for after the show.
TS: Looks good.
SD’S: Thank you.
TS: It’s worth it. It’s worth it.
SD’S: Exactly. And I’m noticing all these layers, right? And then coming into this unstruck goodness, there’s a sense of peace. There’s a sense of, “I might not say or do the right thing and a human playing, but I’m okay.” There’s a sense that, “I’m okay, this is what it is.” It’s a sense of okayness, it’s a sense of, “It’s all right, it’s all right.” Which is something that I think all of us really struggle with. We’re we’re master people pleasers, and that goes against our unstruck benevolence that says, “You’re okay as you are,” but you still got to do a little bit of work to understand your benevolent nature and to embody it more. And not to keep it an intellectual level, but touching it.
And the quickest way to touch that for me is by bringing the attention into the breath, tracing the breath in and out of the body a couple of times, and then allowing it to settle into a deeper plane. And then it’s that place of silence where I can watch the body doing all the things, I can watch myself speaking. And I’m like, “Okay, cool. It’s all right. You are good. I’m taking care of.” It’s a sense of that too, Tami. It’s a sense that I’m taking care of. It’s a sense that there are unseen forces working in my favor.
I think I was talking to my therapist last week and she says, I was contemplating, I was like, “Is it okay if I live out on a farm for a year and I’m not doing this Bodhisattva thing where I’m working at a hospital a couple of days at a week, working at a homeless shelter once a week, doing these podcasts, having a membership, going here, going there, orphan centers, all this Bodhisattva activity very wholly kind of help sentient beings get free?” And she said to me, “Look, there are meditators right now that you’ll never meet praying for your wellbeing in a cave in the Himalayas.” And I think when we touch into that benevolent, unstruck goodness, we’re opening ourselves up to that field where blessings can exist, where blessings are exchanged.
TS: Very beautiful. Now, you mentioned this friend of yours who hopped on a plane when you called and said, “I need you,” and flew to Brazil to be with you after your mother’s death. And I’m curious, when you think of this notion of liberatory friendships versus other kinds of friendships, in Spiritually, We, you also described them as sacred friendships, what are the qualities of those kinds of connections?
SD’S: Great question. I think before I talk about the qualities, I want to kind of give a little context into liberatory and Spiritually, We, and also in my own personal revelation work. I have figured out that I can have a moment of revelation by myself in my house where I’m like, “Oh, I forgive myself for the harm I’ve caused myself, and I forgive myself for the harm I’ve caused other people. Wow, the weight has lifted. I see myself in a mirror. I like who I see. I feel light,” but I’m still my apartment, right? I’m still in my apartment.
Now, walk down the street or run into a neighbor and something happens, am I still able to offer kindness and peace and forgiveness to a stranger or to a friend? And in Spiritually, We, what I emphasize is that this liberatory equation that the Spiritually, We equation requires you to do 50% of the work, which is between you, your body, your mind, your story, your heart. And then 50% of the work is between you, your strangers, you and your community, you and your mother, you and your siblings, you and everyone that you interact with.
And insights are just intellectualized if you only do 50% of the work. But the insight becomes embodied, becomes like you are somatically attuned to a new way of being when you test your material. So liberatory friends are people who are participating in this dance where they are showing you your mind or they’re showing you your mind or you’re showing them their mind. And you guys are also gardening each other’s garden. You are watering each other’s joyful qualities, loving qualities, compassionate qualities, wise qualities, and then that supports you to then bring this liberatory, radical friendliness to everyone you meet.
And we stop living by this idea that if we protect our peace long enough, we’re going to become peaceful. And I think there’s a lot of talk in this psychospiritual space of social media about protect your peace at all costs and avoid discomfort, and avoid triggering people and cancel these people, and mom is toxic and dad’s narcissistic. And we have a lot of language and labeling to address people and experiences today, which is wonderful. We can pathologize, we can label all great things. Language helps to shape reality and helps us understand reality. Wonderful.
However, what I’ve seen is a lot of this languaging doesn’t offer room for paradox. A lot of this language doesn’t offer room for this and that. A lot of this language doesn’t offer room for us to test our material, to engage with each other, to say, “Wow, I think you’re a selfish MF. Okay, cool. What is it about my inner world that believes you to be that sole label?”
And when we shift our gaze and we understand that no one can put a feeling inside of us, and the way we perceive reality is how we have lived our lives up until that point, then we’re actually able to take responsibility for, “What am I caring? What am I bringing to every moment, to every interaction?” And then you have this balance of, “50%, I’m doing the work on my own, 50%, I’m doing the work with other people.”
And this is kind of common knowledge, but we don’t start self harming by ourselves. We don’t wake up one day and start to overdrink, overeat, overmasturbate, watch TV too much, social media too much, do all the too much things that we do to soothe ourselves. We don’t start doing them by ourselves. All of our pain comes from relationships, comes from relating with other people. And it’s common knowledge in the psychosomatic spiritual space of healing that what’s broken relationally has to be healed in community.
So this is a big emphasis of the liberatory friendships, but also radical friendliness, and the kind of the background scent of Spiritually, We, which is that, it’s together that we can arrive at this peaceful stage, that freedom is only intellectualized if experienced alone, but freedom experienced relationally, it’s embodied. You actually become a new version of you if you test your material like that.
TS: All right. So I’m going to go and I’m going to, quote, unquote, “Test my ability” to be with these very difficult situations and people. Let’s just say, for an example, that it happens within my family. And you’re saying no, it’s not just like avoid, avoid, avoid, cancel everyone. No, I’m going to actually go to the family gathering or have my family come visit me and do this. And it’s paradoxical. There’s parts of them that I love and there’s parts of them that I truly can’t stand. What am I doing with the parts that I can’t stand, besides making sure the visit only lasts a limited amount of time despite whatever Sah says? I’m only going to test my material for a limited amount of time, Sah. But even within that limited amount of time, what am I going to do with the parts I can’t stand of these people?
SD’S: Look, I think before we even engage at the Thanksgiving dinner or the birthday party or any face-to-face exchange, we have to have done enough work from our side, which means have you have to arrive at a point when the family, the in-laws visit the mind and there’s no emotional charge in the body. We have to arrive at a point where when we think of them, our nervous system doesn’t go like, “Ugh,” and we don’t go into contraction. We can stay open.
And when we have landed at that, which that will require a lot of sitting, which will require a lot of breathing, a lot of being with these feelings in the body, a lot of responsibility for what I’m bringing to my perspective, what I’m bringing to my biases, how much am I allowing how I’ve lived to dictate how I see these people and these experiences and these behaviors, their tendencies. So, that’s the foundational step.
And then when you are engaging with people who flare you up, who set you off, if these people are people that you… Okay, so this is kind of your opening the door for something else. In the book I speak about the Dunbar research, and this research shows that we only have the capacity to cognitively know 150 people, give and take at any season in life. So, from the 150, we have these 50 people, 50 people, we have 15, and the 5. The reason why I’m explaining this is because where does these family members exist? Are they in the outer ring of the 50 or they’re in the 15?
To give a little backstory, the 150 are the people who are only going to come to the once in a lifetime event, your funeral or a wedding. You go into the 50, it’s a big birthday bash where you ask, “Hey, Tami,” or a friend who has a big backyard, “Can I throw my 60th birthday at your house?” That 50 is going to be that. Those people who come to that big birthday bash. The 15 and the 5, this is where we have the family, our partner and the people that we spend the most time with.
And this is where the question lies, are these people that you’re engaging in family matters, are they in the five who are part of your Thanksgiving dinner that’s kind of an annoying to experience, but are they in the 5 or the 15 or in the outer layer? Because if they are in the 5 or they are in the 15, then we do have to do the work of inviting people into our inner world, which means we must check in with what we’re bringing to the experience, but name it to them, “Hey mom, hey uncle, when this happens, I feel this. And when I feel this, I think this. And when I think this, I say or do that.” So it’s a very intimate, extremely vulnerable thing that, I was going to say you’re going to have to do, if you want to deepen the friendship with them. And there’s a chapter in the book called Conflict is for Lovers because this is the work that we have to do. We have to invite each other into that space.
TS: Now, I think you’re making really important points, Sah, bringing some nuance to the discussion that we can’t just talk about how we’re relating. It depends where they are in these circumference of rings of intimacy. But let’s just say they’re in more of that outer 150, because if there are people who are really conflicted about, that might be where they are. They would show up for my funeral, and I don’t have that much interaction with them, but it does happen regularly. What do I do with the parts that I’m just like, “Oh God, really?”?
SD’S: What comes to mind is see them as a Buddha, literally as Ram Dass would say, “See them as God in drag.” Really push yourself to the utmost space of seeing these people’s functions as actions towards supporting your liberation and seeing if then that kind of gives you some room to meet them halfway. And the truth is, we have to arrive at a point where we’re able to rest with a peaceful mind and an open heart no matter what’s going on.
And it doesn’t mean that we don’t feel the grief, that we don’t feel the anger. It’s just it doesn’t last. It runs its natural cycle. It comes and goes. It doesn’t inform our actions, it doesn’t inform our words, it doesn’t orient our thinking. We can kind of allow the anger to come and go, the grief, the rejection, the fear to come and go. And also, it’s really hard to deal with annoying people or triggering people, or people that we don’t deem worthy of our love.
If you are reading Spiritually, We, which I hope everyone listening will, is that you want to test your material, that you really want to shake up your conditioning and not participate in life the ways you have, that you want to show up at the Thanksgiving dinner in a new way, and you from your side could do better.
And I know this from, and I’m going to give an example that’s very different, but perhaps it lands for people. People ask me, “Do you keep your eyes open when you are leading a meditation or prayer? When you’re being with someone who’s dying at the hospital or a sick patient who’s going through an oncology journey?” I say, “I don’t open my eyes. I don’t need to know if they’re practicing or not.”
Why? Because I trust that the more present I am, the more I can seduce them and the more they will invite themselves to their presence. The more relaxed I am, the more the psychological, spiritual temperature of every room I walk into, it becomes warmer, more relaxed. We know this, I’m not a scientist, but there’s a lot of research about the power of presence, the power of a regulated nervous system, the power of a calm mind, the power of a mind that’s free of biases, the power of a mind that’s free of myopic delusions that you are at the center of the world. And then that opens the door for people to meet you in a new space.
And then there’s, I think this other piece that ruins a lot of relationships, it’s we don’t allow people to change. Unconsciously, we hold the view that we have of them very rigidly. And a sacred friend is someone, a liberatory friend, if we’re going to bring in the high high, the most high, we want these friends to celebrate our transformation. We actually don’t want them to be who they are today, tomorrow. We actually are living in such a changing style, that that invites them to continuously explore their own changing nature.
And with people who annoy us or have hurt us, we ended up unconsciously putting them in that hurt box. And for them to ever have the capacity to surprise us again or to tickle our hearts again, it’s nearly impossible. But I think in order for us to have a sort of a perspective shift, we have to go into the body again and really feel the feelings that we didn’t feel when that event happened. And the more we process the past and the present moment in our bodies, the more we can change our perspective of what’s going on in our lives right now.
Oftentimes, our emotional response to what’s happening in the present moment doesn’t match the context of reality. Oftentimes, we’re overreacting or underreacting. And especially with people who are triggering and annoying, I find that we tend to lean towards underreaction because, “Oh, that’s Uncle Larry, he’s a slob, he’s a mess.”
But what if we actually come in with a new shift perspective? What if there is a baseline of relaxation and ease? And that really requires a lot of self-editing and a lot of responsibility for what I’m feeling in my body, what is left unmet from the past of how I feel about Uncle Larry? I don’t know. Uncle Larry just came up in my mind, whoever. Does that make sense?
TS: No, it’s a beautiful answer, Sah. Yeah. And I’d love to know from your own life, is there a story of someone who you decided, “Oh, I’m going to treat them like a Buddha, this force of awakening in my life”? And then how did it change? Did it change?
SD’S: Oh my God. Oh, yeah. And it’s changing now, too. So, I have two. I have two really big ones. One, what set me on the path, the spiritual path, was 12 years ago I was still working in fashion, in a fashion magazine in New York City with two friends, and these two friends who I thought were my best friends at the time, decided that they no longer want to do business with me, no longer want me to be the creative director of the magazine. And I was so heartbroken by it. And I leave New York, I go to Florida, I started researching, what is peace? What is happiness? What is the point of life? All these little things that then led me to India, Nepal and all that stuff, all that amazing life-changing experience. I can’t say stuff, that’s the holy, that’s what really catapulted my transformation.
And I remember in meditation 2016 at a retreat up in Dharamsala, up in the north of India, and this friend, especially out of this magazine business, visited my mind as I was doing some self-editing work and some forgiveness work. And I noticed that in that moment there was a peaceful exchange where I was like, “Oh wow, I can actually do the loving-kindness thing. I can actually say, ‘May you be happy, may you be healthy, may you be safe, and may you live with ease.'” And so that’s one event which took me four years to arrive at that change of heart, right?
Now, I’m actually going through one right now with my ex-partner, who I write about in the book. Maybe last month, maybe mid-February I started to feel a shift. I started to feel like, “Oh wow, may you be happy. I actually genuinely hope that you’re okay. I don’t wish any harm upon you.” And that’s when we know that we’re changing, is when our sort of a punitive approach to people sort of shifts. We enter to this restorative approach.
And I speak about this in the book, the restorative justice versus the punitive justice, which the word punitive with justice shouldn’t really come together, but this is our American vernacular. I write about this in a book for those of you who haven’t read it yet, and I’ll just tickle you for a bit. I say that our punitive thinking and our punitive words and actions, which means we punish people to the amounts that we perceive to the weight of their damage, to the weight of their harm.
And I say that because our culture in America, because we have the industrial prison complex, which is a huge money industry to keep people incarcerated. And you look at the research of how people do when they go through the system and how they feel after, and studying the people who are in prison, these are the most traumatized people in our population. When we have such a big industry of incarceration, when we have such a big industry of punishing people for mistakes and associating their mistakes with who they are at the base of their being and locking them away and isolating them from society, we, because we are interconnected, interdependent, and because we don’t exist from our own side and we don’t exist independently of other people and other experiences, if it’s happening out there, 9 times out of 10 is going to be happening in here.
So our thinking is very much poisoned by the systems that are all around us. And when it comes to the people who hurt us and who are unkind to us and who are simply annoying, we will unconsciously bring forth this punitive approach to them. And you may say, “Sah, I’m not locking people away. I’m not whipping them, I’m not stoning them. I’m not doing the obvious punitive things that one may think.” But we do it with our energy, we do it with our love, we do it with our gaze, we do it with our words, we do it with our mind. We have all these ways of not replying to someone for a few days or sitting at lunch with somebody and being really cold, or you plug it in. There’s a million ways.
And I out myself in the book with some of the ways that I have played into that system and how hurtful it is to anyone in the receiving end to not have the warmth that I bring to a space, saying hi to everybody, and then skipping that person. Or making eye contact with everyone saying, “Hi,” and then reaching that person and just turning the gaze down and looking away. We do this. It’s so automatic, it’s so autopilot. So, I don’t know if I answered your question, but that’s what came through.
TS: What I was thinking about is an experience that I’ve had sometimes, this is a little bit confessional here, of schadenfreude, where I notice I am taking satisfaction in someone else’s difficult development in their life, something that’s happened, someone unfolding in their life. That’s hard for them. And I’m curious if that appeared in your experience, like, “Wow, I’m actually taking satisfaction in this person out there suffering in some way?” The opposite of the Spiritually, We Dharmic approach, but it still just has come up. What would you suggest to do in that moment?
SD’S: Wow, what a great vulnerable thing to bring into the mix. Thank you for that. And I think that still comes up for me, too. I think there is a little competitive demon inside of me that shows up sometimes when it’s left unchecked, when I distract myself from engaging with the feelings associated with the narrative, when I just get busy, when I choose to go on social media, when I choose to look at my follower account or my emails or my, whatever it may be. Anything that could remind me that I’m doing better than them, anything that could remind me that I’m also a good person.
What to do with that, specifically? I think it comes down to the same kind of thing, what is underneath the surface for you? What are the feelings in the body that are left unloved? And slowly, slowly that might unwind. Or oftentimes too, what can help is editing your relationship, the context that you have with them.
I’m thinking how this has just come up for me recently, too. A friend of a friend did a launch of something and it didn’t go as well as they planned. And then I remember hearing it and taking comfort in it. And I went on a walk later, one of my Dharmic walks, I love long walks. And I was just adding, I was like, “Wow, that’s like an old capitalistic approach of the zero-sum game, that if they are down, then I’m up.” There’s not enough at the top, there’s not an abundance of resources, of love, of possibilities in the world. And I think that is the opposite, is understanding that there is enough and we are enough, and there’s enough love to go around. So, I think that’s what comes up.
TS: It’s a beautiful answer. And this is one of the points that you make in Spiritually, We, is that as meditators, as spiritual practitioners, we discover this interconnected web, and yet we are living and have been trained and conditioned in a very individualistic society. And so there’s this individualistic, competitive world that we’re finding our opening to the big web, infinite, interconnected web of life, trying to bring it all together here.
SD’S: And you know what? What also comes up for me, too, it’s the, God I space my thought here, but it was something about, okay, the connection to all of life, to all people.
TS: And the individualism of our culture, of our Western Culture in particular.
SD’S: Yes. Yes. Oh my God. Okay, so this is what it is. It was how the Western Buddhist approach has put so much emphasis on personal liberation on the Buddha and the Dharma, not the Sangha. So the book also addresses this, very lightly, ’cause it’s not really my space to speak to it in that way. I don’t call myself a Buddhist teacher, by no means. Buddhism informs what I teach, but don’t call myself that. So I didn’t want to be too critical about it.
But I did name it that we’ve sort of lost the plot about the Sangha. And I share a story in the book that one of the Buddhists, very developed disciples asked him about, “Hey, how important is friendship on the spiritual path?” And the Buddha replies, “Friendship is the path.” And so that really informs the book, how much our relationship with other people and how we relate to others and how we engage with others, really informs the depth of our liberation.
TS: Okay, just two more questions. One is that I noticed as I was reading Spiritually, We, I texted some friends I haven’t been in connection with, I introduced myself to someone who’s working on our house project, who’s been working on the house project for days, but I haven’t introduced myself and gone into the backyard where this person’s working. And I thought, “Spiritually, We, it’s working on me.” And I wonder, if you were to give people just one or two actions that they could take as a result of this conversation that would tune them into this heart kind of connectivity, what it would be?
SD’S: It’s social integration. But before I talk about social integration, can I just share some statistics which are kind of eye-opening for people? So the research that we shared in the book from talking to different people who work with data and scientific evidence, we saw that over 60% of young adults in America report feeling seriously lonely. And two out of every five people in America reports that their relationships are not meaningful. And suicide rates in the last few years has gone up by 30%.
And then this last statistic that I’m going to share now, I didn’t have it before when I was writing the book because I’ve only started this training as a chaplain in my work in a hospital this past summer, and the book was already turned in. And this statistic is the most mind-blowing one because you see the loneliness carries itself through our entire life. And because loneliness is an invisible illness, we don’t pathologize it, we don’t treat it accordingly as such we would with a visible illness.
So, 40% of the elderly population reports that they have no social support. And what does that mean? They have no contact with their family, they have no contact with friends. And now, from having been in a hospital, and this is how the statistics, I started looking and researching and trying to find out, from having been there bedside, what I have found is that 40% is a very conservative statistic, that we’re looking more at six to 70%. Some social workers at the hospital say that it’s more like 80%. 8 out of every 10 elderly people who come to the hospital through a really challenging journey, they’re here alone. The only people that come to check in on them are the people who are their nurses.
And that’s really alarming to see that loneliness, it’s pervasive, it touches everybody. And how to start to unsocialize ourselves from the harmful way of protecting ourselves, because we don’t reach out, we don’t engage out of a protective mechanism. “I don’t want to be hurt. I don’t want to be abandoned again. I don’t want to be rejected again.” And because social pain is interpreted by the brain as physical pain, we then don’t want to feel that because it hurts so much. And this is what scientific research has shown, too.
So the way to unwind that from our system is it’s the concept of being socially integrated, which is talking to the person who’s working at your house and actually saying, “Hey, I have some really nice cheese. Do you want to take a break?” And then cutting a piece of the cheese for the person who’s coming to work on your house.
I do this regularly when I have someone coming to clean the house, I walk over to a nice grocery store next door, I buy myself, I buy the person who’s cleaning the same food I’m having, and we sit there, even if they don’t speak the same language, we just share an awkward meal together. And that awkwardness then leads to a point of contact, to a point of intimacy.
And I’ll share one little story about this, too. I moved into a new apartment and I do these somatic dance practices twice a month for an hour each time, so it’s only two hours a month that I play really loud music. And I’ve only been in this apartment for three months. And I do The Sah Method, loud music. I’m having so much fun. I finish here, my dad’s in town and I say, “Hey dad, let’s go have lunch.”
As soon as we walk out of the door, there’s a note taped to my door, say, “Hi, we’re working next door. Can you please keep it down? That was really disruptive.” It’s at 9:00 in the morning. It’s not like 7:00 or at midnight, it’s 9:00 AM. It’s kind of a reasonable hour.
Anyways, I noticed my righteousness coming up, which is my contraction, me feeling rejected, me feeling like the old way of feeling towards relating with other people, “F them. I can do it without them. I don’t need anybody,” kind of perspective, which is very much a toxic, capitalistic agenda of the self-made.
And then we have to remember that nothing’s self-made, nothing in this world exists by itself from its own side, independently of everything else. But we believe that people are self-made, because you look at the cover of Forbes and say, “Self-made billionaire,” but we not to go into that place right now. Anyway, I just wanted to name that.
Now, back to this, the neighbor. I go to the nice grocery store and I say, “Dad, before we go to lunch, let me just take care of this.” I go to the nice grocery store and I get a vegan, gluten-free, sugar-free chocolate cake, tackling all the restrictions that someone may have. And I knock on the door to the left, they don’t answer. I knock on the door to the right, he answers. And I was like, “Did the music, was it loud? I’m so sorry. Did you leave a note at my door?” He says, “No, no, no. The music wasn’t that bad at all. I actually enjoyed the music. Well, what’s your name? I said, my name is Sah. What’s yours? Oh, my name is Michael. Oh, cool. Can I have your number so we can stay connected because we’re neighbors?” I said, “Of course. Oh my gosh.” It’s like that moment.
And now when I’m in the morning, wearing my bathrobe and going outside to throw the trash, “Hey Michael, good morning.” There’s that point of contact where I already feel like I belong. And the feeling of belonging, it really relaxes your nervous system in ways that we don’t often are able to experience unless we’re tapped into that belonging, I was going to say frequency, but it’s not a word that I use ever, but the belonging fabric, the tapestry.
And then I come home and I say, “Okay, if it wasn’t Michael, then it’s these people.” So I write a handwritten note explaining the work I do, leaving my phone number there and saying, “Here’s this chocolate cake as a peace offering,” and I tape it to their door and I leave the chocolate cake in the bag on the doorknob. They don’t text me, they don’t call me, nothing, but there is a point of contact for my side. They never complained ever again.
So, the reason why I share this is because we have all this opportunity to engage. We all feel super awkward in an elevator. We try to not make eye contact with anybody at the grocery store, or how many times you look down when you’re coming up to your own house ’cause you don’t want to greet the neighbors. We are so afraid of connection because of the ways that we’ve been hurt by it, that we don’t lean in and we forget that connection and friendship is a nutrient that is vital for our biology, our psychology, and our spirituality. We can’t live without connection. Connection is the cure.
And Spiritually, We is really emphasizing that. Also emphasizing from the spiritual perspective, but really looking at the data too, from understanding that loneliness strikes in a body the same way that hunger does. But what do we do when we’re hungry? We walk to the fridge, we order some food on an app or something, we walk over to the cafe, but we don’t treat loneliness as a vital nutritional need for our well-being, which is what the evidence says. That is like a nutrient deficiency when we’re not engaging connection and friendship.
So the call is to start with being socially integrated, start testing your material lightly, saying hi to the neighbors, “Oh nice dog, nice shoes, you look nice today.” Or buying a cookie for someone and bring it to your doorman. There’s so many opportunities to train ourselves back into our ability to connect.
And I just want to name one more thing, too. I believe that technology was built… I’m not a dystopian person, I’m a very utopian person. I’m very hopeful, enthusiastic about human life. But I believe the technology that really supported us to connect with everybody is actually doing the opposite now. It’s severed and atrophied our muscle for connection. We don’t know how to say you look nice to someone at the coffee shop without sounding creepy. We don’t know how to say, “Oh wow, that was such a beautiful practice, I’m so inspired by you,” and you just went through a 90-minute hot yoga class where you almost fainted seven times, but your capacity to still notice beauty and your capacity to name beauty when you see it, all things that we’ve been severed from because of the phone.
I believe that when loneliness strikes in the body, instead of us tending to it as a nutritional deficiency that we’re lacking, that we must feed, we go to social media. We watch another episode, we eat another cookie, we do another thing to deflect and neglect ourselves from this biological, psychological and spiritual need, which is friendship.
So, the book covers that. We paint the picture at the beginning of all this evidence for why friendship is the cure, why friendship is a vital need. And then through the course of the book, we’re sharing practices and tools and stories to help people understand that it’s a dance and opening themselves up to see more than what meets the eye. And know that their view isn’t the ultimate view, that their perspective isn’t the truth. It’s part of reality but not the truth. And how we can use a little bit of a shaking up in our rigidity when it comes to connection, and that the psycho-spiritual somatic world of restricted boundaries isn’t helping you. It’s actually keeping you more isolated.
TS: And Sah, just to underscore, I noticed when you talk about our loneliness being like a hunger, like starvation, that’s so powerful, because of course if we saw people who were hungry, we would be inspired to feed them. And this is something that’s within our power to reach out and feed each other with our love and attention and care. Okay, my final question, at the end of Spiritually, We, you say, “It’ll just take 2% of us to have this kind of embodied, Spiritually, We attitude and behavior in the world to shift the entire world.” And I thought, “Really? 2%?” Tell me about that and we’ll end on this note.
SD’S: Thank you Tami for bringing that into the mix. The 2% theory is something that I spoke to Dr. Lisa Miller, who is the founder of the first Ivy League institute within Columbia University of emerging spirituality and mind, body and spirituality weave together. So spirituality and science. She’s sort of the godmother in that school, in an Ivy League school. So we can celebrate her work very much and so much gratitude to her.
And what she says, is that if we are able to live from this place of integrity where our thinking, our words, our actions, the way we interact, if we can match our ways of thinking with our benevolent nature, if there is a integrity and synchronicity in the way that we engage with the world from a place of love, if more people exist living from this place of integrity, the more it’s that thing I shared earlier about how I don’t open my eyes when I’m praying or when I’m meditating next to a patient at the hospital.
The more I do that, the more I practice existing from this place of integrity with my benevolent nature, the more we’re shifting people consciously or unconsciously, people gravitate towards presence. We are like the moth to the flame. We are obsessed with presence. It really does the thing. It’s the greatest drug of all.
I remember to share this just a little bit about it. It was when I sat with His Holiness the Dalai Lama, literally 10 years to the day, first time. And I was in Dharamsala, I had just finished a 10-day retreat. And we were sitting at the outside the temple, there’s maybe 200 people there, and I forced my way in through getting really close to him. And I remember just sitting and looking at my friend and saying, she’s from Australia, “What is happening? I feel like I’m drugged. I feel so relaxed. My mind, the discursive thinking has stopped. I feel like my breath has gotten deep. I feel like my shoulders just softened. I feel like my jaw’s dropped. I feel like my eyes just… What happened?”
And then later on I come to realize when you’re in the presence of these holy beings who are so regulated, so developed, it really invites everybody. And someone so wild like me could actually even fuel the potency of that depth of regulation, of the depth of relaxation. So when I think about the Dalai Lama and what happened to me 10 years ago, and then talking Dr. Lisa Miller, mega-boss scientist, understanding this, it really feels like a hopeful world that we only need 2%. We don’t need the whole world to practice the Dharma, we just need 2% of us to live our values, and live by them and have a higher code of ethics. I think we’ve lost the plot with that a little bit. Yeah.
TS: Spiritually, We, the new book by Sah D’Simone, The Art of Relating and Connecting From the Heart. 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.
