Heroes in Business - Freedom An Invitation to ReMembering

Episode Date: January 7, 2022

Life invites us to remember who we are. When we do this, miracles happen. Spontaneous healing. Then the greatest miracle, freedom from suffering and freedom to live a grace filled life in this episode of Guided Self Healing Fearless Living with Dr Andy Hahn.

Welcome. My name is Dr. Andrew Han, and this is episode 34 of Guided Self-Healing, Fearless Living. And this episode is really about an overview of the book we've just finished, which we finished actually fully just a couple of weeks ago. So this is an invitation to share with you our book. And today is the last day of December in 2021. So it's coming to a completion. So this is very exciting. And I usually don't want to sell things, but I would ask you if you hear this in the near future, if you are interested in buying our book, which is called The One Hour Miracle, if you could pre-order it from Amazon, that would be spectacular. If you want to know how to do that, you can certainly write to us and we will tell you how to do it.

But you can just go to Amazon and pre-order the One Hour Miracle. And I've been told that it's very important to do by our publisher because it's a possibility for getting more reviews in big reviews and higher order interviews. And apparently they care about these things. So it's a world I don't know, but I'm learning about. So in our last two episodes, I read to you the foreword to the book, one of which was written by Anne-Marie Chasson, who is an MD. And so she has, she's a doctor, and she has advanced degrees also in mental health and mental health administration. And she wrote us a wonderful forward about spontaneous healing and how we might understand spontaneous healing. And she is, she collaborates with Andrew Weil and really runs Andrew Weil's Institute in Arizona. If you know Andrew Weil, who is certainly a giant in our field about natural healing.

And Anne-Marie is a gift. healing. And Anne-Marie is a gift. And then the next episode, we talked about the part of the foreword that our editor of this book wrote, whose name is Megan, Megan Davis Hill. And Megan wrote about her own experience having never done this work and then reading the book and then doing it for herself with really miraculous results just by doing it on her own. So now I'm going to go and we're going to start to talk about the introduction to the book. And unlike most times, I have a lot of notes because I'm not going to just read you the book, but I haven't got the introduction memorized. So we're going to be in a slightly different place than just my usual, just talking off the top of my head. So the first part of this book asks the question,

which is how do we make sense of our life? You know, particularly in the context of things that we suffer about, or what do we suffer about? Well, sometimes they're horrendous things. You know, we suffer because the deaths of loved ones or illness that is just unacceptable to us or things that people do to us or we do to them that just are betrayals um so there's all of those kinds of things like you know that it's like job says why have you done this to me god um and then there's more mundane things that we can not suffer about in quite the

same way but you know it's like our lives can get into a rut and we say, do I have to go make one more meal or pick up the kids or do go to work again today? And sometimes it's just like, it all feels like it's too much. And then of course, there are these existential questions that creep in, like, is this all this, is this all there is, or why are we here? So we have all these questions. And really, this book is a response to those kinds of questions. And not only does it seek to respond to those questions by talking about the nature of life, but it also seeks to respond to them by focusing on one little aspect of what creates in which we call trauma. And trauma simply in our definition is something that can't be handled or taken in stride. And in that way, it varies, which I'll tell you again in our next

episode, but it varies very much from the American Psychological Association that talks about trauma in a more objective and horrendous way. So PTSD is when you're a soldier and bombs go off near you. And it's so horrific that you can't handle it. And we want to expand the definition of trauma, because that certainly is traumatic. And we know how to work with those kinds of traumas. But we want to say the trauma is anything you can't handle. Anything you can't take in stride, and it can be something too bad, like those events that we've talked about or you are a child and you're used to having your father just be very kind and gentle with you and one day he screams at you when you show him some something you've done and you say I better not do

that again and I will just shut down my creative side um so it could be or you know so it could be bad in either of those ways horrendous or just the events that just are so different in a bad way but they can also be so different in an overwhelming way so sometimes it's just like you get so much coming at you that you can't handle it and sometimes trauma is actually that something so good happens that you can't handle it. And sometimes trauma is actually that something so good happens that you can't integrate it. The classic example, of course, of that being, you know, the man who was in his late 50s, which makes him younger than me, but in his late 50s, and he's still at the bar talking about the one great catch he made when he was in high school. And he's playing it out over and over again, hoping to find that wonderful experience again, or,

you know, you fall in love for the first time and you, nothing ever compares. You carry a flame for that person. And in a funny way, that craving to reenact what was once so wonderful that it was beyond anything you knew is a kind of trauma because you're stuck still in the past and you keep trying to master it. And of course, there are other traumas, things can be too different or too containing or too, well, there's so many different kinds of trauma, but we wanted to say that it's not just all something that's horrifically bad. So that's the first thing to say. just say that it's not just all something that's horrifically bad. So that's the first thing to say. So this is a question of how do we make sense of our life? And the idea here is that when there's something you can't handle at all, you forget. And you start not living in the present

anymore. You're stuck someplace else. And you're no longer free because you're just acting on automatic. It's like you're living in a trance. And so three things happen. The first is we literally forget who we are. It's like we've fallen asleep to who we are. It's like we're living in a trance. And that we can forget at that point our true origins for some of us so it's like we have the same claim that we aren't who we believe we are we're someone else but we're kind of stuck here we don't belong but all of us on some level forget who we are because if we remembered who we truly are we would know that who we are is divine, and everything is divine, and we're in relationship

to divine, or if you call it differently, it's life. So who we are is life, everything is life, and we're in relationship with life, and that's who we are. So in that way, the second we identify with anything, we forget who we are, because as soon as we identify with anything, that makes us something. And in that way, we are limited and separate. And then we hold on for dear life to this sense of limitation and separation, because if we don't, we will cease to exist. When in fact, what happens is we truly come to exist and live. So that's the first thing, we can forget who we are. The second thing, of course, that happens, which I've alluded to, is when we forget who

we are, we stop longing to be who we truly are, which is life, and longing to make that joining with what we already are so it's funny to join with what we are already um but we forget so we stop going from longing and we start going into craving and craving really is from that point of view um just a a limited form of longing it's like we stop longing for what we truly are and we start craving things that give us pseudo experiences of who we are, but not the real thing. It's not the real deal. And then of course, we become very attached to the things we crave and then we can't let go. And we're going to talk about that a little bit later. We can't let go. You know,

we hold on for dear life thinking that if we let go, we would cease to exist. When in fact, when we let go, we just cease to be limited. But it's so hard to do. And then there is the third problem, which is once we're attached, we live with so much fear. Like we can't experience something. It's too painful to experience. So what happens? We split off parts of ourselves.

We literally dismember ourselves, right? So it's like we're not really whole. We're not integrous, like one. We're not contained. It's like we're split into little pieces like umpty dumpty and the fall comes when we can't just accept something and then you know something is so painful that we have to split off that part of ourselves from ourselves and then we have to protect ourselves by forgetting that we've forgotten ourselves, you know, or, well, we could just say we've forgotten,

we forget we forgot ourselves. And what we also do is, of course, we split off not only aspects of our being, but we actually split off different aspects of ourselves. So we can split off what we do in the West, which is called splitting off the mind from the body, because it's a way to keep ourselves safe really to say you know mind and the body are not one so we're coming to something you know in our culture now where we need to talk about mind-body connection but even that i think is a limited point of view because how could two things be connected that are really just one thing you could say what we are is, when we think of ourselves as whole, we're a mind-body field. That spirit and matter are one. And that soul that is the heart of spirit and matter are one.

So we are really a mind-body-heart field. And they're not separate at all. They're just one field. So they're not even connected, even though on one level they're connected. On another level, you can't separate them because it's just a whole. So that's the first idea that we start with is becoming who we truly are, right? Remembering who we are so we're fully engaged in the present moment and that everything is happening in the present moment and that everything is happening in the present moment

and moving from a place of craving because we're so like afraid to just longing to remember and bringing ourselves back together because umpty dumpty can be put back together again all we have to do is remember. So what are the consequences of this remembering, we ask? The consequences of remembering, right? Remembering that which is dismembered, is that we become whole. And when we become whole, in terms of healing, one of two things happens. whole. And when we become whole, in terms of healing, one of two things happens. Either our symptoms go away that we're suffering about, because they're just an invitation to remember,

we've talked about that a lot. So that everything we suffer about on a human level is, of course, horrendous for us. But on a soul level, it's an invitation to remember what we couldn't handle in the first place. So we can be in a different relationship with it and this time get it right sort of like groundhog's day if you saw the movie and if you did see the movie you know we can work slowly at that each time doing it one step better before we can do it in one fell swoop and of course the way we can do it in one fell swoop is just to experience the aspect of our being that has been split off, and to choose to do it. And once we choose to do it, we no longer live it unconsciously,

as our symptoms that we suffer about, but we say, I'm here with you. I'm here with you who, when you were four years old old couldn't handle the fact that your father yelled at you and walked away i'm here with you whoever you are 20 50 years ago in the french revolution who had her head cut off i'm here with you my great great grandfather who was uh horrifically murdered you know in a pogrom i'm with you. I don't have to separate from you because I am all of these things. That's who I am. And I'm truly all of them, which is, you know, really something to think about. So the consequences of remembering again are either our symptoms go away because they've shared with us what they need to share. And when they go back into their pure form and they're no longer dense,

they're no longer pain in our body or nausea or numbness or whatever it is that's associated with the symptoms, they just go into their pure form and their energy. And then we don't feel them because their flow, they are emotion. They are everything is about verbs at that point. There's nothing that is dense anymore, you know,

and when we realize being, so to speak, you know, I suppose if we are to massage the Buddha, we wouldn't find any knots because there would be no dense energy because he could just say yes to everything theoretically or Kuan Yin or whoever these realized beings are. I also wanted to show us what it was like not to be that way as an exemplar. So the consequences of remembering are either our symptoms go away or it's not a big deal because it's sort of like, let's suppose we're dying, I mean, you know, really awful way of cancer or something.

If we're able to be with it, we can say, I can just be with what is. I would prefer not to die in this awful way. But I'm not scared to such a degree that I have to get away from things. I can be fully engaged. I can be courageous. I can be an exemplar of grace. You know, I can find myself I don't have to disappear. So this is an invitation, you know, to accept everything. That's real invitation the book that we can

say yes to everything, that we can self-accept ourselves and that we can accept life, which doesn't mean we become passive. It means we'd be receptive to what is, and then we take action given whatever is. So it's actually the way to be fully engaged with life is to be able to accept all of what is, including the changes that will naturally happen if we don't get in the way. And then we may have pain, but we won't suffer anymore. What is suffering really? It's pain about something that's painful, right? We'll just experience the pain,

but the pain won't be so great that we won't let ourselves experience it at which point we suffer. So really the invitation that we've said that this book is about, the one-hour miracle, is freedom. And the true miracle is freedom. Because when we can say yes to everything, that is a miracle. It's not like we have to, miracles, you know, we have this vernacular idea about miracles, which we can talk about in a second.

You know, these miraculous gifts that people have, you know, miracle healings, spontaneous healings, which we can talk about. Really the true miracle is to be free and to be free of all of who we are, to be all of who we are, you know? And when we do that, as I said, we can face any circumstance with compassion for ourselves and others, with the courage to face it back with grace as an exemplar. Like we can be an example of how to be truly with something without craving for something different or so much fear that we have to back away or numbing ourselves. And what about, you know, which we talked about, what about the vernacular

of miracles, spontaneous healings? How does that happen? The things that Anne-Marie talks about in her introduction. And it's actually not hard to understand how that happens if one understands something about life. So how could a miracle happen that someone would have chronic pain and nothing touches it? You can go to all kinds of experts, but nothing touches it. And it's because really often the thing that we think is physical trauma actually is not physical trauma, it's energetic trauma, which just means there's something that couldn't be handled. And our chronic pain, in fact, is an invitation to remembering what couldn't be handled. So if you remember some of the stories we told you, like the woman with the chronic pain,

and really, we found out that it was a story from, you know, Rome 2000 years ago, where she was a leader, and she wasn't paying enough attention and she feels like she betrayed all her men and got stabbed in the back while it was happening and really was stabbing herself in the back you could say as a man and when she was able to accept what she had done and ask for forgiveness for herself and from others, miraculously, the back pain, which was the invitation to remember this betrayal that happened 2000 years ago, just disappeared. Because what happens is, and this is the key for healing, we bring a higher vibration intentionally to a lower vibration, the dense energy that she felt was back pain, where we can just say, I can be with you, I can witness you, I can bear witness to you,

and I can hold you with love and with acceptance and with compassion. The dense energy transforms it into its true form. It goes from matter into energy, you know, equals mc squared it raises its vibration to such a degree that the thing that we think is the disease which is really also an invitation just dissolves and resolves right so that's what really from my point of view this miraculous kind of healing is that we see in our work is like it's not so hard to understand when you understand the nature of life and the nature of the universe so um how we find that is interesting and the way we find it is we attune to life and you know when you come for life-centered therapy everything gets reversed because most

people go to doctors or therapists and they think they're going to an expert who's going to fix them. And nothing from my point of view could be further than the truth. But also they think that they know the answers to everything themselves sometimes, which also isn't the truth. So really, instead of coming to a doctor as an expert, really, we're going to take the hierarchy and totally reverse the hierarchy. And we're going to honor two things. The first is that the expert, in this case me, I'm not an expert in your life. You know about your life from the inside out. So how can I tell you about your life? I know about your life from the inside out. So how can I tell you

about your life? I can't because you're the expert. I remember when I was in graduate school, and I don't know if I told you this story because I forget, you know, this podcast like dreams for me, but I don't know if I told you, but when I was in my last year of graduate school, I had this really extraordinary mentor. And she actually was the only person who was ever trained by an extraordinary family therapist whose name was Mara Salvini Palazzoli. And she trained my mentor, whose name was Susanna Bullrich.

And because Susanna was her translator, so she said, well, if you're going to translate my work, you have to understand it. And Susanna taught me something really quite extraordinary. We saw this family where there was a daughter who was psychotic. And she said, the problem here is they've gone to all these people. And the people have said, I know how to, I'm the expert, I know how to fix this thing with medication or whatever. He said, what would happen if we turned everything upside down?

He said, what would happen if we turned everything upside down? And we said to them that they were the experts in their life. And of course, the family was there and there was a mother there. And Susanna and I started to say to the mother, you're the expert in your life. You have to teach us because we're ignorant. We don't know what it's like about living in the inner city where you live. So why don't you tell us what it's like, because you're the expert in your own subjective experience, and we're going to honor your expertise about your own subjective experience. And it was amazing that this woman just, you know, who had been beaten down, started to talk about

what her life was like for her, and had a sense of becoming more and more empowered by the very act of saying, oh my God, someone really wants to listen to me as opposed to telling me one more thing about what's wrong with me or what I should be doing or whatever. And miraculously, and this was truly a miracle to me because I was just a graduate student and I was very lucky to be in this team with Suzanna, this woman, her daughter who was psychotic started to become non-psychotic and she'd been hospitalized so many times. And she certainly wasn't hospitalized

in the whole year we saw her. And as far as I know, because I think she would have come back, they would have come back. My assumption is that she wasn't hospitalized. As far as I know, she wasn't hospitalized again,, because we figured they would have come back to us, but we of course don't know. But we do know that she wasn't hospitalized and all the time she was seeing less than that wasn't true of the many people they had gone to before. So

really, life is about honoring this kind of subjective experience, you know. And people know their own experience from the inside out. And even when we do our very best to align with them, we're still knowing them from the outside in. Now our intention, of course, is to say, I'm going to do everything I can to know what your experience is, light from the inside out, that I could step into it for one moment, have some glimpse of what it must be like to be you, like your other PLX. But what are you the expert in, really? What you're the expert in is being able to name your subjective experience, which is really attuning to life itself.

And life reveals itself to us through the body. So, you know, what I would say now that I didn't know back then is, you know, if this woman, this mother was so beaten down and feeling powerless, you could say, what happens when you feel powerless? And she could say, oh my God, I feel nauseous. Then we would say, well, it's not you that's feeling the power. It's a living being who has its own subjective experience and its name is nauseous stomach. And nauseous stomach is an invitation to remember.

So you're going to be an expert reporter by choosing to become this living being whose name is nauseous stomach, just like you're an actor, who's going to play a role and say, I'm going to bear witness to you and hold you while you share your story. And when you do that, it's like you're opening to all of life. And that's really the extraordinary thing because life is the true expert. And each of us is the subjective expert of our own experience of life, you know. So then we can move to saying, you know, we can really do our own healing. And life-centered therapy is also, was originally called guided self-healing, and all of our lay programs are called guided self-healing. Guided by life, you know, by something larger, of course. You know, hopefully, if we're a facilitator, we stand in as best we can for life and say, we're going to open to everything.

Open to every possibility for the causes of your suffering and the resolutions. And self, you know, self-healing means we're going to heal the small self but really how do we do that we do it with the higher self right and healing really is saying what is healing it means you're going to become whole you're going to become who you truly are and then you're free and you know we move from janice joplin's line from Grish Bestowfish, and you know, from freedom is just another word for nothing left to live, because I'm free, to Mary Oliver's line in Blackwater Woods, which I should actually read to you.

And she of course says, at the end of her wonderful poem in Blackwater Woods, to live in this world you must be able to do three things. To love what is mortal, to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it, to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it, when the time comes to let it go. When the time comes to let it go, to let it go. This is freedom. So what do we do here? We give you a container that allows you to go through that process. It provides a structure, provides words. So many people come to me and they know healing, but they don't have words.

They don't have a container. And life-centered therapy really is a container that has a framework and has words so you can name what's going on. And when you have the words to say it, which is one of my favorite books, a book by Marie Cardinal, it's called Le Mot pour l'Adieu,

because it's in French, but really the translation is the words to say it. It's an amazing book about a woman who's in psychoanalysis, who finds words for what's going on in her body. Same thing we do. So this is the introduction to our book. And this is the introduction to my sharing it with you. So again, as we come to the completion of this, all I want to do is invite you again, if you want to, to buy the book, which is called The One Hour Miracle. And you can go to Amazon and pre-order the book.

And if you have any questions or any reflections, as always, as always as always please write me at ahan a-h-a-h-n at lifecenteredtherapy.com and if you would ever like to do a demonstration with me i will do a demonstration with you as part of the podcast just know that you get the demonstration for free. And then if you want to, you can continue to work with me, but then you have to pay, or you can work with somebody who's trained, but you get the demonstration for free. But what you need to know, of course, is everyone will listen to your session. But I can guarantee you having

done hundreds of demonstration sessions that no one has ever said, please don't broadcast them. But if you say to me, Andy, I just can't do this. At the end of the day, you're still the expert. So then you would just get up from the session. So I will look forward to our next time. And until then, I wish you well. Bye.