Heroes in Business - Guided Self Healing Fearless Living with Dr. Andy Hahn

Episode Date: February 28, 2021

01 Why this Show is called Guided Self Healing Fearless Living. Show Format, Challenges of Life and how we handle them, Why we suffer, How we master suffering, How we can manifest our true Intention, plus a bonus Healing and Manifesting exercise.

Hi. My name is Dr. Andrew Hahn, and I'm coming to you from my library in Waltham, Massachusetts. And of course, you can call me Andy. I want to welcome you to the maiden voyage of my new podcast, which is called Guided Self-Healing, Fearless Living. And in this episode, what I'd really like to do is just tell you what this podcast is going to be about, give you an overview of it, some of the kinds of topics we'll be covering, and also to get your input. So in order to get in touch with me, our website is lifecenteredtherapy.com. And you can contact us there.

You can sign up for our mailing list. You can do anything you want there. If you want to contact me directly, my email address is a-h-a-h-n-a-han at lifecenteredtherapy.com. And you can write me anytime. And I would love your questions or I would love any input you have

about the podcast, anything at all. So let's talk about why I am calling this podcast Guided Self-Healing and Fearless Living. When I say guided, because I do a lot of therapy, on the one hand, I mean, someone guides you. But on the other hand, I think that we have larger guides. We could have a guide we might call even life. And really what this is about for me is to say that we can be guided by something that is bigger than us. Whatever you want to call it. We can just call it life if we like, but there are other names for it, obviously,

whether you call it source or guides or God or whatever you call it, but there's something larger than us. And it's the part of us that just knows something. It's beyond the part of us that figures things out or even has an emotion about it it's just the part that viscerally knows something and when you're in alignment with it it's like you're quickened and you feel more alive and when you're not in alignment with it you are you feel weaker and sort of more dead inside so this is what i mean when i say guided. And when we talk about self, there are also two kinds of self. There's a little S self and there's a big S self.

And when we look at the little S self, it's the part of us that sort of wants to have our hopes and dreams met. It's the part of us that wants gratification. It's the part of us that we usually identify with. But I also want to invite us into a big-ass self, that there's a part of us that just knows something more. It's the inner voice that we might hear, which sometimes is like a soft whisper when you listen to it. And it really tells you what you really desire or what really would make you feel alive or passionate or what you're drawn to. And healing is an interesting word because healing really is about wholeness. It's about integrity. So healing for me and whole, as in you're the whole, are really the same thing. Because when you're truly healed, you become who you truly are, which is something much greater than what we usually identify with.

so I would say that not only is healing and wholeness the same but I would say it's about healing is about remembering who we truly are as opposed to who we often think we are which is much smaller than who we truly are so this is what I mean when I say guided self-healing and of course we train people how to literally guide their own self-healing, but we also open us to something much larger. And that's the point of the whole thing, is that you're guided by something larger. And our job is to really attune to that, however we want to understand that. What do I mean by fearless living? What I mean by fearless doesn't mean you have fear. It just means you're not reactive. That's what I would say fearless living is.

When you're truly fearless, you say, whatever comes my way, I can find some way to take it in stride. I can find some way to handle it, even if it's something that is truly horrendous. So it's not, fearless for me is not not having fear. It's about our relationship with fear. And if we have a true relationship with fear, we say, I'm noticing that I have fear, but fear is not who I am. And when we truly do this, three things happen. We stop being judgmental. We stop thinking about how things should be. We stop judging other people. We stop judging ourselves. Now, judgmentalism is not the same as discernment. Very different idea. Discernment is when you really have the wisdom to understand something. Judgmental actually shuts down the heart because when you're judging yourself or

others, you're not at home anymore. You have shut down your heart and it's kind of you're dead inside. The second way we react is we become comparative. Why did this happen to me? Everybody else is fine. Why did this happen to me? Or I'm better than everybody else. or I'm better than everybody else. So anytime that with compulsion,

we're asking this question, why did this happen to me? Because I've gotten a worse shake than everyone else, or I'm better than everybody else. We know at that point, we are truly in a place of comparison. And what I would invite us to do is not to do that, but just to say that we all have our roles to play.

And from that point of view, we all may have different gifts, and some of us may have more gifts than others, and some of us may have more challenges than others. But whenever you're judging someone and when I say, you know, we're comparing yourself to someone, really what you're doing is you're not owning something in yourself. The last one is what we might call a need, a compulsive need to know something. When you say, why did this happen to me? As opposed to curiosity, there's a compulsion in it. You know, this need to know.

And I'd say the need to know shuts us down from being able to experience what is. So I would say fearless living is really when we let go of all judgmentalism, when we let go of all comparisons, and when we let go of this compulsive need to know, and we're just able to be with what is. And then we move to higher aspects of these qualities. We move to love as opposed to judgment. We move to right action. We stop comparing ourselves and we know that we're all part of something

and we're all in something together. And truly we'll find when you're comparing yourself either because you idealize yourself or you denigrate yourself, really what you're doing is a kind of killing. It's kind of killing yourself whenever you're comparing yourself with judgment. And it's one thing to say, you know, I recognize that some people do something better than me, but that's not really the kind of comparing I'm talking about. but that's not really the kind of comparing I'm talking about. And this need to understand things or this need to know actually stops us from true knowing,

because true knowing just can say, I can be with what is, and life will reveal something to me. So this is why I call it fearless living. And when you're fearlessly living, you truly feel alive. You're not going around in a trance. And you're open to all possibilities, all possibilities of where life is going to take you. Where you're going. How you're going to get there. What happens when you're there. It opens you to all of those things. there? What happens when you're there? It opens you to all of those things.

So what I want to say as an introduction then is really what this show is about is how we're in relationship with challenges. Now, sometimes these challenges can be debilitating, be some kind of terrible loss or terrible diagnosis or some kind of significant mental health issue. Sometimes these challenges are more developmental. You know, it's like, are we able to have the courage to say or do what we know is true for us, what we know is true for us, is right for us, even when you're afraid that everyone around you might judge you for it or might be judgmental of you? Is there a way that you can really live that kind of courage? So really what this podcast is about is how we can be in relationship to these challenges so that we can live fearlessly and be guided by something much larger than ourselves so that we can become who we truly are. That's what this podcast is really about. what this podcast is about is how you can be or face your challenges with as my partner in my institute says with courage and grace be able to say i can be with whatever's

going on even the most difficult things and i can handle it with grace so it's like something it's like uh you realize something which is that you realize what's real. So I want to say, some of the topics we're going to talk about is, how can you be free of suffering? I'm actually going to talk about that today, how you can be free of suffering. How can you have better relationships, both with yourself and with other people? How can you manifest the life of your dreams? So we're going to talk about everything from the most mundane to the most sublime, because the mundane things, which just means of the world, right? You know, it's a very

difficult time for us, because as I'm doing this first maiden voyage of this podcast, we're still in the midst of COVID and many of us have been in homes with children for a year now. And if we're not all totally driven crazy, we're doing quite well. Some of us have had even more challenges than that, obviously, because this has been an unbelievably difficult time. You think half a million people have died just from this. So there's been such loss. So I want to talk with you about how you may be in a better relationship when, if you're a parent, your kids are driving you crazy, or you're feeling really anxious,

even if you're not used to feeling really anxious, or you're finding the worst parts of you are coming out. And I think I have some ways that may resolve some of those things. So that would be great. So how can you be free of suffering? How can you have better relationships with yourself and other people? and ultimately how you can truly know what you aspire to and have the inspiration to go for that North Star. So the format of this program is I'm going to start with a topic, usually, and I will propose a topic and I will talk about it for a little while with all of you. And if you have reflections or questions, I will try to answer them if you send them to me. If any of you want me to talk about anything,

just email me at ahahn at lifecenteredtherapy.com and I of course will take your questions and I will be honored and grateful if you send them. And as time goes by, what I actually hope to do is have conversations with people, not interview them, but really have conversations where we talk about something that is of concern to you, whether it's, you know, why are you anxious or how do you deal better with your relationships or how can you be a better leader any of these kinds of things we can deal with and I hope to do that and ultimately what is very exciting is I would actually like to do sessions with people

and if you're up for that I can do sessions with you wherever you are because I can do them on the phone. I work with people all over the world because I work remotely. And you will get to know how I work to help people heal and evolve, which is what we do here. So that's what we're looking for in this podcast. Today, what I'd like to do just though, I think is tell you the basic premises of how you can guide your own self-healing. That's what I'd like to do today. And I'll give you an opportunity even to experience it. So let me talk to you just first about why people suffer and in fact why they come to me because I think there's only one reason that people suffer and I already spoke to that today

which is that there's something that couldn't be handled and integrated. So life is about being able to say I can be with anything without reactivity. And we, of course, have an exemplar of that in this Judeo-Christian culture. If you think about Jesus becoming Christ, and of course, right before Jesus is crucified, he is screaming at his father as an exemplar, and he's saying, why hast thou forsaken me? And he shows us what it's like to be human when we feel like we've done everything and we feel like we've been abandoned and that there's nobody there and clearly within that statement is judgment and comparison and the need to understand all the things i say that are reactivity

but then a little while later when he's about to be crucified he says forgive them for they know not what they're doing they know not what they've done and really what we're talking about there is uh what he's really saying is they're blind what we're talking about there is what he's really saying is they're blind. So we want to know that sin is they haven't met the mark yet.

They're still growing and they're limited. And of course, Christ is unlimited and it is on limitation. He says forgive them because they're ignorant. They don't know what they're doing. So he talks to us about really what we have to do so we can get to any place. And when I say being in alignment with

life, of course, he's an extraordinary exemplar in the West because on some level he came to know, it seems, that life needed a sacrifice. It's why we call him the lamb, right? That life needed to sacrifice to open up hearts. And he said, that's my role in life right now. But I can live that role out because I know on some level beyond any kind of rational knowing that there is no such thing as death. It just appears that there is. It looks like they're crucifying me,

but what they're really doing is crucifying my body because they can't do anything to me. So that is, you know, an avatar who is giving us something that we can aspire to. So people suffer simply because there's something that can't be handled and integrated. And so what is healing about? It's simply mastering what can't be handled and integrated. what can't be handled and integrated. So how do we do that? It's quite easy. I'll give you an example, an example I often use because it's one that often comes up in what we call PTSD or post-traumatic stress. And let's suppose you were in my office and a motorcycle backfired and suddenly you had a panic attack. Well, clearly you're not having a panic attack because the motorcycle backfired.

So we know that must be the echo, if you'll pardon the double entendre, that must be the echo of something else. So we're seeing something, but it wouldn't help us very much just to work on the reaction to the loud sound. But there's another possibility, which is, let's suppose we could discover quite easily that the reason that you had this reactivity was that you had, you were in a war 10 years ago, perhaps in Afghanistan, and a bomb went off near you, and you couldn't handle it. And suddenly, it's not like you had an experience. You will become identified with it. And it's no longer true that you remember what happened to you.

You keep living it out over and over and over again, trying to master it. So let me tell you how you can master it in a very simple way. Whenever there's something we can't handle, in that moment, a discomfort is born, which leads to quite an idea, which is that every discomfort in our body is simply a story of something that can't be handled and integrated, whether it's physical because somebody punched you, or because you're remembering something and the way you're remembering it, which is really remembering yourself because some part of you has been split off. In this case, the soldier, he's been split off from himself. He has an independent existence,

you could say, and you've identified with it. So how do we remember? Well, we were saying every sensation is really just the story of something that can't be handled and integrated. And if I was going to give you one thing from today, it would be when you have a pain, before you say, I hate you, and I'm going to do everything to get rid of you, you might want to say, pain, what have you come to share with me? And the way to do that is just to bring all your attention to pain, like it's a living being until it's like you are whatever the pain is, whether it's sick to stomach, whether it's sick to stomach or tight chest or heart beating fast or pressure in head. It's its own being, and it has something to share with you. And interestingly, of course, whenever it is that there's something you're suffering about, so you're having anxiety about speaking in front of crowds or something, if you brought your

attention to what's happening in the body as you're fully allowing that anxiety, you will invariably find a sensation, which is the exact equivalent of the thing that you're suffering about. So now let's look at this man who has this panic attack. And let's say we have him bring all his attention to the sensation that arises when that sound backfire, that backfire happens. And when we do that, he drops all of his attention, all his awareness, all his focus into, let's say, pressure in head. So I would say to him, all right, so when you become pressure in head, you're going to choose to become pressure in head. And as soon as you choose to become it, it doesn't happen automatically. You're no longer identified with it.

You're identified with the one who is choosing to become this other being while simultaneously is sort of a witnessing host or holding whoever this is. So suddenly you're in a different kind of relationship with an aspect of being called pressure and head. And then whatever comes to you is its story. But you won't be identified with it anymore because you've chosen to be it. All you'll identify with is the one who's saying, I'm here mindful of you. I'm aware of you. I'm holding you. So at that point, one of three things will happen. Either you will start to live out the story, but you'll do it by choice, even though you might be like, you know, falling on my floor to make sure the bomb doesn't kill you.

But you know that you had chosen to do this now because you've chosen to be that soldier. Or you might see it like a movie, but then you would know what happened to that soldier who was you 10 years ago. Or you might just know it like you're reading a novel and you're going to be the main character, in this case, in the novel.

But then you'll say, okay, I'm the one who's sort of the reader. I'm not the character in the novel. And as soon as you do that, that is the simplest way to be free. So what I want to invite you to do right now, if you're listening to this and you can do it, is just take a moment. You can even stop this podcast for a moment and just do one of two things. Either find something you're suffering about, whatever it is. You're anxious, you're depressed, or you're suffering about the fact that you have chronic back pain, it doesn't matter what it is,

but whatever it is that you're suffering about, just choose to find the sensation in the body that you discover when you scan your body, when you allow fully whatever you're suffering about. And then just choose to bring all your awareness to it to such degree, you're going to focus on it so much like you're going to become it, like your new name is going to be pain in back or sick to stomach or tight throat. That's your new name. And then we're just going to say, sensation, whatever it is, what have you come to share?

And I guarantee you, if all you did was that, worlds would open up to you. Now, once you've done that, let's say you had fear of speaking in front of crowds. I'm going to give you a little while, so you just, you know, do your thing. Let's say you have fear of speaking in front of crowds. going to give you a little while so you just you know do your thing let's say you're speaking in front of crowds so you did this first part of the exercise and then what you can do is you can do a second part which i will invite you to do also now let yourself fully experience and imagine that you're in front of a crowd in any way that's ever happened once in your life, maybe where it really worked out for you and feel what that feels like in the body. And then just drop into that and become that person for a little while, the opposite.

That might be a good sensation. It might be a warm feeling or a light feeling or a effervescent feeling, but whatever it is, just become that. And try both of those exercises. And then I would deeply appreciate it if you tell me how it goes. So we have now had our maiden voyage. Thank you for being with me. I am deeply appreciative. And again, please email me any questions about this or what touched you about this or what you want to remember about it. Take a few moments because actually the time, the most important time kind of in this podcast is right when it stops, when you sit with yourself and say, what was this like for me? And to really be with yourself. So what are the takeaways from today?

with yourself. So what are the takeaways from today? We talked about what we were going to do in this podcast and why we called it guided self-healing, fearless living. We talked about what the format was going to be. And then we spent a little time talking about the first thing we do with guided self-healing, which is to understand why we suffer and how we can be in a different relationship with our suffering just by choosing to become the sensation and then we'll know that it's the one who's suffering, we just identified with it. And then you will notice that your body changes right away, so you'll know something is different. that your body changes right away.

So you'll know something is different. And then, of course, for a few moments, you can experience and imagine the opposite and feel that. So that's our takeaways for today. I want to so thank you for joining me in this podcast. I'm ecstatically happy about being able to share this with you. And I'm so, so appreciative of the Alliances Network and David Kogan, who invited me to do this. And I feel unbelievable gratitude because really all I wanted to do, if I talk about my passion and my mission and my vision, is to help people

understand themselves and others better from the inside out, to help them be free of suffering, and to help them live a life that truly is in alignment with their sense of aliveness. So we'll continue on from that next time we get together. And I will tell you a few stories. And I will share with you even more about how you can go about doing your own healing. because that's where we're starting. And until then, thank you all so much. And until I talk to you again, goodbye.