Heroes in Business - The Big Picture/The Meaning of it All pt. 1

Episode Date: March 13, 2021

Guided Self Healing Fearless Living: 4 Questions What have you come to share? Where are you beginning? What's Happening? What do you need? You can't do the practice wrong Bad things, good people? Loving not=being attached 2 results  

I'm Dr. Andrew Hahn, and this is the third episode of our podcast, Guided Self-Healing, Fearless Living. And this episode is about the big picture, or the meaning of it all. So thank you for being here. And again, if you want to reach us, our website is lifecenteredtherapy.com. And my email address is ahahn, so it's A-H-A-H-N at lifecenteredtherapy.com. And if you want to know about our trainings, go to go.readyforamerical.net forward slash free dash training. And if you wanted to work with any of us, if you go to our website, lifecenteredtherapy.com and go to the pulldown menu about LCT, you will see a subsection called Certified Practitioners, and virtually all of us do our work remotely, so you can work with any of us.

So again, today we're going to have our third episode, which I've tentatively called the big picture, or the meaning of it all. So let's review a little bit where we started and we'll keep building on where we started. So if you recall, if you listen to our first two episodes, we asked the question, why do people suffer? Or why do they come for healing? And basically what we said is people suffer for only one reason, which is that they're traumatized. And my definition of trauma is simply anything that you can't handle, anything that you can or taken in stride so that you remember something that has been dismembered in a sense. So that's why people go for healing, in my opinion. And how it works is actually fairly easy to describe, although we can take lifetimes to do, as I'm a prime example of, because I've been

doing it forever, and it still feels like I'm climbing the mountain. But how it works is simply this. When there's something that can't be handled, in that moment, a sensation is born. A pain, a queasiness, a numbness, a pain, a queasiness, a numbness, an empty feeling, a heavy feeling. So what I would say then is that sensation is just like you. It was born in a moment. It has a life of its own and it's available to us. So you could say we're're part of a community, which is made up of traumatized beings, and non traumatized beings, I'd say we're all a big community. And that's what we call lifetimes could call ancestors, it could be called every moment of this lifetime. And ultimately,

we're a community that's made up of everything, but some of them are close to us than others. everything, but some of them are close to us than others. So what I want to say is when you're traumatized, the sensation is born. And what you don't realize is you believe that you've become the sensation. So you begin to act it out over and over and over again, unconsciously. And I gave you the example of someone who was in my office and they have a motorcycle backfires and they have a panic attack. Why? Well, let's say 10 years ago, they're in a war

and a bomb goes off and they can't take that in stride. So they are now, in that moment, the sensation is born, as I said, and they unconsciously identify with that sensation and they keep living it out over and over and over again. And what is the point of all of this? You could say it's to be able to master it. It's why people come to therapy. It just takes longer.

So eventually it's like Groundhog's Day. If you hear that sound going off enough times, eventually you will remember. You will remember, you will remember that which you have split off from yourself and are living out without awareness. In other words, having a panic attack, which you may not even know why it was there. And because that's what life is about, is about evolving. So that ultimately, we're free. And ultimately, when we're truly free, nothing. We have no reactivity to anything, which doesn't mean we don't have any feelings about it or pain about it, but we don't have reactivity. It means that in that sense, we have no judgmentalism.

that sense, we have no judgmentalism. We have no comparisons of ourselves with others. We have no compulsive need to understand why is this happening to me. We're just free to say, I can just be with whatever is. And when we do that, and we're doing healing work, one of two things happens. whatever is. And when we do that, and we're doing healing work, one of two things happens. Either the symptom that you don't like, like in this case, the panic attack just goes away, or your relationship to it changes to such a degree that you're no longer reactive. It no longer creates anxiety or judgment or any kind of reactivity. It's just what is. And I never know which one it's going to be because like, let's suppose someone came in and said, you know, Andy, what I really want to do

is never in this world die. Well, I certainly couldn't guarantee them that they would never die. But I might be able to say if we work long enough, which may take more than one lifetime, but if we work long enough at some point or other than one lifetime, but if we work long enough at some point or other, you may not have any anxiety about dying. It would just be something you might be sad about because you might miss people or whatever it is, but you would be free. You wouldn't feel

forsaken. It would feel like, I understand. It's just part of life. Death is part of life. part of life. Death is part of life. So how do we do this again? The way to do this is to choose to become the sensation that you've been unconsciously and automatically living out over and over and over again. And in fact, almost acts like a magnet. So it brings more and more examples of the thing that you, or more and more echoes of it, you could say, of the thing you couldn't handle in the first place so uh you choose to become the sensation and at that point you are choose by choosing to become the sensation you're choosing to become the one who's choosing to become the sensation which means you now identify with a holding witness who says, I'm with you, whoever you are. And then the sensation just gets to share its story. And that's the deal. Because as soon as that happens, you say, I

remember being that soldier, but I'm no longer unconsciously living it out. And in fact, the very thing that you're suffering about, which on a personal level is horrific, is actually on a whole other level, the best clue you could have to the thing that you're trying to remember, okay? And then I invited you to do an exercise, which was to say, let's find any discomfort in the body and just ask it a question before we take a pill or say, I hate you, or whatever we would do. So we would just say, find the sensation, choose to bring all our awareness to it to such a degree that it's like we've become it from the inside out. And then we just ask it a question, which we're going to answer because we're going to be listening to ourselves. And we're just going to say, what have you come to share? And then we just hear its story. And then I invited you to do

something else, which is to say, now that you've experienced that, so you're no longer blocked, feel in your body what it would be like to have the exact opposite experience and drop into that and let it share whatever it has come to share. Today, I would add to those questions for you. So if you do the exercise again, I would add two more questions. Or even three more questions. So, and the other thing, of course, before I tell you that is, if there's something you're suffering about, all you do is find the thing you're suffering about that you're reactive to and scan your body and notice any sensations that come up when you are scanning your body as you are fully allowing whatever is you're reactive to.

And then when you'll find the sensation and then you do the exact same thing and you'll say, if we took my person in my office, we would say, sick to stomach feeling, what have you come to share about panic attacks? Where are you beginning? So because we want to get the origin, because everything after the origin is just an echo. Where are you beginning and what's happening? which we'll have to deal with at another time is, do you need any kind of intervention or practice other than just sharing your story while I am holding you and hosting you or witnessing you? Okay, so that's it. So, and then I told you about a reader who wrote to me and she wrote back a second time. This reader, his name is Megan.

And she said she had done the experiment and she had gone into terror and not wanting to be out of control. She didn't want to experience anything bad. So she listened to the second podcast and she said, I found myself tearing up while I was listening. Like this was a moment of great importance. If I could just listen and absorb it all. So I tried doing it again. And this time I had a different result. When I focused on the sensation, I just heard phrases and saw words in my mind's eye,

When I focused on the sensation, I just heard phrases and saw words in my mind's eye. Lots of small messages. Not stories, but sentences like, it's okay to die alone. Because if you remember, it was a tear around dying. It's okay to be alone. Love doesn't require achievement. And then she says, and the tightness in my chest did dissolve, and it hasn't returned yet, but I feel like I'm missing something. I didn't see a movie-like scene or a story.

Do you think I did it right? Now, of course, what I would then say to that person is, let's do a balance on my fear that I didn't do it right, because, of course, everything is part of the process, but in this case, I'm going to answer the question as content, which is to say, of course, you did it right. There is no doing it wrong. And stories come in three flavors. So one way it comes is visually, at which point you will see something. You will see whatever happened to you. You will see yourself dying. You will, or you'll see the other character, if you're not you in the story dying. So you might see something, right? Or as this woman says, you might hear something. And hearing something would be just, I have a sense of what the lesson is here, like, you don't have to die alone. Or you might do it kinesthetically, at which point you'll act it out.

So an example of that was when I, I don't think I've told you this story because I never remember, but I was doing a session in front of a lot of master kinesiologists. And when I was doing kinesiology on this woman, I was doing muscle testing, which I'm going to talk to you about in a future episode. She said, you're pushing me too hard. You're trying to knock me over. Now, I knew I wasn't doing that. Usually I would ask, but there are certain things you can know about muscle testing.

One of which is if you're really doing something too hard, people's arms begin to shake or whatever, even if you don't know what I'm talking about. But she kept doing that for 15 minutes until finally she said, oh my goodness, I am on a gangplank and somebody is, you know, pushing me and they're trying to knock me into the water and I don't want to fall in. And so she found out the story and she'd been living it out. The next thing to say is stories come in two varieties. One is narratives and one is just experiences or deeply held beliefs so in the story Megan tells us she's got a story but it's just coming out as the beliefs that have been her learning at the end of the story so to put it differently, everything was great. There is no way to do it wrong. And but if you want more narratives, you have to ask the questions also,

not just what have you come to share, but where are you beginning and what's happening. Then also a reader had read something I wrote. And this is like a part of the next part of what I want to talk to you guys about. I've written someplace, we long for unity. We long for unity. The divine longs for love. And then we get this question also from a listener. I have so many questions about this line. There's so much that feels like it needs explanation.

My question circles around the whole thing of why do bad things happen to good people? If the divine longs for love, why do bad things happen to good people? How could a loving divine allow great suffering isn't that suffering counter to the greatest expressions of love there are whole books written about this stuff but i've never felt satisfied with the answers i found because just saying that uh you can get to a place where the thing you're suffering about won't bother you anymore requires explaining how to get to that place and also explaining how a loving divine could or would choose that path at the ultimate goal of love and this was my response um when that was written and what i said

is take this as for what it's worth because uh i don't know so but but it's very hard, of course, to take the perspective of the divine. But I said, perhaps in the perspective of the divine, there is no such thing as bad or good or any similar kinds of judgments. There is only love. And it's not clear that a loving divine allows great suffering. I guess it depends on your sense about free will. Perhaps it is so that you can have anything you want, but you cannot have everything you want. And just remember that loving intrinsically puts us in harm's way, because of course, when we love, we're more susceptible to pain.

So perhaps it comes down to where you side in the following statement. Is it better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all? And then we go on and we say, and I asked you to look at this. When I say free will, this is actually important. I want to expand on that for a second. When I say free will, it's like we have choices. Now, I think we ultimately have one choice, which is, do we go along in a state of obliviousness, or do we go along in a state of awareness? That's our one choice. that's our one choice so um but what i said suppose your child needs to have a horrendous shot in order to survive and you hold your child down while he's given the shot and he says i hate you so we ask which would be the greater love to hold him down to have something have him screaming

that he hates you or not holding him down and perhaps having him get very sick or even die. But of course, in the second situation, he doesn't scream at you and he doesn't say, he doesn't say, I hate you or you're abusing me or whatever it is. So you have to decide which is the greater love. And of course, as the parent, you can't justify yourself you can't defend yourself you can't say you'll understand it later all you can say is i really understand it's understandable that you would hate me and feel like i'm abusing you right now because your child may understand nothing and our job is to say i will be with you and you don't have to take care of my needs. I take care of your needs. And perhaps that is how it is with the divine, because certainly we can sometimes say we hate the divine or we deny the divine, but maybe there's a greater wisdom. But in either case,

all you have to do, which is of course an unbelievably difficult thing to do, have to do, which is of course an unbelievably difficult thing to do, is to be with your powerlessness that you know what may happen and there's nothing you can do about it. And perhaps the deepest lesson about love sometimes is to say, I can be with you with whatever's happening, but the one thing I can't do is live your life for you. And I may see that you're going to do something that I believe with all my heart will end you up in a very bad place. And perhaps my job is just to be there and support you. And of course, I'm talking about older children now, not children, because when you have a younger child, you just have responsibility and accountability. You have

to do everything for them, but sometimes you have to let them go, which we're going to talk about also later. And there is nothing you can do. And perhaps that is how it is for the divine, when the divine allows free will also, but I truly don't know. The last thing I said to her is, I think perhaps that it may be that there's a collapsing here of loving and being attached to outcome. Because when we're attached to outcome and we say it's unacceptable unless it's the way I want it to be. That's not really loving. It just is a, it feels like love. But loving is to be able to say, I can just be with you no matter what. Anyway, this is certainly heavy stuff. And it's very painful when you let it touch your heart. So I guess the next question is, which is preferable? To feel, which means to feel everything or to be numb which means to

feel nothing or to have pseudo feelings and this of course is not a rhetorical question and of course at that point this reader says there's another part of the fear that powerlessness that i can't really protect my kids and myself or my husband and it's true all you can do is love them it just means i will be with you and she says i'm terrified of the outcome of being bad that's exactly it. So I think I'm going to make this into two parts. This feels like a good place to stop for now. And next time we'll go on with the big picture part two.

And I can't wait to share it with you. But until then, again, my name is Andy Han. And my website is lifecenteredtherapy.com. Ahan at lifecenteredtherapy.com. Please write. I love your reflections and questions. And until I see you again, goodbye.