Know Thyself - E34 - Dr. Gabor Maté: Finding Our TRUE Selves in a Crazy World

Episode Date: February 21, 2023

In our society when rates of mental and physical illness are on the rise, despite advanced modern medicine, we must look within to ask where we are going wrong. Dr. Gabor Maté is back on The Know Thyself Podcast today, for a deep dive into his analysis of our toxic culture, and how we can heal by finding our true, authentic selves. He explains how to transcend the hypnotic passivity that we have fallen into, and begin to take our health (mental and physical) into our own hands. He explains generational trauma, ignorance in the medical system, and how the coping mechanisms we develop as children lead to detrimental subconscious patterns. He also explains overcoming addiction, emotional awareness, and whether he believes there is a 'divine design' in all our wounding.     ___________ Timecodes: 0:00 Intro 2:13 The Myth of Normal in a Toxic Culture  10:53 Hypnotic Passivity  15:41 Personal Responsibility & Social Media  19:29 Generational Trauma  29:21 Medical System: Ignorance vs Evil 32:50 Childhood Trauma & Coping Mechanisms 41:10 Self Harm  43:45 What Defines Addiction  48:14 Non Attachment vs Emotional Awareness  51:09 Healthy Anger  55:47 Before the Body Says No 1:05:08 Coming Back to Authentic Self  1:06:58 Sensitivity and Creativity  1:11:52 Divine Design in our Wounding 1:18:19 Strength in Vulnerability 1:23:29 Wisdom from Gabor  1:28:57 Conclusion ___________   Dr. Gabor Maté   A renowned speaker, and bestselling author, Dr. Gabor Maté is highly sought after for his expertise on a range of topics including addiction, stress and childhood development. Rather than offering quick-fix solutions to these complex issues, Dr. Maté weaves together scientific research, case histories, and his own insights and experience to present a broad perspective that enlightens and empowers people to promote their own healing and that of those around them.   After 20 years of family practice and palliative care experience, Dr. Maté worked for over a decade in Vancouver’s Downtown East Side with patients challenged by drug addiction and mental illness. The bestselling author of four books published in over thirty languages, Gabor is an internationally renowned speaker highly sought after for his expertise on addiction, trauma, childhood development, and the relationship of stress and illness. His book on addiction received the Hubert Evans Prize for literary non-fiction. For his groundbreaking medical work and writing he has been awarded the Order of Canada, his country’s highest civilian distinction, and the Civic Merit Award from his hometown, Vancouver. His books include In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters With Addiction; When the Body Says No; The Cost of Hidden Stress; Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder; (with Dr. Gordon Neufeld) Hold on to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers; and his most recent book, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness & Healing in a Toxic Culture. Gabor is also co-developer of a therapeutic approach, Compassionate Inquiry, now studied by hundreds of therapists, physicians, counselors, and others internationally.    Website: https://drgabormate.com Dr. Maté's Latest Book, The Myth of Normal: https://drgabormate.com/book/the-myth-of-normal/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gabormatemd/   Watch Dr. Maté's Previous Appearance on the Know Thyself Podcast:  https://youtu.be/gPU0JcjybkY   ___________   Know Thyself Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/knowthyself/ Website: https://www.knowthyself.one Clips Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJ4wglCWTJeWQC0exBalgKg   Listen to all episodes on Audio:  Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4FSiemtvZrWesGtO2MqTZ4?si=d389c8dee8fa4026 Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/know-thyself/id1633725927     André Duqum Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/andreduqum/   Meraki Media https://merakimedia.com https://www.instagram.com/merakimedia/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The normality in our society is that people are disconnected from who they are. The consumer culture and the culture of people influencing each other, it's art-piled of a culture of disconnection. The reason so many people are suffering physical and mental illness, it all comes from this disconnection from our nature. These so-called mentally ill behaviors, they all serve a function, dealing with the trauma that has not been addressed. Are we aware?

Are we conscious? Are we making deliberate choices? Or are we driven by unconscious pain? Which kind of pain would you rather be? The pain of self-suppression or the pain of the pain of, losing some attachments. Do you see a divine design within our wounding? There's something about our nature. There's a kind of intelligence in it that wants us to be authentic to ourselves. People need freedom. Freedom politically, freedom economically, freedom socially, freedom from their unconscious

emotions so they can be themselves. And that's, I think, the essential endeavor of all the great work that's been in the world is the desire for freedom. Hello, beautiful humans. Welcome back to the Know Thyself podcast where every single week we get the honor and privilege. to sit down with a brilliant mind and open heart to see how we can learn more about ourselves and the world around us. Today is part two of an incredible conversation and dialogue that is very needed right now on the planet. My guest today is Dr. Gabor Mate. As you may know, he is an expert on a range of topics and has been speaking in writing books for many years on stress, addiction, childhood development, the implications of trauma on culture.

and he's written multiple bestselling books, such as in the realm of hungry ghosts, when the body says no, scattered minds, just to name a few. And his new book, The Myth of Normal, which I absolutely adore and is available now, that you can all go check out in the link below in the description, is bringing up a very timely subject for our species as a humanity and where we are and how we got to the point where we are now, how disconnected we've become with nature. So again, last night we had a live community kind of podcast and the conversation was really beautiful.

Everyone was so touched. Thank you for coming in the studio to do a follow up. It's great to be back again. Yeah, so good. So I thought we just start because I really love this quote in the beginning of the book, which is from Eric Fromm. And it says, the fact that millions of people share the same vices does not make these vices virtues. The fact that they share so many errors does not make the errors to be truths. And the fact that millions of people share the same forms of mental pathology does not make these people sane.

I think it's a beautiful way to open up our dialogue today because, and if you would share your overview of how unnatural our normalizes society has become. The quote is from Eric Fromm, who was a great psychologist in the first, half of the 20th century, originally from Germany and settled the United States, he wrote a book around the mid-century called The Sane Society, which already he was pointing out, this is three-quarters of a century, oh no, he was already pointing out that in the most advanced societies, there's a greater preponderance of mental illness. And so when you said in your introduction, Andre, that I wrote this book about our disconnection from nature. It's primarily about a disconnection from our own nature as human beings and the normality in our society is

that people are disconnected from who they are and the consumer culture and the culture of fame and the culture of momentary attention and the culture of people influencing each other in engaging in totally meaningless activities that's auto departure it's always part of a culture of disconnection. And so that the reason so many people are suffering physical and mental illness, I mean, 70% of American adults are taking at least one medication. 70%. So on the one hand, we have this richest society in the east of the world. On the other hand, you have a large percentage of the population who have had health issues of mind or body or both. It all comes from this disconnection from our nature. And so that's the biggest normality, quote,

code of our culture. And so when Fromm says that just because a whole lot of people buying into something, that doesn't make it normal or sane, basically they have taken that and updated it to our present time. But I'm riffing on the themes that he raised all those years ago. Yeah. And you in this book so eloquently dive into all the different ways in which toxicity has become normalized in the far-reaching corners of our culture. And you also share, I love that, you know, in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, individual. are so conditioned that they practically can't help behaving as they ought to behave. And you give these character traits that I think are really beautiful that I'll kind of just

briefly mention here because it's very descriptive of the place that we've gotten to individually and collectively. So you give three. The first character trait is separation from self. And I'll just read a quote here, in an image mad culture that sustains itself in large part by making people feel inadequate about themselves or more insidiously capitalizing on these pre-existing feelings, the media holds out ideals of physical perfection against which young and old measure themselves

in which lead people to be ashamed of their very bodies. And that is descriptive to the separation from self the character trait number one. The second one is the character trait of consumption hunger. and just briefly I love this part here you say what the advertisers need to know is not what is right about the product

but what is wrong about the buyer and the third is hypnotic passivity and it's this hypnotic state that we've I believe gotten to in a culture and you share it is we who are made in the image of our distorted, disordered, denatured world the better

keep it running even as it runs us into the ground. So you give beautiful descriptions as to how we've taken on these character traits, but also how culture, society, social media, the news advertisers feed on this. Yeah. So right from we began coding, talked about the social character. And a social character is the personality traits that a society would seek to inculcate and its members in order to keep itself going. I again I've sort of updated that now in hoaxies a very new world

people are literally gestated in a test tube and they're biochemically and environmentally trained and developed to fulfill certain roles and to be happy with those roles no we're not gestated in test tubes that we're not mechanically programmed like that

but it's but but almost like we were because as Hoxley points out in the brain new world the thing is to want to do

what society expect you to do so that what we end up wanting to do has got nothing with our own particular needs or true nature

it has to do with what the society expects of us so these three traits so we're not programmed like in Brave New World but

Hoxley wrote that Brave New World not as some kind of a fantasy he wrote it because this is the way he saw society going. And it's only become more acute

since he wrote that book in the 30s, I think. And since Eric Frum wrote and spoke in the mid-20th century. So these character traits of disconnection from ourselves,

this society needs us to be disconnected from ourselves. Otherwise, we wouldn't elect the politicians that we elect. If we're connected to our gut feelings, there's a very interesting story about Ronald Reagan. Oliver Sacks, who was a British American neurologist

and a writer. He wrote The Manomist took his wife for a hat and other very famous books. And he worked with neurologically challenged patients. And he described as an experience that he witnessed on a ward where there were patients who were aphasiac. That means

they had a stroke, they lost their capacity for processing language. They're called aphasisics. these therapeutic patients as a group are watching Ronald Reagan, the president on television, and most of them are laughing, and some of them are outraged. And Sax asks himself,

is it that they don't understand Reagan, or is that they understand him all too well? And what it was is these people could not be mesmerized by the words, because they didn't understand the words, they're reading his body language. and they read that he was a complete phony. Why was Reagan a phony? Because not that he intended to be,

but because he was a traumatized child. His father was a heavy alcoholic, and Reagan developed this teflon, non-involved, emotionally distant, inauthentic persona as a way of surviving his childhood. In this insane world, that above it, reassuring presence was seen as a political strength

and he's aphasiac who didn't buy into the words. They just saw the real person. They didn't buy it for a minute. So what I'm saying is that if we were connected to God feelings, there's a lot of things we wouldn't be choosing. A lot of things we wouldn't buy that we don't need. A lot of people we wouldn't follow who are actually not authentic themselves. So the big way that this society survives is by people disconnected from the gut feelings.

So that's what I mean by as an essential part of our social character is to be disconnected from ourselves and the society wants us to be disconnected. Right. Because it keeps the machine going. It's very much so. And the way you describe it, it's almost like, I think of the Matrix less like a movie

and more like a documentary showing exactly how plugged into the system we are into the Matrix. And it's like a very real thing. there's this hypnotic rhythm in which people don't even realize they're in, much like the Matrix, that feed into the system that supports people at the top, people, the oligarchy of America that it has become. And so is there anything you want to speak to just like how the mass hypnosis continues to propagate and how we can start to dismantle that?

Well, interesting you mentioned the Matrix because I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure that I've heard the story that the people that wrote to the Matrix did so after they took part in a self-awareness program, which I won't mention, but they did, you know, so that they could see all of a sudden the gap between how they lived and the reality, you know. Well, look, massive moses. Let's take something simple. Let's take America's wars. Since the 1970s, America has been involved in several wars. Each time there's a war, sooner or later it transpires that it was based on a pack of lies.

And this is true in American history. The Mexican-American war was based on abacalized. The Spanish-American War was based on abacalized. The Vietnam War. All these things were documented. There's not even controversially. But at the time, everybody bought into it. Now, anybody who'd done the research at the time would have known right away that they're being fed lies.

And despite the fact that, or say the lie about the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, which never existed, anybody with eyes in their heads knew that that was a manipulation and it wasn't true, the result was that thousands of Americans and half a million Iraqis died. despite the fact that each time the lies are exposed when the next war comes along, everybody still goes along with it. That's a mass hypnosis.

It's like there's all this history. And if you take the average American ask them to string together two intelligent sentences about the history of Afghanistan, they couldn't tell you anything. The Ukraine war right now.

Without going to the apothex of it, I actually have a German to give you two sentences on the history of Ukraine, two intelligent consecutive sentences on history of Ukraine. That didn't start last year. But so going back in their history, they couldn't. And yet, they get swept along every time into the narrative. And I'm only talking about these wars. I could talk about any number of political issues. You know, it takes a kind of a passivity.

Or take an issue that surely affects us all, climate change. This is, we're talking today, this is January the 16th, I think. Today there's another article about Greenland, how about how the ice mass of Greenland is melting at a faster rate than it has for over a millennium. Now, we all see it happening. but we're all totally passive in the face of it. It takes the hypnotic state of passivity.

I mean, we're actually seeing the earth changing because of our own activities. Nobody denies that except people in utter emotional denial states or unless you work for an oil company where it's your job to deny it. But nobody else can ignore what's going on. But you and I, we live our lives as if it wasn't happening. Well, that's the state of hypnotic passivity. And so this society, of course, tries on that, because we get to be led into foreign policy adventures or economic policies that turn it to be ultimately harmful.

But we were, I don't even say willing participants, but we're passive participants. And I would go on. But there's a kind of passivity about us. And it's that passivity that allows advertisers to. beam programs into our homes and into our machines that addict our infants. Our infants are getting addicted to technology. You can sheet on brain scans. You can see it in their behavior.

Would you allow drug dealers into your house to inject heroin into your infants? But we're allowing it. So that takes a tremendous mode of passivity. Yeah, it's like a mass psychosis that has become so normalized and just accepted as just the status quo, just carrying on his business as usual. And there's a part of my time, like, you know, six, seven years ago when I got very much so into seeing this and waking up to this. And I think it's important to become aware of what's happening on a global scale, but then also reclaiming the personal responsibility to see where am I still asleep in my own

life, right? Absolutely. And bringing that back home within ourselves, because that's ultimately the only thing we have control over. So is there anything you want to speak to and to inviting people just to try, before trying to wake up the world and liberate the world, we got to start where our feet are. Well, sure. And I was speaking just a few days ago with this wonderful Buddhist meditation teacher, Tara Brahe, and she talks about the trance that we're all in. So, you know, the trance is when we're not aware that we're there, that we're not aware of ourselves. You know, we're just sort of automatic carrying on with something and, you know, There I am at my hotel room last night, you know,

toggling from one YouTube video to another. And I was sending with, I'm in a trance. What am I doing? Not doing anything useful. I'm not even doing anything that entertaining. I'm just an automatic pilot. So you're totally right. And we all find ourselves in this trance much of the time.

Lacking aware of our bodies and our minds and what our life intentions are. I mean, I tell you, I hate the idea of being on my death bed and looking at it. I'm like, what did I do with all that time? You know? Yeah. Even now, you know? Yeah. So, yeah.

So that waking up and not taking responsibility is a daily task. Again, this culture tends to lull us. It's designed to lull us to sleep all the time. With Thomas Merton, who is a Catholic monk. also an animistic and he also lived in mid 20th century and in his um um um autobiography called the seven story mountain he talks about that his whole society designed to allow us to sleep with our products and our hollywood films and everything else to to keep us in a state of um passivity yeah controlled yeah yeah so and and of course wittingly or unwittingly we

get to be willing participants in this mass hypnosis. Yeah. And it doesn't make it easier that, for example, with social media, that algorithms are literally meant to keep us as engaged with the least amount of effort that we can just sit there and they'll even do the scrolling for us now. We just have to stare at the screen and keep getting dopamine. Yeah, well, and those devices are designed with addictive. blandishments in mind.

They're designed to keep a company called dopamine lab which helps design programs for cell phones for God. Dopamine is a chemical that we need for life but when we don't generate it through meaningful activity

we get hooked into false activities that spike our dopamine for us and it's a very deliberate attempt. They call it neural marketing. They're actually marketing stuff to get our nervous system worked, you know, and we participate in it.

Yeah, I want to touch on how oftentimes the society around us will capitalize, before our minds make the environment, the environment makes us, right? And who we are as individuals when we come into the world, you know, we are these, some might say we're connected to our true nature in this blank state.

But I actually want to touch on and ask you about intergenerational trauma because of course, we have the traumas that we've occurred in this lifetime, but also as a species, as a culture, as a people, African Americans, Middle Easterns, we all have our own individuation of trauma that is within our bloodline. And how do you see that stored in the unconscious? Because let's say I'm in my 20s and 30s and I have, you know, I have, I have some sort of repression of emotion or something that I can't necessarily point to an event that happened in my life. And maybe it didn't happen in this life.

But how do you see it can't, is everything just coming from this life or is it essentially the genes in how they impressed upon us? Well, some people believe in past lives even. You know, my mind has never been able to go there. I usually find it sufficient to look at a person's life in this. temporal state and find enough reasons for why they are the way they are. That doesn't mean that past generations don't come into it. But what I am saying is that the effect of past generations is past generations is passed on to us in this lifetime.

So in Canada, there's a terrible history of our native people being horribly abused by the state. Their children were abducted for 100 years and sent to the terrible residential schools where they were sexually emotionally and physically abused and many of them died at the hands of the church and the state.

It so happens that our indigenous Canadians also make up large percentage of our prison population, they have much higher rates of addiction, suicide, mental health issues, physical illnesses that they never used to have before colonization. And unfortunately

and where they used to parent in a much healthier way than so-called advanced society's parent. They really knew about a parent. Old kids, support them, give them an environment that reared them to be confident, self-assured, socially connected human beings. They knew how to do it. They were much closer to our nature. That's been largely extirpated as a result.

now they abuse their kids. So each generation then passes on its trauma to the next. So in a lot of native communities, it's almost impossible to find young girls by the time that teenagers who had not been sexually abused. Now, that's the impact of the past, but it's being exerted in this particular lifetime.

Then you have what's called epigenetic transmission, which means that the way the genes function if one generation is traumatized, that alters not the gene structure or the genetic functioning. And that genetic functioning can be passed onto future generations. That's a new science. I don't think we fully know yet how strong those epigenetic effects are. It's an emerging field. It means a very interesting research.

But in general, and certainly it's already true that when a mother carries an infant, the stresses and traumas that she is burdened with can affect the developing brain and personality of the child already in the womb already. So yes, the experience, you know, as a Jew, I can tell you that the traumas of previous generation certainly have an impact on, you know, as a part Palestinian, you know, the same thing.

Yeah. And in fact, there's been an unfortunate set of circumstances that have, in my view, imposed the trauma of women people onto another people. We're here today in loving embrace. Yeah. So the past trauma does

happen and Eckhart Toley, the spiritually teacher talks about the pain body, which is really our accumulated traumas that affect us. And he talks about the pain body can exist on the social and historical level as well. So women, you know, because of the

persecution of women, the witch hunts, the oppression of women, the rape and so on. women carry that pain body. And certain people's carry a heavier pain body than other people's. So yeah, it's all multi-generational. It's all historical. And I think that the effects are always exerted in this particular lifetime.

Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. I think in the middle part of the book, you give so many examples of how the trauma that we store within us lead to the manifestations of illness. For example, racism leading to asthma or even within culturally, how African Americans deal with hypertension more frequently

and how sometimes we just look at the diagnosis of whatever the disease is and think that that's it. But there's all these psychosomatic emotional elements that we just are not aware of that are often the real reason for why we have the manifestation of a disease or a diagnosis. So is there anything you want to speak to there? Because I thought it was so fascinating

in all the examples from gender to race to the different things that we hold within us that create the illness? Sure. So this is where my profession, the medical profession, is so remiss in its duties. Because we have the science now. I mean, we have the science elegantly delineated,

showing the unity of mind and body, showing how emotions affect physiology. Which also means that our relationships, relationships affect physiology because our relationships program or emotions. So when there's a study that shows that parents with kids are, parents are very stressed, the kids are more likely to have asthma. It's because the stresses of the parents affect the physiology of the child. That's been known for decades.

It's not even controversial. And yet, you go to the average physician with asthma, they'll never talk to you about stress. that just give you inhalers, which is necessary, but not sufficient to deal with the issue. Same way, there's been a study that showed that the more experiences of racism, a black American woman heads to endure the greater risk for asthma. The physiology is very simple. I'm not going to go into it here, but it's very simple. It's very straightforward, not even controversial.

And how do we treat asthma, by the way? You know how we treat it? We give people stress hormones. We give adrenaline and cortisol. in a form of injections or inhalers, should we maybe ask ourselves, gosh, we're treating it with stress hormones, does stress as something to do with it maybe?

As a matter of fact, if one asks oneself, which medications are used most commonly across the board? If you come in with inflammation of the intestines, as in colitis, or the joints as in rheumatoiditis, or the skin as in eczema or psoriasis, or the nervous system as in multiple sclerosis,

or the lungs, what to give people. We give people steroids. What are steroids? They're the stress hormones that are adrenal gland manufacturers. Maybe we should see that there's a connection between stress and all these conditions. And there is.

So, great pioneers of medicine, who I won't name now, but they're in the book, in the 19th century, already identified that multiple sclerosis, remote arthritis, and breast cancer, were related to stress. They had no science then. They were just giants of medicine with tremendous insight. Since then, there's been 100 years of research

showing the relationship between, say, stress, trauma, and rheumatolythritis. And there's women, by the way, who develop 70, 80% of autoimmune diseases. Nobody understands why. Well, they just happen to be the more stress-absorbitrifice. of their whole families and of their men as well. That's why they have more stress-related conditions such as rheumatoiditis, much more. It's also simple, it's also straightforward and it's also scientific. To go back to black Americans in hypertension, you know, there's this,

they have a high risk, black American men have high risk of high blood pressure, hypertension is called. Their genetic relatives in Africa don't. It's not genetic. So what is it? well, let's do a simple linguistic exercise. Take the word hypertension and split it. Hypertension.

Hypertension. Oh, too much tension. Black American kids already have high health blood pressure than white kids. And why? Because of the stress of racism. And just to conclude this, a wonderful American physician called George Engold back in 1972

called for what he termed a biocococcal social view of medicine which is to recognize that a biology is inseparable from our psychology which is inseparable

from our social relationships we are biocococosocial creatures and all those influences determine our health or our illness once you see it it's like obvious right yeah

do you feel like the medical professionals is just a problem of ignorance or is it really malevolent intent from higher-up corporations that, I mean, obviously profit from the ongoing cycles of not creating cures but keeping customers? Well, it is true that pharmaceutical companies want to create products that people will have to take for a long time.

So they're not particularly interested in cures. But they don't even have that vision. But what makes the medical, you know, and, you know, and, you know, and, you know, You know, and there's lots of examples of chicanery in the pharmaceutical industry where drugs are promoted as much more effective than they really are, or the side effects that are known are kind of denied or diminished, you know. So they're not above. There's any profit-making entity. Their bottom line is profit. Ethics is not high on the list.

They're not unique in that, you know, airline industry, the auto-making industry, the fossil fuel industry. the food industry, the entertainment industry, ethics isn't, you know, corporate ethics is kind of like an oxymoron, like military intelligence, you know, like the two don't go together. Like you say in the bug, you're not, it's not like they're trying to kill people, they're just trying to make money, and if they kill people, it's just like a blood-by-bye-bye. Yeah, they're not trying to kill you, they just don't care if you die. They'll sell you junk foods, knowing how harmful they are.

They're not trying to kill you, they're just trying to make money, but they don't care if you die. die. I don't care. No. But what makes the medical profession so susceptible to that kind of pressure? That's not the fault of the phomercule companies. That has to do with both the ignorance and the arrogance of the medical profession. The ignorance comes in not looking at the science that I've been referring to. Not looking at the studies linking multiple sclerosis and stress and trauma. Plenty of them. Not looking at the physiology of how trauma inflames the nervous system, not looking at the physiology of how people traumatized in childhood carry higher markers inflammatory chemicals in their bloodstream.

It's still there. Not looking at how trauma and stress in childhood affects the functioning of one's chromosomes. I mean, the science is there. So there's any kind of ignorance there. The arrogance is in assuming that. that doctors don't think they know everything, but the arrogance comes into thinking that what they don't know is not worth knowing.

So wisdom of indigenous people, for example, which has shown the mind-body unity, forever, not shown it, recognize it. Modern science has shown it. Indigenous wisdom has always maintained it. So what I'm saying to you about the biocaco, social nature of human beings and illness, that's not news to any indigenous healer.

our arrogance is in dismissing the wisdom of other people's and of human tradition you know i mean our science is amazing nobody can deny its achievements um nobody can i mean it's miraculous what modern medicine can do it's also very limited and the arrogance is in not recognizing the limitations the degree in which we experience joy and suffering in our life oftentimes comes and like depending upon the constitution of our personality. You said that if a parent doesn't know how to hold a child, a child will develop a mind to hold itself, right? Yeah.

Oh, that came from a therapist. Great. And so the minds that we develop to hold ourselves become the color-tinted glasses in which we view the world. And like we spoke to earlier with the reference the medical industry, it's like if we see a problem or we see a leaf on a tree that is turned brown or fruit that isn't, it's like the solution oftentimes is to paint over the fruit with the color red paint instead of treating the root and giving the nutrients to the soil.

Likewise, as an individual within our own nature, if we have come to this withered, crippled place within our own psyche, you know, because of the personality that we've developed, I just would love for you to share how we can one gain awareness on what the personality is and then how inextricably connected it is to the amount of suffering and joy that we have yeah so we talk about for example a winning personality what is the personality winning it's winning approval and admiration of others why does somebody is to win that why is somebody compelled to win that because they didn't have the acceptance and the admiration just for who they are in their early childhood.

So they developed as a winning personality until they get depressed because they weren't being their true self. Because people who are very nice, very nice. I worry about the very nice people because that niceness is very often a personality trait in which they actually repressed their healthy aggression,

their healthy capacity to set boundaries and to express healthy anger when somebody's transgressing. And they take on the needs of others. So everybody thinks that they're so nice. And when they go to their funeral, how nice they were. And that niceness is what killed them

because that niceness reflected a repression of their healthy anger. You know? So the person is not who we are. And the problem is, and this is of course spiritual teacher teaching

that goes way back to ancient India at least, that the personality that we develop is not actually the essential ourselves. So modern psychology has beautifully studied and

depicted how the personality develops. And the personality develops an interaction with the environment. And basically kids will develop traits that will help them fit in with the environment. If the environment doesn't accept them for they actually are, then we develop these personality traits that are designed to make it acceptable. So I'll be charming, I'll be winning personality, I'll be very nice, or I'll be very consumed by being attractive

so I can attract attention. To me, this very sad phenomenon of people as they age, desperately trying to look younger, because they're so deadened and fight with their attractive. attractiveness, who am I if I'm not being attractive? But that's the function of the childhood programming reinforced by cultural conditioning. So you have the multi-billion dollar cosmetic surgery industry. Article of Time magazine today about science is discovering the ways to reverse aging.

We just can't accept the reality that get old. It's all going to lead nowhere. Because there's such a thing as nature. And the wisdom isn't how to get around nature, is how to align with it. You know, but we know, in this society doesn't get that at all. There's a way of getting old, aging physically, without aging in our essential self and in our minds,

so that you can be a very youthful 90 year old, or you can be a very old 45 year old. And it all has to do with internal dynamics. So I'm not even sure what a question I'm answering anymore. I'm sure it's a good answer, but I don't know to what. It was a great answer. And I think it's just important to interlate how the personalities we develop then become deleterious, obviously, within our experience in ways we're not aware of,

that lead to addictions that we, we can't seem to resolve, right? And you said, don't ask why the addiction, why the pain, the pains that we hold oftentimes were the origins of the personality being developed in the first place, that persona that we develop, which is a mask. That is the barrier between us and the wound. So like serves as the protection mechanism as it did earlier in our childhood. But then it also becomes the barrier to joy as we age.

Absolutely. And you said it very, Sucinctly, well, to give you a personal example. So as a physician, I was a work called a doctor. Now, I genuinely wanted to serve people. So wanting to serve humanity wasn't any kind of a false personality trait. It was genuinely expressive of who I am, as of many of my colleagues. But it doesn't operate it on its own. it operates in a context

in conjunction with other dynamics that are not so pure so one dynamic that certainly I could own to is I really believe that if I go to medical school I'll respect, finally they'll respect me. Well, why do they even need that?

Because I didn't respect myself. So I had to have a stethoscope and a white coat non-s somebody. So there's that. Not so healthy. but even more subtle is the need to be needed the need to be wanted

as an infant for reasons I won't go into now but it's explained in the book I got the message as an infant that I wasn't wanted that's how I interpreted the world's actions I wasn't wanted now if you don't wanted medical school is a great way to make yourself

wanted because you're offering something very important to people in maneuvering crisis they want you all the time very addictive because there's a whole inside you where you should be and you're trying to fill it all the time from what you get from the outside so it's never enough.

So the more you get, the more you want. That's the nature of any addiction. Therefore, I'm addicted to working. Well, that kills joy. It also makes me absent as a parent to my children and makes me absent as a partner in my marriage, which also is not a joy enhancer, exactly. And so this trait of working hard for others, and the world admires it.

And the more work like a physician I am, the more the world thinks I'm wonderful. And the more money I make. So I get all this reinforcement for my disconnection for myself. And then you couple that with the fact that I really wanted to help people. It gets so confusing. And the thing is to separate it was genuine in that, which is the desire to be of service and to engage

in meaningful activity and to separate that from the need to fill a hole in myself. This is hard work. And in society, again, it seduces us into that disconnection and even rewards it.

Yeah. Yeah, definitely, like we spoke to earlier. In the book, you share, a comedian Daryl Hammond said to you that cutting himself, afforded him a crisis that's more manageable than the terror inside of you. The one that's ongoing in your head. Yeah. Now, the Hammond is an interesting example.

There's a documentary about him called Cracked Up, which is on Netflix. And then I spoke to him after the documentary. And he had decades of mental illness, so-called. Multiple medications and diagnoses of 30 or 40 psychiatrists. They all try to figure out what's wrong with his. brain given the right medication until a psychiatrist finally said to him, I don't want to call what you've got an illness, you've been abused. And he was in childhood. That's what the documentary is about. And so the self-cutting is one manifestation of his so-called mental illness.

And anybody who accost themselves, when I speak with them, my question is not always what's wrong with this behavior, but what's right about it? What's it doing for you? Now, anybody who self-cuts, and I give several examples, Darrell being one of them, is that cutting serves a purpose. First of all, it gives them a pain that can identify as opposed to this searing, emotional pain that's just so confusing and so threatening. It gives Darrell a crisis he can handle.

It's a runner on finding bandages and dealing with the cot as opposed to the chaos in his head, the crisis that he can't handle. self-cutting also releases the body's own painkillers, the endorphins. So you actually might even feel better. Like numb it a little bit. Yeah. So the point of the Daryl Hammond incident or episode is to show that these mental health,

these so-called mentally ill behaviors, they all serve a function. And that function has to do with dealing with the trauma. that has not been addressed. And Hammond is a very forthright self-disclosing example of that. So there he is on the one hand. He appears on Saturday Night Live more than anybody else. And he's a brilliant comedian, getting all these accolades and making a lot of money,

and just tormented inside. Until Fanny says to him, there's a reason for that torment. You're not crazy. Yeah, so beautifully put. I think, I mean, you shared it as well. Like, it's not the, it's never the thing, right? It's not the heroin. It's not the whiskey. It's not the social media. It's always our relationship to it. That's right. Because somebody could have a completely healthy relationship with a plant medicine, with their phone. So it's always a relationship to it. And so how do you... Or even a glass of wine. Right. You know, whatever, yeah. Yeah, I guess what is the distinction there in somebody that has a healthy relationship versus versus nine? How does that manifest in our life? In a healthy relationship with any behavior, whether it's to do with a glass of wine or your work or your sexuality or your relationship, are you related to food?

Clearly, we can have a healthy relationship with food. In fact, we have to. But we can also have a dysfunctional relationship. the food that could threaten our health. The key question is, are we aware, are we conscious, are we making deliberate choices, or are we driven by unconscious pain? And so the unhealthy relationship is always driven by unconscious pain. So if I get into a relationship, because I'm looking for a life partner with whom I can grow and whom I can cherish and feel cherished by, Even if it takes several relationships to get there,

that's just healthy human behavior. If I'm engaging in relationships because I need validation and I need somebody to prove to me that I'm lovable, or because I need to dominate somebody, or perhaps get some comfort in feeling dominated as I'm driven to do it, then it's unhealthy. Same with food.

If I'm eating to enjoy it consciously and to nourish my body, that's great. But if I'm doing it to soothe my pain, if I'm eating junk food to release the endorphins in my brain so I can temporarily feel better. If I'm using it to stuff down my pain, literally you're stuffing down your pain by stuffing down the food. If that's why I'm doing it, it's unhealthy. So it's not the activity per se. It's one's internal relationship to it. that defines whether it's healthy or addictive.

And the key question is, are you craving it, does it give you temporary pleasure, but cause harm in a long term? If yes, it's not a healthy relationship. Yeah. It's almost just like if we going into a behavior, whatever it is that could be addictive or not addictive, based on our relationship to it, if we're going in it to from the experience of joy rather than the seeking of joy. and the temporary relief from the self, which is necessary in the addictive behavior, right? There's like, Young has that saying that pleasure is tension reduction. And I think this is just very apt there because it's these external addictions or whether it's more visceral like, you know, self-harm or a relationship that we have to a drug or, you know, pornography or whatever it might be, is giving us temporary relief from.

from the pain that we can't seem to bear. Yeah. Well, and that's my definition of addiction. Is there any behavior that gives us temporary pleasure or relief, and therefore we crave it, but then it creates harm in the long term and we can't give it up. That's what an addiction is, so that could be anything. Gambling, sports, eating, shopping, work, relationships, pornography, food,

or internet, of course, anything. Yeah. Anything. Or we could do any of those things. or not pornography but we could be interested in sexuality without being in health

without that being in any way unhealthy in fact it being a very healthy expression of who we are it has to do with the raw relationship to it. Yeah. It just feels like the relationship to how we relate to just about everything in our reality is like the most important to pay attention and gain awareness on because that's how we

relate, that's how we commune with the world around us is in the relation that we have to it. What is your to do? distinction between like the Buddhist view of non-attachment, but then also expressing our emotions in a healthy way. So we can see the illusory nature of whatever is happening. We can see the content of our experience in a larger context of awareness, yet we do have the very real experience of being a human with our shit. And so how has it been, you know, either for you on your journey and how you support people to be non-attached, but then also be very authentic?

to your real-time experience. The word attachment, it's interesting because it's got two uses. When the Buddha talked about attachment, he talked about an unhealthy craving and holding on to mind patterns or behaviors or objects or anything. So letting go of attachment, non-attachment is kind of a Buddhist ideal, that we don't look to the outside to fulfill. us that's really what non-attachment is about you know I mean it's one thing for me

to want my book to do well it's another thing for me to be attached to the book to me well so that how the book is doing then determines how I'm doing yeah not a healthy attachment right you know but then use the word attachment in modern psychology in a totally different way yeah where attachment actually is this this relationship between parent and child yeah connection and and and And it's essential. So all mammals are creatures of attachment. No mammal would survive without attachment relationship

with the nurturing environment. Where the attachment is a drive that pulls the parent towards the child and the child towards the parent. Or the drive that pulls two adults together, like it's a gravitational force that pulls two bodies together in order to procreate children, or to live in community.

You know, so attachment in that sense, healthy human drive. Here's the kicker. Those people that don't get their healthy attachment needs met in childhood will become attached in the Buddhist sense to externals because they haven't got the internal fulfillment and connection to themselves. No, they have to get it from the outside. So the lack of attachment in the healthy sense based of their attachment in the unhealthy sense. That's a very powerful distinction because we're going to create all these coping mechanisms and behavioral compensations if we don't get our basic fundamental needs

yet, which we spoke to in the previous live podcast. So in the pursuit of expressing our emotions in a healthy way, how do you, what is a healthy expression of our emotions? If we're not to suppress it or repress it or express it in a way that is dangerous or harmful to those around us, how do we release what is inside of us? And somebody you quote in the book, what's in, must out. Yeah. Well, what is in us must out? In this case, the physician, researcher who said that was talking about her creative

urges. If something is inside us, we have to give it expression. Otherwise, we'll choke, he said. But I'd love to go there as well. But yeah, then also there's these emotions, too. Yeah. Well, so one of the essential needs of children, one of the essential development of children, in the absence of which child development is distorted, is the freedom to express all

their emotions. Now, in our brains, there are certain emotional circuits. We are wired for them to include anger, lust, curiosity, playfulness, caring for others, fear, grief, even panic. we were wired for these. We share these circles, by the way, with other mammals. The child, in the course of the development,

they will experience all of them. They have to be able to express it, and to have that expression received, understood, attuned with, and held by the adult world. When that doesn't happen, we start stuffing our emotions. We start disconnecting from ourselves

in order to belong, in order to be accepted, to be acceptable. So then we don't know how to express healthy anger anymore. Healthy anger there's nothing negative about it. Healthy anger simply says, you're in my space,

get out. All animals have it. You enter an animal space, you get an anger display. Wow. Yeah. You know, which is good because it prevents violence. So, at least

reduces the chance of it. It's a boundary defense. That's all the is. You in my space. Get out. Whether that's physically, or emotionally true? No. And how the anger

simply and no? Which at the same time is saying yes to yourself. When people don't are not granted the experience of going through healthy anger having that understood

and respected by adults, they suppress it. Now it'll burst out of them in a volcano. Either they totally repress it in each case they become sitting ducks for malignancy or autoimmune disease because those are the studied traits of people to develop these conditions

I don't make the stuff up I've seen it but I don't make it up or they get into states of explosive anger which is like a volcano where the pressure has been building and building and building and all of a sudden the volcano blows its top yeah so the question if I can translate your question is if in childhood we were made to repress that healthy anger how then do we learn its expression as adults that's a question of good therapy I think I think

yeah yeah would you just say like creating a nurturing environment for that to be released from within because in interpersonal dynamics whether it's within our family or friends or lover it's like these repressed emotions that we haven't dealt with are a pebble in our shoe

that kind of make us shittier versions of ourselves constantly and until we can have, I guess, the safe space to take off the shoe and take out the pebble, which could be through therapy or psychedelics and a lot of the modalities that you suggest. Yeah, or even just awareness. If I am aware that anger is rising within me, well, then if I can be an observer of it

and hold it myself. Not that I shouldn't experience it, is that I should experience it, but I don't necessarily have to act out on somebody else. Well, that's the question of self-awareness, mindfulness, physical practices. A lot of the martial arts are not about killing others. It's about being present to yourself.

Since you brought it up, there's this beautiful part in the book where you, towards the end, page 412, you go into before the body says no, a self-inquiry exercise, right? These different questions that you say, suggest people explore in order to gain access more and more to their true selves. And oftentimes we've created a life for ourselves by virtue of an inauthentic version of ourselves.

And in the pursuit of creating inauthentic reality, we first have to discover who we authentically are. And so I'll share these five questions and then we can touch them. Let me just preface it by saying that this relates to a book that I mentioned in the beginning called When the Body Says No, which I pointed out that the people who develop autoimmune disease and malignancy is, they said earlier, people that don't know how to say no. They're the very nice people who take on everybody else's stuff. And they don't know how to say no to the world. The body says no for them in a form of illness.

And if they can learn from that, there's a lot of healing that's possible. Now in this chapter, we're trying to say to people, do you want to wait to get sick or do you want to learn to say no before your body has to say it for you? So that's the intent for this chapter. which is, I think, a beautiful invitation for all the listeners. It's not ideal, obviously, to wait until we have cancer to realize we have to deal with our shit. But to allow these questions to be a process of self-inquiry. Question one, in my life's important areas, what am I not saying no to?

Question number two. How does my inability to say no impact my life? So let's take an example. I arrive here in L.A. I'd call you up, Andre, do you want to go for coffee or tea, whatever. But you've been up all night helping a friend and you're tired. You don't feel like going to for coffee. But you don't want to displease me.

You want to be a nice guy. And you come for coffee. It's a very trivial example. What happens to you afterwards? What do you feel afterwards? What's the impact? I'm going to feel like I abandoned myself. And that's, I guess, maybe too much language for it.

but yeah yeah but you have some sense of self-betrayal yeah yeah physically was the impact fatigue tired yeah yeah yeah so this little word no if you don't say it there's a lot of impact yeah so we're examining we're inviting people in this example to what is the impact when you don't say no i'm talking about a no that wants to be said and you don't say yeah absolutely yeah and i think that's also just an important thing for the listeners that anybody you don't ever want somebody to be in your space out of obligation. Like, you know, I don't want somebody to come help me move because they feel like they have to,

only because they genuinely want to, right? And that goes into so many different things. All right. Question number three, what body signals have I been overlooking? What symptoms have I been ignoring that could be warning signs? Where do I pay conscious attention? Yeah. So here's the thing.

People might feel tired or they might have difficulty sleeping. Entress, they might have dry mouth, back spasm, stomach aches, frequent cold. fatigue, of course, and they go to the doctor saying headaches. They go to the doctor, get rid of these symptoms for me. I'm suggesting, well, nobody wants to live with headaches. I understand the desire to escape them,

but you might want to ask yourself, is my body talking to me? Yeah. Is my body saying no somewhere where I'm not? So these bodies, so do a bit of an inventory. have I felt this week? And if there are noticeable physical signals, see them as signals, don't just dismiss them as symptoms that you want to get rid of. Maybe look into what the message is. That's so powerful just because oftentimes we have something that happens within ourselves and we think it's something wrong with us.

But instead you're inviting to look at it as a signal is my bodies are so intelligent. Absolutely. It's there for a reason. So thank you for the headache because there's something that is going on within me that if I didn't have the headache would have an uglier manifestation down the road. That's right. So question number four is what is the hidden story behind my inability to say no? Okay, so I come to LA, I call you up, doing with coffee. You've been up on night.

You don't feel like it. But you don't say no. What's the story? Why don't you say no? If I say no, then my friend might not like me. Yeah. What does that mean about who I am as a friend? Yeah, I'm selfish.

Yeah, all the meaning. So that's what I mean. What's the story that you're telling yourself where you're not saying now? Yeah. So, and by the way, if a friend doesn't like you for not having coffee, what kind of a friend are they anyway? Yeah. But, but, but, you know, but if being liked is a big value to you because you weren't, then, oh, they won't like me. I better not be myself because if I'm, if I'm like me.

So what's the story? What's the hidden belief? And by the way, is it really selfish to say no when I've been up all night? Is that really what selfishness is about? Not exactly. Yeah. So good. And then yeah, the question five is there's deeper inquiry, right?

Word that I learned these stories. And we've been speaking to that. And the origin is childhood. Right. So there's some childhood programming going on. I learned at some point I learned that if I say no, that's self. somewhere I learned that if I say no authentically they won't like me

and I was desperate to be like to be accepted so I learned how not to say no. It's powerful in the book you shared Jamie Lee Curtis's quote and in the society there's a genocide of authenticity. Is that in the book? Maybe, maybe it's not. Maybe I got it from somewhere else. I was going to put it in there.

Okay. But then I thought I've quoted her because she said it and said, I think it's a wonderful quote. But we ended up not bringing in the book. I thought maybe because it's a bit too harsh a word, you know? Well, yeah, I think if anyone can say, maybe you can. Regardless, that's a very powerful pointer to like we were speaking to, our inability to say no, we're going to develop friendships, relationships, and our external reality

based off of the inauthentic version of ourselves that we hold on to so dearly, right? And then coming back into discovering who we are going through this process, reclaiming our authentic selves, oftentimes there will be a crumbling of our world and relationships that were attached to an authentic version of ourselves. So what words of advice do you have for people that are maybe going through that or will be going through that as they claim more of their authentic self? Because there is a kind of perceived death of sorts that is happening when you're releasing who you're not. Well, if you start asserting your own true emotions and saying no, where it doesn't know what that wants to be said, some people in your life who are trained to see you in a certain way will not like it. And so we talk about this tension between an attachment, you know, belonging, being accepted, and authenticity. As a child, you had no choice. Whenever it came to a tussle between attachment and authenticity, you had to choose the attachment, give up the authenticity.

Now as an adult, if you start choosing authenticity, you stay in a marriage, that's really not working for you. And your partner is just not going to look at themselves in any way at all or to work on it. Well, as you grow and as you change, you become more authentic, they're not going to like it. No, you have a decision to make. Do I still choose the attachment and suppress the authenticity? Or do I choose the authenticity at the risk of losing the attachment? What it comes down to us, not whether you're going to be in pain or not, because you are. Which kind of pain would you rather be in?

You want to choose the pain of self-suppression or the choose of the loss of certain attachments? I can almost guarantee it that as you choose yourself and the authenticity, you'll have new attachments that are higher level, more respectful, more authentic, more meaningful, more fulfilling. But not right away.

In the beginning, there might be an estrangement in alienation. there's somebody at the event that you and I participated in last night whose story I know who was sexually abuses the child by their grandfather in fact they have a book coming out in fact I can mention it the book is called glimmer when she couldn't touch her that and she began to talk about it a lot of her family renounced her and and came it to go through the pain of the loss of attachment figures in her life but not being authentic was killing her Yeah.

So it's the question of which pain would you rather have. The pain of suppressing yourself? Because believe me, it's going to cause pain. Or the pain of losing some attachments. That's the choice you have. It's like either you choose pain or you keep letting pain choose you. Well, exactly. That's exactly what it is.

Now, eventually that pain will heal. Yeah. But you're going to have to go through that process. Which is why so many people are afraid of, going through it. Speaking of processes, you give a, in the section on kind of healing coming back into wholeness within ourselves, you give the four A's, which I think are a good process to coming back into that authentic self, which I'll share in.

We can riff on as well. Sure. Like pulling these little nuggets. So the four A's and five compassion, some healing principles. Number one, first A is authenticity. We spoke to this, right? By definition, striving for some idealized self-image is incompatible with being authentic. identically who one is.

And the lack of authenticity, as we spoke, he makes itself known through tension or anxiety, irritability, regret, depression, or fatigue. The second A is agency. An agency is a capacity to freely take responsibility for our existence, exercising responsibility, in all essential decisions that affect our lives to every extent possible.

We talked about the alternative, which is being asleep early on. Being passive. Being passive, the hypnotic passivity. the third A is anger and the fourth A is acceptance and you share that anger's core message is a concise and potent no

said as forcefully as the moment demands very important and acceptance beginning with allowing things as they are however they are before we can try to integrate it and embrace it and move on and and to three minutes or a that should have been in there

which is called awareness because all awareness is kind of the ground for all the other four and some of you missed we're going to aware enough to put awareness in it so the reader will have to forgive us for that but yeah and those things are essential for health

yeah yeah beautiful and the awareness like you spoke to that's just so crucial to even begin the process or have the desire to yeah you give a really beautiful distinction as to I mean I've studied Eastern philosophy to feel quite a bit. And that's the type of, I guess, text that I most enjoy reading. And in Eastern

philosophy, there's not a whole lot of talk of creativity from my perspective. And I love the framework you give on how sensitivity is tied to our creativity because creativity is such a big part of why we hear. We are creative beings. We use our life force energy to bring things forth from the unmanifest to the manifest. And oftentimes our sensitivity can be viewed as, as something that is hindering instead of a superpower. And so how do you view the relationship between the two? Well, sensitivity is simply a trait that people tend to be born with. It's probably significantly genetically determined.

And the more sensitive you are, the word sensitivity itself comes from the Latin word for feeling. The sincere means to feel. So the more sensitive you are, the more you feel. Now, the more you feel, of course, the more you absorb and sense and get in tune with the environment, which is what artists do, poets, artists, actors, creators of, you know, sculptors, actors, actors, you know, dancers. It's just like to have these antenna out that just pull in energies, you know, which really promotes. what you call the super power of creativity. But that same sensitivity also makes them more susceptible to pain.

Because the same touch that would be experienced as trivial by somebody less sensitive really might hurt the sensitive person. So when you get sensitivity combined with trauma or stress, you get a lot more need to protect yourself. Hence the high rate of addiction amongst, say, actors and musicians. Because they're the sensitive people, they're hurting more. Yeah. They're more of a need to escape from their addictions.

And you get one Hollywood story after another of some big star diverging their addiction. And, you know, so that same sensitive temperament in a supportive, loving environment just becomes a wonderful, creative, leader, joyful, intuitive person. But in an unsupportive environment, they become more distorted, more hurt, more defensive.

The creativity doesn't go away, but the creativity starts to serve their personality. And so you look at all these great artists and actors and musicians who, their creativity was so amazing that leads them to stardom but on a personal level they're they just die and sometimes literally they die and we miss there's so many examples of it

yeah it's like the sensitivity is almost we would have a piano and from all the way to the end to the top is like the full spectrum the more sensitive we are the more we have access to within the spectrum of like the human experience exactly um so it's a beautiful thing to have access to the full piano, to the full spectrum of our emotions, to this human experience.

But I think, you know, that invitation that you're sharing is to not have it to serve your personality, but to allow it be an expression from your soul. Exactly. And not just our conditioning. Exactly. Yeah.

In the book, we give the example of Reis of Franklin, by the way, who does a wonderful documentary about her where she gives a concert. I think she had her in a, you're here in LA maybe in a church here when she was quite young and she's just channeling God I mean that's the only way you can put it you know and that's just coming through her um and then she's got this song song r E.s p ct respect which is kind of an anthony of the women's movement

and she herself was not respected at all she was an abused child and an abused woman she did great creativity, great creativity, incredible talent. But she was hobbled from being her true self in her personal life. And I think that contributed to the illness that I kill her. The more that you grow on your journey and the vast amount of experience that you've garnered in your life, do you see a divine design within our wounding? For example, nature is obviously. Nature is obviously intelligent. It doesn't necessarily have to be a higher power and a God and some guy sitting on the clouds, but nature's intelligence is almost in ways it feels like is giving us our wounding so that we can strategically move through what we need to move through to gain true access to

ourselves. And so through your experience, working with so many people, on the other side of our challenge is our gift. So how do you feel like the link is there? And do you feel like there is that kind of divine design within our wounding and how it shows up and the purpose it serves? So the Greek player right, Escalis has in one of his plays the statement that the master Zeus created us so that we have to suffer, suffer into truth. So when you talk about divine design, I just think I don't want to go to the question of divinity, but there's something about our nature that there's a kind of intelligence in it that wants us to be a thing. authentic to ourselves. Not just us, any creature in the world, a plant, an animal, anything. And there's a wonderful spiritual teacher and psychological theorist called A.H. Almas, ALMAS, from whom I've learned a lot. And he writes the following. He says,

your conflicts, all the difficult things, the problematic situations in your life are not chance or haphazard. They are actually yours. They're specifically yours designed for you by a part of you that loves you more than anything else. The part of you that loves you more than anything else has created roadblocks to lead you to yourself. You are not going in the right direction unless there's something pricking on the side saying, telling you, look here, this way. That part of you loves you so much that it doesn't want you to lose the chance. it will go to extreme measures to wake you up. It'll make you suffer greatly if you don't listen.

What else can it do? That's its purpose. Now, this may seem harsh coming from a medical doctor, but physical illness is often an opportunity for people to wake up. I don't wish it on anybody. I've just seen it function that way. So we have a chapter called Diseases Teacher, a dreadful gift diseases teacher.

And I've talked to so many people. who told me that the illness was the best thing that I've happened to them. And strangely enough, this is even true when I was working in palliative care, administering to dying people, and somebody would say to me, no, not everybody, but it would happen on occasion that somebody would say, Doc, I don't know what express this exactly, but this disease, even though it's killing me, is the best thing that ever happened to me.

Because it would call me back to myself, and I learned what's important in life and what isn't. No, I don't wish that on anyone. Yeah. But it's certainly true that there's something in our inner intelligence that's going to make us suffer if we stray away from ourselves. And so for a lot of people, disease has been a huge wake-up call. And they've used it that way.

And when you study these people, they're so much more happier, so much more fulfilled, so much more present for whatever remains to them of life than they were before. And many of them will say, I'll never trade this disease for anything. you know and some of course even recover if they take that process deep enough and they have the strength and the capacity to do so but but they do look upon illness as some kind of a gift yeah it's like the switch between asking why is life treating me this way to what is life trying to reveal to me yeah and that's just a powerful reframe and maybe difficult to hear right when you hear the news of a diagnosis or something that you don't want to, you know, wish on somebody, but ultimately billions of years of evolution have gotten us to this point where the intelligence of nature is so widespread, prevalent, omniscient, omnipotent, and there's no way around it. And we are nature. That's the whole point. Contrary to the definition of it, if I know. Yeah, we are. And just to assure you, if you came to

me with an inflamed wrist, I wouldn't begin to talk to you about what stresses in your life and I deal with your inflammation first. But at some point, that inquiry is so helpful to people at the appropriate time. Right. And it might be the only way out, right? Because like if you could go through three rounds of chemotherapy and all the ways and through the medical system for trying to heal a cancer, but until you reconcile what is truly at the root, right, what would you say?

I wouldn't say that. People are cured of cancer without doing that work. I'm just saying there are certain cases, right, where, for example, unless they heal and reconcile the deeper emotional traumas, they might not be able to be healed through just Western medicine, right? Would you say that? Well, this is where I make a decision when cure and heal. You can be cured in the sense that the disease will go away. It doesn't mean you're healed. Yeah. The healing means becoming whole. Yeah, yeah. So illness can be an opportunity to become whole to really heal. But the reality of Western medicine is, but the reality of Western medicine is, that is largely help us in the face of most chronic conditions.

Like we don't know, autoimmune conditions, like lupus and rheumatoiditis, multiple sclerosis, whole range of them, we can mitigate the symptoms and usually look for deterioration and see that as the prognosis. So now, when it comes to acute conditions and some cancers, best of medicine is brilliant and people can be brought back from the brink of death, you know or certainly from the brink of debility but for most chronic conditions of mind and body we're rather poor at really helping people heal

we just don't have the mindset and the capacity to do so yeah whether it's the ignorance or the arrogance like you spoke to earlier yeah yeah why is it essential to be vulnerable to heal it's not that it's essential to be vulnerable to be healed because everybody's vulnerable Vulnerable simply, again, it's a Latin word. It means to wound. And vulnerability is the capacity to be wounded.

Now I assure you, we're all totally vulnerable from conception until death. There's no such a thing as a human being who's not vulnerable. There's just a lot of human beings so don't want to recognize their vulnerability. So to reframe your question, it's not why is it essential to be vulnerable? We all are.

Just to recognize it? Why is it essential to come to terms of it, to accept it? Yeah. Because nothing in nature grows without vulnerability. So I give this example in the book. A tree doesn't grow where it's hard and thick.

It goes where it's soft and green and vulnerable. Take a crustacean animal like a crab. It can't grow inside its shell. When it's hard, it can't grow. It means to mold and become very soft and vulnerable. So growth and vulnerability go along together. That's why children are so vulnerable. you know and why is it essential because only through vulnerability can we grow

and our denial or a denial of an escape from our vulnerability keeps us stuck hardened keeps us really rigid we can't grow we can't heal and you know you you see this in veterans all the time these these men who are um grandment to a kind of toxic masculinity. Yeah. Or killing and accepting being killed are just, that's okay, you know. Then they go through their PTSD treatment and they say, oh my God, I'm vulnerable. I can hurt.

I can accept those emotions. I don't have to deny them. I don't think of this tough guy all the time. You know, so that post-traumatic growth that happens always happens through embracing people's vulnerability. Yeah. And then how do you propose people be the most effective and efficient advocate for healing, right? Because oftentimes as we gain awareness and we start to go on the path of healing within ourselves, we then see all the ways in which the people and circumstances around us are not healed.

And we can fall into the trap of trying to change people and to becoming healed. Yeah, well, the first thing is not to be an evangelist. And Almas, who I just quoted, he said once, I think he's the one who said that, protect us from the people that want to save the world, you know? So if you find yourself filled with evangelics fervor, look a bit deeper inside. What is it that you're trying to do by trying to save the world? That's on one hand.

And in the other hand, when I was working with severely addicted people in Vancouver, they would say to me very authentically, Doc, if I ever get out of this, I don't spend the rest of my life working to make sure that nobody else has to go through this. So there is a, as soon as there's healing and a movement towards wholeness, there's a genuine movement towards

to want to heal others. Yeah. So that should not be dismissed or derided. It should be honored. But the question is, what's driving it? So I'm telling you, whenever there's an evangelical fervor where you need somebody to heal, where you need to heal others, that it's in need.

Yeah. Then you better watch it. Yeah. And you do some more healing yourself. so that's the distinction I'd make. Yeah, my friend Peter Crone always says there's none so self-righteous as the newly converted. Well, exactly.

Yeah. And I've been to that a number of times. Yeah. There's a new insight, a new impression, a new wisdom you might even say, anywhere you want to inflict it on everybody, you know? Yeah, totally. Same.

And nobody can stand it. Yeah. But it is that natural tendency, I guess, or inclination of light to spread light, right? It's for awareness to spread awareness. And once we have that growth within ourselves, oftentimes we'll probably want to unconsciously enforce that on other people. But then the deeper desire there is to just expand what wants to expand,

which is... Well, take your light analogy. Try pushing light. It can't be done. Yeah. And you can shed it. And but it... Yeah, so that desire to pour shit on others is,

is some unresolved problem that you still haven't dealt with. And, you know, again, I've been through that. Yeah. Powerful. Be the light. All right, cool. Last couple very quick questions. Yeah.

One, thank you so much for this, by the way. And everybody who's been tuning in and loving this conversation, let us know in the comments section below. And check out the myth of normal. Link in description. If you haven't already, I highly recommend you purchase it. It's very transformative. What does it like to be 78?

I'm trying to remember that was three weeks ago I'm 79 Wow what does it like to be 79 Happy birthday Thank you What's it like to be anything Look

this is sort of a line I've often evoked I know It's some 79 now And I wouldn't wish to be as young and stupid As I was when I was 78 You know So

It is possible to grow old Which doesn't mean to get more decrepit. It needs to grow as you're getting old. It's possible to do that. And I hope and pray I can stay on that path. You know, I know that I know more now and I understand more now, accept more now,

see more now, can self-regate more now than I ever could. So that sense is very comfortable. On the other hand, I don't swim as fast as I did three years ago or five years ago, you know? So that's something to be accepted. So what's it like? So far I like it.

You know, it's not the 79 aspect that I like. It's just having a bit more access to myself. That's what I like. What advice do you have for young lads like me who want and see their trajectory of hopefully growing old and being maybe 100 one day and up until that point trying to do healing work and transformative work, much like of what you're doing? what advice do you have for individuals like myself that are on similar paths and trying to spread the light and awareness? What advice would you have? For myself? Yeah, just reverse your question.

What advice do you have? My advice, I guess for myself in that position would be to continue to stay true to myself and to unravel the gifts that I feel like have uniquely been given to me. Okay, so my advice is that you don't need my advice. Great. What do you feel like for you has been your single-handedly biggest lesson in this life if you had to pick one? When you say to people, who do you think you are, that's a really good question. Depending on I was asked, because you're not what you think you are. If I just know not.

Do you feel like you know yourself? I'm getting there. I've often said this. You may have heard. but I've written my epitaph. Do you know what my epitaph is going to be? It's going to be carved on my gravestone. It's going to say, it was a lot more work than I had anticipated.

So it's just ongoing work. That's all it is. Yeah. But that's not a negative thing. No. It's a good thing. It's a glorious thing. Yeah.

Beautiful. What is the strongest memory you have of your life if you had to pick one? Strongest memory. What do you mean the strongest memory? Strongest emotional attachment. I guess you have to a memory that sticks out. When you look over Dr. Gapramate's life and you see his history, what stands out as potentially the most impactful memory?

I just don't think they can give you an authentic answer to that. Nothing. No worries. But if I allow the question to percolate in me, you know who comes up is my wife? This relationship that I'm in and have been for 55 years. That's the strongest. emotional resonance.

If you had to put in a succinct way what your wish for humanity is freedom. People need freedom. They need freedom to be themselves. Freedom.

I actually did a workshop here in L.A. I participated in it maybe five, six years ago. And the theme was, what is your calling? And by calling, I didn't in what profession you choose, what calls you? And when you leave the earth or when you return to the earth,

what would you have wanted to have contributed? So I really got that my calling is that people are free. And so this book, it's all about liberating people or helping people liberate themselves, put it that way. Freedom politically, freedom economically, freedom socially freedom from their unconscious emotions so they can be

themselves. I think that's my desire for human beings is freedom and that's I think the essential endeavor of all the great work that has been done in the world is the desire for freedom. You certainly are doing that I know personally within my life and a lot of the people that have been

students of your work how much freedom there is on the other side of this gained awareness and everything that we've been talking to today. So your work is very much so doing that. Thank you so much for the work that you're doing and for coming on today for the second time. I really appreciate it. And here to support any way that I can. Is there any last words that you have for the audience, for anything that you want to share?

Well, you've already said it, but, you know, if I'm a self-serving for a lot, I just really want people to be aware of this book of mine, the myth of normal. I think I've already been told that it's life-changing for a lot of people. It's also everything that I've worked for. It took a lot to write this book. I don't say this is a complaint. I'm saying this is a reality. I went through panic.

I went through moments of a few days of high blood pressure, hyper tension, a lot of pressure I put on myself. And in the end, it's just sort of satisfying expression of what I wanted to say to the world. And there was a patient of mine once who was a great Canadian poet His name was Warren Tallman

And he became, after I became a doctor He became my patient And I said to him once We'd have these conversations during his office visits And I say, Warren, I want to write But I don't know what And he said, Gabori says You're right when you're something to teach the world

And so this book is an expression of that Of what I've learned I want to teach so I just want people to pay attention to it If I don't want to buy it, take it out of the library. But notice it. That's my request to the listener. Beautiful. I strongly encourage that.

It's beautiful. It's also read by Daniel Mante. The book was written with and narrated by my son, Daniel, with whom I could not have done his work. And he also was the narrator of the audio version. Yeah. And him and I do writing a new book together where actually it's not going to be Gabor with Daniel. It's going to be Daniel and Gabor.

And it'll be called Hello Again, a fresh start for adult children and their parents, which is a workshop that we've done. Believe me, we've had our stuff to go through, my son, Daniel and I. And based on that, what we've learned, we do this workshop and based on that workshop, you're writing this next book. Wonderful. I'm impressed at which the scale and magnitude, which you keep going and then spreading the good word. Thank you so much. Again, everybody, the link will be in the description for the myth of normal, which is available now. Thank you all for tuning into this episode of the Know Thyself podcast.

If something in particular resonated with you, let us know in the comments section below. We share clips on social media. Have a separate clips channel that's also linked down below. And thank you for coming on this journey with us. Until next time, be well.