Sense of Soul - Journey to Wholeness

Episode Date: November 27, 2023

Today on Sense of Soul we have Alex Boianghu he has been a psychotherapist for over 30 years, he has had the honor and privilege of working with individuals, couples, and families providing holistic support for all of life’s challenges. From his perspective, the goal of therapy is to let go of outdated ways of living that make you feel “stuck” or “in survival mode”, so that you can live in freedom, joy and success. We are all here to thrive—and that is his mission! Alex has been trained in both Eastern and Western psychology and philosophy, and he approaches therapy in a way that integrates insights from both traditions. In addition, he has specialized in addiction and trauma treatment for the last 12 years and he incorporates EMDR method (Eye Movement Desensitization and Re-processsing) as the cutting-edge tool towards healing. He is also a certified yoga instructor and meditation teacher, guiding others on their spiritual journey. Learn more at http://journeytowholeness.health/ Learn more about Sense of Soul Podcast: https://www.senseofsoulpodcast.com Check out the NEW affiliate deals! https://www.mysenseofsoul.com/sense-of-soul-affiliates-page Follow Sense of Soul on Patreon, and join to get ad free episodes, circles, mini series and more! https://www.patreon.com/senseofsoul Kitties in the Cauldron Children’s book by Amber Johnson   

Hello, my soul-seeking friends. It's Shanna. Thank you so much for listening to Sense of Soul Podcast. Enlightening conversations with like-minded souls from around the world, sharing their journey of finding their light within, turning pain into purpose, and awakening to their true sense of soul. If you like what you hear, show me some love and rate, like, and subscribe. And consider becoming a Sense of Soul Patreon member, where you will get ad-free episodes, monthly circles, and much more. Now go grab your coffee, open your mind, heart, and soul.

It's time to awaken. Today on Sense of Soul, we have Alex Boyanju. He has been a psychotherapist for over 30 years. He works with individuals, couples, and families, providing holistic support for all of life's challenges so that you can live in freedom, joy, and success. He is trained in both Eastern and Western psychology and philosophy and integrates insights from both traditions. He specializes in addiction, trauma treatment, and incorporates EMDR. And I look forward to this conversation today. So please welcome Alex. Hey there, how are you?

Thank you so much for joining me today. And where do you join me from? I'm in Greece, about, you know, six to nine months out of the year, I'm in today. And where do you join me from? I'm in Greece about, you know, six to nine months out of the year. I'm in Greece. And then back in New York, I have family. If I showed you the view, I think people hate me. So I'm not going to do that. Oh, I love when people show me the views. Oh, oh my God. Oh my God. This is where, this is where I'm doing the podcast from. Okay. Wow.

Well, if I showed you my surroundings, you would laugh. No, I'm in Colorado. I'm in a very beautiful area. I love Colorado. It's beautiful. Yeah, but it's definitely, I would love to go to Greece. In fact, this morning, Alex, I was talking about a word. When you look at it from a Greek perspective, it's quite interesting. In fact, this morning, Alex, I was talking about a word.

When you look at it from a Greek perspective, it's quite interesting. The word choice. Choice. Yeah. So it means heresy. The word heresy. The Greek, the root of that. It is interesting and i've pondered on it a lot this year because when i think of like plato's allegory of the cave and i think about choice or even

starting out with in in the bible you know of all the abrahamic religions that choice at the beginning that was sin the choice that was given by the serpent, the choice to know thyself, the choice to discover your inner wisdom, all of that was heresy, was made to be feared. It's very different in the Buddhist tradition. We have a different take on that. Sure. Our take on that is that there is karmic momentum

that is then intersected by aspiration. It's a very deep topic. It's a big, big discussion. Some people, there's actually a lot of people recently that are on the internet that are blowing away this idea that there's actually choice. Literally.

Like, for example, Sam Harris is a big one. I mean, he blew it up. He was like, basically, it's nonsense that there is actual choice. It's all kind of unconscious replaying and rehashing momentums. And there's something to that. I'm not 100% so, not 100%, but in order for us to really be so conscious of choice, I mean, I am talking about the level

of like a Thich Nhat Hanh kind of style. That level of awareness, that level of awareness is rare. In the human being, it's rare. And at that point, what was driving Thich Nhat Hanh was no longer a sense of personalized identity. No more. No more. It was universal consciousness we have more freedom of what you're speaking of

and maybe in our dreams when we maybe are in that lucid dream where we get to change the outcome or in meditation yeah that's a that's a deep discussion and and as a lifelong meditator i'm also i'm also a meditation teacher this is dear to my heart this conversation it's the beginning of the gap it's the beginning of the pause it's the beginning of a time out from the default mode network of of the of the brain and the nervous system from operating unconsciously, mechanically, it is the beginning of that, right? You know, when I was 16, 15, my first book was Gurdjieff's book called In Search of the Miraculous, I think it was called. And basically, in the first paragraph, I remember him saying, we are, but automaton.

And it really, really struck me. And I was 15. And of the whole book, I remember that, right. And that started my life on, on the spiritual journey. It was like, I don't want to be an automaton. You know what I mean? And how much freedom can one gain from habitual unconscious you know and i'm going to tell you something very difficult even as a meditator my whole life there are such subtle i didn't talk about such subtle undercurrents of karmic momentums such subtle that it's really difficult to be in a particular moment and feel

like one is absolutely making choice that is not grounded in past or future. Wow. I mean, I'm talking about subtle. It's like a whisper, a whisper. And in order to get to that space of silence, and then in that silence, one doesn't even feel like there's anything that needs to be chosen to do. There's just absolute freedom. And then there's just a body. The body wants to eat. You feed the body. You enjoy. There's joy. So you get to that silence, and then there's joy. There's peace, deep contentment, nowhere to go, nothing to do, nothing to become, no one to strive for. And yet there's a natural expression of one's own beingness as it's incarnated in this

in this lifetime. So it's not a blank nothingness, but it's a creative font of like, capacity for awareness, right? Yeah, I love that quote that stuck with you. It reminds me of one of the first questions that I asked myself over a decade now ago, how much of what I believed in had I been told to believe? And of that, how much had I actually experienced to be my truth? Perfect. Perfect. And what happens with people when they ask that question? One of two things. Either they're drawn into the mystery to go,

oh my God, what is it like to experience life free of all of that noise and some people get terrified and say no no no there is nothing but what i have learned is true it's really people to actually sit in that silent feet where literally everything falls apart everything yeah it is it is and you go through almost like a grieving period i did for some for some people it's grieving and for some people it's sheer ecstasy. I've seen it both ways. I think I experienced both.

I mean, the ecstasy, I think, came right away, which kept me going. But then it was difficult to realize that everything that I was and that I was trying to be and that I was trying to even mold my family to be. All of these things were based on, you know, this picture perfect box of conditions that was strategically and intentionally created to keep us from knowing thyself? The Buddha was very clear. There will be nothing. There will be nothing that you can actually hold on to that you can call mine. There will be nothing. That freedom begins.

I will not make it a black and white as though it begins then. There are steps to that, but the absolute freedom will be that there little will be like, no idea will be grabbed onto, nothing. Yeah. And that's hard for a seeker. Seeker is one of the archetypes that will have to dissolve on the journey it's one of the more you know seeker sage um madman wild woman uh jester are the those those are the last you know archetypes in the in the wheel and they're difficult sometimes to let go. You can have several incarnations of that that can be, because it's so elevated, it can be sticky actually.

I can see that. And it also, I mean, cause the logic, you know, it's like as a person begins to seek, sometimes can lose logic. What do you mean as in you know how far you go down a rabbit hole you know what i mean and oh you know very dangerous very dangerous the seeker can start to start to figure out the more subtle nuances and actually get lost in it because it becomes just another more subtle version of grasping. It's almost like imagine that you have a mirage in the desert. And from far away, the seeker is like, oh, that looks very solid and real. And then as you get closer, you start to deconstruct that and you're like, that's a mirage.

And the seeker will go into mirage and be like, I know it's a mirage. But yet in the most subtle way, still hold on to it. It's got this very slippery slope of it's empty, yet there's something for the seeker. And in that something, they could live there for lifetimes. I can totally see that that could happen. I'm definitely that person. And it actually can become addiction as well. I mean, you're just, you're moving from something maybe you consider unhealthy and to call it what you want. I definitely have pulled myself back. I mean,

this has happened several times though. It was like, I did this with my ancestry. I was in it hardcore. I mean, it was an obsession. I was deep it hardcore. I mean, it was an obsession. I was deep in it. I mean, it was like six years of uncovering my ancestors and, and it was healing in the end. And I wondered when it would stop and it did. And then it turned into something new, right? Then it turned into, it's amazing. Yeah. And, and, and no one can argue. Let's back up and say no one can argue with the mystery and the necessity of going through that. So I'm a Buddhist. And so for me, I have a particular way of understanding and looking at something. I didn't have a choice.

This was just the way it went. This wasn't I didn't wake up. It's just who I am. On Siddhartha's awakening, one of the things that he noticed is that he was able to recount every one of his previous lifetimes in detail, the level of clairvoyance. And what he said was, I was everything to everyone and to myself. I've murdered and been murdered in every possible scenario that you could imagine of incarnation, I've been. And I can't find any sense of self, where it began, where it ends, nothing to grasp onto. And so my freedom in the awakening, as he's saying this, is recognizing that there is nothing there graspable. And it's so beautiful, it's so freeing, because he was a sage. He was a wise person at some point.

You know, he was an animal. He recounted animal lifetimes, so many animal lifetimes, right? So it's like he says, so what are you going to do? You're going to be like, oh, I'm going to get stuck on one of those where I was a sage. How many incarnations? The point is to jump off, to jump off those wheels. So it's beautiful. And so no one can argue how many lifetimes we're going to have of now. And I'm looking at this and thinking, is it just layers of just peeling more and more and subtle and subtle? So here's the analogy that I give everybody. I say, imagine you're wearing a jacket and it has infinite number of layers, right? And I'm just wondering how each incarnation just, and if we do the work, let's say, it's just like more subtle, more subtle, comes off, it's coming off, it's coming off.

And then we just get these whispies. Yeah, you're really describing what it felt like for me to go through my ancestry and feel those layers of the trauma carried by them fall off. Or then in the Gnostic Gospels, the layers of conditions from religion that was so deeply rooted within this. So it's almost been, even though this has been a very spiritual journey, right? And throughout, I've experienced divine guidance through all of it, for sure. You know, I've just been leaning into what is put before me through synchronicities, through dreams, through conversations, whatever. But then I had to grieve my religion. You know, it was like, these were all heavy, heavy layers of Shanna that I was making space each time I did this within this meat suit, more light.

That's great. I love that. Those are the two words that I would say, highlight this more light and more space. Okay. Now you've hit upon probably that there's other words, but these are two of the most important words, space and light, right? The more space, the more light. Yeah.

And so the light is not coming from the outside. The light is coming. This sense of light or a lightness, a li is not coming from the outside. The light is coming, this sense of light or a lightness, aliveness comes from the inside. So the jacket is like, you know, take a bulb and put something really thick and heavy on it. Well, the light, right? That's the synonym for trauma. So we do the work, whatever work it is, through the Gnostic teachings, through Sufi, I don't care. It doesn't really matter to me. It's all about clearing. All of them are about clearing. So name any one of them at the home point is clearing. If it doesn't clear, I'd be very careful what we're doing. So I'd like to give a criteria for every spiritual religious philosophical path right whatever it is have the criteria that it is clearing right so it's

clearing more spaciousness and it's clearing and more light so if that criteria is there continue yeah and you know here's the thing too a, is I don't know what's coming next. We don't know. So it's not necessarily I'm seeking something next. With the clearing and the more space and light, the opening of what next will naturally come. I call it the quickening. You don't know, but imagine there's more light. You know, Mario Brothers has this particular game. It's a racing car game and what happens mario car right and what happens is mario card is driving and the road is not built yet and what's happening is mario is driving the car and the road is being built as mario is driving it's a very

interesting visual by the way i see it i don't believe that the path is it's built for us already in me you know i don't land in that camp but this whole mario thing is this the more light and spaciousness there is it almost feels as though that that that it's being built faster and clearer for us for more light and for more space. Yeah. That's the sense. That's the sense that I get. And you know, here's, here's another thing. A lot of people want to go bypass all this stuff. They want to go straight to where Thich Nhat Hanh is.

No, not possible. Thich Nhat Hanh had thousands of lifetimes or whatever amount of lifetimes where he had to work, work. You have to work. You had to work, work. You've got to work. You've got to work at it. He was like one of my greatest teachers, for sure. I met him.

I was at St. John the Divine in New York City. So I used to live in the city. So he was coming and he was doing a talk at St. John. And there are two doors when you enter St. John on the main avenue. And I walked into the right door and he was in the left door. And as he was walking in, I turned and I looked at him and I, and I'm telling you, all I saw was like space walking. It was space. I couldn't locate an identity or a person. If I went to put my hand,

I felt like I was just going to put my hand right through him. It was that. It's what you said before. It was space and light. It was literally space and light walking. Oh, my God. I had on Neil Donald Walsh, and he shared with me how the times that he had talked, you know, on the same stage with Thich Nhat Hanh and being in his presence was like one of the most powerful things for him ever. I think for me, it was probably the most transformative meeting of a human being, whatever that means, that I've ever had in my life.

Oh, bless his soul. I only aspire to be a percentage of that. Me too. So, you know, that's the thing. It's good to meet that and then to go, I aspire. You put that in front of you because we know that that is that absolute freedom. Right. That's actually kind of freaking amazing of us, Alex, that we know this.

Look at the mass of the world. You see, what you just said is in the knowing, in the knowing, I would say that if you took a person and you quietly got them away from all the scenarios of life and you spoke to them and you were able to use certain kind of words to ask them what they're really seeking i believe that most people would say that they're seeking the experience of spaciousness and freedom and then people with addictions and all these all the all the things that we're saying look troublesome, they're the ones who are screaming the loudest that they recognize and want what Thich Nhat Hanh is. They're not the ones who are the sickest. They're the ones who are screaming the loudest for us

because those of us who are not expressing the suffering of not being the light source and spaciousness, then we're just lost in the dream, pursuing our careers and our relationships and making money, building businesses and so forth. That, to me, being on prescription medicines. They find this space. Correct. So then they crave it more. They're not addicted.

They're not addicted to the drug. The body. I mean, the body gets chemically addicted. They're turning off that monkey mind. But they're turning off the default. What we now term in science as the default mode network. And so, you know, the whole new movement of psychedelics and psilocybin and ketamine and all of them actually do the same thing. They shut off the default mode network. It's the same. We know this now, the science proving that. Some people are

looking at extracting particular chemistry within psilocybin where you don't get addicted, but you get the experience of shutting off the default mode network, but with a lot of more consciousness. So I actually have micro-dosed psilocybin. I did three weeks and I had ADHD and I have never been more aware throughout my day throughout multitasking. I could, in fact, I journaled about this the same time I'm journaling. I'm hearing the leaves in the trees. I'm sensing my pen in my fingers. I'm sensing the breeze on my skin, experiencing what's happening in my body. As I began to release my thoughts onto the paper. I mean, it was freaking insane.

And no one would have known I was microdosing because it's a small dose. I brought my kids to school. I did the same things. Everything you're describing, when we look at the brain of meditators, long-term meditators, that's what they describe after 15,000 to 20,000 hours of practice. Right? hours of practice right so that becomes a stable characteristic that the brain literally just you look at like matthew ricard or mingy or lindy or rinpoche whose brains have been studied a lot under mri things like that their brains have basically learned to shut off the default mode network and operate in the way that you just described right so then all of a sudden the past and the future are in gone and

there you are feeling the breeze feeling the pencil you know it's hard to get there i mean i had to really work on mindfulness you know meditation i had to rewire my brain you know i had to use tricks to trick me into you know finding that space i had to learn how to in different methods you know chanting or sound yes i think the future, and we're seeing it, one of my friends is actually heading the UC Berkeley, whole entire department on psychedelic and psychotherapy. It's a huge, huge department, and the research that they're doing is beautiful.

And actually, I just saw an advertisement for a summit that Jack Kornfield is holding on the future of mindfulness and psychedelics. So it looks like Dharma and psychedelics are about to meet. And isn't it interesting that here again, we could have learned from our ancestors, they knew this. Correct. Houston Smith's book on psychedelics that I've been around for thousands of years, it's already been there. We've known this. We've known this. We just have not known how to incorporate it in an intelligent way. Those societies had a different ethos already built into them. We've gotten far away from that. Okay. So Alex, tell me about EMDR. I know that this is a practice that you work with

to help people shed some of that density and reach more of their life. Yeah. Beautiful. EMDR is a powerhouse of a tool and what it does, it reorganizes the way memories are stored and it reorganizes the way we define ourselves within a memory so i'll give any i'm going to give an example so this way listeners can grasp onto it easier hey listeners sorry for the interruption but i couldn't wait to share this with you hey all you cool cats and kittens out there. My name is Amber Johnson and I am the mother of two kiddos, three and five. I just wrote and self-published my first children's book, Kitties in the Cauldron. It's a book of enchantment with

five adventurous and curious little kitties that embark on a whimsical journey inspired by the classic tale of the five little monkeys. One by one, the kitties fall into a cauldron, and their concerned friend, Wishiwubu, makes a call to the magician for advice. With each call, the magician advises a magical ingredient be added to the cauldron to retrieve the kitten safely. The book ends with all five kittens snuggled into bed with Ushiwubu. The illustrations are digitally displayed similar to that of a Pixar style. As a first-time publisher, I would love to hear your honest feedback in the reviews. It's available on Amazon and part of the Kindle Unlimited subscription. Thank you so much for your time and I hope everyone has a magical

holiday season filled with love and prosperity. Now back to our amazing guest. I always make a good example, and this is the one that I use all the time. So let's say a young child, a girl, she's cleaning the kitchen. Her father and mother are there. She spills something, and the father turns around and says, ah, I can't believe it again. Right. Okay. In that moment, there's a few things that happened in that moment. The father may be a great guy. He has a moment. He's tired. So this doesn't make him a monster.

He's a human being, but let's say we don't know. He may be like this on a regular basis. He may be like this one time. And we don't know if the girl is sensitive. Maybe she's not. I mean, there's a lot of things that happen. But in that moment, here's the possibility of what happens. One, her nervous system is going to react to him and his energy as a threat. So it's immediately going to tighten up and her breathing is going to change. Her breathing changing is telling the nervous system that this is a dangerous moment now this is on the unconscious nervous system experience next she then interprets that she's bad for this daddy's upset it must be that there's something wrong with me. So now we have an emotional identity laying down of tracks on top of the nervous system,

which is, it's probably my fault. I must be a bad girl. So what am I going to do? I need to be a good girl. So in order to be a good girl, I have to apologize to daddy and then be a good girl and I'm going to try harder. So I'm going to now become more of a perfectionist. Now, this is just one scenario.

She could have been a rebellion. I'm just going to give scenarios just to fill it out. Now, all of a sudden, she tightens up and now has to be really super careful. So she loses some play and joy

because now she wants to make sure that she pleases daddy one and to make sure that daddy doesn't get upset this way again we're going to try to maintain you know him not getting to that same space because she doesn't want to feel that it's her fault again so this gets laid down very quickly in this subconscious and then she's an adult and she's playing all of this out without even understanding that. She wants to make sure that when she's dating someone,

she gets tight and she wants to make sure they don't get upset with her. She's a people pleaser at work, at school. She wants to be perfect with her teachers, right? So she realizes now all of a sudden she's having anxiety and panic attacks because that's what's going to happen.

The nervous system is just going to become wired that everything's a threat. She calls out a therapist and says they're specialized in EMDR. What do we do? EMDR, there's a particular methodology. We use either the eyes or tapping or sound and what we do is we we induce a semi-hypnotic state using particular methods right not hypnosis but it's done through a different method and the person then has the trauma arise in the therapy setting but because it's done under a slight hypnotic state they have a little bit of a distance from it.

It arises, but not with the same intensity anymore. What happens is now instead of it arising the way it arose as the child state, which is going to be like, say, a level nine, now it arises at a level four or five. The person goes, oh, wow, it wasn't my fault. So now there's a reorganization in two spaces, the nervous system and the sense of the I am. So this is amazing because now the child is like, wait, maybe dad was upset that day. It wasn't about me. Maybe dad was having a bad day that had nothing to do with me. And you just go, oh, you start to feel so much better now. Right. And, and so therefore you don't put it all on you.

And now when things happen at work and you realize, Oh, I may feel the way I did as a child, cause you're still going to have the trigger. The nervous system may still have the trigger, but I realized that it doesn't have nothing to do with me. So I can then, I don't have to get caught up in the reaction of the nervous system as an indication that it's my problem, my fault, there's something wrong with me. And that's what EMDR does. It reorganizes, it reorganizes

those key trauma points. And it lives in our muscle tissue. Yes. A lot of this trauma, you know, and I'm glad that you used that example because it's not always something extremely traumatic. You know, sometimes it's just that. I mean, I mean, I have both, I would say, I think most of us have, you know, many layers and many levels of severity when it comes to some of the things we carry. There's no getting away from this with human period. We can't escape being conditioned. So nobody grows up to be unconditioned. So there's just the small imprints and the big

imprints. They're all there. We all going to have to work with them. You know, one I thought of recently, it came up that, you know, when I was punished, which I was a good girl. I mean, I was a people pleaser from the beginning. It was in my genetics. You know, that martyr, martyrdom, totally. But when I was punished, I would get sent to my room alone. So when I think one of the reasons it felt so uncomfortable at first to meditate and to just make that space of being alone, it was connected to fear of being punished or, you know, shame or whatever I was feeling in those alone times or those, you know, times I had to be

quiet, you know, no television, no radio, you're in your room alone. To them, that was punishment. And so I correlated that, which is sad. I think that's probably common for a lot of people. You know, it's interesting. I'm going to capture something subtle in what you said. Let's see if I can describe it. Often time, we don't realize that what we're trying to get away from. And so you say the martyr is the archetype, right? It doesn't matter what the archetype is. So martyr, good girl, bad girl, rebellion, you know, like whatever it is, people please her. There's like 400 of them. Carl Jung identified like hundreds of them, right? They are all attempting to do the same thing, which is to avoid what she's feeling is that when she's at work and her male counterpart

or boss or friend or coworker says something to her, when she feels that feeling tone in her body, the way she's going to try to get away from that feeling tone is by being perfect. So it's not that she, that, that, that, that perfection is for them. The perfection is for her to get away from that uncomfortable feeling tone. This is very important. This is very subtle. Very important for people to understand. What we're trying to avoid is the initial feeling tones. So the methodology,

some people don't like what I'm about to say. Let's say the caretaker. See, the caretaker, everybody likes to be like, but I'm a caretaker. And I like to blow it out of the water because I grew up in that way and I know what the caretaker is. The caretaker is selfish. It's bullshit that it's for other people. The caretaker, they're doing it not to feel what they felt. So are they doing what they're doing for the other person?

They believe that in their mind that they are, but it's actually to help them alleviate the feelings that they grew up with. So, you know, we'd like to paint that the archetypes are really about the management of other people. No, the other people no the the the other people are simply the objects in in the theater to help us alleviate the way that we felt as children yeah and i and i know that doesn't sit well for people because it's like oh but i'm the

i'm the caretaker i know the caretaker fucking very well. Me too. So. Yeah, I was the definition of codependency. Yeah. And same here. So for me, I had to really like dig into this one, you know, because there was a lot of pride, you know, built up in it. But you can take any of the architects and do this and do the same thing just and say wait a second it's not accurate to say that it's really for the other person it's to massage the other person so that we don't end up feeling what we feel so but i want to bring a lot of compassion into this for a second so it doesn't feel like we're trying to destroy the archetype.

So here's the compassion. Because each archetype is trying to help us alleviate what we experienced, that's because it was traumatic what we experienced. So, you know, to say that we're manipulating the other person out of malice is really incorrect. And I just want to really expose that it's unconscious and it's not intended to be malicious. It's intended to actually stop suffering, right? It's just not effective, right? It's a temporarily effective, but it's not effective long-term's it's not effective long term and it's not effective in let's say relationships that are going to evolve beyond trauma relating right so i think i think as you

know we're talking about before about like spaciousness and and light then the more space and light we have then the kind of relationships that we're going to have in our lives are going to be less trauma-based, right? I think if you look at the bulb and we had the layers on it, right? So this goes back to what you had asked me about relationships. It goes like this. So imagine there's a hundred layers. We're going to be attracted to people and attract people into our lives within a certain degree of the density of layers on that light bulb. If the light bulb is covered 90%, we're going to draw people who are between 80% and 100% of the covering the light bulb.

If we're at 50%, we're going to include people who are 40% to 60%. It goes like that. If we're at 20%, it's going to be 10% to 30%. That makes sense. I also was thinking, so doing all my ancestry as I was peeling back those layers, what I discovered was this was a pattern. So it was, I'm sure that codependency real within me, but it also had been taught to me.

I had seen it work. Absolutely. And been told to do and be that way. Literally. I mean, I remember my son's first birthday, my mom saying, aren't you going to feed your husband? And I thought, yes, this is what I've waited for my whole life. I've always, I couldn't wait to be in this moment where I got to be the host and have the party and serve my husband, their friends, the children, because that's what I saw. And I looked up to the women in my family. But I'm going to go deeper. It's not just what you saw, because you got to look at the experience. Let's talk about you.

Yeah. That's it, right? There you go that's the more important what you what the archetype uh what's the word that i'm looking for potentially promises is i'm gonna be now loved so let's say the caretaker is gonna be like if i fulfill the caretaker because that's the way we learned we're gonna be loved I'm going to be loved. But being loved is equated directly with this feeling that I could be myself. And I want to really equate this in a very subtle way.

This is very important. Because when we say I'm going to be loved, it means I have now staged everybody to allow me to be me, but through the archetype. And because that still doesn't free me fully to be myself, it's limiting. It's a pseudo temporary freedom that feels like I'm really becoming myself, but only under the conditions that everybody likes me or loves me. So what happens is that it's, I get it. It's like, what we're seeking is we're saying, Hey, I really want to go to the playground and be myself. But the only way I can go be myself is like, I have to wear this jacket and I'm going to go into playground and be like, Hey guys, look, I'm going to enter the playground and I'm going to take care of all of you. And you're going to all

like me. And then I can be myself, but, but, but I really truly can't be myself because I'm going to take care of all of you and you're going to all like me and then I can be myself. But I really truly can't be myself because I'm still wearing that jacket. You see? So it creates such a space of tension. And we know it. We'd like to take the shackles off and say, you know what, everybody? I'm going to be me and I'm not going to wear a jacket. And you know what? I'm okay if you love me or don't love

me with or without this jacket, because I'm okay without this jacket. Now that's the point of where real freedom lives, where you're like, you know what? I don't need other people to love me, for me to be me. You know what I think? I always call it that you're unfuckwithable at that point i often say that and i love that and i love that term and i often say that about myself because it is freedom that freedom it's one of the reasons why i made this podcast because i came from such strong rooted codependent family also who lived in fear of religion and conditions and thoughts of trauma, you know, in my ancestry and stuff, you know, which explained why they were where they're at, but all of these things had to be deeply understood. And I had to become aware of, I mean, it really

was part of it as you were speaking. I mean, I've, I've experienced what you're saying. I mean, seeking love outside of you and your friends and family and wherever, whatever it is, may even be a job or whatever it is. I mean, it's temporary's not yours. You're like borrowing to make you feel good. And then when you're in your room alone, punished, you don't feel loved anymore. That's right. That's right. And then, and in order then to get love, one has to then from that scenario that you're describing, move the pawn pieces on the board to do that.

And the child doesn't know any better than that you know the archetype is born out of the creative wisdom of being you know if you think about it the archetype is not nothing but the actual light of being saying okay i can't shine like this so let me wear this uh mask for now which is made of of beingness itself. It's not two actual things. It's, it's one thing, right? Very creative. You know, architects are very creative, beautiful. I love Carl Jung for sure. He's fascinating. He's around every corner I turn. There's so much work that has to be done. I mean,

we're talking about this and it is possible i mean i'm proof of that you're proof of that right and i'm sure with the many clients that you've worked with i mean because i mean you're bringing a lot of wisdom today and in the way you explain it is very receivable great great and uh you know the ancestral work is absolutely necessary i want to say that you know like when we do our individual work how can we how can we do individual work without understanding who is the individual there without the understanding of where all the streams of influence have come in it's like saying saying, imagine like having a mountain, you have all these waters coming in and here you are like, where'd you come from? All of that stuff, all that, you're not flowing by yourself. Like you originated out of nowhere. You know,

ancestral work is important. And that was made clear to me as I started to really understand my, my unconscious more and more like Russian immigrants, Holocaust survivors, like being like, whoa, wow, how much I carried that in my body. I couldn't believe the love. I think I ignored that. I have to be very honest with you. I really believe like I thought, oh, no, no, no, not me. I had this really like a pridefulness that it didn't get to me. Because's nonsense. They say even the ones who were doing the punishing actually also carry down mutations. So I found that to be- Absolutely. Oh yeah, no, it's both.

You can't just be the ones who are like, you know, doing the hurting, that they're the bad ones who didn't get influenced on the collective unconscious. Nonsense. They're acting out the duality. The punisher and the punished are playing out the same source of confusion and influence. That's why compassion is needed both for the aggressor, you know, just as equally.

And that's why a lot of these, you know, awakened beings, when they talk about, let's say, the aggressors, and we could name many of them, have as much compassion for the aggressors as the ones receiving the aggression. But it's hard for people to swallow that. Yeah. I don't know where... It's in a book I read read and I can't think of the book right now, but they were doing a talk. And during the talk, he told a story about this traumatic situation with a boy and how abused he was and how his mother was his safe haven. And she dies. Everyone had tears in their eyes for this little boy. And even if it wasn't conscious, they were sending love, you know, and compassion, you know, to this little boy of what he had gone

through. And then at the very end, the speaker had said, and his name was Adolf Hitler. And at the end of the conference or whatever it was, a woman had come up to him, hugged him. And as she rose her, her sleeve fell back and she had numbers of her concentration camp on her. And she said, you made me send compassion and love to someone who I thought I only hated. I only had hate for I um I've had to sit with this one I think my whole life knowing that my family was influenced by that so much like like literally I think I became obsessed with watching world war ii movies were you trying to unconsciously experience pain and I was I was i was i was i was i was trying to re-experience

what i think my ancestors were experiencing and i think i wanted to get into the shoes of both wanting to kill right and to understand both sides of the killer and the killed i mean it's it's crazy because you have to get into those shoes to really become free you have to understand both sides of that oh god alex i had to go through this i mean i had some of the worst plantation owners in history and i also have grandmothers who didn't have names they were slave of that master and then on my dad's side um i mean my dad's only for third generation here from czechoslovakia both sides and he had quite a bit of jewish in him which no one knew no one ever knew i have quite a bit of jewish in me that was hidden i had quite a bit of Jewish in me that was hidden.

I had quite a bit of African American that was hidden. And these are pieces of me that play out every day that I was unaware of. It's heavy. But in giving them a voice or at least acknowledgement, awareness of this, I was able to remove some of those layers. That's why there's so much theater about this in so many plays, because we have to, we have to act it out and let it come, let it come through. You know how many times I've been to the Holocaust Museum? And every time I've been there now, I think six or seven times. And there's a reason. I mean, one, it was field trips, but every time I've been there now I think six or seven times and there's a reason I mean one was field trips but every time I go back I think I'm just trying to get really close like yeah to enacting this wow you know I've never thought about this until now but you're right

there are some things that I'll seek like I used to love to watch Gone with the Wind. I loved to watch certain scenarios. We want to experience both sides. This is what I think I've realized. I know this will maybe make people think it's crazy, but I think we want to experience both sides. Yeah. To resolve.

Yes, to bring healing. To bring healing to it there's a room in the Holocaust Museum where all the shoes are sitting that were collected and I end up getting stuck in that room sometimes I'm just sitting there and I'm going

holy your mind gets blown by the sheer numbers. What does your body feel in there? You know what happens to me? I get to the point of where I feel like I am there. Like I am there.

I bring myself to the point of where I try to reenact that I am dying. Wow. That I am dying. Wow. That I am the one dying. So I've been to plantations where I knew that I had family that owned there, lived there at times. And I remember this one time I was in the slave quarters. Wow. And me too. I mean, I think the rest of the group had even walked off it was a tour and i

was stuck in just like you said you were stuck in that room with the shoes i was stuck i mean like i can feel as i'm telling you i could feel the energy rising right now you know what i mean because and i could feel i have goosebumps mean, just being in there, there was something, there's something in my bones. What were you seeking? At the time, it was very early on. You know, I was just discovering these things. This is, this was very early on. This is probably about six years ago. And actually, I'd love to go back and see if it feels different to me now that I have awareness. You know, now that I know more stories. Because a lot of these things, I was unaware of why I was experiencing that. So I'm imagining my teacher sitting here,

my Buddhist teacher sitting here and asking her the question, what are we seeking? And here's what is coming through. I can hear her voice. We are seeking to end carrying that baggage. That's what we're seeking. So in a sense that reenactment

is to finally say i get it i understand it's almost like it's like bringing the baggage of all of it right in front and saying here it is i fully get how it was created i fully get how it's being carried and i'm finally let it ready let it go because if we don't do that then what is happening is we're going to keep seeking the reenactment of it, right? Yeah. To play out. To play out without putting it down. This is the important part here, right?

So if we keep seeking the reenactment of it, we're getting close. But then we can become addicted. And I saw that within myself in the repetitive watching of the movies. Yes, I've been there. Because things are lighting up in your body. Like if you saw my Netflix account, you'd be like, who is this guy, right? It's the seeking of the reenactment of it to actually put it down. We want to put it down. Yeah. It's a timeless healing.

It's kind of like what you said. Correct. You're actually healing when you put down that bag, the past, the present, and the future. I mean, and you literally are free from that. And so I encourage you, me, and everybody else that if we keep speaking reenactment, and drug addiction is a reenactment too, or alcohol addiction, like all addictions are reenactments. It's the reenactment to actually put things down. We're getting close.

Getting close. As actually a collective, we are reenacting and this is where those patterns come from when you hear oh every 16 years or every whatever you know you hear this it's because individually we aren't doing the work to let it go and the dharma says that we are actually doing that as a species on earth. The sun is doing it. There's a cycle. There's a cycle.

So like, let's go big now, right? So there's a reenactment as an entire astrologically that way, right? Like as you're saying, right? So we say, oh my God, there's a movement of reenactment in the universe of the human being species looking to heal, to become enlightened as a species. So when do we get off the crazy wagon and actually say, we need healing. It needs to be healed first. And that's why there are other spaces in the universe where there are other beings that are not in body form, in other forms. Right. And they're playing out a different enactment than we are.

Right. So let's say, let's say they're at a space of where they put down more denser karmic patterns and closer to spaciousness, light beings, right? They have less density. They have less density. And I have a sense, you know, like, you know, people are like, how do you know? I don't, I don't know. I can't tell you from my mind. It's not from my mind, but I have a sense that that's happening in the universe. I have a sense that that is exactly what angels or, you know, that kind of. Correct. That's right.

And I think this whole thing of angels and in Buddhism, we have all of the human attempts to portray these light beings in these forms, these archetypal forms, right, is because we do have a sense that that's possible for us. So angels are, I think, our way of depicting of what may exist in the theory of forms and what we want, both, both. Maybe just a more advanced society of what they were. But if we get stuck on them as beings Maybe just a more advanced society of what they were. But if we get stuck on them as other like beings and we need to, that they're far away, then we start to objectify the lesser dense beings. Make an entity a deity.

That's it. That's exactly right. And that's not the point. Right. It's not to make all of those identities, deities and identities, it's deities into spacious, luminous light beings. The other way, the arrow has to go the other way. So if we take everything we just said, basically,

each one of us individually is representing the movement of the whole as a, as a species on the earth. And hopefully we can move this evolution to a more awakened, you know, state. Cause if not, I mean, you know, we're going to eliminate ourselves eventually. It's just where it's going to go. Shiana wants to save the world, but I know that I have to work on me.

And as I work on me, everything around me changes. Yeah. Yeah. Just keep on becoming lighter. That's the work. I love that. Yep. Just becoming lighter.

You know, I almost see it. I mean, you can think about it scientifically. Those neurons that are, you know, finding new pathways all over your body. Every time you decide to make a choice to not go down that road, that pattern that's been controlling you your whole life, you make a new one. Every time you make a new one, it's light, new light. Literally because we are light. We are light to begin with. So, yeah. Well, very cool, Alex.

I really appreciate you coming on. I really enjoyed the conversation. I really, really. Thank you for what a beautiful shared space. And I hope somebody gets something out of it. That's all. I think they will. Can you tell everybody where they could find you, what you have going on, and if they can work with you directly?

Sure, sure. The easiest way is just go to my website, journeytowholeness.health. They can find everything in there about me. Thank you so much. Yeah, let's do it again some other time. Yeah, a lot of wisdom. Yeah, thank you. Thanks for listening to Sense of Soul Podcast.

And thanks to our special guests for joining me. If you want more of Sense of Soul, check out my website at www.mysenseofsoul.com, where you can work with me one-on-one or help support Sense of Soul Podcast by donating to my coffee fund. Thanks for listening.