Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 555: Can You Really Trust Your Gut? | Amber Tamblyn

Episode Date: February 6, 2023

There may be a temptation in some circles to dismiss intuition as witchy, folkloric, or unscientific but there’s actually a ton of science around this. Our guest, author, actress and director, Amber Tamblyn will guide us through this. Tamblyn argues that intuition is a trainable skill but that this south-of-the-neck intelligence is often obscured by being too stuck in our heads and out of touch with our bodies. Tamblyn has been nominated for Emmy®, Golden Globe, and Independent Spirit Awards. Her work in television spans over two decades including starring roles on House M.D., and Two and a Half Men. On the big screen, she starred in movies such as The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants and 127 Hours. She’s written seven books, including her latest, which is called Listening in the Dark: Women Reclaiming the Power of Intuition. In this episode we talk about:How she defines intuition, and the role it plays as a bridge between the conscious and unconscious parts of our mindsWhy we are conditioned to validate rational intelligence over intuitive intelligence  The gut/brain connection, and why the enteric nervous system is known as the “second brain”Practical tips for getting better at listening to our bodiesThe role of meditation in boosting intuitionThe scientific research that points towards the importance of having a relationship with nature, and how this can improve our intuitionThe relationship between intuition and creativityHow we should think about dream lifeWhat to do when you’re not sure whether you should trust your gutHow to recognize the difference between anxiety and intuitionAnd why our society has downplayed the importance of intuition, which has been a tool used against women and menFull Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/amber-tamblyn-555See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hey gang, there may be a temptation in some circles to dismiss intuition as witchy, folkloric, or unscientific. In this episode, we're going to establish that attitude is bullshit. There's actually some very interesting science around this. Fun fact, which I learned from the book written by my guest today, what scientists call the enteric nervous system is made up of more than 100 million nerve cells lining your gastrointestinal track.

This ENS or enteric nervous system is in constant communication with your brain, about not only your digestive state, but also whether you're in danger. There's a reason we use terms like knowing something in our gut or in our bones. But this south of the neck intelligence is often obscured because so many of us are stuck in our heads out of touch with our bodies. We're in the bell-free with all the bats, utterly unaware of the tower below. My guest today argues that intuition is a trainable skill. Amber Tamplin is an author, actress, and director

who's been nominated for Emmy, Golden Globe, and Independent Spirit Awards. You've seen her on such TV shows as House MD and two and a half men and such movies as the sisterhood of the traveling pants. She's written several books including her latest, which is called Listening in the Dark and is all about intuition. In this conversation we talked about how she defines intuition and the role it plays as a bridge between the conscious and unconscious parts of our minds. Why many of us are conditioned to favor rational intelligence over intuitive intelligence? The gut brain connection and why the interic nervous system is known as the second brain.

Practical tips for getting better at listening to our bodies, the role of meditation, in boosting intuition, the role of nature, in boosting intuition, the relationship between intuition and creativity, how we should think about our dream life, what to do when you're not sure whether you should trust your gut, how to recognize the difference between anxiety and intuition, and why many parts of our society have downplayed the importance of intuition, which has been used against women and also men. Just a heads up before we get started here, there are brief mentions of addiction and sexual trauma in this episode.

We'll get started with Amber Tamlin right after this. Before we jump into today's show, many of us want to live healthier lives, but keep bumping our heads up against the same obstacles over and over again. But what if there was a different way to relate to this gap between what you want to do and what you actually do? What if you could find intrinsic motivation for habit change that will make you happier instead of sending you into a shame spiral? Learn how to form healthy habits without kicking your own ass unnecessarily

by taking our healthy habits course over on the 10% happier app. It's taught by the Stanford psychologist, Kelly McGonical and the great meditation teacher, Alexis Santos, to access the course, just download the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps or by visiting 10%.com. All one word spelled out.

Okay, on with the show. Hey y'all, it's your girl, Kiki Palmer. I'm an actress, singer, and entrepreneur. On my new podcast, Baby this is Kiki Palmer. I'm asking friends, family, and experts, the questions that are in my head. Like, it's only fans only bad. Where did memes come from? And where's time from my space? Listen to, baby, this is Kiki Palmer on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcast. Amber Tamplin, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure.

So why this subject, why intuition? So this idea about intuitive intelligence is something that had been circling in my head and my thought processes for a couple years. It sort of started around 2017's MeToo movement and what a powerful moment that was for this sort of intuition to show itself in and mass in the zeitgeist where all of a sudden people all over the world and certainly in all over the US were without even knowing it, without even asking the permission to do it or without having a kind of chain of command in the usual way that we do to express

ourselves, were speaking about things that they had never spoken about before. And so I was very curious about this idea of intuitive process and the connection between what our mind knows, what our mind understands, and also what our body does, but what we are conditioned to ignore about what our body tells us. So for me at that time, I had written a piece in the New York Times which was one of the most widely read opinion pieces that year in 2017 called, I'm done with not being believed. And that actually came out before a lot of the reporting that had come out about Harvey Weinstein. But I bring this up to say that it's sort of an example of how even I felt that way.

I felt like I was something in my gut was telling me that the peace needed to be in existence, not only for my own truth, but for some kind of larger truth that was happening in that moment. And from there, I just thought we talk about women's rage, we talk about systemic inequality in socioeconomic status and things like that.

What is the underpinning of all of these things? Well, it's intuitive intelligence. It's the voice inside of us. It's what the gut tells us. And I thought, oh, there must be really great books about this. I gotta go find them. And the truth is there were none in a modern context. The last one that was really written was decades ago was women who run with wolves, which is a phenomenal book.

And any of the other books I had read about intuition were written by men and they were in specific genres like self-help or psychology. So all of that to say, I was kind of surprised that a modern text with everything that has happened all over the world in the last eight years, ten years, fifteen years, everything from the Arab spring to even what's happening right now in Iran to the Mehtu movement, to the political upheaval of Donald Trump. I felt how is this not been something that's been explored? And so I began to explore it. So you view these huge social movements as a sort of mass flexing of this inner intuitive muscle that we all have that is sometimes overlooked? That, but also as a really striking example of its oppression.

And a lot of what I explored in this book and what I learned in my research for some of the essays in it really looked at that, gave a very clear timeline, a lineage of oppressed intuition as it pertains to women and minority groups. And so I thought, well, if I want to write a book about that, if I want to be part of a book about this subject matter, I want to hear a lot of different voices. I'm not just really interested in what I have to say about it. I want to hear what one of our biggest politicians has to say about it. Congresswoman, I am a press lady. I want to hear what a comedian has to say about it. Amy Poler. I want to hear what what a holistic practitioner survivalist has to say about it, whose doctor Nicole

Appellian. I mean, there was so many. I want to hear what my mom has to say about it, a public school teacher for three decades. So the book sort of started to come into this formation of a lot of different voices that were not necessarily trying to say, oh, look, I got it all figured out. I know exactly what intuition is. It's so great. I am so connected. Good luck, reader. And instead, I wanted this to really be an exploration that helps the reader ask more questions

about what intuition means to them, what their disconnect looks like with their gut, and how to recreate a connection with it. how to recreate a connection with it. How do you define intuition? Intuition is so hard to define. I have found this time and time again in the process, again, of writing the book, because it's so curial and it's so different for different people. It presents very differently. What I will say is that intuition is sort of this,

to my mind, connection between the rational intelligence that your mind has learned, and the feeling of truth that your body knows. And that might sound like some woo-woo mysticism stuff, but the truth is the more research I did, I found out that is this kind of intelligence, this connection, this deep listening, profound listening of what our body tells us, is in fact, one of the most important and ignored forms of intelligence that human beings have

and that animals have. In the book, I quoted Gert Geiger-Anzer, who's a brilliant philosopher and he's talked a lot about this idea of making decisions and when we make a decision not all outcomes can be known. There is not ever you could be the smartest person in the room the smartest person in the world and you could you could make a calculation only made on a certain amount of fact-based rationale, meaning there's always a margin of error in any decision we make.

Anything. You, Dan, you can't tell me unequivocally that this is the only good life you could have ever lived. Undeniably 100% no margin of error, that's it. Or that anyone, any given person, is 100% married to the right person and no one else. And we could say this about many of the decisions that we think about in our life or many of the truths. But the fact of the matter is, there's still a small margin of error. That's just the way the calculations of our lives work. And to

my mind, intuition is that margin of error. It is the part of ourselves when not all outcomes can be known, when not all reasoning, rational thought reasoning, the same intelligence that says, well, 2 plus 2 is 4. There is no alternative factor that. That is the thing you and I both agree on. The world agrees on that. That is a thing you and I both agree on. The world agrees on that. That is the rational thought. That's the rational intelligence. But we've been so conditioned to tell ourselves,

thinking with your body, thinking with your gut, thinking with your emotions, is bad for you. And I make a case in the book, as does Gird, Geiger, Answer, that this margin of error, this part of us, the secondary intelligence, is very real. And it is the thing to rely on when not all outcomes can be known, especially when making a difficult life decision, or when you're looking at something as it pertains to the trajectory of your story.

You have a nice phrase in the book, you call intuition the meet cute between the rational and the instinctive. And then you go on to say intuition bridges the gap between the conscious and unconscious parts of our minds. Yeah, very much so I think, but we don't see that as being valuable in our everyday lives. And my hope is that more people will. I think it's especially hard right now because we are sort of

programmed to be desensitized and to feel numb. And everything around us makes it so that we kind of have to live in this a bit of a numbed existence, both because of the political climate, the fears of climate change, but also just because we have been told over and over again, don't be so emotional, don't be hysterical, all of these terms, this terminology that has been described, and certainly it's not always best to lead with that foot, right? But it does inform a part of our intelligence and our decision making. And if we learned to have control over that and respect for that and an understanding for that in the same way that we do with our rational intelligence, with the part of us that comes out swinging each time with an answer, with what is known. Then we would kind of come into this balance between our physical

selves, our unconscious mind and our rational self. And it becomes, instead of these two things fighting each other, they begin to fight together. And that, to me, is the power of intuition, is having respect for this other part of ourselves that we've long ignored. Just a signpost for the listener, we're going to delve quite deeply later on in the discussion into how we can have these two parts of our system talking to each other. But just for now, to pick up on something you said before that, if I'm hearing you correctly, you're saying that all of us are kind of at a disadvantage right now because the way culture and technology work right now, they're conspiring to cut us off from listening to our bodies because we've got our nose and

screens or we're trying to numb ourselves in the face of these seemingly intractable problems. And I think you're also saying that specifically, there's a gendered issue here where women have been told over and over, don't be so emotional. There's been sort of an effort, a concertor or otherwise to cut women off from this deeper form of knowing. Yes. And to both of those parts, firstly, I would say we can look historically, and there's an essay in the book that I wrote that looks exactly at this. We can look back at throughout history, at who controlled and how it was controlled women hearing voices. We can look back at the age of women being

burned at the stakes for hearing voices all the way back to Joan of Arc and then all the way looking forward through the modern advent of psychiatry. As I mentioned, the term hysteria was coined to describe women who were having auditory hallucinations. And to me, in a lot of the research that I did and just sort of factually you understand that for hundreds and hundreds of years, what women heard was dictated and in the history books, through the men who they told their stories to. So it was to their preachers or their priests or it was to their doctors. And these were all men. And the conditioning began because it was so much about when women heard these voices, they weren't hearing themselves. They were told, they were hearing

God, or they were sick. And so it's kind of concerning to me that there is no text, there's no history that shows any kind women's connection to their own voice as it pertains to their own outcomes and what it meant for their own life. So certainly, yes, there is a history of that. We could go on and on and on, literally all the way up until the modern feminist movement and the hearing voices movement of the last 40 years. But before that, there was really no context for what women heard to be true for themselves or felt in their bodies to be honored and respected and believed. And we're in and time right now where we've got a Supreme Court in the United States that

is now telling women again that they don't understand their own bodies. They don't understand what the responsibility of our bodies are, what they can or can't do, what they are allowed to do or not do. And we're also living in an age, as you mentioned, where algorithms on social media dictate our proximity to each other and dictate our the outcome of our friendships and our relationships who we literally see and don't see online. Coupled with the pandemic, which also furthered this divide,

separated us even further, so we weren't having for years face-to-face arguments, face-to-face love, face-to-face grief. These things that are so vital and important for human connection and human growth and our ability to be in service to what our bodies can do for each other. So that's one aspect of what you asked and the other aspect that I think is really important, that while it is a gendered conversation, the reason that we're in this place also has so much to do with men's conditioning and programming to not see the feminine as valuable. And that is in and of itself, I think a cruelty that has been put upon our boys and our men to always be leading with masculinity and to think of that as the only

important part of their evolution and their story. And so part is, so these two things come hand in hand. I don't think that oppressed intuition is just something that women experience. I think it is also something very much that men experience trying to figure out how to hear themselves beyond the patterns of the patriarchy and the world in which they have grown up to exist in and believe is how they should relate to others. So it's very complex. I would say the person who's had the biggest reaction to this book after they read it was my 87- old father. He cried and he called me and he just sort of felt like I didn't know this was a thing. I didn't know that I could listen to myself in that way and I certainly never thought about it as it pertained to women. Just to loop back to something you said, you said many

interesting things there I want to follow up on, but one of them was about hearing voices and referred to a hearing voices movement, which I've never heard of would love to be educated on that. And I guess, if I'm hurling lots of questions at you, I'll throw one more, which is, how do we distinguish between a sort of healthy hearing of voices and an unhealthy version? That is a great question. I'm not an expert in that field, but I can tell you from some of the research that I did. HVM, the hearing voices movement, was something that took place several decades ago, but it was, hearing voices movement was really about respecting mental illness.

It was the first time in which we could say, it's okay to hear voices. It's okay to hear auditory hallucinations. That is part of this big, complex brain that sits inside of our skull, of which we only know about 15-10% of what it's capable of doing. And so it was really just a movement to say, Hey, mental illness is okay. To experience these things is okay. To hear voices, to hear something inside yourself in a world that tells you that's unhealthy or it's wrong is powerful. And it needs to be honored. That's sort of just what a little bit of what that movement was about. Same thing for

the feminist movement. First wave, second wave feminism was, I think, very much about taking back our voices and taking back our stories so that any given experience was told through our perspective, as opposed to, again, being told through the male gaze and the sort of narrative that got to decide for us the way in which we could show up and exist in the world. So while it didn't maybe address specifically intuitive process and intuition, these things are all connected. And I think it starts with a respect of the body, all forms of the body. When the body is working for you,

when the body is sending you signals and telling you something is wrong, when that flight or fight mechanism kicks in and you push against an answer that terrifies you because it might uproot your life or change everything for you, honoring the diseases of the body, the illnesses of the body, the illnesses of the body,

all of these things, is something that in a culture we don't really do, and so our brains, our rational mind has been trained to say, that's a problem. You're not good enough. What you're feeling is not right. Numb it, drink it away, drug it away, you're too fat, you're too wrong. That is like a real conditioning that for both men and women is true Instead of having this connection with it and a respect for the feelings that come up along the way I Can't remember if I've ever told this story before but I'm just thinking about this time in college

When I went to this little college in Waterville Maine and I took a semester in Washington, DC for an internship in television news. And my girlfriend was back on campus and she called me one day and said, I'm breaking up with you. And I, in a last ditch romantic gesture decided to drive through the night from DC to Maine to surprise her and plead my case. And that's pretty romantic. Yeah.

Well, wait till you're the end of it. As I crossed the main state border, I started to feel really sick. And I was like, I don't know if I was listening to her or not, I wasn't the most evolved teenage boy, but I definitely, I didn't feel good. And it wasn't like I had a stomach flu. It was just like something was going on. Like I, I didn't feel right. And sure enough, I got, at dawn, I pulled up at her dorm and I went to the door and knocked and she opened it and the blood drain from her face

and she closed the door on me and then opened the door and kind of like pushed me back and was talking to me in the hallway. And finally, I got into the room and we're talking and I looked down on the ground and I see some like very large LL bean shoes. Oh, no.

And I opened the closet and one of my fraternity brothers was in there. Oh, boy. And so I tell the story just as an example of like sometimes very often the body knows. Yeah, can I just like witness something to points of thing out, which is in that story you just told, your immediate reaction in the storytelling portion of it was to undermine yourself. And to say, I wasn't a very evolved boy, or however you phrased it, right? It's to like think immediately that feeling you had. Which, sure, could have been a stomach flu, but also it could have not been.

It could have been your young, fragile, growing body and brain and heart trying to kind of send you a warning signal that something was going on. But it's so interesting to me in hearing that, which is what I hear from men all the time. It's like, well, I was not a very, which is probably true too, but I think in seeing it differently, I mean, why can't we just say?

Why can't we just say it was an intuitive moment? It was, let's just say it out loud, because I think so much of our storytelling again has been about us undermining the body, right? And saying, no, it wasn't good enough where I had had too much coffee or, again, those things could be true, but if we are the arbiters of our truth, and if part of it is saying yes

to what the body tells us, even in retrospect, a different thing happens. That is the part of the muscle flexing of learning how to trust the intuition, even at our age, your age at my age, there's still time to open up those pathways. So if anybody's skeptical, I would like, if you're open to it, for you to kind of nerd out a little bit on the science, because there are a couple of essays in the book that you edited where people really talk a lot about what we know from the science around our God

and our intuition. And I don't know if you'll be able to recite it chapter and verse, but I would love for you to say as much as you can recall. Yes, I definitely won't because there were major experts in the book who spoke about this, but I can sort of give an overview. Once again, one of the things I think that's important to remember is that we're not talking about something out here in the clouds, like a feeling way far away, which is what I think intuition is associated with. This thing that we can't control, right?

That we can't use in practical terms. And I'm making a real argument that we can, and that we should, and that we owe it to ourselves, to see it as a tool as much as we do our brains when we want to make a decision about something and to go with that and to nurture that and to protect that at all costs. So two women in the book, Dr. Mindy Netafi, who is a depth psychologist and a somatic practitioner who specializes in trauma on the voice, she wrote about leaving a marriage and how difficult that was,

spending years and years trying to figure that out and sort of ignoring some of the warning signs that were very prevalent and also ignoring the warning sides of her body, of what her body was telling her. But she also talks a little bit in the book just from a doctor's perspective, from a psychological perspective, about the gut brain access.

And that over the last several years, they've really been able to identify that the guts, that the intestines, what runs through the center of our body, is now what they refer to as the second brain. It is completely connected to what fires and what comes about from our brain processing information, the gut also processes information. And oftentimes disease and a lot of forms of illnesses and things like that, they start not in the brain, but they start in our stomachs. They start in our gut, in our intestinal space, in what's called the gut microbiome.

To that end, there's a lot more scientific data and evidence that Dr. Nicole Appellian, who's another writer in the book, talks about the importance of research. And she cites a lot of articles in her piece that really looks at the importance of having your body have some kind of long standing relationship and connection with nature. And to not take that for granted,

and to see that as really powerful as opposed to like, I'm just going to go walk through the park for 10 minutes and that'll be that. Or like, I was near a tree today, so I'm good. But having this active practice of she goes through a whole long list of things like finding a sit spot that you go to every day, even if you can't, if you feel like you don't have the time to do it, but to be physically in nature, to put your feet in the dirt, to be a part of the natural world as much as we are the digital world, is extremely healing. There's a lot of evidence, again, she cites it in her piece, and she's a survivalist. She was on the TV show alone, and did two seasons of it. And she's also someone who cured herself of a major ailment, which was MS. She had MS, and she was wheelchair bound. She talks about this in the essay.

And through a lot of work, through sort of retraining the story with her body of its illness, and what could her couldn't fix it and working to heal herself in a more holistic approach, which means cutting out certain things for her diet, adding certain things that were herbs and supplements and more natural remedies while also working with more Western medicine to help heal herself but then to really connect with the natural world to have these ways in which she wasn't just doing things that made her feel sick. She wasn't doing things that alienated her body from the natural world. So both of these essays are sort of in complement to each other, and if your listeners get the book, they'll be able to really read about the substantial amount of evidence and data,

and facts behind the idea that intuition, this term, are a gut feeling. It's a phrase, but it's also a real thing. And for each woman, especially in this book, that can present like a ringing in your ear, a tingling, a tightness in your stomach, getting numb and cold, and sort of feeling like this block in your body. And so some of it is really looking at that, and saying the more you work towards it, you are coming into an appreciation and an understanding of your body as this other really important vessel for information. You already talked about this a little bit and we kind of teased

it earlier, but can you say more about how we can get better at listening to our bodies as another source of information aside from just the rational mind? I make an argument in the book for it being like a muscle you would flex and actually I did this event when the book launched with Amy Polar who's one of the contributors in the book and and she said something really funny, which was, we gave a fraction of the time we spend on deciding what we're going to eat on any given day. If we gave a fraction of that time to respecting and having an understanding of our body and our gut, we would be in such a profoundly different space because we can walk all day through the world and go,

what am I gonna have for breakfast? Or come and have oatmeal, then two hours later you go, which I have for lunch, I have a salad, no, I'm gonna be able to get chicken on the salad. No, I'm not gonna do that. I'm gonna get avocado this time. Then immediately an hour later you're thinking about dinner or a snack or whatever else.

And that you just, we'd think about food all day long. Most people do. And if we gave a fraction of that to saying like, okay, what is my body telling me right now? What is it saying? This thing hurts. I'm also, I'm not feeling good. For instance, I'm driving a car

through the middle of the night. I have a stomach ache. Maybe I shouldn't go see this girl because maybe she's not the one. If we had, if we could look at it in that way, of like a respect of the body and it the body and what it's telling us, we would just be in such a vastly different capability, certainly for the outcome of our life.

And so to me, when I look at it, when I think about like a muscle, it's something to be practiced, not to be perfected. At no time is anyone gonna just fully have this perfect understanding of what their body is telling them, what their guts telling them, and they're able to act on it and everything's great and all outcomes are wonderful. It's a slow process.

It's a scary process. And part of it is doing a little bit at a time, right? Asking yourself a hard question, seeing what comes up from that, how scared do you get? Does your brain immediately jump in and say, no, we're not doing that, absolutely not, no. How do you push past the fear? How do you push yourself one step further? To say, okay, well, hang on, let's see.

Let's see, let's just talk about it in here, in our heads, in our bodies. Let's sit with a potential answer. And the more you do that, the more you address the fear of your brain running away from something your body knows to be true, a little bit, it's like chipping away at a layer, chipping away at this generation's long conditioning that tells us to not listen to that at all, that it's not important, it's not something to be listened to, it's not effective.

And so to me, it's just sort of like a trial by error, little by little. And in the book, in the back of the book, which I'm sure we'll get into, there is sort of a piece that helps people walk through a step-by-step process, like a guide, to help you go through using this as a tool and trying it out as a practice. Can you say more about that guide? Sure, absolutely. So, the last chapter is called the Roadmap Revealed, and I really believe this is for, you know, anyone.

I'm now obsessed. I'm thinking about you as this teenage boy driving through the night to this girl that was about to rip your whole heart out and throw it on the ground in front of you. And be like, oops. But like, what if you had read this book? What if you had, you probably wouldn't have,

but you know, future dance, future teenage dance, reading this book, reading this last chapter right and it sort of starts by saying what's a difficult question that you have for yourself like we can all have one right now we could pick one anyone listening to this podcast could have something in the back of their head it could be about their job it could be about their relationship it could be about how much they're getting paid it could be about their relationship. It could be about how much they're getting paid. It could be about something with their body, their identity, anything, anything. And it sort

of asks you to find a quiet place. It asks you to center yourself in the conversation you're about to have, and to sort of go inward and ask yourself the question about the decision that you need to make. And then to see what comes up for you first, but without reacting, so without jumping in immediately as I've talked about the flight of fight mechanism, this part of your brain, the rational thought that wants to jump in and protect you, because that is its job. It's supposed to do that. It doesn't want you to go out of the life that you've chosen because that's a whole survival mechanism that the brain

is not prepared to confront. That's not the brain's job. So you want to sit with it. And then you sort of want to if for lack of a better term, and it's much more eloquent in the chapter, but sort of separate yourself into two people. And imagine that one person is the scared one. And imagine that one almost as a child. Even if you don't have kids, like, imagine it as your grandmother. Imagine it as someone that you want to support and love and say, okay, I know this is hard. I know you are scared. I got you. I'm going to hold your hand. We're going to do this together. Yeah, I always use the metaphor for children because I have one, so that's what I know. And I think about a toddler having a meltdown.

You're not trying to give into the child at that point, but you're trying to help them get through it to say, okay, on the other side of these feelings, we're gonna be able to talk about it and we're gonna be able to have a truth that maybe we didn't know before the feelings. So it walks you through, sort of step by step, how to push past the fear. Then once you're past it, once you've sort of come to the other side and you've sort of had this

conversation with this other self, this part of yourself that's scared and you're the adults or you're the support system or you are the one that is helping to get to this other side. Then you don't necessarily have to agree with that outcome. That is not something you have to go forward with in your life. You don't have to divorce your partner of 20 years or leave your job immediately. The point of the exercise is not to say, do this or else. The point is to say, look at you. You were brave.

You were super brave and you went out and you did something that was scary and now you have choices. And now you have an understanding of something that is true for you. And you can do that with that whatever you would like. But the truth of the matter is that if you do follow through on something that terrifies you and that your body has been telling you is probably wrong or needs to change or needs to happen in your life, the outcome is profound. And a lot of these stories in that book prove that point. So the exercise runs through all the way with a person reading the book or listening to the audio book, how

to do that for themselves. And you'll find that you might get stuck at the fear portion of it because we're supposed to, and that's okay. But with time, with time, this retraining ourselves to respect this connection between the brain and the body. And to sit with the fear and then to act on the truth of what the fear brings up is life changing and becomes easier and easier. And that is the premise of sort of flexing it like a muscle, thinking of it like as much as we think of how what kind of food we're going to eat or as much as we go to the gym and we practice self-care by working out or other forms of wellness.

If we thought about this conversation between our bodies and our minds and this conversation of the voice inside that tells us something that we want to put away, we're really opening up the door for a whole new perspective and a whole new way of making decisions which affect the complete trajectory and outcome of our lives. And frankly, puts us in a position to finally be our most authentic selves. You know, this reminds me a little bit of my meditation teacher, Joseph Goldstein talks. A lot about how if you've got a big decision or you're at a crossroads on a creative project, in other words, if you're in any way mulling something over, he says seed it in your mind loosely,

and then sit to meditate. and in the meditative process, often we're just feeling our breath coming in and going out. It's a little less involved than what you were describing, but you're just trying to get out of the spinning stories and into the raw data of your physical sensations. And in that process, maybe an answer will emerge. It may not be the answer you were looking for. But there's a way that if we can slow down the rational mind and tap into something else, we'll get a solid answer. Yes. And that is another thing. I'm so glad you brought up meditation because that's another thing that Dr. Nicole Appellian talks about when she sort of gives lists of things that are really important to get more connected with your gut and

get more connected with your intuitive process, whether that's your creative intuitive process or whatever it might be, but your intuition, what your gut says, that is one of the things she talks about, the importance of meditation, sitting in silence, and feeling without words running through her head that are dictating what the feeling is. Right? So that the voice, the only voice is not in language, but just in listening and just in feeling. And she also talks about the importance of simple things like sitting around a fire with friends or total strangers, talking to people you don't know at all. These are like little tiny connectorites that just connect us to each other, which furthers the connection to our bodies, and takes us away from this other part that aims to just separate us from everything and make us, frankly, numb.

from everything and make us frankly numb. Yeah, so it's not unlike when you spend all day puzzling over something and then the answer comes in the shower. It's like that part of the brain, the discursive mind, the CEO mind, the executive mind is valuable. We need it. And yet, in order to get the right answer sometimes we need to tap into something else, which you would call intuition. And speaking of practical takeaways, sorry, you look like you were going to say something there. Well, yeah, I was just going to say that is again, Greg Geigerens or talks about that. I mean,

it specifically talks about when the corporate world of how decision-making is made and he's done, there's huge studies on it that at the end of the day, a final decision that is made by somebody who's in that corporate world who's used to making rational decisions always comes from their gut. So they put all this other deductive logic and reasoning and as many facts as they can to get as close as they can to the answer, but then at the end of the day, you've got to use your gut. Your gut is the thing that's going to tell you as well, Dr. Derek Cass, who's an emergency medicine physician.

She has a great essay in the book, talks about the doctor's gestalt, which is sort of the same thing. It's a mechanism past everything you've learned from medical school in which in a split decision situation, and an emergency situation in which you have to make a decision right now or someone's going to die. You have three minutes go. What do you do? And doctors also have come to rely on this exact same thing

of which they call gestalt. Coming up, Amber Tamplin, on what to do when you're not sure if you should trust your gut, how to recognize the difference between anxiety and intuition. And why intuition is a team sport after this? Life is short, and it's full of a lot of interesting questions. What does happiness really mean? How do I get the most out of my time here on Earth?

And what really is the best cereal? What does happiness really mean? How do I get the most out of my time, pure honor, if then? What really is the best cereal? These are the questions I seek to resolve on my weekly podcast, Life is Short, with Justin Long. If you're looking for the answer to deep philosophical questions, like, what is the meaning of life? I can't really help you. But I do believe that we really enrich our experience here

by learning from others. And that's why in each episode, I like to talk with actors, musicians, artists, scientists, and many more types of people about how they get the most out of life. We explore how they felt during the highs and sometimes more importantly, the lows of their careers. We discuss how they've been able to stay happy during some of the harder times. But if I'm being honest, it's mostly just fun chats between friends about the important stuff. Like, if you had a sandwich named after you, what would be on it?

Follow Life is short wherever you get your podcasts. You can also listen to Add Free on the Amazon Music or Wondering App. Continuing with these practical tips that Nicole Appellian, I enjoyed her essay. She dumps a ton of practical tips and they also include service, play, and being cold. Yes, she talks about cold plunging, like the importance of kind of shocking the central nervous system back into feeling, how good that is for our health. There's a part of her essay that didn't really make it in

because it is such a big essay with a lot of information, a lot of cited articles and studies about this topic. But she was out in Africa for many years studying with tribal communities there and learning how to track animals. I mean, she's an expert tracker. That's one of the things she does for a living. And she talked a little bit and she's told me many times, you know, in Western culture, we're the only ones that don't use our instincts and our intuition with everything we do. If you don't do that out there in the bush, you're dead. You'll get killed or you won't be able to find food.

And so this is something we used to live by. Our rational thought was pointless in survival. But yet through generations and generations, we have sort of been othered and pushed away from remembering that that is a really important part of our decision making. So she talks a little bit about that. Would it be safe to say that the common denominator among all of these practical tips said, Nicole,

and you are recommending, including meditation, getting in touch with nature, sharing stories with friends, getting cold, playing, helping other people, the common denominator seems to be getting out of your head. Oh, definitely. I think that getting out of your head, quieting that voice, the one that talks all day long tells you everything is wrong or has a checklist or has all of the things. It's important, it's valuable, but it also needs boundaries. We need to have boundaries with that voice because that voice will dictate

and take control over everything. Again, I use the metaphor of like an unruly toddler who's gonna trash the whole living room with all the toys and everything. Unless we say, no, here's the area where we can play. Here's the area where all your stuff goes. There's a conversation in the end of the book with my friend, America Ferreira, who's an actress and organizer and activist and amazing woman. We have this discussion.

She talks a lot about that as a metaphor of like, am I gonna let my three-year year old son not sit in the car seat just because he doesn't want to? No, I'm the mother. I am the parental figure is going to dictate the boundaries of what he can and can't do. And there will always be time for fun and play and big feelings that don't make any sense,

but that need to be let out. But we have to keep finding the container for them. We have to have a boundary around them. And I feel very much that way about that voice in our heads, the one that we hear, not the voice of the body, not the gut. And because that is what gets overshadowed by this other part of us, the conscious mind, which is just like a rambling, paranoid, anxiety-ridden thing that just will go on and on and on and on and spin you out into illness, into all of the things that are usually really hard to make decisions by.

Okay, but is the gut ever wrong? I mean, I'm thinking about, I can imagine times when I listen to my gut, but my gut is a bigot, or my gut is just not seeing things clearly. So how do we manage that? Well, first of all, I would say that you have to be in connection with your gut first. It's not enough for you or anyone or me to a certain degree to just say out of nowhere, I'm gonna trust my gut. It is a process to come to understand it, just like meditation is. For anyone who's never meditated before, the first time you sit down and if you do trans and dental meditation

or whatever the process is, if you've been given a word that you use, it's sort of a mantra that you say over and over in your head, that other voice is gonna jump in and be like, you look down, this is stupid, this is a waste of time, you have a list of mile long, how long are you going to sit here and say this stupid word? Okay, keep going. Nope. And then we'll just keep jumping in and jumping in.

But with practice, over time, that voice goes away quicker and quicker. And great meditators, people who have mastered this work, no. That silence, the space in which you can just exist and feel and hear birds and hear airplanes or whatever the outside world might have without a single comment from the brain and that voice in the brain, that's sort of the sweet spot.

So to that end, I would say that it is a practice to get there to an authentic relationship with your gut. It's not something you can just jump into because it will be wrong, it could be wrong. It's something we have to sort of take in consideration over time and really work on respecting and hearing and understanding. Because then, of course, it's possible that it could be wrong.

Absolutely. But probably nine times out of ten, it will steer you in the right direction. One of the great essays in the book that I really love as well is by the feminist writer, Jessica Valenti. And her piece is really framed around this exact idea that she has a really fraught relationship with her gut instincts and her intuitive process. And that comes from many different reasons, being sort of a sex object her whole life, having really bad relationships with men early on and bad boundaries and how do you go about things

when you really can't tell the difference between anxiety and intuition. One is your gut and what is a response of your anxiety and your fear. And she's a beautiful line at the end of her essay that I love so much, which is when I can't trust my intuition, I trust my community. And so there's another layer, right, on top of this conversation, which is to think of our friends, our family, the people that are right around us, the closest peripheral of human beings that we have, as a sort of shield, someone that we can trust, that we can bounce off of when we are

sure, when our gut tells us one thing, but the fear is too powerful. Or the gut tells us something and we think, oh, this definitely can't be right. I'm gonna ruin my whole life, aren't I? But this idea that we have a safety net, a sort of shield of a community that can help us when we don't know. This comes up in your conversation

with the aforementioned America Ferreira that intuition is not a solo endeavor. It's to be shared. Yeah, and I love that. And that's a little bit of sort of what we're talking about. The idea that having this generous, beautiful, deep understanding of yourself and what works for you and what doesn't, and learning over time to flex this muscle,

this strong part of our intelligence, and to really come into communication with an understanding of it, rubs off on other people. It's infectious, right? When you meet somebody, when you know someone in your life who's willing to tell you know,

and it hurts your feelings, but they know that's right for them and it is what it is. That's really powerful and sharing that with other people and also holding people accountable, holding friendships accountable, being the person in the room that can tell you hard news or tell you something about yourself that can help you grow without breaking you. That is to be valued. And so intuition is not just something I think that is for us, it is for other people.

It is something to share with people that you love. It's something to share with people you love. And if you're worried about the gut steering you wrong, doing a gut check in conversation with another person or other people can be super helpful. I can walk out of my office and walk down to my wife's office and say, have this feeling that maybe I should do X and she can say you're a dummy or know that's brilliant

and that's like a gut to gut communication. Yeah, and also our partners certainly, but our best friends, the people who are closest to us can read us. They can see something sometimes for us that we can't see for ourselves, for a myriad of reasons. I know that my husband's certainly done that for me, and I've definitely done that for him

when he sort of has felt blinded by the fear of something, or the possibility of something, or the grief of something, and sort of being a blinded by the fear of something or the possibility of something or the grief of something and sort of being a sounding word for that but also being a person, again, who becomes the sort of the boundary maker, the reminder of your boundaries and saying, okay, we're going to have these feelings. We're going to feel this way, but let me remind you x, y, and z about yourself, which I know to be true, which again helps you sort of takes your metaphorical hand and says, let's do this together. I know you're scared,

I know it's scary, but I'm here for you. Coming up Amber talks about the relationship between intuition and creativity and why she suggests taking your dream life seriously. Keep it here. So there are a couple other things I want to talk to you about before I let you go. One is intuition, and we touched on this a little bit before, but intuition as it relates to creativity. You have an essay about the late actress Brittany Murphy, and I'd love for you to tell that story if you're up for it.

Yes, of course. So there's an essay in the book called Crossing Pass with Ghosts. It's also the essay you can find a lot of this sort of the historical lens of women's oppressed intuition as I described it earlier looking back at women saints and women being burned at the stakes and psychiatry and all of those things that I sort of referenced are also woven through this essay. But so for me, there was a around the time that Brittany Murphy had passed away. I started to become very obsessed with her story. For no reason, it felt like at that time. But I was very interested in her trajectory as an actress as a young woman

who wanted to move to Hollywood, who came there and was successful for a few years and then was as usually happens with child actors ripped to shreds by the media and everyone saying, oh, she's washed up, she can't work anymore. And her sort of succumbing to her own illness and and a drug addiction and then ultimately dying at a very young age. And it was a really tragic story and as somebody who was born and raised in Los Angeles, who's a third generation from Los Angeles, which is me, who is also a child actor and had also sort of been objectified in similar ways as she had, I became really sort of obsessed with this story and I felt very connected to her and talk about intuition, talk about intuitive process.

I don't even, didn't even realize that my obsession with her and that story was the beginning of the sort of existential death that I had been wanting to come. And I wrote this poem for Brittany, which was originally called about the body, and then it ended up in a book called Dark Sparkler, which looks at the lives and deaths of child star actresses. It came out in 2015. It took me about seven years to write,

and it absolutely was an exorcism of everything I had been through in Hollywood, my perceptions of it, my wanting there to be this truth, this honesty, this humanity to the lives of these women whose stories have been so protected by the world writ large and publicists. And we sort of see them as these beautiful prom queens that don't really have interior lives and are not tormented. And I wanted to show some of that and humanize them. And it began with Brittany Murphy. It really began with her.

And then it snowballed out. And I was going down many rabbit holes of research and looking at many different women who had died very young. And for me, this was at a time in my sort of early 30s where I also wanted to die. And when I say that, I wanna be very clear. I don't mean for my life to die, it was nothing like that.

It was an existential death. I was looking for the current life I was living as an object, as a woman in the entertainment business, who was only ever seen as one thing, an actress, someone who would go out and say someone else's lines, interpret stories for other people who just did this one thing. I wanted that life to cease and for something else to be reborn from it. But I didn't really know that in the process of writing. And so in this essay,

I talk about the few run-ins I had with Brittany Murphy, one of them in the book, I talk about going to an audition where she was, it was like the last time I saw her a few years later, she died. But the idea of crossing lives with someone who had similar ending to what I wanted, but that mine was in a different way. And that I wanted to not become that version of her, but that I also carried her grief in me. And I carried the knowing of what women in the entertainment business go through, what is expected of us of our bodies. And so I described the beginning of my creative intuitive process and my ability to write and my ability to know how to write, like how I come to my process as a writer. And I would imagine Brittany literally sitting down in my body like in a chair. I would have this visual

when I would start to write, whether it was poems or whatever, she became like an integral part of my process. It was in and of itself meditative. It was in and of itself a mantra. Her sitting down inside me felt like this mantra. Like when she sat, the poem would come. We were connected in some weird way. Her is this sort of ghost formation. And also this need to sort of feel like I'm continuing to tell her story. I'm continuing to be a voice for the literally for the voiceless in a way. And so the essay looks at that. It looks at my love and my sadness for the business I grew up in since I was 11 years old and what it's done to women and also what it's done to men and trying to

communicate something about that while also freeing myself of it and becoming something more. So Brittany Murphy's death and for anybody who doesn't know she was in movies like Clueless and 8-mile but her death kind of touched off an intuitive cascade for you where you in the moment, you didn't recognize it fully, but it set off a process where you realized, oh, I feel a lot of resonance with this individual given our shared history, both in that powerful moment where you cross paths, well, both auditioning for eight miles of the role that she ultimately got. And also, you're shared history in this at times on healthy industry. And you then started listening to yourself and writing about it, and then you transformed from somebody who was primarily an actress or actor

to somebody who's now really identified with writing. Yeah, very much so. And I didn't know when I was writing those poems, when I was doing the research of the actresses, when I was asking the artists who contributed to it, the David Lynch's, and all of these incredible artists to contribute pieces in the books, that this was going to be a book that would change my life life and it did. It really was a, it was something that I think put me on the map in people's minds as not an actress anymore, as something else, as something who was capable of many different art forms and many different forms of output creatively. But I wasn't writing it to do that. I wasn't writing dark sparkler to say, why can't people see me? Why can't I be these more things?

Why can't I be taken seriously as a writer? I was writing them out of an act of survival. And again, I was writing towards ending this other part of myself. It needed to go. And by exploring women that had literally ceased, I was in a way kind of saying, look, here's what happens to us. This is what this happens to all of us. I don't know any of these women. And yet I know them so well. They are me and I am them. And they met this specific kind of ending. And I'm going to meet a parallel one, but in this life. And I'm

going to keep going so that I can keep sharing the stories of these ghosts, of these women that either died at the hands of stalkers or abusive family members or themselves. And so for me, I could have never known, but that was the intuition. That was the beginning of my gut telling me, keep going towards this. And I had no control over it. He was like something I had to do. I had to write. And by doing that, I came naturally into this next evolutionary part of my career and my life.

So it really guided me towards that. All right, last question from me. You also have an essay about another aspect of intuition, which involves taking your dreams seriously. Can you tell us more about that? Yes, that's one of my favorite essays and it is a trip. I went Ronan Farrow interviewed me and a few of the contributors here in New York City and he was like, that is an acid trip of an essay because it's called, in the mouth of the wolf, you will find it. And it really looks at the importance of our dreams, of our dream life, of considering that the dreams we have can also be tools towards better understanding our intuition and what our gut is telling us.

Obviously, you can't take everything literal because dreams for people who are heavy dreamers and even lucid dreamers, you can do it meaning from some of the symbolism that comes out of it, but it's ours to and to it. I think I even say that in the book that we don't have to believe everything that our dream life says, but there might be markers. There might be symbols. There might be parts of our unconscious mind that are trying to tell us something through story,

through mythology. And mythology is very important to human beings. Storytelling is in our nature. It is a part of our existence. It is a part of how we move through the world. And so I talk a little bit about that and the obsession with keeping diaries when I was a little kid. And this reoccurring dream I had about wolves coming into my parents apartment, which sort of led after a while to an understanding of a very traumatic thing that happened when I was a child with a babysitter.

But I couldn't have known that without my subconscious mind sort of leading me towards it through this visual and through this recurring dream that was happening. And I could have ignored it. I could have just chalked it up as something that I was dreaming over and over again because I loved wolves, who knows. But by sort of following it and looking at what it was trying to tell me specifically, years later in therapy

when I was trying to resolve some things, it was very clearly this sort of snaking intuitive line pointing towards something, the fact that it occurred, the fact that it had very specific visual moments that were tied to something that happened in real life. So I put the, you know, that essay, that essay is in there to remind people that it's not just in our waking lives, that intuition affects us, it's also in our sleeping lives. And if you are a big dreamer, that that's just another way that you might be able to

into it meaning from something that night need to be resolved. And just to put a fine point on it, you were having this recurring dream that involved wolves, and by following that thread through therapy, you were able to uncover a memory of when a babysitter had kind of woken you up in the middle of night and touched you inappropriately. Yes, that's exactly what happened because I kept seeing

the wolves were literally in my dreams leading me to the bedroom, leading me to the same place where it had happened over and over. And I know this because I kept diligent diaries. And in those diaries, I kept a lot of my dreams and they were reoccurring. This one was happening over and over. And I thought, oh, that's interesting. And one thing led to the next and sort of exploring it and talking about this small memory that I had of this experience with a babysitter

and just going from there. It was really pretty profound, pretty powerful. Much of this material really is. Before I let you go, would you please plug the shit out of your book and any other books or any other things you're putting out into the universe that you think we should go access? Yes, of course. So this book is called Listening in the Dark, Women Reclaiming the Power of Intuition. And it is an anthology with incredible writers, activists, doctors, teachers, politicians, women across industries who talk about their relationship to their gut,

trusting it or otherwise, distrusting it, distrusting the self, and really harnessing it and using it as a tool to go through our lives and to make decisions by and seeing it as a very important part of our intelligence to be utilized in our everyday lives. And I would say to that end, some other books I really love are Catherine May's Wintering. I quoted that a little bit in this book which I think is just such a brilliant. It's also, I love reading it around this time of year towards the winter because I believe the solstice is really important and we have to honor it, our two solstices we have. And it's a time to get quiet, it's a time to respect the darkness,

to not be afraid of it. And I know there are people have real issues with the getting darker outside and in the winter and things like that. But Catherine makes a really beautiful argument for seeing winter as not just a season, but a part of our existence as a part of a time in which we are existing in the world and seeing our own sort of quiet and darkness and cold and aloneness being really important to everything else that we do in our lives. So that's a book that I really love. Amber Tamplin, thanks very much for coming on the show. Thank you so much for having me, Dan.

Thanks again to Amber Tamplin, one quick note before we let you go. Are you interested in sharing mindfulness with young people? IBNES teacher training program is a comprehensive year-long training that will support you in feeling confident in your skills as a mindfulness educator and inspired to make a difference in other people's lives. Applications are open for the 2023-24 cohort and the training includes some of the teachers and coaches that you hear right here on the 10% happier podcast. Scholarships are available. Just go to ibme.com for more info.

We'll put a link in the show notes. Go check it out. Before we leave you, just want to thank everybody who worked so hard on this show. 10% happier was produced by Gabrielle Zuckerman, DJ Kashmir, Justin Davy and Lauren Smith. Our supervising producer is Marissa Schneiderman, Kimi Regler is our managing producer, and we get scoring in mixing by Peter Bonnaventure of Ultra Violet Audio.

We'll see you all on Wednesday for a brand new episode and speaking of intuition, this one, I intuit is gonna be fascinating and perhaps challenging for some of you. I won't say more than that. We'll see you all on Wednesday. I'm looking forward to it. ["Move to the

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The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The Hey, hey, prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and ad free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and ad free with Wondery Plus in Apple Podcasts. Before you go, do us a solid and tell us all about yourself by completing a short survey at Wondery.com slash survey. by completing a short survey at Wondery.com-survey.