The One You Feed - Michael Galinsky

Episode Date: December 2, 2014

This week we talk to Michael Galinsky about the role of emotions in physical pain Michael Galinsky is an American filmmaker, cinematographer, photographer, and musician who has produced and directed a number of documentaries, including Battle from Brooklyn and Who Took Johnny. He also runs a production and distribution company called Rumur. He is currently running a Kickstarter campaign to fund his new film, All The Rage which is based on the pioneering work of Dr John Sarno. Dr Sarno is a leading figure in understanding the role of emotions in physical pain. In This Interview Michael and I Discuss...The One You Feed parable.The history of Dr John Sarno.How being a "goodist" can create strong repression and anger.How repressed emotions can cause physical pain.His family history with Dr. Sarno.His personal battles with pain.How Howard Stern, Larry David and John Stossel are fans of Dr. Sarno.How pain is a normal problem but chronic pain is a failure of the body to heal itself.The challenges in healing the emotional issues that can cause physical pain.The role of fear in causing physical complaints.Meditation practice as a way to manage challenging emotions.How pain can be a barometer of how we are doing emotionally.Knowing is not the same as doing.The difference between acceptance and repression.Michael Galinsky LinksMichael Galinsky TwitterMichael Galinksy/ Rumur Home pageAll the Rage Kickstarter campaign   Some of our most popular interviews that you might also enjoy:Kino MacGregorStrand of OaksMike Scott of the WaterboysTodd Henry- author of Die EmptyRandy Scott HydeSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

We're not saying it's a simple take a pill kind of thing. What we really want to do is shift the perception back to the idea that there is a balance between our mind and the bodies that have a humongous effect on our health. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit.

But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction. How they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really No Really podcast

is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallyknowreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really Know Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest today is Michael Galinsky, American filmmaker, cinematographer,

and musician who has produced and directed a number of documentaries, including Battle for Brooklyn and Who Took Johnny? Michael also runs a production and distribution company called Rumor. He is currently running a Kickstarter campaign to fund his new film, All the Rage, which is based on the pioneering work of Dr. John Sarno. Dr. Sarno is a leading figure in understanding the role of emotions in physical pain. Here's the interview. Hi, Michael. Welcome to the show. Thank you. Thanks, Eric. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to get you on the show. I'm really interested in the movie you're working to make right now. We'll talk a

lot more about that as we go on, but I'd like to start off, as we always do, our podcast is called The One You Feed, and it's based on the parable of two wolves, where there's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson, and he says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, and it represents things like kindness and bravery and love, He says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. Well, it actually means a lot to both of those things. And the work that we're doing now is a film that started out largely about Dr. John Sarno and his book Healing Back Pain, which is basically about mind-body medicine. And the reason we're making it is because my family has a long history with him, and I see the importance of this story.

His understanding is that the back pain epidemic and the pain epidemic is related to the repression of our emotions. Essentially, it's not a structural problem. It's actually not a physically based problem. It's that their repression of our emotions causes problems within our autonomic nervous system, which lead to the pain. And so the point is, is that if you think negative thoughts about yourself, about the world,

it kind of keeps that going. And in the process of making this movie, which has taken 10 years, I have been on a very long journey myself to get to the truth of that very simple idea. And because these patterns that we live by run so deep, if we feed the negative for a long time, it's going to get very strong. And it takes a while to weaken it by, by feeding the other part. And it feels a little unnatural to feed the other part, to feed the positive, to feed that, that good wolf. And I'm excited to say that over the last five to six months,

maybe the last year, the good wolf feels like it's starting to win. So I'm connected to it both in relation to the work that we're doing on this film, but also on this personal level, which actually makes the film seem more possible to have a powerful effect. So the film, and you've got a Kickstarter campaign going right now, and I think that's how I got introduced to your work. I'm actually a supporter of it. And the film is called All the Rage,

and it is based on the work, as you said, of Dr. John Sarno, who is essentially postulating that a good deal of the pain that we feel has to do with repressed emotions. Is that? That's exactly it. Dr. Sarno is over 90 years old, and he recently retired. And when he started his practice, he was familiar with the work of Freud and it was still, it was at the edge of its being in vogue when the kind of age of mechanistic medicine was starting to take hold. And what he found when he was an orthopedic

doctor, he was teaching, working in orthopedic medicine at NYU's Rusk Institute for Rehabilitative Medicine. And it's important to know also that before he worked there, he started the first group practice in New York State. I think it was called the Hudson Cooperative. And so each day, all of the different doctors who dealt in the different realms of medicine met each day to talk about all the patients that they dealt with. So there's this very comprehensive approach to the whole person. Even though they might be a specialist in one realm, they would talk about it with every other doctor

so they would have a better understanding of what their patients were dealing with from a variety of perspectives. So then when he was working at the Rusk Institute, he found that everything he'd been taught about standard care for back pain, which is what he was dealing with, just didn't seem to help. The physical therapy, the hot and cold didn't really make sense. It didn't seem to have a scientific basis. And then when he looked at the data to support standard care at the time, he found that there

really wasn't any. It was just standard care. He was also curious as to why none of this was actually working. And when he looked at his patients' charts, he found that 80% of them had a history of two or more psychosomatic illnesses, migraines, colitis, eczema, ulcers, things that were known or thought at the time to have a mind-body connection. So he realized that that pain was probably connected to that as well. He started to talk to his patients and he started to see that a lot of his patients fit a certain type of pattern where he would call them a goodest. They really, really put themselves under pressure to be perfect and good. And they had a difficult

time saying no to people. They would always want to, they would want to do for others before they would do for themselves. And we got them to just basically see that connection and see the possibility that they might not be dealing with things they needed to deal with. They started to get better. And he further developed his practice by kind of getting a better sense of the knowledge that made sense and understanding how the system worked. And what he ended up postulating was that it was, you know,

from a very Freudian perspective, that the unconscious was so afraid that these thoughts that were not supposed to rise out of the unconscious might rise to consciousness, that it used the autonomic nervous system to reduce blood flow to a certain area, which would cause pain, thereby diverting the attention. And when he got people to slowly understand that, they would start to see. They could use their pain as a barometer, and they would start to think about the thing that they weren't supposed to be thinking, and they could kind of get it to go away. So he was able to get people to kind of see how the pattern process worked, and in that way, they were able to kind of take control of it and to heal. I haven't seen the movie because it's not made, but in the clips that you have, you

are battling pain yourself. And so I'm assuming that you have, at least for yourself, personal evidence that says that there's some credibility to this theory. Absolutely. You know, my dad, this is the way we came to know about Dr. Sarnoff. My dad got the book in the early to mid-80s, and he was a clinical psychologist, so he understood the theories. And at the time, he had whiplash. And Dr. Sarno goes into great lengths about whiplash, where in societies or cultures where you don't have the kind of institutionalized medicine that we have, there's not whiplash.

It doesn't exist. So, like in Latvia, they don't have whiplash in Sweden. 30% of the people in an accident get whiplash. So there's this kind of connection with what we expect. And, um, that, that also plays into it. Anyway, my, my dad read the book and he got better. And at the time I was probably in seventh or eighth grade and he was, he would come home from work every day, have a whiskey and sit in traction. But before that, when I was in second grade, he almost died of a bleeding ulcer. So he could see himself on every page of the book, which is what so many people say when they read the book. And he got a lot better. It wasn't perfect, but he got a lot better.

A few years later, my brother had terrible RSI kind of hand problems. He couldn't type, and he couldn't drive. He even gave me his car because he just couldn't grip his hands on the wheel. A doctor in New York told him he had, and this was supposed to be like one of the best surgeons in the city, told him he had to carve away bone in his collarbone to free the nerves from his neck going to his hand. And my dad was like, can you just go see Dr. Sarno? And he did. He went to see Dr. Sarno. And within a week, he was 80% better and he took his car back from me. And he'd been struggling

with this for two or three years and it'd been getting worse and worse and worse. So he got the connection and he was able to reverse the course of this problem. At that point, I read the book myself and my back would go out once or twice a year. I was in a band. I was carrying heavy amps. It was stressful. And every now and then, it would go out. I remember carrying a big heavy amp over an icy pathway the day before we went on a big tour, and I threw up my back. So, you know, the kind of stress is when you look back, you go, oh, it wasn't really that action.

It was what was going on. So I read the book, and I didn't have a back problem for 10 years. I was great for 10 full years. and I was fighting it. I was reading the book and I was fighting it, fighting it, reading the book, getting worse and worse. Boom!

I hit the floor like a ton of bricks and I couldn't even move. I was in so much pain. My friend had to get three Vicodin in me before he could even put me in a car

to take me to my house. And, you know, I had been reading the book and it hadn't helped. I ended up getting an MRI. I was told I, too, had to have surgery. I had an L4 disc protrusion.

And once again, my dad was like, would you just go see him? And I did. I went to see him, and I got better. And at that point, I said, can we make a documentary about you? That was 2004. And we started to try and make a documentary. We couldn't even talk to people about it. You'd say, hey, do you realize that this is going on?

A lot of the pain problem is actually repressed emotions, and people didn't want to hear it. We applied for 20 or 30 grants. We didn't get any, and we just couldn't figure out how to make the movie. So it kind of stalled. When it happened again in 2011, which is the footage that's in the film,

I screamed to my partners. I said, grab the camera. We're making this movie, and we're making it now. And that's kind of how the movies Jumpstart series for the third year running. All January, I'll be joined by inspiring guests who will help you kickstart your personal growth with actionable ideas and real conversations. We're talking about topics like building community and creating an inner and outer glow. I always tell people that when you buy a handbag, it doesn't cover a childhood scar.

You know, when you buy a jacket, it doesn't reaffirm what you love about the hair you were told not to love. So when I think about beauty, it's so emotional because it starts to go back into the archives of who we were, how we want to see ourselves, and who we know ourselves to be, and who we can be. It's a little bit of past, present, and future, all in one idea, soothing something from the past. And it doesn't have to be always an insecurity who we can be. It's a little bit of past, present, and future, all in one idea, soothing something from the past. And it doesn't have to be always an insecurity. It can be something that you love. All to help you start 2025 feeling empowered and ready.

Listen to Therapy for Black Girls starting on January 1st on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door

go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth.

Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today. Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really No Really, sir. Bless you all.

Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really No Really. Yeah, really. No really. Go to reallynoreally.com.

And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It sounds too easy, too good to be true, right? That I just read the book, I realize that my emotions are the problem, and I get better. And it sounds like you even having that knowledge doesn't, just knowing it seems to maybe start the process, but it sounds like there's a lot more to be done

in dealing with these repressed emotions than just knowing that that's the problem. Well, it goes back to the wolves, right? If you cannot fully get the simplicity of that message because the patterns run so deep, it's sometimes not as easy as we might like. At the same time, every person is different. And I think that this situation exists in a cultural context.

So one of the things that's really interesting is when we couldn't make the movie eight years ago, now we can. And the reason we can make it now is because the culture is shifting faster than most people can imagine. And sure, because of the work that you do, you can see it. You can see the data coming out about the relationship between stress and health. You can see the data coming out about the relationship between stress and the repressed emotions and

stress, right? The culture is changing at a very rapid pace. So we live in a cultural context. It's very difficult for us to believe things that nobody else around us believes. But when everybody else starts to believe it, it's much easier. So one thing that I think is really positive is that it becomes easier and easier for people to buy this idea because they can see more evidence of it themselves. They can see more people talking about it. And an interesting corollary to that is I've been looking at the reviews

of Dr. Sardo's book Healing Back Pain on Amazon. This book came out in the early 80s, mid-80s, and this year it has gotten, at the beginning of year, it had like 400 and something reviews. Now it has 945 reviews, and they're almost entirely five-star. And if you read them, I mean, a lot of people say reading the book is a healing process in itself. But literally just reading the reviews can be extremely healing, because you read hundreds of stories of people reading the book and getting better, and explaining how and explaining why, and the revelation that they received.

You and I were talking before we started recording, and I was talking about the Kickstarter. And what's really interesting about the Kickstarter is it hasn't really gone beyond the people who know who he is yet. So almost everybody who's backing this project is extremely passionate about it because, for the most part, they're someone who couldn't have been through 20 30 doctors never got better finally they either read the book or saw him and

had a miraculous recovery and it's only miraculous because it's it goes against the grain of what people normally do you have some fairly uh prominent people in the movie who are big fans or supporters of of dr sarno i I think you've got Larry David and Howard Stern and John Stossel from, or at least he was with ABC News. Well, John Stossel is an interesting person in the movie because he is literally the only person who's ever done a major media piece about Dr. Sarno. And it was, you know, it had a huge impact on people. It was in 1999 that it was on 2020. And even at the time, John Stossel was kind of the crank,

the non-straight-up liberal guy on 2020. And so he was kind of often approaching it from an outsider's point of view. But his piece was so profound because in it, three people were healed by going to see Dr. Sarna. One of them was Rosie O'Donnell's assistant, Jeanette Barber, and she had to use basically an electric wheelchair to get around the city because she couldn't walk. And three weeks of the practice, and she was better in walking around. And she's still very vocal about that.

And there were also two other people. But what's astounding is, you know, this was before YouTube and even before eBay. So when eBay kind of came around, that tapes of that show were going for several hundred dollars because it was so hard to find. YouTube made it much easier for people to connect with. But John Stossel, when we did interview him, he said, to this day, once a week at least, someone stops him in an airport and I think they're going to say, John Stossel, I love your libertarian politics. But they say, no, I saw that 2020 piece and it saved my life. And after we interviewed him in his apartment, he texted me 20 minutes later.

He said, I went out for a coffee, and the first person I saw stopped me and said that 2020 piece saved my life. So that's kind of interesting. And then it is interesting also when you think about the fact that there's several comedians in the piece, right? Because comedians tend to be highly repressive of their emotions because they want to please people so much. So Howard Stern is one. Larry David is one. Jonathan Ames is one. And they're all in the movie, which is great.

What does Dr. Sarno get into in more detail in the book Healing Back Pain? Because what you've said is a pretty simple premise, right? You can say it in a sentence, right? Like, repressed emotions can lead to pain. Right. And if you don't repress those emotions, you'll have less pain. Is there more of a prescription in the book? Yeah, well, I mean, his prescription, as he says, your campaign. And I do, I do believe very much that what we think about and all that can have and does have connections to our body, the idea that the mind and body aren't connected, seems silly to me. I mean, the nerves run right down there. I mean, it's, it's clearly very much connected. I'm, I'm, I'm a little I'm still and I've asked, I've kind of poked at this question a couple different ways, a little bit around, like, take, for example, I have depression. And I think I know a lot of the things maybe earlier in my life that may have caused me

to act certain ways. For me, though, just knowing that hasn't caused that to completely go away. And that's what I'm kind of, and it sounds like you knew about Dr. Sarno, and you still, you know, found yourself back in back pain. And I know there's a difference between knowing something and actually living and doing it. That can be a pretty wide gulf. And so maybe that's what we're getting at. I'm just kind of trying to understand more. It's one of those, I'm always skeptical of too good to be true, right? Like, I've had this problem, and then, you know, 10 easy steps to never being unhappy again. And so it sounds to me like the theory may be 100% correct, but that

bringing those changes about in your life may not be as easy as just reading the book. Absolutely. And for some people, it's as easy as reading the book. For some people, they need to go through intensive therapy. We all have a different level of experiences in our life, some of which are painful and some of which are not painful. But I think one of the reasons that I decided to be a character in the film is because I didn't read the book and get completely better. I did at one point. And then when the pressures of life and the patterns that I exhibited, that I participated in, caught up with me.

So, you know, as you said, you yourself are a goodist. Well, so was I, and it's a hard pattern to break. So even in, say, my relationship with my wife, relationships are very difficult because what they require is two people to be unchanging. Otherwise, they lose the balance that they have. And so when you change, it's a difficult process. And so part of our problems sometimes have to do with the different relationships we have. We change and our parents don't want us to change. Our wives don't want us to change. They don't want to upset the balance. So there are a lot of different factors at play in these situations. It's not simple. There's not a simple answer.

I think what, and I want the film to recognize, and I'm really glad you brought this up, because we're not saying it's this simple, like a pill, take a pill kind of thing. But what we really want to do is shift the perception back to the idea that there is a balance between our mind and our bodies that have a humongous effect on our health. And I think, unfortunately, the mechanistic approach to medicine and to science has not respected that reality. And that's what led us to a lot of problems. I agree with that 100%. There seems to be two extremes. One is, as you said, the mechanistic or reductionist medicine that says,

that doesn't even acknowledge that as a possibility. And then the flip side of that, which is all the way over at the other side that says, you know, your entire experience in your life and everything that happens to you as a result of the way you think. And I also think that that is nonsense. I think you had a post recently on your blog where somebody asked, who had a torn Achilles heel? Asked Dr. Sarno, is this because of my emotions? He's like, no, of course not. It's because you've tore your Achilles heel.

Right, but he pointed out, and this is where it's interesting. So, yes, that happened. But what she realized is not that that wasn't the cause of the pain originally, but your Achilles tendon will heal itself and the pain will go away because the pain is there for a reason. And when the reason is no longer there because it's not damaged, the pain should go away. But what often happens is it stays. So there's so many different aspects of this. So on one level, yes, it's very simple. And on another level, it's very complex.

And yet, even as it's complex, it's simple if we can just go there and be with these thoughts. So one of the things that connects all these three different guys that I brought up, Dr. Clark, Dr. Mate, and actually I got a call the other day from a dermatologist who practices his way, and Dr. Sarno, is the autonomic nervous system, right? And the autonomic nervous system is, we see it as the automatic nervous system, the stuff that goes automatically. I like to think of it in some ways as the less conscious nervous system because when we pay attention to it, we can change the way that it behaves

if we bring our attention to it. So at the end of the movie, the movie becomes actually quite focused on spirituality and on the idea of meditation and mindfulness. Because I think through these practices, we can become more in touch with what we think and what we feel. And through that process, we can take more control over how we react to things. And central to that is the notion of fear. And much of our unconscious issues have to do with fear. I have some kittens now, which is really useful to understand these things. A kitten gets scared, and it runs away, and then it shakes it off, and then it's fine.

Now, if you think about this, there's another doctor, or I don't even know if he's actually a doctor, but he's a healer based in England named Ashok Gupta who does a lot of stuff with meditation and with kind of understanding these ideas. And once again, from a different cultural construct, he was dealing mostly with chronic fatigue because he had chronic fatigue as a medical student, and then he spent 10 years figuring out what was going on and came up with

his program to deal with it. And it all comes back to the amygdala, which connects all of these different things, which is the fight or flight response. It's the pre-linguistic. It recognizes that there's a danger and it gets out of the way, right? But think about it this way. He says that the amygdala, say you step off a curb and you almost get hit by a bus because you're not paying attention, right? The amygdala then pulls you off the curb. You know, you're like, whoa, what just happened? That was scary. Now your amygdala checks in with your cortex, which is your thinking brain, your rational brain.

It says, hey, a bus is scary. Two things can happen. If you're kind of primed to be afraid, if you're primed to go towards the negative, you might go, yeah, buses are scary. Now, whenever you see a bus, your amygdala says, I don't need to bother the cortex. I'm just going to get the stress hormone going so that we're ready for the threat. If your cortex says, hey, you know, buses aren't scary, acting like an idiot, not paying attention to where you're going, that's scary. Pay attention, dude, right? So then you don't get the stress hormone every time. You learn to be a little bit more aware as you go around. Those are the two different things. But if you do that on a repetitive, constant basis, and you're constantly unconsciously stressed,

it plays absolute havoc with your body. Yeah, we had a guest on the show, Dr. Srini Pillay, and he does studies on this sort of thing around the amygdala. And he has some really interesting studies that talk about the idea of unconscious fear, our amygdala can be as you said releasing stress hormones and be triggered and we have no idea of it they did some studies where they would show people um you know something terrifying but they would only show it to him for like you know 10 milliseconds which is not enough to register consciously. And yet, you know, they could see in the brain, like, yep, there it went, it's afraid. And so that is a, you know, it's definitely seems to be a real, real challenge there, which I'm always sort of

wondering, well, how do I, how do you deal with something that you can't, can't even see? You know, on the show, we talk a lot about meditation, and it's been a huge help to me in my life in trying to just, in starting to become more aware of what's going on at more of an unconscious or at least repetitive, habitual level. For me as well, this last year, I went actually to get, I earlier mentioned Dr. Norton Hadler's book, and I went to get his book from the library, and next to it on the shelf was mindfulness, so I picked it up. And I read both of them, and I started the mindfulness practice, and it is a practice. It has taken me a long time to get to a place where I'm actually able to get a real benefit from it. able to get a real benefit from it. It was good for me at the time, but now it's actually, I feel it has a very powerful ability to help me to pull things together, to be aware of what's going on in my body.

And so back to the very first question you asked me, you know, has your own experience helped you? And it has. Like I can see what clues did I have that what Dr. Sarno was saying was true. My pain is a barometer for what's going on in my life. So if I'm stressed out, I know it because of my foot. Sometimes I'm not aware of it and I go, oh, my foot is bugging me and I have to learn. And this goes back to the habits. One thing I've learned is probably because of unconsciously low self-esteem on some level,

I push myself way beyond my capacity way too often. And I've learned to not do that. So as we started, we get up for this Kickstarter campaign a week and a half ago, I was doing that and my foot was bugging me. That night I thought about it. I said, tomorrow I'm working completely differently. And I got up, I took a lot of breaks. I didn't get into that kind of adrenaline-fueled work cycle that felt good. It felt like I was getting something done, but it was clearly not working. It was not good for me, and it was very bad for my body. And so even doing this Kickstarter has been a practice of trying to do it differently, to not take things very seriously, to not think of each instance as being of utmost importance

and that things are relying on it, to be just present in the moment and accept what comes. And it's had a profound effect. I mean, I'll tell you that in the last six months it's been crazy. Like, in the past, if I had a film shoot, I would get nervous and I'd be, like, stressed out before. It doesn't really happen in the same way anymore. And in some ways I'm like,

it feels wrong to not be stressed out before a shoot. Like I'm going to forget something or I'm going to do something, but it's actually, I'm doing, I'm much more in the moment and I, there's very few mistakes. And, uh, you know, this week we shot, um, I don't know if you're familiar with Prince E from, uh, St. Louis, who's done a number of recent videos that are just wildly viral. And he did one, yeah, he did 60 seconds, how to get stress-free in 60 seconds. I saw that and I was like, you're talking about that movie. It echoed all the stuff I'd recently been reading

from Eckhart Tolle and from Ram Dass. And so I reached out to him and he said, sure, yeah, I'm happy to shoot with you. So I went there last week and I didn't have his phone number. I didn't know how to get in touch with him. I was emailing, and he wasn't responding. And at the point where the person was trying to help me do sound and get to him, I said to her, you know what?

It's cool. It's not going to happen. And I don't actually – I'm not upset. In the past, I would have been really upset. I would have been stressed out. But it just is what it – and, of course, right then, as soon as I let it go, the phone rang, and we had an amazing shoot. And I just put up the video just now.

And it's awesome. And he's awesome. And so it's interesting, too, because I just saw a video he did a couple years ago. It was more of a hip-hop video. And there's this kind of internal struggle that he's having at that point that you can see it. There's an anger there. And he's just a completely different person now because he walks the talk that he's having at that point that you can see it. There's an anger there and he's just completely different person now because

he, he, he walks the talk that he talks about was just letting go of this stuff. And it's so clear to me after meeting him and after watching him, he has, he's let it go. The guy's getting 50 million views of his videos and he's just the most humble person I have, I've ever met. Hey, y'all. I'm Dr. Joy Harden Bradford, host of Therapy for Black Girls. And I'm thrilled to invite you to our January Jumpstart series for the third year running. All January, I'll be joined by inspiring guests who will help you kickstart your personal growth with actionable ideas and real conversations.

We're talking about topics like building community and creating an inner and outer glow. I always tell people that when you buy a handbag, it doesn't cover a childhood scar. You know, when you buy a jacket, it doesn't reaffirm what you love about the hair you were told not to love. So when I think about beauty, it's so emotional because it starts to go back into the archives of who we were, how we want to see ourselves and who we know ourselves to be and who we can be. It's a little bit of past, present and future all in one idea, soothing something from the past. And it doesn't have to be always an insecurity. It can be something that you love. All to help you start 2025 feeling empowered and ready. Listen to Therapy for Black Girls starting on January 1st on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Listeners are probably tired of sort of hearing about these semi contradictory things, or paradoxical things. But just a minute ago, you know, we started talking about this idea of part

of the issue is we're goodists, and we repress things. And, and my one of my major ways of doing that is that I repress that something bothers me. And you just talked about a situation where you sort of had a situation that might have bothered you, and it didn't because you let it go. And I'm always interested in that distinction between letting something go for real and repressing something. I'm just interested on your thoughts on that. Yeah, that's interesting, because the truth is, what I was struggling with at that,

the reason I was even bringing it up to her, is because it was a bit of a struggle, because it was this long period of time where it was like, trying to make it happen, and struggling with that idea of being able to let it go. Because I had traveled all the way to St. Louis to film him, and it seemed like it wasn't going to happen. And so, you know, there was, there were, there was, the wolves were at each other inside me and,

and they were, but they were, they were, it was more like my kittens playing. They weren't angry. And the point I was making was I, I, you know, I was accessing what this might have felt like six months earlier. And I think I would have been really stressed out and I would have been, my mind would have been racing. I'd be trying to think of everything I could do to make it happen. And instead, you know, I might have been calling 10 different people, like trying to figure this out. And the whole point was that I had committed myself to not doing that. And so there was some internal struggle there, but I was actually calm, and I could check in my body, and my foot wasn't tense,

which is a good barometer for me. And I was just, I had accepted, you know, I was actually really going with what Princey speaks a lot about, was just being present, accepting what is, and not judging the moment. And I think judgment is central to all of these ideas. Fear is central to all of these ideas. And empathy is central to all these ideas. And I recognize that he probably had some things he had to deal with,

and that was that. And, like, you know, I'd made the decision to come, knowing that I didn't even have a time or a date. And, you know, it was on wasn't, I didn't even have a time or a date. And I, you know, it just, it was on me and I accepted what it was. And what I found interesting was I also found a lesson in it that as soon as I let it go for real, like, cause you were saying, I was struggling with it. And what I said is, as I said that to her, I really felt myself completely let it go. It just didn't matter to me because you know what I figured if it didn't happen now, it would happen in the future. Or maybe it wasn't even meant to be in

the film. It just is what it was. And I, and I wasn't overthinking it. And as soon as I stopped overthinking it, I stopped thinking about it. It came. And you know, that sounds quasi mystical. It sounds quasi whatever, but that was my completely authentic experience at the time. And it felt like, okay, this makes so much sense. And then what was really interesting is a lot of his stuff that he's talking about really echoes many other gurus and spiritual people who've come before him. Especially, like I said, Eckhart Tolle. And on the way there, we passed a paint and auto body shop where the T had fallen off paint and the ampersand had fallen off. So the sign outside literally said, pain body.

And even though we were late, I said, I have to film this because we cannot get it later. And then we got there and he was, the reason actually he wasn't able to do it was his car broke down and he was getting it fixed. You know, he's like, I've got to deal with this. So we went to where he was and we picked him up and we brought him back to that place and we filmed in front of the pain body sign. And it just, you know, it all made so much sense because, you know, these, these things appear when, when we're ready to see them, when we're ready to hear them and we're ready to know them. And, and I think that's really a big part of the message of this movie, which is that, you know, a lot of it's

just about not overthinking it and just being with it. And that's a really, really, like, you know, I'm saying it's taken me 10 years to begin to get close to understanding that. But now I really feel excited and happy to be able to make the movie. And one of the reasons it took us 10 years to make the movie is we weren't ready to make the movie before, but now we are. one of the reasons it took us 10 years to make the movie is we weren't ready to make the movie before, but now we are. Excellent. Well, let's tell people where they can support the campaign if they want. The movie looks really interesting. The subject matter is very interesting to me. You've made a lot of other really good movies. So the movie itself looks really interesting as part of the reason I supported it. So where can people go to do that?

It's really simple. It's just the movie's called All the Rage. You know, it's a quasi-positive thing. It's All the Rage, but All the Rage is part of the problem. And it's alltherage.tv is how you get to it. Alltherage.tv. And how much longer is the Kickstarter campaign going? Till December 17th. Okay, excellent. Yeah, so there's some time left. And, you know, I think you might be surprised by the number of people who listen to your podcast who know who Dr. Sarno is. And that's our big challenge right now, is just getting in front of people who know and love Dr. Sarno, because there are hundreds of thousands of them. Well, if you know of Dr. Sarno, I think head over to alltherage.tv and if you're interested in this topic

and more people learning about and understanding this stuff, this is a, you know, supporting Michael is a great way to do that. Well, Michael, thanks so much for coming on the show. I wish you the best of luck with getting the movie funded and out there. Any idea

of when, assuming your campaign is successful, we'll get to see the movie? Well, the goal is to try and finish it by next fall. I mean, we've shot 90% of the movie, although one of the interesting things about the Kickstarter campaign is we're finally kind of out in the world

with the movie, and such amazing stories are coming to us and amazing people are coming to us. So we're trying to figure out how to integrate all that into the movie and into the website, you know, because the movie will not be able to contain all of this stuff. I mean, as someone who's following the project, you see,

we're posting hours of footage, we're just posting so much footage and so much, because there's so much amazing stuff there. Like we talked about the comedians, but we didn't mention, for instance, Ben Crane, a golfer who won the Memphis St. Jude's Classic this year, is also a patient. And he's an amazing, soulful person who just gave us the most beautiful interview and so much great insight. So we're posting like clips like that and clips with Ashok Gupta, things that we just can't fit at all in

the movie. So we're trying to make the website this great resource. Well, it is. There's a lot of great stuff there. So again, thanks so much for taking the time to talk with us and best of luck. And we will look forward to seeing the movie. Yeah. And thank you. I really appreciate, I appreciate you. Oh, you're welcome. Take care. Okay. All right. Bye. you can learn more about this podcast and Michael Galinsky at one you feed.net slash Michael.