TRIGGERnometry - "We Are Angry Because We Feel Powerless" - Dr Louise Mazanti

Episode Date: May 5, 2021

Louise Mazanti PhD is a psychotherapist, specializing in sex and intimacy. Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Locals! https://triggernometry.locals.com/  OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: https://www.PayPal.me/triggerpod https://www.subscribestar.com/triggernometry https://www.patreon.com/triggerpod Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/sign-up/ Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media:  https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kissen. And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people. Our brilliant guest today is a psychotherapist, Dr. Luz-Mazanti. Welcome to Trigonometry. Thank you so much. It's so good to have you on the show. For anyone who isn't familiar with you or your work, I'll just say that we came across you first watching David Fuller's documentary, a glitch in The Matrix in which he asked you a lot about the came. Kathy Newman interview with Jordan Peterson, and we just thought, oh, wow, what an interesting

perspective would really need to get into some of this. But beyond that, for anyone who's not familiar with you or your work, tell everybody who are you, how are you where you are? What has been the journey that leads you to be sitting here talking to us? Oh, wow, that's a big question. Yeah, I think maybe around 10, 12 years ago, I was at the height of my academic career. and I'd been working really, really hard to get to where I was. And I kind of achieved everything I could in my field. And I was mid-30s and I realized, what am I doing? I'm not happy.

I don't know who I am as a woman. I don't know who's inside my body. I don't know my sexuality. I don't know my spirituality. I don't know all the things that I kind of had to compromise in order to perform in academia. So that sent me on a really big journey. into going to the deeper sides, the mystical sides of life. And I discovered psychospiritual psychotherapy, which I studied psychosynthesis,

and I started to become a psychotherapist in that area. And it was a deep personal and spiritual journey that really took me into who am I as a human being and why am I here. And beginning to understand the deep experience of being a woman, the deep experience of being a mother, the deep experience of having a body and what does that mean. And that kind of took me into what is most meaningful in life experience. This is really what I've been investigating ever since in myself

and in the clients that I work with now and the people that I train, is how can we go deep in our human experience as men, as women, in these bodies and as everything in between, wherever we find ourselves in this human experience, what does it mean? So I think I started with that curiosity when I came out of my academic mind, what else is here? When I stop thinking all the time and start feeling with my body, with my intuition, what else is available? And that kind of took me here where I'm working with people to come home to themselves in their bodies and have that deep experience of the human journey.

Yeah, I think. It's fascinating. It's fascinating what you're talking about because I think the connection with your body is one thing that in modern society, we don't really deal with or talk about it. You don't get to, you don't go to school to be taught about that, right? No one tells you about that. And also, you know, you talk about your experience, getting to your mid-30s, being successful

in your career, but then suddenly realizing you're not happy. Well, it's sort of a single example of something happening at a broader level. of society where we've seen for 70-odd years women's happiness in particular plummeting but also men's too and you know mental ill health on the rise as well what are your thoughts on the sort of like why is that all happening what are the the areas where we're becoming more and more disconnected from the things that we ought to be connected to i think we've we've lost touch really with the meaning of why we hear the meaning of what What is this human experience?

We're just producing and producing and producing, kind of just keeping the wheel going. And we are realizing as we are doing that, it doesn't give us anything other than survival in the moment. And maybe it boosts our ego a little bit. Sometimes it hurts our ego. It's kind of that dance of the ego. And at some point, that becomes exhausting. When we realize it's not just all about me and my personal experience, what more is here?

And I think people are really disconnected from that level when we are in the wheel. At the same time, as deep inside we know that this is not sustainable, where we are going as society, where we are going as humankind, it's not sustainable. So we're kind of, we're keeping an identity going and we know it's not true. And I think that in a compromise is what is tearing people down the knowing that something more true is calling and we're just not listening. And why is this way that we're living not sustainable? What do you mean by that? The effect that we're having on our planet, the effect that we're having on our bodies, what do you mean by sustainable? First of all, it's not sustainable on our planet.

We see that we see that very clearly that we are getting out of sync with ecology. We're too many people on the planet. We can see that that's just a very basic fact. We can see that it's not sustainable in the long run. We are out of touch with what really makes us happy. That's another thing. We're just spinning in the wheel of thinking we have to do something. It's not sustainable either. And we know that it's overpopulated.

The climate is changing. It's not sustainable. Within a very few couple of years, we'll begin to see more and more tangible effects of things that we are not taking seriously. Our economy will probably be crashing. Our societies are not sustainable. They're not stable. There's a lot of tension in our societies that is just bubbling under the surface.

And right now, we are able to keep it kind of safe and contained. But I don't think that's going to last forever because there is, in the individuals and in the collective, there is this knowing that this is not the right direction. What are we doing? And you talk about the right direction. What is the right direction, Louise, for you? Yeah, that's a very good question. I think the right direction is really to pause

and to stop producing all the time and to start feeling. In a way, I took the microcosm of that in my own life that I stopped performing in that big way and said, I really don't know what is a direction right now. I pulled every plug in my life, literally, to the point where there was nothing left of my old identity. And I think as a society, we need to do this journey in finding new values, finding what is life really about, what has value to us, how are we connecting with each other?

What is life, this miracle of being alive in our body, of being able to breathe in a body to see, smell, touch and feel. That is an incredibly deep journey that we're not honoring right now as we're just racing ahead. Our nervous system are constantly on high alert and we're not feeling. We're not really being present with the miracle it is to actually be here in this human experience.

And Louise, one of the things that I, you know, I've done some of the sort of work that you're talking about in my own life, you know, personal development and training and all that sort of thing, and I found it very useful. But one of the things that inevitably comes out of what you're saying is, the more you connect with your body, the more the male and female aspects of this start to come in. Because our bodies are different.

Our hormonal makeup is different. And I don't know whether you'd agree with this, but I think it has been the case that we, in the last many decades, have sort of tried to erase all of that and pretend that actually, you know, we're not men and women. Actually, you know, like we're kind of the same. Like, you know, we can all do the same stuff. We all think the same.

We all, you know, it's all sort of, you know, it's up for grabs. It's a socially negotiated thing. And you can just be who you are without ever having to deal with the fact that biologically you are of a particular sex. And it's, I don't know, because I don't know exactly the nature of your work. But I imagine you might have some thoughts on that. Yeah. It's, I love this question.

because everything is in that question, because what you're saying logically makes sense. Of course, postmodernism, deconstructivism makes sense. Like we have to go through that stage where we question all these essential truths. But once we've done that, what is left when we stop thinking about it, when we stop thinking the world from a conceptual level and we start feeling, when we start slowing down so we can actually feel what is this human experience about in me at an experiential level. We start connecting with something that's deeper than the conceptual constructions of values in society.

We start feeling our existential condition. And in that existential condition, I don't think we can just say there is nothing like a man or a woman or the masculine and the feminine from a felt perspective. Of course, we have both inside us. Absolutely. And also some people find themselves on different spectros of that. But we have male bodies.

We have female bodies. And that's a given that we have to somehow make peace with unless we want to change. But it is a condition that we have. And that does not mean that we identify as a woman or a man as society has conditioned us. Absolutely. I really agree with those questions are so important to ask.

We have to move through this phase. Absolutely. Those stereotypical images of what it is to be a man and a woman, they don't work anymore. But once we've done that, that's the next level. And that level is about really feeling, what is, in lack of better words, what is the feminine in me?

What is a masculine enemy? How does it want to express? What does it feel like as an archetype, as an energy? And some people are more connected to the masculine energy. Some people are more connected to the feminine energy. Most of these people will be women and men. And of course, we oscillate all the time. But we can't say that they don't exist.

They exist in my experience as simply existential polarities that are within us and between us. And they want different things. They have different qualities. And a thing that I am really interested in is how that shows up in society, how that shows up in the discussions we have in society about men and about women and about that really, really hot space between men and women. And I say hot space because it's both a space, it's a space where there's a lot of passion and there's a lot of excitement and there's also a lot of very, very difficult emotions. And what's that about? What are these emotions and why are they so hot right now? The emotions are basically because we're moving out. We've been moving out for a very long time,

but we're still in that transitional phase of moving out of a society that was structured around patriarchal values. That's a given. That's how it's been for very, very long time. time. And for a long time, we've also, we've been rebelling against it. We've been, we've been, we've been moving through that paradigm. But again, with this paradigm, I think we have to be careful that we don't throw out the baby with the bathwater. Because as an existential given, as human beings, we're vulnerable. We're vulnerable because we are alive in a body. That makes us very, very vulnerable. We're physically vulnerable. We are emotionally vulnerable. And what we do is we try to reach out to someone that can protect us that's bigger and stronger than we are.

That's what we're primed to do. And men have had that ability to be the bigger and stronger that women were reaching out to for safety. That's how it's been for a very, very long time. And now that paradigm has been moving for a long time. It's beginning to shift. And right now, women are not happy with that role. And they're angry about it. They're angry about the shadow sides of that role,

which has been the misuse, the abuse of power. But what I see is that that discussion happens without looking at nothing exists in a void. The masculine abuse of power does not exist in a void. Why is that? the masculine also exists with a feminine that has been adding into that dynamic. And looking at that dynamic is really important for me in my work where I work with a lot, mostly I work with a lot of female clients that have a difficult relationship with being a woman and have a difficult relationship with a sexuality and have difficult relationships with a masculine,

whether they are wanting to be in relationship with men or with women. But that space is difficult. because they don't know where to put the masculine. They don't know what to do with it. They don't know what is a masculine about. Is it wanting to overpower me or is it not worth anything? Has it lost the blood?

And I think many women are struggling with that whole what is the masculine when it's not patriarchy. And do you think, Louise, part of the problem is that the role of men has changed in society whereby before, you know, there was a very traditional structure.

The male was a breadwinner, went out to work, the woman was a homemaker. Now, because of a myriad of different reasons, that is no longer applicable. Do you think that's part of the reason why we're in crisis? I think that's a very big part of it. I think men have, in their own journey, men have lost their identity,

and women are reacting to that. So women are both angry, and women are also feeling more empowered, like that kind of, that tower of patriarchy is crumbling. So women are reacting to that in different ways. And men are also reacting to it. Men are reacting with, I don't know how to be a man anymore.

I don't have any role models. Men have to make it up as they go along now. And they have all these reactions from women to deal with. These reactions, these projections, and they're very strong still. We're still only on our way out of that paradigm. And to see, from my perspective, as a woman working with women, to see what women do to men and see the suffering that I'm going to say we inflict on men is painful. And it's painful.

What do you mean? What are you talking about when you say the suffering women as a whole inflict on men as a whole? What do you mean? I mean that many men now don't really know how to be with. women. They don't know where women are with men. They don't know, can I be myself? Can I be in my power? Can I just be my spontaneous natural expression? Or am I going to offend anyone? Am I going what's going to happen if I just express this? Men are really tiptoeing around women as it is right now. And women are still waiting to see if this kind of overpowering is going to happen. Women are still

an alert for that energy. And men get anxious around women. And that space means that none of us are able to actually relate to each other. We're still in the projections that belong to the past. The projections are not true anymore. But we're still carrying that energy. So we're not actually able to see who we are, what we're bringing to the table, each of us. We're not able to see each other in a clear light. And I see that in women, what they see in men is still this waiting, there's still this rage that's waiting to come out. That's that work hasn't fully completed yet. And men are just there waiting to see when is it going to come my way? When is it going to happen? So none of us are really using our ability to actually be in synergy to co-create,

to add different energies to the whole. I think that's a part of the crisis that is in the world, right? Still, that we are not, we're not co-creating. We're not feeding each other. We're not using each other's sensitivity, each other's abilities, each other's gifts. We are more, we're still fighting them. And you say that we're still fighting.

Do you think as well part of the problem is our understanding of sex and relationships has been so distorted by pornography? that in a way we find it impossible to connect in a way that is real because we see sex and connection as a type of performance almost. I think porn has a lot to answer for in that regard that it has made this kind of stereotypical difference between men and women has made it very clear. It's both diminished men and it's diminished women.

So we have the kind of the role models for our real power, of our real potency, the role models that we have are really, really poor. They are degenerated. They are kind of the shadow sides of who we really are. And I think we are seeing a consequence of this because we know porn is not real, but it still creeps into our subconscious that we think we have to be like that, to be in our power, to be in our potency. And that becomes very distorted.

That easily becomes distorted because it. It's still working our subconscious. Louise, earlier you were talking about the postmodernist approach. And this is what I was so. It's very popular to rail against postmodernist ways of thinking now. And I do to a very large extent because I think there are a lot of flaws in that approach. But having said that, you have to also concede that there are elements of truth. For example, the idea of how men and women should necessarily dress.

right now I still have like an instinctive discomfort if I'm being honest with the idea of like men wearing skirts for example right but but I also recognize that that instinctive discomfort is a product of socialization right there's no god-given biological reason that men and women should dress in this particular way and so the idea that some aspects of our behavior are socially constructed is a fact right and you're talking about how well you know some elements of that social construction were about maintaining what was then accurately, in my view, could be described as the patriarchy, right? Men behave like this, women behave like this, and men seem to end up in all the roles of power and influence and whatever, for the most part. And now we've, as you

were talking about, we've gradually gone to strip that away. And I think it's left both sexes quite combulated and uncertain about what they're supposed to do. And I see that in, you know, in my own relationships and relationships of people around me, like men still know that a woman does want a confident, strong man. But at the same time, being strong and confident is sort of like, are you supposed to be that still? And women are the same. Are you supposed to like that? Or are you supposed to be repelled by that? We're sort of in this limbo, aren't we? Yeah, yeah. I'm all for that postmodernism that opened, opened our minds,

that destroyed those rigid paradigms. Absolutely. So important. The problem with postmodernism is that it easily stays as a mental construct. So we think, how am I supposed to be? Instead of feeling. And I really will come back to that sense of feeling, because it has to emerge from inside.

We have to feel the masculine inside and the feminine inside, and we have to be able to not get stuck in one. So I have a male body or I have a female body. It must mean blah, blah, blah. But let it come from a felt experience. What does that mean to me? Today, I'm in my masculine. Tomorrow I'm in my feminine.

Or it shifts from moment to moment. And also in our relationships, can we switch roles? can we be the one that takes initiative? Can we be the breadwinner? Can we oscillate between those energies in ourselves and in our relationship? And one day I want to dress like this, one day I want to dress like that, but not because I think that I should be doing that because that's the right paradigm, but because it feels true.

When I connect to myself, this is how I want to express today. Tomorrow I might want to express in a different way. And that's still a lot of work to do in having the courage, to do what feels right. But I think we have to be careful with thinking what's right. And my sense is that a lot of this as it is right now comes from a mental conceptual place. It makes sense.

And I think it's important that it happens, but it's not the truth. We are experimenting with a conceptual paradigm. Great. But we're still evolving. We're still in a process. And I think that's a very good point that we are still in a process, because if you saw what happened with Me Too, it was very important because it had women to talk about their experiences. But at the same time, there was an anger that was unleashed at the same time.

And do you think that's part of the process of healing, or do you think that was something else? I think it was an important step. that anger was a long, long, long held anger. And some of it was a righteous anger. And some of it was an anger that had gone into its own spin. But the process of going through it of acknowledging in ourselves, in the collective, and being acknowledged, having that acknowledged, I think it's extremely important that that happened.

but let us not get stuck in. Oh, now we reached kind of the truth. This is how society should be. This is a truth about women. This is a truth about men. And women are allowed to always be angry. And we should be watching each other all the time. That is really, it's a really deep misunderstanding that is leading us astray if we keep watching each other with that suspicion.

That it happened was important. and I think there was also some, there's been some victims in that on both sides. I think that's important to acknowledge. Men has also suffered. And in the documentary that I talked about earlier, you were talking specifically about the interview between Cathy Newman and Jordan Peterson,

and you talked about, and I'm paraphrasing from memory, and for you, it's a couple of years ago as well. So correct me if I'm wrong in any way when I try and recollect exactly what you said, but something along the lines of the rage that you could see in Kathy Newman's behavior is a rage that any woman can connect to and feel if she so chooses. Yeah. Right?

Is that? And so is it really, is what's happening in modern society? Like we all have a reason to be angry and increasingly we're starting to choose to connect to that anger. I honestly have a sense that we will see more. and more and more anger, more and more anger coming out. Now women have been really airing their anger. Some, as I said, righteous anger and some of it not so much. And men are also beginning. There's riots going on. And that anger maybe has a different source, but I think that the anger that we are carrying collectively is deep down, it's an anger of despair. It's an anger of hopelessness.

It's an anger of powerlessness in where are we going as society. What's happening with our politicians? What's happening at the collective levels? What's happening with our societies? We feel so powerless to what is really happening in the world. That anger is building up. And I think that's happening as we're speaking. It's building up collectively.

And when I say we're not heading in the right direction, it's because I think that that anger will begin to erupt. Because we're aware, like, what are we doing? Also, how are we treating animals? It's a different thing, but how we're treating animals? At some point in the future, we'll look back and say, oh, my God, how come that people did that? That was really something. And there's so many of these things that we will look back and say, how come that we were

so un-evolved? And that knowing inside, that's roaring. That's roaring in all of us. We just don't really know what to do with it. we burn cars or we smash the police or whatever, wherever it starts. But that anger, I think it's an anger that all of us have in the powerlessness of COVID is just a little, kind of a little reminder of we are very vulnerable as a society. And we're very vulnerable as people.

We are very vulnerable as communities. We are very vulnerable to things that happen like this is just COVID. that no one kind of created it. But how do our politicians deal with that? What's really happening? We're powerless and we're powerless in we don't know. We really don't know anything, to be honest. We can have a lot of theories about this and that,

but we don't really know what is real. We have so many stats. We have so many experts that are saying this and that. We don't know how to sift in it. Most people feel overpowered by life. and I think that creates a rage of hopelessness that will begin to erupt more and more. Do you think part of the problem, Louise,

especially when you look at COVID, is in the West, death is a taboo subject. We don't talk about death. We don't acknowledge it. We seem to have brought into this idea that actually we're going to live forever and you can see it. I am.

Yeah, exactly, much to the chagrin of everyone around you. But you see it also, you know, smooth, blank, expressionless faces of our celebrities who don't want to just don't want to admit that the age that they really are. Isn't part of the fury and the rage from COVID, the realization, and you talk about it yourself, that we are fragile, but more importantly, we're mortal.

Yeah. As I said, we are vulnerable just because we are alive. It's scary if we really connect with it. The price of admission to be alive is we have to die. And we are vulnerable all the way through at all stages of life. We're vulnerable. That's scary. And we don't know.

We don't know what to do with that existential vulnerability. And we don't know, as you say, we don't know how to talk about that. We don't know how to talk about, yeah, at some point it ends. That's this life is a scary place. And how do we start to as individuals? Because I get the very strong sense from what you're talking about. that the solution to all of this comes at the level of the individual. It's by individuals thinking, not thinking, but slowing down,

feeling what is right for them, and changing their own thought patterns and behavior and how they feel about things. I've been struck by a thing, this is turning into personal therapy now, but... Do you want me to go? Yeah, yeah, thanks, mate. I'll lie on this little sofa and talk to Louise. But what I've been noticing is during this whole pandemic and lockdown, I'm very concerned about some of the ways we've dealt with the pandemic.

I think they've been excessive, unnecessary in many things, and panic-driven more than anything. But it doesn't really matter how you feel about it. What I've been struck by is in my own, my life is great. Like the lockdown in many ways meant that I spend more time with my wife. I have a job that I love doing this. You know, I'm surrounded by friends. Like my life is good.

So I feel good about me, but I also feel very concerned about what's happening in society and sort of like weaving those two things together, there's a big clash going on. I think quite a lot of people feel that way at the moment that maybe their own life isn't really that bad, but what seems to be happening around us, as you say, there's a repressed thing that we're all realizing that our lives could be changed like that by people. who we have no ability to influence at all. How does one reconcile those two things? Yeah, that's a journey.

That's a journey. How do we reconcile that? We stay right in there, right inside that question. That is, how do I contain my own human experience? How do I make peace with the price of admission? is I have to feel all these things. I don't know what to do with all these feelings. They're here.

Can I contain them and stay present? Stay with a light of awareness on. Stay awake to, wow, what a ride this human life is. I don't know how it's going to end and I don't know what it means. And it's vulnerable and I feel powerless. But I'm here. And one of the things that for me, the pandemic has really, broad when we're so physically disconnected is that we can connect in different ways. We can connect

on the screen and we can connect with our consciousness. And I think this is now I said a lot of things that sound quite pessimistic. But I also feel that there's a paradigm that's beginning to emerge where we feel our consciousness is more and more connected. Because it's not just about me and my personal experience and me slowing down. It means when I slow down and I slow down and I begin to feel life in myself, not concepts and ideas, but the felt sense experience. And I connect with other people when I'm in this place. We're beginning to feel more and more that I feel your experience. I don't have to physically be with you.

I can just listen to the sound of your voice. I can listen to the vibration of the sound. And I can feel. I can feel like we are beginning to be one conscious. more and more. And that's something that is beginning to emerge that hasn't fully shown itself. But that feeling, we are not that different.

That's another thing. We're not that different. We think we are so unique in our experience and all that. We're not that different. We are wired, mostly exactly in the same way. We are so predictable as human beings. So what I am experienced is very easy

to tap into and influence each other. We don't need to be physically connected in order to create a field of consciousness where what I feel becomes what you feel. And we can begin to change things like that. I'm very excited and very interested in what does it mean when we use our consciousness. I want to say as a technology, it's not a tangible technology, but it is a technology. Because it is a way it creates, we become a bigger neural network. that has a lot of potential. It's not that I have the answer of where this is going,

but we are beginning to create, to create those connections of becoming a bigger neural network. And I think that will hold a lot of positive change, a lot of really interesting new narrative about what does it mean to be a human being. And we haven't discovered that we're beginning to. But it's way more than these boxes that we have placed ourselves. as it is now.

Do you think part of the thing that might actually help, and this is what happened to me during corona, so I was a stand-up comedian, I was gigging every night of the week, I was doing well, I was earning money, most money that I've ever earned. And then all of a sudden, overnight, it stopped.

And I was left alone in my flat. Overnight, everything I worked for stopped. And then you suddenly realize that these things, these ideas that you've been chasing, there are many ways in an illusion. They don't matter. What matters is the connections that you have with other people. Do you think we may have been reminded of that?

And we may appreciate that far more when all these lockdowns are over. We're able to socialize again and we're able to see our family again. I think what's happened is a massive shift in our values, of course, because most of us have been, as you say, we've simply been slammed out of our identity, of our identifications. this is who I thought myself to be. It's not possible anymore. So who am I?

And what really matters when I'm sat there in my flat deadboard and physically on my own? What am I going to do? What really matters? And that takes us into that fields of consciousness where it really is about connection. It is about what can we create when we come together? What can we create when we feel each other? When we are on a human journey, not just all about our identity, identity and what am I doing? What are you doing in life? Which kind of identification game are we

playing out? But who are we as human beings? I think that that is also a shift in our values that is happening. And I really like the fact that we are so much online and sometimes you're in a studio, sometimes you're in your home. And we are seeing more and more of each other. We're beginning to unpeel a bit more, show a bit more. It's not all shiny. It's, it's. It's. becomes more and more real. And that ironically happens when the world becomes virtual. I think there's a very interesting dichotomy in that kind of collective intimacy that we are also able to create. That wasn't possible in the same way before. That's really interesting. Lise, I want to talk briefly about something else. You talked about the fact that there's a bubbling rage fueled by

our hopelessness and powerlessness that we feel. What about fear? What about fear? because one of the things that has absolutely shocked me during the pandemic particularly is how willing people have been to give up certain rights, certain freedoms that we all used to take for granted and assume could not be. We assumed they were inalienable from us, the right to walk on the street,

to go for a jog, to meet friends, to eat in a restaurant, all of these things have gone like that. And the support seemingly, at least we're told by pollsters, you know, the vast majority of the public are very happy with this and they want more of it. And I've personally, maybe I'm just quite a risk hungry person. I've never had an issue with taking risks. But a lot of people seem to be to have turned out to my surprise and it could just

be my ignorance, but a lot of people surprised me by how risk averse they were in the middle of this. Do you have any insights on why that might have happened if you share my analysis? Yeah, yeah. Honestly, I think we are in a collective trauma. We are in a collective. We are both at the same time we're in a collapse. We are just collapsed in hopelessness. We don't know.

We really feel disempowered. We don't actually really know what to do. And there's so much going on exactly with feeling overpowered with what's going on politically. How is that suddenly possible? Are we becoming a police state? What's really happening? So there's a collapse. So that's one trauma response.

Another trauma response is dissociation. We also dissociated. We're detached. We're just gone into, let's have intellectual conversations, or let's watch a lot of TV, or let's just veg out and not think about it. That's dissociation. And both the collapse and the dissociation happens when our system is in overwhelm, when we simply can't compute what's happening.

And I think collectively we can't compute what's happening because we don't know. It's not over yet. and and COVID is just that's that's just a little circle that kind of tickles us in hey people life life is beginning to change wake up wake up and right now I think we are in freeze and in detach collectively and at some point and this is where when I'm talking about the collective neural network that is also forming that that comes more online when we're to unfreeze from that place and realize, okay, but there's other possibilities. There's other ways we can connect.

There's other ways to find meaning. There's other ways to be human. But right now we are going through a state of trauma because everything we thought that was, okay, this is just how it's going to be. It's not possible. It's not possible right now. And when it becomes possible again, the world will have changed. It's happening kind of mostly under the radar, but it's happening at very deep.

levels. And Louise, do you think another part of the problem is, and let's talk about politics briefly. So, you know, Trump was elected and then Biden was elected and everybody sort of went, well, you know, everything's fine again now. Are we not learning from our mistakes, meaning that we continue to make the same mistake again and again? Well, electing old white man. Yeah, exactly. But in a sense, you know, collectively we're making these mistakes again and again. whether it's with the institutions, whether it's with the political system, whether it's with our treatment of the planet, whatever it may be. Yeah.

I really don't know what to say to that because there is a big problem around our political structures, our political systems. It's very obvious. They don't work. But it's not like we have a better answer. Okay, we're just going to do this instead. We don't know how we're going to sort that out. I don't know what to say to that.

but I can see that it is an incredibly big problem that we have such, I'm going to say degenerated leadership. Because I didn't grow up in England, but something that I really, really love about that country is the myth of King Arthur, where I love the English countryside and I love there's a lot of that mysticism, and I think that that myth is a part of it, where they say the king is a land.

And let's just say the king or the queen is a land, which means that leadership is not about power over. Leadership is about being. It's about serving the well-being. There is no leader without the land. The land is a leader. And we've completely forgotten that. Leadership is degenerated and self-interested.

It's not really about the land. how it's become tyranny so this is what jordan peterson often talks about we've gone from a powerful but benevolent leadership that looks out for the interests of the people to corrupt tyrannical leadership that only looks out for the interest of itself yeah yeah yeah how do we change that system how do we put a better system in place that's a very difficult question but revolution Yeah, there probably isn't a pretty answer. That's the truth to the difficult questions. There isn't a pretty answer.

Yeah. Yeah. Louise, we've got about 10 minutes. There's one thing I wanted to come back to, which is the men and women thing. And my wife will be very unhappy with me if I don't bring this up. Because what we've noticed, and I think a lot of people have noticed, and you talked about at the beginning of our interviews, the more you connect with who you actually are, you slow down and you notice not what you're supposed to feel, not what you've been told that you're

supposed to feel, but actually how you feel. It's difficult to not then notice, well, as a man, there's certain things that drive me in this direction. And it's only when you fully connect with that that I feel for myself, I'm able to connect with the feminine parts of me, to be more, you know, gentle or diplomatic or whatever the stereotypes you want to put on it. And one of the things my wife has been talking to me is the importance of the cycle and recognizing things that come with that. And that's, you know, a taboo subject for, you know, for a hundred different reasons. But men also have a cycle, too. Not me.

You're just constantly depressed. Yeah, is that it? And angry. Like, but we all have, like, patterns that we go through. What advice do you or would you give to both men and women in terms of being or, aware of that being present to that. And, and, you know, I just increasingly am aware that's not something you can pretend away from the human experience, right? If your body is flushed with certain types of hormones for both men and women, you can't ignore that, right? So what do we do

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This is how I'm feeling right now. I'm flooded with this feeling. Feel it, really be fully in the feeling. Let the feminine inside show you here. The feminine is full of feeling. The feminine is always looking out for the tribe. The feminine is feeling. How is the field?

Light of consciousness, there's a field here. Wow, this field is feeling a lot. And light of awareness in there is a field that's feeling a lot. What are we going when we stay in our inner alignment? What is the choice we're going to make? What are we going to do with that feeling? Again, the king of the queen is a land. The land is the feeling.

What is the decision we're going to make? How are we going to be with that feeling? What does that feeling want? How does it want to express? And how do we, with our structured mind, with our masculine, how do we want to conduct the feeling? It really is about that inner alchemy. It's about bridging the masculine and the feminine inside.

And when we are flushed, listening to life is expressing something. and having the light of awareness to not just in pure feeling act out but saying I'm going to I'm going to listen to what this feeling is telling me so it's neither black or white like I'm wearing it's neither black or white

it really is to stay right in the middle and feel both and we tend to want to dismiss one or the other yes we do but it isn't part of the challenge as well that a lot of us live in these city landscapes where it almost seems designed for you to not experience stillness, for you to not experience that feeling, because it's a constantly sensory overload because you're go, go, go, go, go, go. So actually, you never get to experience that

stillness. And in many ways when you do, you're sort of bereft because you're missing that constant stimulation. I think it's a good point. And I think it's a good point. And I think we are always in choice. In every moment we're in choice. You don't have to be like on a meditation retreat out in nature before you can sit still and begin to feel. In every moment, in this moment, the feeling is available right now. Just slow down and feel. It's not complicated. It's not like you need to design your whole life around it or you can't live a normal life. You can't have a job. You can't be in a society. That's again, that's again black and white, a misunderstanding. That Being able to connect with the field is always available.

We have a body. We have feelings. We have our breath. We can feel every time we tune in. It's never further away than that. Tune in. There's a breath. How am I feeling?

And yes, there's a screen. There's people I have to talk to. There's phones ringing. There's whatever there is. And I'm here. It's that simple and that hard. Yeah. It's really interesting to me.

that whenever we've had this conversation, whether that's with you or with Jordan Hall or with Jordan Peterson, whenever we pose these questions about society, the answer always comes back down to the level of the individual, which is it's you that has to, you know, in Jordan Peterson's case, clean your room or whatever it is, or you have to slow down and you have to be present and you have to feel. And that is really the answer to all of this, isn't it? Yes. And it's not black and white because the individual is collective too. It's a false dichotomy. It's either me or the whole because we can only feel the whole when we feel ourselves. And we are in a field of consciousness, whether we are physically connected or not.

We are impacting each other all the time. So the journey to the individual is really a collective journey. We just haven't totally figured it out yet. That makes sense. Well, Louise, it's been an absolute pleasure speaking with you. As you know, we have one final question. Which is always, what's the one thing we're not talking about as a society that we really should be? Yeah. We've been talking about it today without talking about it because it's a big context stuff of where it's the ground of all the conversations we have, which for me is, what are we going to do with the fact that we are too many people on this planet and the numbers are going up and

up and up and up and up and up. And we get fixated on the stats of COVID and oh, the deaths and that's a bad thing. But if we look at how many people are born every second on this planet, it's going up. and up and up. And very logically, that can't continue. And what are we going to do about that? It's such a painful and difficult question. And we don't know how to even begin. No, don't worry. We're going to have a war and it'll all be fine, Louise. That's a sad answer. I know. I know. I'm a comedian. I'm supposed to do jokes about sad thing. So I don't have to address the reality underneath, which is difficult. That's my job.

It's a good point. It's a very good point. It's one we've discussed on the show in the past. And, you know, I want to thank you for coming on and for giving us this perspective. It's really, really valuable. I hope and I'm sure that people have enjoyed it. If our audience want to find out more about what you do or follow your work, where's the best place to do that? It's my website, Luis Mazzenti.com. Perfect. We'll put that in the description of the video. Thank you once again for being a guest on the show, Louise.

And thank you for watching at home. And please, please, please follow us on all the social media. But more importantly, from Wednesday, right the way through to Saturday, 7pm, or I should say Tuesday right the way through to Saturday. 7pm UK time, check out another fantastic live stream or episode. And be still present and notice your breathing as you're doing that. Don't forget to breathe, guys, because it gets problematic.