TrueLife - Rev. Dr. Jessica Rochester - Self Respect

Episode Date: August 1, 2023

One on One Video Call W/George https://tidycal.com/georgepmonty/60-minute-meetingSupport the show:https://www.paypal.me/Truelifepodcast?locale.x=en_US🚨🚨Curious about the future of psychedelics? Imagine if Alan Watts started a secret society with Ram Dass and Hunter S. Thompson… now open the door. Use Promocode TRUELIFE for Get 25% off monthly or 30% off the annual plan For the first yearhttps://www.district216.com/https://www.revdrjessicarochester.com/Rev. Dr. Jessica Rochester is the Madrinha and President of Céu do Montréal, a Santo Daime (Ayahuasca) Church she founded in 1997 in Montréal, Canada.She is a transpersonal counselor, she trained in the work of Dr. Roberto Assagioli and trained with Dr. Stanislav Grof.She worked with Health Canada from 2000 until 2017 to achieve an Section 56 Exemption to import and serve the Santo DaimeSacrament (Ayahuasca).She is an ordained Interfaith Minister with a Doctorate in Divinity.From 1986 to 2018 she has been a workshop leader, teacher, and in private practice.She is the author of Ayahuasca Awakening A Guide to Self-Discovery, Self-Mastery and Self-Care, Volume One and Two.She continues to lecture on consciousness, non-ordinary states of consciousness, self-discovery, spiritual development, health and well-being and personal transformation One on One Video call W/George https://tidycal.com/georgepmonty/60-minute-meetingSupport the show:https://www.paypal.me/Truelifepodcast?locale.x=en_USCheck out our YouTube:https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPzfOaFtA1hF8UhnuvOQnTgKcIYPI9Ni9&si=Jgg9ATGwzhzdmjkg

Darkness struck, a gut-punched theft, Sun ripped away, her health bereft. I roar at the void. This ain't just fate, a cosmic scam I spit my hate. The games rigged tight, shadows deal, blood on their hands, I'll never kneel. Yet in the rage, a crack ignites, occulted sparks cut through the nights. The scars my key, hermetic and stark. To see, to rise, I hunt in the dark, fumbling, fear. Heiress through ruins maze, lights my war cry, born from the blaze.

The poem is Angels with Rifles, the track, I Am Sorrow, I Am Lust by Codex Seraphini. Check out the entire song at the end of the cast. Ladies and gentlemen, it's such a beautiful day to be alive, and I am so excited to be here with you today. I hope the sun is shining and the birds are singing wherever you are. I hope you realize that you're part of you're part. that you're part of a miracle that is more beautiful than you can possibly imagine. I am here with an incredible guest to continue our series, the one and only Reverend Dr. Jessica Rochester, author, spiritual leader, transpersonal educator.

Dr. Jessica is an ordained interfaith minister with a doctorate in divinity, a transpersonal counselor. She's trained in the work of Dr. Roberto. I always... Thank you very much. I don't know why I just lost it right there for him. moment. She's also trained with Dr. Stanislav Graf. She's also the Mahadrina and president of the Sioux de Montreal, a Santo Dime church. She founded in 1997. Also, the author of a two-volume set of books, they look like this called Iowasca Awakens. They are a set of guidebooks that have been a tremendous

amount of wealth for me and everyone with whom I've spoke that has them. So I would like to encourage everyone to go in their show notes and check them out and follow along. Today, we're continuing our series with Self-respect Part 3. Dr. Jessica, I'm sure I left some things out, but did I leave anything out of there in that particular monologue this morning? Well, first of all, I just love your introductions. You make me feel like I'm in a Disney animated film, you know. It's like the birds are tweeting and the sun is shining. At any moment now, someone's going to burst out of the back curtain singing a song, right?

It's so much fun to join you on your show. thank you always for having me. Today we're talking about self-respect. What is self-respect? And we've been, you know, having fun doing the series based on the two books that you've just mentioned. And we've worked our way now into volume two. And the first part is about the four cornerstones, okay, of real self-care. And the first one is self-awareness and self-love. Now we're in self-respect. The fourth one is self-responsibility. And, and we're in self-respect. And And why they're in that order is because awareness has to come first. We have to awaken our awareness as to who am I and why am I here and what is my life about

and what is it like to be human and, you know, here I am on planet Earth. And it has a beginning, middle, and end each lifetime, right? And then what ends and what begins and all these wonderful questions. And then we wandered into self-love and defining what love. and defining what love is about and what love isn't and how in today's world, how what love is keeps transforming as people start understanding things differently. You know, we're understanding that a lot of things that we used to think we're love in our culture, like romantic love, which is a form of love, but it's not really love.

It's romance. Okay, it's romance and sexual attraction. Sorry, folks, but that's just naming it the way it is. Okay, love is hopefully the container that can hold romance and sexual attraction, hopefully. So, and love is not dependency, and love is not a lot of things that people actually confuse it with, you know, back to the Disneyville, okay? Someday my prince will come. So now we're into self-respect, okay? And actually, what is self-respect?

I want to start working on a definition, and then we'll round it out. You're up. Yeah. Okay. I'm up. I think self-respect is the awareness that you are the actions that you put out into the world. I'll keep it kind of short there. Oh, I like that.

That's good. Yeah, a gold star for that one. Yes. So I might, you know, through today's section, I might just grab a few statements from what I've written because they're succinct. It'll keep me on track a little bit so we can cover some ground today. Okay. Self-respect fosters dignity.

Dignity. something that seems to have been lost through the years, decades, centuries. Dignity is something that is so important. How do we keep our dignity? So dignity is the state of being actually worthy of respect. Okay. When we have our dignity, you know, and if you can lead, I can do, we try to do a definition of that one,

but I think we've all got it. it. Okay, dignity is not arrogance. Dignity is the inner reflection and acceptance of one's self-value, of one's personal worth. And that means strengths and shortcomings. It means accepting our wholeness. And when we accept our wholeness, our strengths and our shortcomings, and our character flaws and our habits and all those, you know, our mistakes that we've made. And When we accept that that's part of our wholeness, then we can conduct ourselves with dignity because that we are valuing ourselves. And we are, as we value ourselves, we are in the best position for others to recognize who we are and value us as an individual. And this is not valuing us beast on artificial constructs that society and culture develop, you know, how many toys I've got and how much money I've gotten, how much power I have, and how many records I sold, and, you know, all that jazz, okay?

But, you know, you can have the most simple, you can be hurting goats in the Mongolian, you know, outback. and you can have more dignity than some power broker on Wall Street because you live your life with impeccability. You're impeccable in your life. So self-respect affirms the sacredness of the psychic space. I like that. The sacredness of the psychic space. The value of the soul and the preciousness of the body.

body, soul, and spirit. That's what self-respect does. It creates a space. Remember when I'm talking about love? We talked about what is love, and we try to boil it down with this simple definition based on Scott Pack, Dr. Scott Pack, a American psychiatrist deceased now many years. But he said, love is a space. He created for others to grow in. And if we have self-awareness and self-love, then we're creating that space.

And that's something that is like a garden. You've got to keep it minded. You've got to garden it. Okay, otherwise it gets all full of brambles and thorns and everything else. So that's a daily practice. Self-awareness, self-love, self-respect is a moment-by-moment daily practice. Okay. So are we doing good so far on our definitions?

Perfect. I love them. Okay. Sacredness of the psychic space. value of the soul, preciousness of the body. Okay, so let's keep going. Self-respect means healthy boundaries.

Now, what are boundaries? You hear a lot of talk about boundaries, and I have no boundaries, and I have my boundaries, and I have my boundaries and everything like that. But what actually are they? Okay. Seriously, what are boundaries?

That's a question. It seems that boundaries. I'm just getting on the carpet today that you've been doing so well. It seems to me that boundaries or patterns were taught about what it's appropriate. That's good. Yeah, that's good.

I like that. Okay. So a boundary, if we think about a boundary, let's work with the most basic definitions. A boundary is a limit, the point at which something ends. So if you think about you buy a house and you buy the property

and you get the land on it and you have a very clear designation of exactly the characteristics of the limits of that boundary and that's where you put your fence, right? Right. So your neighbor's dog doesn't come and poop on your lawn. So or what have you. So it's something ends and something begins on a human level. We develop boundaries based on our family of origin first,

the environment that we're in, which could include daycares and culture and society and the extended events that families experience and parents' experiences their children are growing up. And we learn something about that. We learn something about that. So there's a few things that will interfere with the development of healthy boundaries. And those are those early wounds that we've talked about in another session. where we've talked about abandonment and we've talked about engulfment. The two major wounds that we can experience.

Abandonment, that's a pretty easy one. We don't get what we need. First of all, physical safety, comfort, shelter, food, nourishment, all the things that we need. And especially the younger we are, we need that physical contact. That really wires down to security, our feeling of being secure in life.

If we don't feel secure in life, it's really difficult to work on those other things that are so important because those survival things are going to override other things. So engulfment is, abandonment is when we don't get what we need, and engulfment is when we get what we don't want or need when things come into our space,

either physically, emotionally, psychically, what have you, energetically. So now what's really interesting is around the world in different cultures and certainly in different eras, boundaries were very different. Extremely different. Okay. And, you know, you'd have in some cultures, you would have people all sleeping together in the longhouse or living them together in the long house. And this was normal. You'd have entire families and extended families living in a large D.P.

Okay, this was normal and this was acceptable. And you would have houses where multi-generations would live in the same house. We would be horrified in our culture if everyone decided to move in. It's just for the weekend, right? No, for a minute, honey. Okay. So what's, you know, but within those dynamics, there would be very clear boundaries, very clear boundaries that we coming from a different culture, may not understand or respect about, and this is why diplomacy is needed to help bridge the

understanding between cultures as different ways of behaving towards each other and ourselves. In some cultures, you don't touch people. You don't touch people unless you know that you have that invitation to touch. In other cultures, people are touching all the time. They just you on the bus. They push you on the on the metro. They elbow you in front of the counter of sale, some things. Okay.

I mean, they cue, never mind. I mean, the one good thing about COVID is social distance. And it was that lovely to not have someone breathing down your neck or yelling on their phone while you're standing in line at the post office. Right. So different cultures. Yeah, you know, I'm told, you know, by a family member who did some draft. I'm not so sure there's some countries you want to visit because they have very different understandings of personal space.

If you get on a drain in this particular country, I won't name it, just people will think absolutely nothing of falling asleep on your shoulder. Okay, I'm not sure if I'm going to be good with that. You know, we're putting their feet up on your lap. We're looking at you when you get your lunch out, expecting you to share it with them even though you've never met. Okay. These are just differences.

And so culturally, we learn different things about boundaries. But let's bring it back down to our culture and what's kind of our norm here in Canadian or Western civilization Canadian culture. So healthy boundaries can be defined as having an adequate sense of being connected to our own genuine needs, not wants. people, do we need to do the difference between wants and needs? Maybe. Probably, probably a good idea. Okay, so for people with certain, you know, and especially abandonment issues, okay, there will be a blurriness between a want and a need.

There will be a lack of an ability to discern between a want and a need. Okay. What do we need? Let's do that. We need physically air, food, water, shelter, and caring relationships. That's what we need to survive. We need physical safety, security, things to take care of us.

Emotionally and psychologically, we need caring relationships. Intellectually, we need some stimulation. Creativity, on a creative level, our needs are that we need an opportunity to express ourselves creatively. Okay, spiritually, we need to have. the opportunity to have a sense of exploring our connection with the divine and whatever framework that might come with in our culture or family. Wants are something completely different.

You know, maybe one of my granddaughters wants a pony for her birthday. Right, right. Not getting it. Okay. So the thing is, if we don't have our wants and our needs defined with healthy boundaries, when we're young, it gets really blurry as we develop and we become older. And then we take those longings, which to other adults just look like a want, but to the person who didn't get the needs, it feels like a need.

And so one of the things we need to do with Bioneries is really have a good look inside of ourselves about wants and needs. Is this a want or is this a need? Right. And that's just part of self-awareness, you know? That's just part of self-awareness. So much as we need to, healthy boundaries says, I need to respect my genuine needs, feelings, beliefs, and thoughts. Healthy boundary says, I need to respect others.

Okay. And this is one of the things that's not a little bit out of balance in our culture. It's like a me thing, me, what I want, what I think. and what I believe should kind of be, it's kind of like a cultural narcissism that's happening, should be imposed on everybody else. Whereas healthy boundaries and dignity says your thoughts, feelings, and beliefs are equally as important to mine. And then we negotiate if there's a meeting of a relationship of some kind, personal or

business or what have you. The ability, healthy boundaries or the ability to communicate. our feelings, our thoughts, our beliefs. So it's not just to recognize them within us, but the ability to communicate them. How many people get angry and go passive-aggressive or hostile or or stonewall or go cold and you have no idea? Like, okay, does something happen?

You're not talking to me. You're sloughing doors. You took off. Like, hmm. Okay. Those aren't healthy boundaries. Healthy boundaries are the ability. to sit down, respect my feelings and respect yours enough, but I'm going to approach you on

some kind of conversation and discussion in which we talk about that, about where you start and where I start and end and where that meets. Boundary issues are probably the greatest problem in unresolved boundary issues in relationships. And if we're willing to peel it back to respecting my thoughts and needs and feelings and respect and yours and ability to communicate my thoughts and feelings and beliefs and welcoming you to communicate yours. That's what creates all of those healthy memories, right? The ability to listen to others when they express themselves, right? Not just me, me, me, me, me, what I want, what I think.

Okay, the ability to listen. Now, people often, I find in our culture today, they confuse listening to with agreeing with. It's like, those are very different things. Right. Okay. I can listen to you. I can hear what you're saying. And I can also not agree with it.

Right. And that doesn't mean disrespect. It does not mean disrespect. Because true listening means I hear that you. believe the world is flat. I don't agree with it, but I hear that you believe that. Not that I think for a minute,

George, that you think the world is flat. If you do, we never talked about that, right? So it's understanding that my thoughts, feelings, leads, et cetera, are valid, and yours are valid. And so are others valid. Okay? And the boundary is where they meet.

Okay. And if we look into our culture, we'll see that's where a lot of laws got created. You know, I have a right to be angry with you. And I have a right to express my anger. But self-respect, okay, and dignity means that I do it in a way that is not harmful to you or to me. Right. So I have one quick part that I want to jump in because I think it's relevant. And that is sometimes it seems to me that the boundaries can be walls.

And it's important to understand the difference there because when you hit a wall with somebody, you're up against a boundary. But sometimes those boundaries are put in place to keep people out. You know, it seems to me we're working on trying to find ways to resolve, problems, but how boundaries and walls can be a tricky sort of a semantic thing there, right? It's perfectly in align with what I'm saying, okay? Perfect. Because that's what happens, especially with people who have deeper wounds.

Okay. You know, there's a wonderful little exercise in psychosynthesis. Do you want to try to do it? Yeah, I wouldn't love to. Okay. So you're going to close your eyes and you're going to go. inside it. I'm going to take a long, slow, deep breath. And you're going to imagine that your body and your psychic space is kind of like a house. And with its garden around it, it's your home.

It's the home that your soul lives in, her body. I want you to just imagine that it's like a house on sitting in a garden. I want you to imagine the fence that you have around your property. What does that look like? Mine is like a white picket fence. Hey, I knew you were going to have a white picket fence. You're such a white picket fence. Yeah, and there's a gate, right? Absolutely.

That you can open and you can close. You want to let the dog out in the yard? Well, you can close the gate, keep the dog in. And your door and your windows in your house. Are they open? Are they closed? how many bolts do you have on that front door? My door is open.

My door is open, my screen is closed. And it's just a regular, it's like an eight-foot door. And then the screen is right there. And I got like, I got like a little window in my screen for my cat to come in and out if they want to. Okay. Okay. I love it. Okay.

Sounds like your real house, you know. Yeah, why not? I can imagine you living there. So, you know, here's the thing. You can make a long, slow, deep breath. Okay. Now, what do you do when strangers come to your front door? How does that feel?

Curious. Okay. So your first instinct is curious. Okay. And how do you feel when a friend comes to your front door? Excited. Okay. And you can welcome them in.

Absolutely. Absolutely. Okay. So bring yourself back, long, slow deep breath. I just have one more little piece to do if you're willing. Sure. Absolutely. Let the image of the house and the picket vents and the cap flap fade. Okay. Now I want you to imagine your psychic space. Your psychic space. It's going to close your eyes. Long slow deep breath. your psychic space how far outside your body does it extend where's your comfort zone this is my space I think a few feet around me

and I would be aware of anybody that were coming to the door of my psychic space and it might make me feel a little bit perturbed if someone got into it when I wasn't prepared for it Okay, great. Now I want you to imagine, if you can, the wall that you have. This is Georgia's wall. Okay, what's it made of? How does it feel?

It's sort of gelatinous. It can bend and move a little bit. Flexible. Flexible, yes, that's a great word. Yeah. But some parts are soft. Some parts are sore. Some parts are ticklish.

Some parts are, are, I don't want them to touch it. Okay. Can you, can you see through your wall? I can. It's transparent. And can people see through to you? It's more translucent, I think, where it's, it's sort of pixelated for people to see in. It's it's they can maybe they can see something in there at times, but maybe not

what they think they see. That's really great. Okay. So you're wrong. You can see out through it, but you've got it organized so that you reveal, you want to reveal and you get it all pixelated when you don't want anyone to see it. It's true. That's great.

Loving it. Okay. So long, slow deep breath and bring yourself back when you're ready, open your eyes. That's tough. Yeah. Well done, you. Thank you. So here you have two kind of different experiences, but they give you a really good idea of how I am in my space, how I am in my home, how I am in my psychic space.

And you see there's some a little bit similarities, but there's also quite a bit of difference. I ain't home with the garden and you can come in the picket fence and, you know, and then wait a minute, now you're getting in my psychic space. That's a little bit different. It's a little bit different. Yeah. And what you've described is extremely important to understand about, you know, I can see out, but I can obscure. there's things and there's sensitive parts that I don't want anyone touch. I don't want anybody poking in that.

So you got to respect. I'm going to respect it and I'm asking others to respect that part of me that doesn't want to be poked. Mm-hmm. You know. That was beautiful. I'm going to have to do some thinking on that. There's a lot in there. Thank you for that.

Well, the thing is, this is the work of Roberto. Sagioli, the Italian psychiatrist who developed psychosynthesis. And he just developed these wonderful tools for going in really quickly and seeing through our own creative imagination, things about ourselves that we might not even notice without these kind of really simple tools to look inside of ourselves, you know. And so that kind of deep inner work, you can do a quick, dart in and get a thing that you can work with for months and get deeper and deeper understandings about it. And so, yeah, talk therapy has its place and then the slightly

non-ordinary state, closing my eyes, taking a breath, going inside that you were working in a slightly altered state. Yeah, totally. close our eyes to go into. And so the non-ordinary state of consciousness gives us the great gift. Okay? So more about boundaries. You know, it's a perfect little imagery here.

We respect our limits. We have the ability to say what I can do and what I can't do. It means knowing how to say yes and it means knowing how to say no, kindly, firmly. Because saying yes, we're going. when you mean no always leads to problems. Always leads to problems for ourselves and for others. So saying yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. And then being furious with the person that you're saying yes to is really out of integrity.

Really is out of integrity. In our world, we're not in a situation. where we have a culture that is so self-denying, self-right, denying of personal rights, okay, that it is imposed itself, where we have to say yes or we got shot, okay, or go to jail or something, okay? That's a whole other thing.

I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about in everyday life situations. I'm not talking about situations under duress. Okay, I'm talking about regular everyday situations where you say to your partner, yes, but inside is a no. Okay, what's honesty and what's love and awareness and respect how to do that? So we respect our limits. We respect other people's limits.

So if we're in a relationship and our friend or our partner or our business partner says to us, you know, I don't think I'm going to be able to do that. Do we coerce them? do we try and convince them or manipulate them but I really need this and I really want this and you have to do this for me and if you really loved me you would really do this for me right they bat my eyelashes a little bit when I get you going you know so respecting our limits and accepting and respecting others limits responsibility to you know self-respect is recognizing our ability and responsibility to make decisions. If I respect myself, I make decisions that are healthy

and mentally, emotionally, physically, spiritually. I'm going to make all of that, right? Yeah. So self-respect means that we understand that life is difficult, that life has challenges. And that sometimes the, The only thing we can do is have dignity going through the challenge. Now, Buddha said, you know, no one escapes illness or suffering. And we can say, yes, that is true. Everybody, everybody at some point in their life is going to experience something that's difficult or challenging, right? And sometimes dignity is the only thing we've got to go through that.

Okay? And that is a combination of self-awareness, self-love, self-respect, and self-responsibility, is we keep our dignity. That means we respect ourselves. We accept this is a really difficult challenge. The one question I always encourage, it's what the question I ask myself on a daily basis, what is for my higher good? What is for the higher good of the situation? and then doing my level best to choose that. Okay, there's a lot of temptation in life, okay?

Wouldn't it be nice to let our lower self sneak out and have a go with something? Like, seriously. I mean, it's very tempting, right? Sure. Yeah, but doesn't it have like a big price tag on it? It always comes with a very large price tag. And we have to be willing to pay that price tag. Whereas I know I can tell myself and I can assure others that if we, from a genuine place of self-love and awareness,

if we ask ourselves what is for the higher good in a situation and we take as much confidence and courage into the situation and do that which is for the higher good, which might be something quite difficult, by the way, we will feel content within ourselves. We will have inner peace. because some part of us knows that we did what we really believed was for the higher good in that moment. So

healthy boundaries are recognizing our needs, wants, feelings, thoughts, beliefs, and others. Respecting, accepting the limitations that we have, our strengths and our limitations and respecting the strengths

and limitations of others. It means the ability to say, yes when we need yes and no when we mean no and maybe when we need to think about it. And that's also part of respecting our limits is understanding that saying maybe I need to think about it and give me a little time to think about it is actually the right answer. How about self-respect being the willingness to admit our failures and our mistakes instead of hide them and pretend they didn't happen? That's a tough one.

Yeah, that's different. Now, I'm not talking about like taking out a billboard on the main street of your town. Okay, saying I made a boo-boo. I'm talking about where one needs to admit. Wait a minute. I think I made a mistake here. Apologizing. Self-respect is about cleaning up.

I made a mess on your front lawn. My mess affected you. guess what? Self-respect requires that I respect you and your boundaries equally to mine. It means I need to offer to go and clean up the mess I made on your front lawn. And if I'm not doing that, how can I respect myself? Yeah, it's a great point. I think there's shame involved in this one. People have a relationship between shame and boundaries.

Like it's sometimes it makes them not want to do the, work on themselves or what do you think is the relationship between shame and self-respect? Well, it's it's their antagonist. Okay. And self-respect requires that we examine that shame. And sort out shame from guilt. Very different thing. Do we do we need to stop for a moment?

and define those. Let's go through both of those. That would be fantastic. So, shame, I really, you know, I think that there's a lot of misunderstanding about it. First of all, I think that we're a little bit hardwired for shame. And we'll see that animals can experience it. You know, your cat or your dog. Cats aren't so wired for shame, us thought for dogs.

can like, you know, you can look by their whole face. They know, oh, I did something. And and so we're kind of wired for it. It's kind of like embarrassment and shame are connected somehow. Yeah. And when we're really young, if there's things that are happening around us that are embarrassing, that we don't understand, that cross and blur boundaries that we automatically know, okay, or sense with behaviors and attitudes and beliefs, okay? Then we can have what could be a simple case of embarrassed over somebody's behavior, actions, or beliefs, but it turns into shame, okay? Dad getting drunk and throwing up on the rug becomes our shame.

okay because energetically it can transfer there's the the transferance of shame that can happen do we want to say something about that too do you i don't understand there's that transfer of shame where parents can get angry and dump shame on children and children can take it in and instead of a parent saying gee what happened that was kind of embarrassing i feel badly that that had too much to drank and, you know, we need to sit down and tell dad that his behavior is affecting us. And that keeps dad's behavior about dad, right? Yeah. That we might still feel uncomfortable with or embarrassed about because it's our dad.

Okay. Sorry to pick. It could equally be mom or Uncle Harry or anybody else. But, you know, so that's how all those boundaries kept blurred. So what might be just simply an embarrassing that could be used as a teaching moment or, or a, you know, I mean, we all do something embarrassing. I mean, you know, something happens. You know, it just is, it happens in life.

Okay, you trip over something. Your graceful entrance into the room is completely destroyed by tripping over the edge of the rug, you know. Well, you can turn that into something funny and have a laugh over it. and, you know, and a teaching moment, okay? Maybe I shouldn't be wearing high heels anymore. So I'll wear running shoes with my pretty dress. But you can turn it into something that people can relax with. Or you can get angry and rage at somebody.

Dump all that on somebody who's now like got this big dump on them. Okay. And if you do that with children, then they take a huge. in and they end up carrying around this transfer of shame from situations and other people that has nothing to do with them. And this is interesting because when people start unpacking, you know, I had a private practice for nearly what, 40 years. So when people start unpacking these internal, the internal luggage that they're carrying around, these heavy bags of stuff, okay? They find out that a lot of it isn't even theirs. I've got to start handing.

Mac, you know, this is yours. And then this is your uncle Harry and this is your job. It's not even mine. Why am I lugging this stuff around and feeling bad about it? So shame is somehow connected to embarrassment. And that's something we just make a study. Is this embarrassing? Why am I feeling shame?

I didn't know. It's like, okay, let it go. Have a laugh. Let it go. You know, guilt, completely different. guilt tells us that we've done something wrong. We've either committed or omitted something. That's what guilt is.

Guilt is useful. Without guilt, we would have no sense of conscience. Now, if guilt gets all mixed up with embarrassment and shame, that makes a very undigestible. A, that we feel in the pit of our stomach. It's very third chakra, power center, right in the middle of our body, then we'll feel that as a heavy, you might feel it up at our heart space as a heavy or unpleasant, nasty kind of experience. And so grieving out the experiences. And if we're

talking about guilt, well, you know, that's something completely different again. It's something we've committed or omitted. And that means we need to look at how do I clean this up? We're back to self-respect. How do I clean this up? If I want to respect, I want to respect my myself, it means that I need to resolve those unresolved issues. I need to dot those eyes and cross those teeth. I need to forgive myself and or others if I want to have my self-respect. I need to have a look at all of this and see. And that's not a need.

It's a need and a want. I want to do this because it will make me feel more healthy and more in alignment with my authentic self. So that's the shame and the good thing. Is that helpful? Yeah, that's super helpful. I love looking deeper into it. And I think it helps myself and probably people listening to thoroughly understand that there's different moving parts there. Absolutely.

And once we sort out what's mine and what's not mine, then we know what the next step is. If most of this isn't mine, well, all I need to do then is forgive it. and let it go and put it into the sacred fire or send it out into the cosmos or you know send it out with prayers and light and a chant and a song and you know dance it out draw it out whatever way feels right for us to do until we are relieved of it and it's not mine anymore but what is mine is mine and i can't put that on anybody else so self-respect means taking ownership of my words my actions and my deeds, physical boundaries. You said something really interesting.

He said, well, I feel my psychic space. And that's about right. Usually most people feel it about two to three feet around like a sphere. Sagioli is, he draws it like an egg shaped because of our shape. It's like kind of an egg shaped sphere around us. And that's our psychic space. And I love what you said when you said, I wouldn't be very happy if someone like got in it when I was watching it.

You know, I mean, it's one thing if we're in a crowd and we're getting a crowded movie theater or a vent or something like that, we know we're going to be shoved and pushed a little bit and we know to expect it. Okay, and we get our elbows little pokey things out, right? Yeah. And yes, we have, and here I want to give a shout out to Rupertch doctor. Robert Sheldrake, British biologists, so brilliant. His books please everybody run out and buy them. And the sense of being stared at, I think, underlines this.

Our awareness of our psychic space is so sensitive that we can feel a kilometer away, someone's doing. This is such an extraordinary. kind of sense that it's had to have to read the research on it and go, it's true, it's true, it's true. It's not something that we're imagining. Is it actually real? We can feel when people are getting into our psychic space. We can feel when we're being stared at.

We can feel when somebody is sending bad vibes at us. We can feel that, you know. You get in an elevator with two perfect strangers. You can tell in a second, who's in a good mood? Who's not? Who's leaking like Chernobyl? Seriously, or what was it, three-mile island? Right.

Yeah, okay. Leaking, okay, either good stuff or radioactive. And we don't want that in our space. But what happens if we're in a situation where people are leaking that into our psychic space? what do we do and healthy boundaries is that we learn to clean that psychic space and keep it clean

we learn to keep it filled with light and peace and good vibrations that's our choice it's like going into a dark room and turning the light on you know we can let all other people's junk you know sometimes you go in different parts

of the world or different parts of the city. And you look and you think, why is everybody dumped all that stuff and littered? Why did they do that? And yeah, and psychically people do that too. They dump and litter all kinds of stuff. And we need to learn to keep our space the way we want it. Peaceful, clear, open, but aware. So we have, those are our energy.

energetic boundaries or psychic space. We're going to come back that a minute. We have physical boundaries. We talk about that. Don't really want anybody touching any of those things. Okay. And so depending on our culture, we will have instant, yes, you can hug me because I know you and I love you and I care about you. And, you know, it's an instant meet and greet and there's a hug involved.

There's other people where there may be a shake a hand or a smile or something. It's a bit further out on the list. It's like, you don't get to touch me. close. Okay. And and and and and and and so it goes and you know with the boundaries that we consciously unconsciously have created. Okay. Our emotional boundaries. What does that look like? We have the right to maintain limits on what people deliver in our direction emotionally and verbally. And we have the right to say no the same way you see those cute little signs on people's front lawn with a doggy and please no.

I'll let your dog on my lawn. Okay. We have the right to say no, please stop. Please stop. And that's really important that we understand that that beautiful difference between creating the space to listen to people, to their thoughts and feelings and beliefs, but not creating a space for dumping, littering, dumping. you have such an interesting expression on your face right now.

Is it like, have the difference? Yeah, there's a huge difference between somebody, even if they're angry or upset, that's okay. We can say, listen, I'm feeling really upset and angry, so please be patient, and I want to just take a little time. And there's a big difference between somebody aware that they're upset or sad or frightened or angry by something and sharing it with us, especially if we've played a role in why they're upsetting and you're frightened.

Yeah. You emptied the RSB to go buy a sports car. Yes, I'm angry. I think I'm a right to be. Yeah. So communication of feelings without littering and dumping. And even worse, carpet bombing. I'm not sure if you've ever been in a situation with somebody who carpet bombs.

Herbly, verbally carpet bombs. Right, right. It's like it's all coming out so fast and everyone is like an explosion. And you can't keep track of them and you can't answer them. And because it's all, there was no warning. Okay, it came in the dark in the night and the sky and pull from carpet bombs. So these all violate our boundaries and we'll be aware we'll feel dumped on, littered on, bombed on. So emotional boundaries.

Intellectual boundaries, what do they look like? Well, we have something called intellectual property laws that respect intellectual property. We have a rate to not just our own thoughts and ideas. and expressions, but we have a right to protect them. So if, I mean, it's not just in an everyday conversation, but obviously if we write a symphony, we have a right to, you know, protect that. If we write a poem or publish a book or do a piece of art, you know,

we have a rate to protect that that came through us, that we need a channel for that. And that in our world, that, you know, we have the right to say how it's used and how it's not used. And that's really kind of like an interesting thing in our society where everybody feels perfectly free to take whatever they want, you know, because they like it. That's not a good enough reason.

I'm sorry. I'm really fussing about images and things like that when we use them. or in our church for printing our handbooks. I always want to make sure that we credit the artist. When I get PowerPoint, when I'm lecturing and I give PowerPoint, so I always have the image credit page, even if they're from unsplash, where it says you don't have to. Okay, yeah, but I want to, because that person took that photograph

and that's so beautiful, you know. And so how do we self-respect ours and respect others? Because remember, they are indivisible. We can't have self-respect and no respect for other people. That's called arrogance. That's not self-respect. That's arrogance. You know?

So my self-respect is equal in equivalent to me respecting you. This is at the core of Namaste. Right? This is at the core of the true teaching of Namaste. say, I honor the divine which I see in you. And to do that, I have to recognize the divine in me, which is honoring the divine in you. So, spiritual boundaries. Okay, there's a whole other conversation.

We won't do it today, but if you and the listeners are interested, but mediumship is a whole other conversation, but women are just going to give a little umbrella. Spiritual boundaries include. on the most basic level, the right to your own beliefs. You want to believe the world is flat charge? Well, I know you don't, but if you did it, you know, I don't care. If someone wants to believe that the fairies live in the bottom of the garden, you know, I kind of like that.

I don't believe that there are any there, but I'd love it if there were. Okay, I'd be the first one out making sure that the habitat was appropriate. And again, I don't believe there are. But the right to have our beliefs and to allow others to have our beliefs. And the boundary is of self-respect. Your beliefs cannot be overrunning my beliefs. There needs to be that healthy boundary there. So you will see couples who will have where I've worked with couples that come from very different backgrounds.

You know, one perhaps comes from a Catholic background. The other ones come from a Jewish background, you know, and they've been raised in their religions, but they fall in love and they want to get married. And, you know, they come and sit in front of me and say, how are we going to work this out? And, well, you know what you can. Can you look at including some of both?

Okay. And so some couples where there's a lot of self-respect and respecting of the others make a space that's inclusive of both. So you can have Christmas and Hanukkah. You know, you can have Easter and Passover. You can have all the teachings of both of the traditions. So I once, I knew a couple many years ago where loved and committed and, you know, like had a 60-year marriage until they're both deceased many years ago now. But part of it was embedded in this level of self-respect.

in which every Sunday morning they'd get up, they'd have breakfast, and he would go off to his church, and she would go off to hers. And they would come back afterwards, and they would talk about what the sermon was about and how the service was lovely, and then they'd have lunch. And then they'd go off and do whatever they were going to do. There you go. What's wrong with that picture? Nothing.

You make a space of love and self and respect that is inclusive. It's not one person insisting and imposing. My religion is the right religion. My religion is the only religion. My spiritual beliefs, because nowadays, religion is kind of a bad word. Spirituality is everything. Okay, sorry, but religions were built to allow people to practice their spirituality. Did they get out of hand?

Yes. Why? Because of human nature. It had nothing to do with the cause. most spirituality, the realms of divinity and shamanic and everything else, zero human issues. Sorry, that's my take on it. We can create a space, respectful to self and others, where your spiritual beliefs and or religious beliefs have their space with no imposition and no discounting.

They're of equal value. So the fairies at the bottom of your garden on your flat world is just fine. Okay. Boundary issues abound because of why. Why, George? Why are there so many boundary issues? Because we never really learned how to deal with them. We've found ways to pretend they're not there.

We've found ways to ignore them. And different people have different boundaries. We all have different buildings and constructs we've built. So when they come into contact each other, we don't know how to interact. And unless we have a very solid foundation of communication that was built on self-respect. Yes. But it's never too late to learn. Yes.

That's the thing. It's like, okay, I'm all good with grieve out that you didn't get it then. I'm fine with that. I'll pass the Kleenex. And make a space of listening. No problem. But there needs to be an end to that then. Okay.

Griefing can have it be its process, but it can't just get indulged in and carry on. Like I didn't get and I didn't get. Okay, you didn't get. I move on. Okay. Create it in your life today. Create it in your life today.

Develop healthy boundaries. Develop self-respect. Recognize your strength and limitations. Learn how to forgive. yourself and others. Learn how to say I'm sorry. Learn how to say, I think I made a mistake here. I think I really screwed up. I'm really sorry and I might need some help cleaning it up. At first, that's like hard to get out. When you're first starting to, you know, respect, it's, it's hard, because all those human foibles get in the way.

But after a while, it becomes so much easier. And you realize that you feel so much better inside. Now, one important thing, I know we're getting to the top of the hour here, one important thing that we also need to recognize that in the cleaning up process that we've been talking about that will give us dignity and self-respect, okay? we also have to I love what the 12-step program don't ask me which step it is because I couldn't wouldn't be able to remember without looking it up but one of the steps says that you

make amends unless to do so would be causing harm so if to make amends with a person that you believe you cause some harm to that you to respect yourself you know you want to clean up then you take a a little time with that. And if needed, get a second opinion. Ask a professional of whatever kind feels right for you. And say, hey, there's this. And do you think that it would be the great thing to write a letter or make a phone call or ask to meet the person? And if you look, if it's not a personal thing, if it's more like, wow, I littered so much when I was young. I I drove around and I tossed all those litigarettes. I wonder now if I started a forest fire.

Well, you know what? Do some volunteer work. Go and we have here in Montreal, we have a clean the mountain every spring. They have, you know, you bring your gloves in your bag and they give out more bags when that one's full. And you help clean up the mountain. So if you littered, help clean up. Do some volunteer work. If you felt, I remember once a client telling me that they were heartburned.

broken when they realized that they had been very neglectful with a former cat that they'd had. And they'd had kind of a couple of cats and maybe favored one and not so much or really kind of more neglected. Whatever, for whatever reason. They were heartbroken when they were. So I said, well, can't get it's gone. You can't really. I'll send a prayer and send good vibrations to whatever form that cat may be in now. But you can treat some other animal really nicely.

So you can take the good energy and put it somewhere. You know, maybe in the scale somewhere that's going to start to even things out. You know, so it's never too late to restore our self-respect. Now, a couple last thoughts on its respect and trust, I think, are the two things that are the easiest to lose and the hardest to rebuild. Trust and respect. And they work together. Have you noticed they're good companions?

And they're so easy to lose and they're hard to rebuild. And so it takes confidence and courage and intention. That's our willpower working again. I want to build my self-respect. And to do that, I need, I want to conduct myself in dignity. And to do that, I need to be self-aware. And I need to love myself and the divine and nature and community enough to be willing to put the effort in. How are we doing?

Oh, it's so beautiful. I'm just, I am just bathing in the light and trying to think about the way in which I can not only apply them to my life, but think on them more and try and. find ways to recreate or maybe look at the boundaries I have in my life and apply some of these things to them. Because I think no matter where you are in life, it's always a good idea to reexamine boundaries. It's always a good idea to say, hey, where am I at? Or maybe for me, as I'm talking to you, I'm beginning to think like, hey, you know, maybe after this conversation, I can take some time to revisit some of the things that happen in my life and understand where the boundary was at. Was it my boundary? Was it someone else's boundary? Or,

Was it a fair boundary? So it's so beautiful. I love it. Yeah. And what can I learn about this? Yeah. And then how do I tweak? How do I tweak things going forward?

You know, is this a kind of thing that, wow, that was an out-y in the future. I think I'm just going to close it down sooner and move away. You know? Sagey, I'm really sorry, but I'm not available for this conversation. It doesn't feel. integrity with what's for my or your higher good. Actually, quite recently, I had to tell somebody that. I was watching somebody dig themselves into all kinds of old, crazy stories,

third hand, fourth hand, second hand, what have you. And it was like, whoa, you're going to get halfway to China. You keep digging in those old stories. And so eventually what I said to this being was, you know what, this is not healthy. you know this is not healthy if you want to be healthy you need to go by your own direct experience with life and with people and not go into gossip and stories and and who said and what said and this and that and everything in our tradition in the santo daini we have that in the hymns was a hand of Master

Hernia and he also says No, To Cox of Calcinetics. Don't play with the mind. Don't put your sister's mind. And so this is all about healthy boundaries. Gossip. You know, how healthy is that?

Okay, well, we all love a little bit of gossip. It's quite a human, but what do we do with it? We play with other people's minds, and do we use it to manipulate and do we what are we doing healthy boundaries healthy boundaries healthy boundaries yeah i think that that's why the conversations about lived experience are so rich because they are about your personal stories your personal understandings of how things unfolded for you and in front of you and as we talk about stories i one thing i know notice that we have in our conversations that I try and using my own life. And I've really found

powerful, these ideas of metaphors. And when we talk about boundaries, they can be translucent, or they can be opaque, or they can be a picket fence, or they can be sort of pixelated. It's so beautiful and powerful to use the powers of metaphors in order to create these things in your life that really is really helpful. Yeah. And then there's people who have great big, stainless steel wall with no doors and no windows. Those are mean. They are,

they have imprisoned themselves. What starts off as a boundary for self-protection becomes a prison. You know, earlier up in our conversation, you were saying, you know, I think we put those boundaries

in place and those walls in place. Yeah, you're right. We get outched a few times. Okay, I'm going to protect. And so we put the wall up. The place we put it up the most is around our heart. We can put it around our mind. We can be very closed mind.

This is what I believe. Don't try and convince me otherwise. This is right. This is true. I believe it. And so we can close our mind down and put a tight, hard wall around it. We can close our heart. down, put a tight, hard

wall around it. But remember many months ago we were talking about to loosen too tight. The teaching of the Buddha. One of his core first teachings on the path was about to loosen too tight and finding

the middle way, the balance. That was the beginning of his understanding of the middle way, the balanced way, not to loosen too tight. And it's the same with boundaries. You know, flexibility, resilience. These are the things we want with our boundaries, to be flexible, to be resilient,

not to block ourselves in and shut everybody out, but also not to be so loose and leaking that we're kind of leaking into everybody else's, or everybody's, we're letting everybody into our space, you know. And we don't even own our thoughts because our thoughts get changed by other people's thoughts And our feelings aren't even our feelings because we let other people leak their feelings into ours. They're angry. We become angry. Okay.

This is part of a conversation about mediumship because these are the exact kind of boundaries that happen with energetically in mediumship and especially unconscious mediums. Well, so boundaries. It's been wonderful speaking with you today. Thank you so much. I love being a guest on your show. those of you who are interested in learning more. Thank you again, George. You always talk about my books.

Aalawasco awakening, a guide to self-discovery, self-care. It's a two-volume work. And yes, you can read one without the other, that I highly recommend that you're... Anyone interested, you can find lots of information free for educational purposes on my website, which is www. R-E-V-D-R, Jessica Rochester, just as you kind of see it here all lowercase. And thank you, George.

You are a wonderful host. Always with joy to visit with you. The pleasure is all mine, and I absolutely love our conversations. I find them rich in rewarding and valuable. And I know the listeners do, too. The new site looks amazing, by the way. Congratulations on that. It's really well done.

Yes. It just needed, I hadn't had the time. It's been so crazy busy. And, you know, just said, okay, really have to freshen this whole thing up. It did a really nice freshen up and shopped the new web designer who worked on that, Tony V. And give him a little shout out because he's doing a great job. Yeah. Do you have time for one more question, Dr. Jessica?

Okay, so I want to say thank you to all the people. in the comments. Michael Ross Brewer, Magic Micro, Michael Bonneritz. Thank you so much to everybody who has taken some time to participate in the conversation today. And I have some friends of mine that find themselves going through, like sometimes I had a friend of mine that's going through like a Suboxone withdrawal. And I would imagine that it states like that when you find yourself transitioning from

being addicted to something, that that also opens up a whole new world. of boundaries and stuff like that. What advice, like what, I'm sure that you've seen people in times of crisis dealing with boundaries. And while you can't speak to the actual individual, I'm sure maybe you could shed some light on what boundaries might look like for that person. Sure. Give me just a little bit more information about the person. Okay.

So a good friend of mine, they were addicted to substances. Then they found themselves going through the medical model of addiction where they were given Suboxin, which is normally something that's. given to like a heroin addict. And they found themselves wanting to get off the medicine. And the medical system is tapering them off. But they found, they decided that they were going to go their own route and taper off, but also somehow find the courage and the light to try and get off completely.

And I think that that's where they are in that, in that aspect. Well, first of all, all good vibrations for a successful recovery. and please go out and get my books because we talk to addiction and recovery and and the thirst for wholeness and underneath if we come to accept that underneath all addictions are unresolved dependency issues and that within those dependency issues is the thirst for wholeness. The longing for love, for acceptance, for safety. People under us, you know, we're all looking for love, you know, that actually safety has a higher survival priority. Love is way down the line, you know.

It's like safety. To be able to feel safe is so profoundly important. And because we live in a world where most of the time we do feel safe, we've, you know, we can see on the news that people, or bombs dropping in the Ukraine, all these crazy things around the world and political overthrowes of governments and all kinds of things where people actually don't feel safe and they get their bags and on their bicycles or with their wagon or their car and they try and look for safety. So that's the first thing that people in their recovery process need to do is, do I feel safe in my life? Do I feel safe? Not how many people love me.

Okay. That's down the line because the first person needs to be you. I need to love you. George, you need to love you. So this friend of yours, okay? Self-awareness, self-love. So self-awareness, first question is, do I feel safe? And if I don't feel safe, what is it that I need to do to start to feel safe? So self-awareness, self-love. Okay, now that I'm feeling safer, okay, now that I'm feeling more safe, now that I realize, oh, okay, I have home. I have some professional support that I need. I have some family support that I need. I have a group that I can go to every week or every day if I need to and share and talk. Okay, some kind of support group. I'm a great believer in that. Then you start to look at my thirst for wholeness.

What else is missing? Now that I'm starting to address safety, all of a sudden I start to realize, wait a minute. And what's missing is what I'm not putting into it. They tell me in the 12-step programs that people, you know, they're always looking for love and they want a relationship and anything. And they say, first you get a plant. If the plant is alive after a year, you might be ready for a companion animal. And if the companion animal is doing really well, after a year, maybe you're really good.

for a relationship. And so that's how, you know, I love that. You know, I start a plant. Okay. If you can love that plant and get that plant really healthy and happy, then guess what? Then you can make your whole, your whole life, your space, peaceful and happy and filled with good things.

So you have to start with the very basics, safety. The basic human needs. and then you'll have to love yourself and respect you. I hope this helps your friend. Yeah, I think there's lessons in there for everybody. When we begin talking about the three parts that we've talked about so far, at least for me, I feel as it has given me a thorough understanding of the different colors I have. on my palette that I can paint with.

You know what I mean? When I begin to think about the world of self-love and self-awareness and self-respect, it's you really got to understand all the tools you have before you can begin painting this authentic version that you want to get out there. There's such beautiful tools. I really think everybody can learn from them. It's so interesting to me, Dr. Jessica, because I feel that the lead up to all of our conversations, life is testing me in these things.

And when I get to talk to you, I'm like, oh, that's why that's why that's thing happened. Oh, that's that. I can play that there. You know, so. Synchronicity. Synchronicity. I know. God, it's just wonderful. It really is. I love these synchronicities. So anyway, it's been a joy. Absolutely. See you next time. Okay. Thanks a million. Lots of light, love, health, peace, prosperity, everything good for you and for all the listeners out there. Fantastic. Thank you so much for being here today. Ladies and gentlemen, check out the books. You will love them. I guarantee you. That's all we got for today. I hope you have a beautiful day. Aloha.