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Follow along with the transcript below for episode: Embracing Self-Love with Brittany & Sarah [INTRODUCTION]   [00:00:02] PF: Thank you for joining us for episode 455 of Live Happy Now. This week, we celebrate Valentine's Day. Today, we want to talk about the greatest love of your life, yourself. I'm your host, Paula Felps. Today, I'm talking with Brittany Derrenbacher and Sarah Pavey of The Healing Collective in Louisville, Kentucky. In their practices, Brittany and Sarah teach clients how to discover a deep lasting love for themselves. They also hold workshops on creating self-love vision boards. Today, they're sharing some insights on how self-love improves our lives and our relationships. They also give us some tips for starting your own self-love practice. Let's have a listen. [INTERVIEW] [00:00:44] PF: Brittany and Sarah, thank you for joining me on Live Happy Now. [00:00:48] BD: Thanks. [00:00:48] SP: Thank you for having us. [00:00:50] BD: We're excited to be here together. [00:00:52] SP: We’re so excited. [00:00:53] PF: I know. I don't usually do tandem things, but this is absolutely too perfect, and I'm really excited to be able to do this. All of the month of February, we are talking about love, the different types of love. One thing that really struck me is all of our guests have mentioned – all of our guests. Both of the guests prior to you have mentioned just how important self-love is. Everything begins with self-love. No matter – whether you're trying to build another relationship with a person, it still goes back to self-love. Can you talk about that? Why does everything really start with self-love? [00:01:28] BD: I think our relationship with ourselves is the most important relationship that we'll ever have in our entire lives. If we don't cultivate that relationship with ourselves, we always consistently show up in our other relationships with people with a glass half-full. I think when we lean into this idea of self-love, we're able to embrace all of the parts of ourselves and realize that I think we're the ones that we've been waiting for, right? We can love every part of ourselves and really sit in the ooey-gooeyness of our essence and our being and our greatness. [00:02:13] PF: To make sure we're talking about the same thing because self-love can seem kind of this concept, tell me what true self-love is. What are we actually talking about here? [00:02:23] BD: I think self-love is the unconditional acceptance of self. It's showing up for ourselves the way that we would a best friend. It's seeing and hearing and valuing and just loving every single part of ourselves and the way that we do our friends, our animals, our family. We’re projecting that back to self. I think that is one of the most beautiful relationships that we can cultivate. [00:02:56] PF: But that's a tough thing because we aren't really taught to love ourselves. Even it's difficult sometimes to be comfortable with the concept of trying to learn to love ourselves. We really do oftentimes try to get that love and validation from the outside, and we don't even know how to go inside. Where do we start even learning how to do that and how to discover self-love? [00:03:19] SP: I kind of like what you said, Brittany. That was a really beautiful approach to it. When we look at ourselves how we do our best friends or even loving ourselves how we would a child, when we’re tough on ourselves, almost visualizing yourself as a child and sitting down and how we take care of ourselves in that way or talk to ourselves. Sometimes, I mean, we can be really tough on ourselves. It's easier to show yourself self-love when you think about like, “Little me,” and making sure that every child gets what they need or just showing ourselves that same love that we would our friend or a child or even our pets sometimes. Yes, I think that that's a great place to start is how we take care of other people. [00:04:01] BD: I also think this is inner child work. We're getting back to the root of when we are born into this world, we have unconditional love for ourselves. We want to get our needs met. We think we are the best thing ever. [00:04:19] PF: Especially if we're only children. [00:04:21] BD: Yes, yes. Like there is no one greater than us. Then we start to grow up and life happens and society happens. That changes over time. So I think we have to lean back into that. We're almost reclaiming that love for ourselves that we are born innately with. [00:04:43] PF: That doesn't feel natural for a lot of people. It doesn't feel natural to go back and say, “I'm going to talk to this wounded child that I was.” How do you kind of start taking steps toward that? [00:04:54] BD: I think the first thing that we have to do is start understanding the parts of ourselves that maybe are uncomfortable to look at. That is usually what I do with my clients, right? It's like this road back home to self, embracing and holding all the parts of ourselves that maybe we wanted to push away or overlook. You may have heard the phrase shadow work. This can also teeter into shadow work. I think, ultimately, the first step that we have to take is to view that all of our parts are good. They are there for a reason, and they make up who we are as we sit here today. [00:05:37] PF: What happens when you run into someone who's like, “I hate this part of myself.” I hear that from people where it's like, “I hate this about myself.” They are so hard on themselves about this one thing. How do you get over something that was very strong feelings about what's wrong with you? [00:05:54] BD: I think this will be an interesting thing for Sarah and I to both answer because we do this both innately in our work but differently based on our professions, right? My step is to always work with the person to identify why this part of themself exists, how it used to show up for them in the past and protect them and help them survive. It's like a reclaiming of that part of you and coming to understand it so that you can love it and also tell it that it can take a break. Like, “It’s okay. I don't need you to jump in and protect me right now.” [00:06:34] SP: Like you said, seeing how those parts did serve us at one point and how it was a protection of armor. Also honoring the valuable purpose that that armor has but also being able to take a step back and set it down to find a way to love those pieces and see how they can flow into your life and, yes, just look through a different lens. [00:06:57] PF: One thing that you ladies did, and I am just so fascinated by this, you've done it last year. I don't know if that was your first year. I know you did it again this year. That was a self-love vision board workshop. First of all, tell us what that is. [00:07:12] BD: It is a fun, playful, imaginative, and creative way to reclaim a part of ourselves that oftentimes we lose from childhood into adulthood, right? Imagination, creativity, play. We lose that, and we become really serious adults. I think it's a really beautiful way and a tool to allow people to dip their toes into self-love because they're essentially sitting with themselves. We usually start with the meditation and have them call in their higher selves and really kind of do a heart activation to where they can drop into their bodies and into their hearts and sit with themselves. We ask that they essentially create a board that encompasses all of the things that they love about themselves and also the things that they want for themselves. It's really interesting to see how that plays out for each individual person. [00:08:14] SP: Yes. Also, it's hard when you have glitter glue and scissors and stickers. It's hard to take yourself so seriously. I think that that really allows people to get into that inner child. Also, by the time they're done, they look at it, and they're like, “Wow, this feels really good. This is something I would love to look at every day.” But they're like, “I had so much fun doing it. I didn't – I can't believe time went by so fast.” I think it's a really fun way for people to get in touch with that. [00:08:41] PF: What kind of things do they look at in terms of self-love? What kind of pictures and words do you see people gravitating toward to create these self-love vision boards? [00:08:50] BD: Well we ask that people bring in an inner child photo to also work off of, too. [00:08:55] PF: Oh, nice. [00:08:56] BD: But a lot of times, especially with women, there will be something that they're working through with their bodies, their relationship with their bodies. Learning to love their bodies and meet themselves where they're at. You'll see a lot of language and verbiage around their relationship with their bodies. Also, it's interesting to see a lot of people will reclaim parts of themselves that maybe they've lost. Maybe life got in the way, and they haven't been able to travel in a while. Maybe they've had complicated romantic relationships in the past. So they're calling in a partner that is exactly what they want for themselves and knowing that it's not asking too much. [00:09:38] SP: It's also incredible to see how everyone will relate to each other. But when everyone holds up their boards at the end how different they are. Also, everyone's like, “Oh, that is so amazing. That feels so good to look at.” Then you look around, and everyone's so different and so unique to them. It's just such a beautiful feeling. [00:09:57] BD: I'll share a story of this woman's board that was really moving for everyone. Everyone gets one board, but really there's no limit. You can do what you want, and she did. She got several more, and she attached them all, and it became this expansive board of – she used different imagery of women and a lot of bright colors, very vibrant inner child colors, and created this board for herself to remind herself how beautiful she is. That not only is she beautiful but she's surrounded by beautiful amazing women all day. It was almost like this love letter to herself and to all of the feminine energies around her. It was incredible. [00:10:44] SP: It really was. That same woman, she asked everybody to sign her board, which has never happened before. It was just so beautiful for her to make those connections with herself and everyone else. [00:10:55] PF: What happens when people do this? Can you talk a little bit about how that changes what's going on in their brain? You're focusing specifically on this self-love topic, and you're getting into the magazines. What does it change with them, and how do you see that just over the course of this workshop which takes how long? How long are you there? [00:11:17] BD: About two and a half hours. [00:11:19] PF: Okay. How do you see people change, just during this two and a half hours that they're working on this? What's it doing to their brains and to their hearts? [00:11:28] BD: I'm glad asked this question because we did something a little differently this year. I use a lot of essential oils and breath work in my therapeutic practice. I used a specific oil that's good for heart activation, and I had them do what's called a manifestation breath. Really what that helps them do is drop out of their brain and into their bodies, and begin really focusing on the wisdom of their body and focusing on their heart. I think when we drop out of our minds that tend to worry and overthink and criticize and intrusive thoughts, we drop into the natural wisdom and rhythm of our bodies that's like, “I love you. This feels good. This is fun. I want to do more of this. I like this.” You start to get more of the I am affirmations, which is powerful. [00:12:23] SP: Yes. What's been so exciting to see the last couple years is by the end of it, everyone's like, “Wow, I didn't think I would have so much fun doing this.” When they first walk in, they're kind of – you can tell everyone's like, “Okay, what is this going to be about?” Then by the end of – [00:12:38] PF: What have I signed up for? [00:12:40] SP: Yes. They're like, “Wait, it's been two hours already?” It’s like show and tell. When they hold it up at the end, they're all excited to share. I mean, it's a really vulnerable thing to share, but they're so happy and excited to do it. It's really beautiful. [00:12:55] BD: Sarah and I, we’re super excited this year. We had a surprise come to our workshop. We had a man come. It’s not that – self-love is not just for women. In fact, I think it is incredibly healing modality for men. I think it helps just as a collective healing to bring men into this work. Yes. Do you want to tell the story? [00:13:21] SP: You could tell when he came in, he was nervous a little bit like, “I don't know what I'm getting into.” But it was so beautiful to see him come in and just see him feel supported by that feminine energy and really settle into kind of the womb space we created and to have that that nurturing healing energy around him. [00:13:38] PF: Is there a home version? How does someone do this if they're not in a group, and they're like, “Maybe that would help me.”? How do you sit down and create your own self-love vision board when we don't have you guys to walk us through? [00:13:53] SP: There's no right or wrong way to do it. What I love to do at home is sometimes I’ll even use a bulletin board and pack it and change it throughout the year. But really on construction paper, on anything, and cutouts from magazines. Or you're walking and you see something that resonates with you, just putting little images or anything that calls you. There’s no right or wrong way to do it. For me, at least, the whole purpose of a vision board is something that you can look at and see. It’s a little cliché, right? Every day, we get to reset and get to start. But that's true and having something to see and set your intentions towards, it gives you a direction to go in every day when you want to start new. Really, there's no right or wrong way to do it. There's not. [00:14:42] BD: I think whatever your creativity level is, whatever your capacity is, wherever your imagination takes you, go with it and have fun and don't limit yourself. Collect weird things. I dare you. Collect cool stickers. I dare you. Cut out pictures of yourself as a kid and create a masterpiece. You will be so proud of yourself. One thing I will say about the vision boards that we've created together is I look at them with so much pride. I love her. I love that version of me from a year ago. I love her, and I'm a different woman today. So I got to create something new in this workshop, and I love her. [00:15:29] PF: That's so great. How do you use it properly? As we all know, you can put the affirmations up on your mirror. But after a while, you don't see them. How do you make sure that this stays fresh every day? You kind of make a ceremony out of making sure you look at it and remind yourself and kind of reinstill that self-love every day? Or how – what's the best practice? [00:15:52] BD: I think probably Sarah and I do this two different ways because I tend to leave space on my board and add to it throughout the year. It does always kind of lead me back to it. [00:16:06] SP: Yes. For me and a lot of people in our groups, they like to put them in the bathroom or in the kitchen. But kind of like you said, we put it up there. Then we kind of get too used to seeing it. For me, I just fill my board up. When I meditate, I like to look at it but I mean really what aligns to that person. Some people, they like to see it while they're cooking or while they're using the restroom. It's some good material. Yes, I kind of like that, though, the idea of adding on to it throughout the year. That could keep you more involved with it and have more attention on it throughout the year or however often you do it. Yes. That's a good tip. [00:16:42] PF: Since self-love is so tough, how important is it that we're able to remind ourselves daily of this self-love journey that we're on? [00:16:50] BD: Oh, this is – I love to talk about the brain. Yes, repetition, repetition. It takes so many times. I think scientifically it's 300 to 400 times of repetition, right? If we stand in the mirror at day one and we say I love you to yourself in the mirror, it may seem kind of weird. It may seem uncomfortable. It doesn't stick. Day 20, I love you in the mirror. Maybe it lands a little bit more. Then by the end of this cycle, say you do this every day for a year, your brain – this is a new neural pathway, and it believes that is truth. So whether or not it feels silly to us and it feels maybe like, “I don't want to do that. That's not going to work,” it will work. It will work. Your brain will believe you. I think that's an important tool that I think we just have to do things until it becomes our truth. [00:17:52] SP: Yes. I think that's so important. It might feel silly at first. That's the cost is to feel little silly, but it will pay off. Like you said, I don't know the exact numbers, but we can think something so many more times than we could say those words out loud. If you're telling yourself in your brain, “I love you. I love you. I love you,” and you're just changing that narrative, it will create those new pathways. [00:18:16] PF: I had a guest on the show. It has been a couple years now, Shauna Shapiro. She wrote the book called Good Morning, I Love You. Her practice is one that I started doing, and that was she would put her hand on her heart every morning, before she gets out of bed, as soon as she wakes up. Now, I do it. It's good morning, Paula. I love you. It's like put your name in there and state that truth to yourself. When that's the first statement, the first thought of your day that your day is going to get better. It starts better. That is a real powerful way to do it as well. [00:18:49] BD: That is part of my morning practice, and it's non-negotiable for me because, otherwise, my intrusive thoughts are louder, and she's not going to win. [00:19:00] PF: That's awesome. What changes when we really start embracing self-love? How do we show up differently in the world? How does it change us? How does it change the way we interact with others? [00:19:12] SP: Not to get too woo-woo out there, but I mean I truly think it changes the vibration that you send out to the universe. That changes how you interact with yourself, with others. I mean, just the law of attraction and abundance. If you can imagine something for yourself, so much more is available to you. I think having some sort of reminder about that, it can totally change how you interact in the world, the vibration you set out. [00:19:41] BD: Fort me, I think when we cultivate a better relationship with self and we work on self-love, self-compassion, all the selves, we show up better in our relationships. We show up as a whole, happy, excited, joyful version of ourselves, right? We don't expect our partners and our friends and our families to be the ones that are always going to meet those needs. That is something that I think traditionally happens in especially romantic relationships, right? I mean, we're in the month of love, so we have to kind of talk about that. That societally and traditionally, we have been taught that once we find our partner, the happiness goal has been met. Really, it's being able to show up and create that from within. So then we can be in our relationships in a very easy lighter way that gets our needs met. [00:20:42] PF: What about the people out there this Valentine's Day, this season of love who are lonely, who don't have someone special in their lives, don't have a significant other? They feel very isolated, and they feel maybe unloved. What are some ways they can specifically embrace them themselves and show themselves love and feel that same kind of love that they're looking for? [00:21:04] SP: It's interesting you asked that question. We actually had a woman last night at our group. She was one with the big beautiful board. She was talking about how she used to hate this time of year. It would make her depressed, make her feel so bad, and how she had this shift where she's like, “I can buy my own flowers. I can buy flowers for my friends.” I think that that's a great place to start is, whether it is romantically or not, showing gratitude in the places that you can for yourself. Also, if you're not there, if you do have a good support group, showing gratitude and love towards those people and those things in your life will help cultivate that type of thing. [00:21:42] BD: What better way to celebrate love and to learn about self-love than to spend Valentine's Day with our best friends. [00:21:51] PF: That's a great talk, especially women tend to put a lot of pressure on the day. I love the idea of reframing that and saying this is about love and not just romantic love. It's about our love with our friends, with our pets, with our family. I really love that idea. [00:22:07] BD: There's nobody better to show up unconditionally for us than our pets and our best friends. [00:22:12] PF: Exactly. Your advice for everyone out there. They want to learn more about self-love, and we will. We'll put that affirmations, make that available as a download to them from you. Thank you for that. But what are some things they can do right now, some steps that they can take to just start practicing, baby steps toward greater self-love? [00:22:35] BD: I think we have to be open to spending more time with ourselves. I think – yes, and that involves releasing a little bit of fear around that. But just showing up and spending more time with ourselves, whether that's going out for a walk and not putting headphones in, really just spending some time with ourselves. [00:22:56] SP: Yes. I think a lot of times we are hard on ourselves because we focus a lot on how things may have gone wrong. But do we ever stop and think about when things go right or how we have supported ourselves so far into this life? I think we should pay more attention to those moments. [00:23:12] PF: Well, ladies, it's a lovely time to talk to you because it is all about love. I appreciate what you have to say to us. I really thank you for spending your time with me today. [00:23:21] BD: Thank you. [00:23:22] SP: Thank you. [END OF INTERVIEW] [00:23:27] PF: That was Brittany Derrenbacher and Sarah Pavey, talking about self-love. If you'd like to download a free printable poster of their self-love affirmations, learn how to create your own self-love vision board, or follow Brittany and Sarah on social media, visit us at livehappy.com and click on the podcast tab. While you're there, be sure to sign up for our weekly Live Happy newsletter. Every Tuesday, we'll drop a little bit of joy in your inbox with the latest stories, podcast info, and even a happy song of the week. That is all we have time for today. We'll meet you back here again next week for an all-new episode. Until then, this is Paula Felps, reminding you to make every day a happy one. [END]

Follow along with the transcript below for episode: Rethinking Your Relationship with Dr. Julia DiGangi [INTRODUCTION] [0:00:03] PF: Thank you for joining us for Episode 454 of Live Happy Now. It's February, which means a message of love and Valentine's Day is all around us. But did you know that this is a make-or-break time for many couples? I'm your host, Paula Felps. Today, I'm talking with Dr. Julia DiGangi, a neuropsychologist and author of the new book, Energy Rising: The Neuroscience of Leading with Emotional Power. She's here today to talk about some of the common mistakes we make in our relationships, and how we can improve those relationships by learning more about what our brains, not our hearts are doing to complicate things. Let's have a listen. [INTERVIEW]   [0:00:42] PF: Well, Dr. Julia, welcome to Live Happy Now. [0:00:45] JD: I'm so happy to be here, Paula. Thanks for having me. [0:00:47] PF: It's February, love is in the air, but sometimes it's not. That's what we want to talk about, because we have Valentine's Day coming up. This is a whole month, I know it's Heart Month. We talk about our hearts and we talk about love. That puts a lot of pressure on people. One reason I wanted to talk to you is your team had sent me some pretty revealing stats about what this time of year does to couples. It said that a survey showed 19% of respondents say that Valentine's Day is when their relationships hit the breaking point. What's going on with that? [0:01:22] JD: I think that one of the hardest things. I'm a neuropsychologist, which means, I'm a clinical psychologist with specialized expertise in the brain. I'm always thinking about our relationships through the lens of neurobiology, which sounds not romantic, but I swear to God, it's very romantic. The brain hates nothing more than dissonance. The brain is a prediction machine. It's a pattern detector. So your brain is moving you through life going apple, apple, apple, fill in the blank. Should it be an apple? Well, on Valentine's Day, what this means when our brain is quite literally in the business of predicting things based on context, your brain is going, Valentine's Day, hearts, love, romantic love, super intimate connection, sexual satisfaction. All these expectations really start to get pretty intense. For those of us who don't feel like our relationship meets those expectations, that disconnect between what we think it should be, and what the brain is actually experiencing can be quite painful. [0:02:27] PF: Do men and women experience that differently. [0:02:30] JD: Let me approach the question this way, and then you can tell me if I've answered it. Is the brain a pattern detector on both men and women? Absolutely. But then, when we get into these questions of like, well, what are the patterns that are programmed in our brains as women, versus what are the patterns that are programmed into our brains as men? So I think what happens is the function, the structure, and the function of the brain, we've done a lot of research around this. And we do not today think there are meaningful differences between the women's brain and the male brain. What I do think happens is there's different predictions, which a lot of us call expectations, which a lot of us call culture, which a lot of us call roles. What those are at the neurobiological level, though, are these predictive codes. I as a woman should do X. You as a man should do Y. One of the things that I do a lot of is I work with a lot of men. A lot of men gravitate toward my work. What I have seen over and over again is, society has set up a pattern, where men, when they were boys, when they were tiny, tiny boys were told to sever themselves from their emotion. The brain undergoes spectacular – I mean, it gives me chills to think about. In the earliest years of life, in year zero through five, the brain is doing something like a million, a million neural connections every single second.   [0:03:51] PF: A second?   [0:03:53] JD: A second.   [0:03:54] PF: Wow.   [0:03:55] JD: I know, it's incomprehensible. Well, what happens is we say, "Well, I don't really remember when I was born, one, two, three, four, five. So maybe, it didn't get me. Well, no, your brain was encoding your most formative lessons, specifically around relationships, around what love feels like, around what we're supposed to do with difficult emotions, about how safe intimacy is or isn't. So we've gotten messages in our childhood, we all did about how safe people are, about how much access we have to them. We continue to play that out. One of the things I think is very healing for people to understand, I got a couple of things to say about this. The first is, there's no relationship on the planet, there's not a single relationship on the planet that is more complex than the adult long-term romantic relationship. [0:04:47] PF: I think many people agree with that. We're relieved to hear that, because sometimes, we're made to think it should be easy if the media makes it look easy and it's not.   [0:04:57] JD: It's not. It's not easy at all. I think for a lot of us, because we have either shame, or we're confused, we then – I call it a pain sandwich, our relationship doesn't feel good. Then, because we don't know how to get the relief we want, we're in even more pain. But the things that we ask from our long-term partners, the number of roles. They're supposed to be our lover, or confidant, our caretaker, our coparent, our house manager, our business partner, it's insanely complex. So when there's a lot of complexity, there's always confusion. The confusion is happening in real time, meaning it's happening in our households on a day-to-day basis. But also, and this is a piece I would love to talk to you about. We do not partner for life by mistake, we partner for life to finish our unfinished childhood business. [0:05:54] PF: Oh. Yes, let's talk about that. Because I see a lot of articles where people say, "Well, maybe we weren't meant to be with one person for the rest of our life." Is that true? Or is it that it actually gets so difficult or so intense, that it's like, "Hmm. I think I'm going to go start this with somebody else"? [0:06:13] JD: I do not think that there's an answer to it. In other words, I think some relationships are meant to go on forever. I think some relationships are meant to end. I don't actually think that's the most powerful mission, if you will, of the long-term relationship. I think the holy hope, believe it or not, of our long-term romantic partnerships is to show us precisely where we still hurt. Where we hurt has been where we have hurt since childhood. Why? But like, most fundamentally, the brain is moving us through our life. I mentioned patterns. But it's even more fundamentally than just any type of pattern. It's moving us through our life based on emotional patterns. What does an emotional pattern sound like? It sounds like some – I'll give you a couple examples. "I never get what I want. I never get what I want. I never get what I want" or "No one will help me. No one will help me. No one will help me" or "People don't listen to me. People don't listen to me." So then, what happens invariably, there's always two relationships that there are tremendous similarity. That of our parents, and that of our partner. In other words, how we were parented, that plays out always in the long-term romantic relationship. So if I feel from my childhood, I'm still carrying these wounds, I just feel like people don't hear me. When I try to communicate my distress to my parents, they're too busy, they work too much, they have their own mental health issues, there's too many kids in the house. I mean, there could be a million good reasons. But nonetheless, I, as a four-year-old have this feeling that I'm not heard. I promise that plays out in the long-term romantic relationship. I know how excruciating long-term romantic relationships can be. I'm not being funny; they really can be devastating. Well, I think a lot of us think, "Let me get out of this and let me try to partner again." But there's an interesting, you mentioned statistics at the beginning of our conversation, there's other really interesting statistics. Second marriages fail more than first marriages. And third marriages fail more than all of them. If this doesn't make logical sense, in other words, the more I try to do something, the better I should get at it. Ride a bike for two years instead of one year, and three years instead of one year. My bike riding skills should get better. They don't. Why? It's because until we address the underlying childhood injuries, they continue to play out. Now, of course, and I think this goes without saying, but you'll humor me. Plenty of us are in abusive relationships where there's violence and there's abuse. I think there are relationships that are meant to be left. But I think for part of the, both the curse, and the blessing of the romantic relationship, is that it brings to the surface injuries. The greatest power of the long-term romantic relationship is in its potential. Meaning, my old injuries are going to get activated, am I now going to exacerbate them or am I going to heal them? [0:09:13] PF: As people are in that state, where the injuries have surfaced, it presents as turmoil within the relationship, it can present as discontent with your partner. One thing I see a lot of times when I'm feeling very discontented with my partner, and I sit down with myself, it's actually things I'm mad about with myself. That has nothing to do with what she's got going on. Because her actions have not changed, it's what's going on with me. I think that's probably pretty common too. [0:09:40] JD: It's very common. I think we all relate to that, and I think it's incredible that you're giving yourself that pause and that reflection, because I think when we're around people, and we feel bad, it's very natural. Like there's no shame, there's no weakness. It just seems like you were in my environment when I was having this bad feeling, you must be the source of it. Now, this is complex because our partners do legitimately do like, in other words, if your partner had a bad day, and they're being gruff with you, that hurts. But I think the work is so much around, what are the kinds of the pattern conclusions that I'm drawing? One of the things I would love to talk to you about, because I think it's so healing in relationships is when we get upset with our partners, when our relationships start to fall into distress, we draw all these conclusions. Again, like these patterns, "You don't really love me, you don't really care about me, you don't really validate me, you don't really desire me." I mean, we could go on and on. What I'm saying is, what we have to understand that never gets talked about is the emotional state of confusion, the emotion of confusion might be singularly the most difficult emotion for the brain to process. Let me explain this. If the brain is a pattern detector, going Apple, fill in the blank, the only emotion that works against the fundamental design of the brain is confusion. In other words, if I'm angry, the brain knows what to do about anger. If I'm sad, the brain can predict what to do about sadness. If I'm afraid, the brain can predict what to do about fear. But when I'm confused, it literally stops the pattern detection abilities, because the brain goes, "Apple, apple, apple. Well, what's next?" What happens is, because your brain is always fundamentally invested in survival, meaning, keeping you out of pain. This is a great paradox. Your brain will predict conclusions that actually make you feel bad. In other words, the brain says, "It's better that you're vigilant and defensive, rather than soft and connected." When my partner walks in, after a long day of work, and he doesn't greet me, it violates my expectation. I'm thinking, "Oh, I'm going to see him, we're going to talk, da, da, da." He walks in, kind of nods me, and walks upstairs. I initially had that, "Huh?" But the brain can't huh for long, it has to very quickly move that. Instead of interpreting that violation to the pattern is like, maybe he's tired, or let me give him 15 minutes, I start to stew. I don't know why he treats me like this. Does he think I didn't have a hard day? Why can't we ever connect? Before I know it, my whole marriage is on the rocks. But can you see that all of that actually started if we really dismantle it, and talk about the emotional math. All of it really began based on the energy of confusion. I just wrote a Book Energy Rising, and I talk extensively about this energy of confusion, or sometimes we call it unclarity or uncertainty. It's this energy of who do I become when I don't know. [0:12:55] PF: I think that is so important that you brought that up, because anybody who's in a relationship has seen this exact thing play out for them. I've got a friend who talks about when she and her husband disagree, she's in the next room. They've been married for 30 years, and she's in there figuring out like, "Okay. Well, how are we going to divide up the house?" It goes from fine this morning to like, "I'm going to file for divorce." We have talked about how ridiculous it is, but that's just what happens to her. It just sets off this little domino effect, and she's got herself signing papers by the end of the night. [0:13:28] JD: It's great that we can all laugh about this, but I just want to normalize. It's so normal, and the reason it's so normal really has to do with our neurobiology. [BREAK] [0:13:36] PF: Today, we're talking about your heart and brain. So how about if we add lungs to the conversation. If you're spending a lot of time indoors this winter, chances are you're breathing in polluted air. In fact, indoor air is up to five times more polluted than outdoor air. That's why I'm loving my new air purifier from AirDoctor. It filters out 99.99% of harmful contaminants so your lungs don't have to. AirDoctor has a wide range of purifiers, so you can get the size it's right for your space, and you can breathe easy with its 30-day money back guarantee. So if you're looking to eliminate allergens, pollen, pet dander, and even bacteria, and viruses from your home or office space, check out AirDoctor at airdoctorpro.com. If you use the promo code LIVE HAPPY, you'll get up to $300 off and get a free three-year warranty. That's airdoctorpro.com, and use the promo code Live Happy. Now, let's get back to my conversation with Dr. Julia, as she tells us how our brains respond to conflict with our partners. [INTERVIEW CONTINUES] [0:14:46] JD: The reason it's so normal really has to do with our neurobiology. In other words, it sometimes tickles me and sometimes frustrates me, like we pay more attention to the intelligent operating of our cell phones, and ChatGPT than we pay attention how to intelligently operate the most exquisite machine on the planet, which is our own brain and nervous system. Well, in order to intelligently engage with the nervous system in the brain, we've got to understand what it does. The brain is telling us, when it comes to confusion, when it comes to uncertainty, I do not like it. So if we want to powerfully engage in our lives, with our emotions, with our partners, we got to have reverence and say, "When I'm confused, let me really take a beat, and try to not make any interpretations. Because if I do not slow my roll, my interpretation will be, I need to file for divorce by 7pm this evening." [0:15:47] PF: Then, what happens too is your reaction then sets off everything that's going on with them. I mean, so say your husband has come in, he's already had a bad day, didn't act the way you wanted. Now, you're like a house on fire and attacking him. That's not what he was expected. He probably just wanted some alone time, and like, "Let me get this day out of my head" and now it's escalated. How do you create a practice both individually, and as a couple that went to identify when you're in that state of confusion, your brain is confused, and to take that pause, and step back, instead of letting all of this escalate? [0:16:25] JD: I think the most important piece, and again, I think this is what I mean when I say, like really have reverence for the machine. Far, far too many of us want to do the work when we're activated. They're saying to me, because I do a lot of work, I do a lot of couples coaching, couples therapy. They'll say, like, "When we start to get in a fight, how do we solve it?" Well, you know how when a toddler is in the middle of a meltdown, really, the only thing you can do is wait for the storm to pass. And in fact, for those of us –I have little kids, they're not toddlers anymore, but they're still little. It's like, if you try to engage when they're activated, and you can try to be the most soothing, be like, "What can I get you honey? Do you want to cookie and a warm blanket?" It's like, when people are activated, what has to happen is we've got to restore emotion regulation. In the moment, a lot of times, the best we can do is go for a walk, take a deep breath, blah, blah, blah, we've heard it a million times. The powerful transformative healing work comes in the questions we ask ourselves, and the actions we take when we are not activated. I have a responsibility to own my childhood injuries as I bring them to my marriage. There's a classic pattern that plays out in most relationships. There's sort of three attachment styles. The first is, securely attached. This is the idea that our parents had a great intelligence of how to attend to our emotions. They really nailed it, and I can simplify this considerably. They really nailed this complex dance between connection and autonomy. In other words, they really knew when to soothe me, and they really knew when to trust me. They really knew when to be around me and they really knew when to give me my freedom. The second is something called anxious. So anxious attachment is when my parents sometimes shown the great, glorious golden light upon me. But then, sometimes, they went cold. I as a little child could not figure out the pattern. A lot of times, this happened in household with addiction, where there's a lot of emotional volatility, there's a lot of moodiness. Sometimes my parents were telling me how great I was, and then sometimes, I really needed mom, or I really needed dad, and even though I tried my little four-year-old heart out, I couldn't get them. The third category is what we call avoidant, and I'm oversimplifying for the purpose of it. But avoidant is basically, my parents chronically, totally miss my emotional needs. I learned as a very small child that I am an island unto myself. I learned that relying on other people for my needs is totally dangerous. Now, all of us have some aspects of these in all of us. In other words, these are not clean categories. They're continuums of behavior. But it's a very classic dynamic to have an anxious person, a person who's more anxious, pair with a person who has a more avoided pattern. So you get in this classic approach, avoidance dance, where the anxious person is saying, "Please come closer to me. Are you mad at me? Can we talk about this? Let's be more intimate. Let's talk about this. I love you. Do you love me?" They're more asking for this like chronic kind of anxious anxiety. The energy of anxiety is propelling this like, affirm your attachment to me. The avoidant is more like, I am so overwhelmed by emotion. I am so overwhelmed by, I know, because I'm now an adult in an adult relationship that your needs are on some level my responsibility. We're in a partnership here. No one ever taught me how to even get my own needs met. Now, it's kind of a double whammy. I don't know how to meet my own needs. I sure as hell don't know how to meet yours. I run from the room screaming on fire. Well, as I run from the room, screaming on fire, the anxious goes, "No, don't leave me," and then chases after them. You get in this classic, anxious avoidant standoff. [0:20:36] PF: That's so interesting, because, first of all, I could see that being a great little cartoon visual. But that is, it's really common. What then do people do? Do you just have to recognize this as my pattern to start healing this, or how do you start breaking it down so that you can make it work? Because obviously, people got together for a reason. They've been together this long, for a reason? What is it that made that happen, and how do you get past these patterns to get back to what is real and genuine, which is the love and affection that you have for each other? [0:21:08] JD: Such a great question. I'll sort of answer like this. First of all, I think these are the biggest questions of our life. They're enormous. I like to simplify them from people, which doesn't necessarily mean they're easily. Not necessarily, they're not easy. But I think we can do a lot of simplification. When couples come to me, they are very clear on the pain being caused by the other. They'll sit on my couch, either virtually, or in real life. They will say, "He doesn't respect me." "No, she doesn't respect me. She doesn't listen to me. No, she doesn't listen to me. She doesn't love me. No, she doesn't love me." So I say, "This is very valid. When we feel like our partners aren't seeing us, loving us respecting us, I got it. Totally going to get to this. Let's just put a pin in it for one second, and I have a different question. Give me all the evidence. In other words, tell me all the ways that you profoundly respect yourself, that you profoundly love yourself, that you profoundly see yourself." I got to be honest with you, Paula, I almost never get an answer to that question.   [0:22:15] PF: Really?   [0:22:16] JD: In other words, people kind of look at me like, "Well, I'm not sure how that works." Now, pay attention here, because I think this is a really important piece. We're saying, because in our marriages, in our long-term relationships, we die a death oftentimes by a million paper cuts. Even when there's catastrophic betrayal trauma, people aren't having a great marriage on Tuesday, and then cheating on Wednesday. You see what I'm saying? There's this growing disconnect. Both of us need to assume radical responsibility for our relationship. If I look at my partner, and I say, "You don't wash the dishes." The conclusion I draw about you now washing the dishes is catastrophic. In other words, if you don't love me, you don't respect me. You don't listen to me. How could I then not have an equally discrete – because washing the dishes on Wednesday is a very discrete thing. How could I not then be able to identify an equally discrete thing for myself, and put that same amount of emotional loading on it? In other words, when I do leave the house and get a massage, I feel the same degree of anger, I feel the same degree of self-love. When I tell myself, I'm going to walk away from this conversation, I am profoundly listening to myself, and now I'm in a state of joy. I'm in a state of exuberance, like how much I respected myself. People will say, "Well, that's silly to tell me to go get a massage or hold my boundary. You don't understand how miserable it is that they're not washing the dishes?" Well, you're taking a discrete behavior, and you're putting a ton of emotional loading on, it's fine. We all do it. This is how we make meaning out of life. There's no problem there. What I'm saying the problem is twofold. Do I have any examples in my own camp? And if I don't, and if I believe that this pattern has been with me since childhood, years, and years, and years before I even met my partner, what is my own responsibility? Not responsibility like [inaudible 0:24:07]. What is my own profound ability to my own injuries? When I really see people taking radical, self-loving responsibility for the ways I have heard for decades, and decades, and decades, and decades, far beyond the marriage, for example, this is when you start to see radical healing in the couple. [0:24:29] PF: I love this because you're giving responsibility to both parties, and you're breaking it down. Each one has their own way that they're going to have to set out to resolve this. It's not like if he starts doing the dishes, then, "Hey, everything's good." It goes so much deeper. How do people start doing that? How do couples start doing that, and start deciding where they need to focus on individually to come together as a couple? [0:24:57] JD: Great question. I'll say like, all of Energy Rising has a ton of these examples, case studies, exercises. I'll give you one brief one here, but I just want people to know, there's a lot of material. I would go to myself and say, "What is my primary emotional pattern around my pain in this relationship?" I gave a lot of examples, "I'm not seen, I'm not heard, I'm not loved, I'm not listened to, I can't get what I want." I would listen to myself and be like, "Okay." Say, mine is, "I can't trust you." I would say, that's valid. I'm not saying that our partners don't have work to do. Of course, they do. I'm saying, but just for a moment, let me ask the question to myself. What are the ways I don't trust myself, and I would write down 10 examples. I didn't trust myself to stop working today at five o'clock. I felt like I had to overwork, but I really wanted to stop and go play with my kids. I told myself that I was going to get out of bed this morning and go to the gym, and I didn't. When I make those kinds of commitments to myself, and I go back on my own word, I give myself a lot of good reason not to trust myself. You see. I start to say, I want a lot of evidence, 10 examples of how I don't trust myself, and I start to clean it up there. I start to become – because what we're really saying to our partners is, I can't rely on you. Well, can I rely on myself? I think what we start to see in a lot of cases is, no. Now, we partner precisely for reinforcement. I get that. In other words, if we're all perfectly islands unto ourselves, then why would anyone need – but a lot of us are coming, and when I say a lot of us. I mean, a lot of us. I'm a child of a psychologist, so I come from a lineage. I've been watching this conversation for 40 years. There's been profound evolution. I feel incredibly hopeful. But we know more than our parents knew, and our parents knew more than their parents knew. A lot of us are now taking, I think, radical responsibility for our injuries. We're doing this, yes, for our partners. Yes, for our children, but also for ourselves.   [0:26:58] PF: Absolutely.   [0:26:59] JD: We feel better in our own bodies, when we're not so on edge, when we're not so triggered. Here's the truth. If I feel like shit, my partner could be an angel. My partner is not an angel. Love him to death, but not an – let's imagine that we were married to a saint. I still got to go face the rest of the world. The people in traffic are still pissing me off. The people on social media are still making me angry. The people in my job – you see what I'm saying? [0:27:24] PF: Yes. You still have all these external factors that are going to trigger you, and then, you get to go home and take it out on your spouse. [0:27:31] JD: Yes. Yes. The holy hallucination, called the holy hallucination is that our partners are going to rescue us from our own nervous systems. There's no human being on the planet that can come into your nervous system, and ding, ding, ching, ching, ching, ching, chong, ching. It doesn't go like that. This is really a radical conversation. When I talk about power, Energy Rising is a lot about emotional pain and emotional power. I'm not talking about power, like lording over people, like my way or the highway. I'm talking about this beautiful life-giving wholeness, this profound courage, this profound resilience, this profound relationship with myself. Do you see when we give that to ourselves, we become the most magnetic thing on the planet? We change our frequency as a partner, as a spouse, as a lover, as a parent, and we feel great about it. A lot of us are out there being totally codependent, working ourselves to an absolute pope, "serving" other people and feeling like absolute shit about it. It doesn't have to be that way. [0:28:37] PF: I think there's so much that you can teach us. Obviously, it's not just our romantic relationships, this changes every relationship that we have. I think the work that you're doing is really incredible. As I said, we just have so much to learn from you. As I let you go, what is the one thing, the one thing that you want couples in particular, no matter where they're at in their relationship, what do you want them to keep in mind as we enter Valentine's season and go through this time? [0:29:05] JD: Like so many things going through my head. I think I'm going to say this. It's a big thing to metabolize, and it's really the reason. I've been asked to do kind of other public-facing projects, and I've always said no. I'm a Midwest academic, who likes to go to two parties a year and then spend the rest of the time alone in my office. The reason I agreed to write Energy Rising is, I feel like the work of my life, I was put on this planet to give this message. That all of those horrible feelings, it's so easy to feel. Anxiety, fear, frustration, rejection, humiliation, and all of them. They are not here to torment you. They are here to lead you home. Those feelings are telling you is they're calling you into your next level of power. The reality of our life is there is no way to have more connection with other until we come into a new relationship with the energy of rejection. If I can't hold the possibility of rejection in my nervous system, I will never have real intimacy. All of us want more self-confidence. The only way I negotiate more self-confidence is by coming into a more expansive relationship with doubt. Do you see, there are opposite sides of the same coin? The more I face my own doubt, the more confident I become. The more I say, "Am I really being rejected here?" As I contemplate it, it doesn't feel great. But then, I start to see very quickly, I get relief and say, "Oh, no. It's okay that he's not available for me tonight." I don't have to come up with this horrific thesis nightmare about how like, I'm alone in the world, and I'm going to destroy my family. It doesn't have to be that way, but we need a more intelligent relationship with the feelings we don't want to feel. [0:30:49] PF: Excellent. Fortunately, your book is a great primer for how we start feeling those feelings and get in touch with ourselves. Dr. Julia, the work you're doing, like I said, is just amazing. I so appreciate you taking this time out of your busy schedule, and sitting down, and talking with me about it. [0:31:05] JD: I so thank you for having me, Paula. Thank you again. [END OF EPISODE] [0:31:12] PF: That was Dr. Julia DiGangi, talking about how to make the most of our relationships. To learn more about Dr. Julia, find her book, follow her on social media, or watch her fabulous TED Talk. Visit us at livehappy.com and click on the podcast tab. Speaking of love, we would love to hear how we're doing. Please leave your comments and ratings wherever you download your podcast and let us know what you think. That is all we have time for today. We'll meet you back here again next week for an all-new episode. Until then, this is Paula Felps, reminding you to make every day a happy one. [END]

Follow along with the transcript below for episode: Building Love with Maria Baltazzi [INTRODUCTION] [0:00:03] PF: Thank you for joining us for episode 453 of Live Happy Now. As we approach February, our minds turn to love. For the next few weeks, we're going to talk about that many ways love shows up in our lives and how we can create more of it. I'm your host, Paula Felps, and today, I'm talking with Maria Baltazzi. In her book, Take a Shot at Happiness, Maria outlines eight happiness essentials and not surprisingly, one of them is love. Today, she's here to talk about some of the different types of love we may be overlooking and what practices we can use to build more love into our lives. Let's have a listen. [INTERVIEW] [0:00:42] PF: Maria, it is so wonderful to have you back on Live Happy Now. [0:00:46] MB: Thank you for having me back. I'm so excited to have another conversation with you. [0:00:52] PF: As we're getting ready to go into February, we have a lot of conversations around the topic of love around your heart, because February is also heart month and everything becomes heart centered and all about love. In your book, Take a Shot at Happiness, where you map out the happiness essentials, your number two happiness essential is love. That makes you the perfect person to sit down and set up the month that we're walking into and talk about love. My very first question, as we talk about love, what are we talking about? Being loved, loving others, in terms of it being a happiness essential? [0:01:30] MB: Yes. All of it. [0:01:32] PF: All the above. [0:01:32] MB: All of the above, because it all factors in. I think that you start with self-love. When I talk about self-love, I don't mean the selfies, narcissistic tendencies that we have taken on in the social media world. I mean, self-love in terms of respecting yourself and caring for yourself. There's so much research that supports the importance of self-care. When you think about the analogy, and you probably have heard this, but it's a good one, when you are on an airplane and the steward says, “In the invent of an emergency, an oxygen mask will drop down. Put it on yourself first before helping others.” That's what self-care is. It's putting on your oxygen mask first, so you can show up better for others. [0:02:39] PF: Do you think that self-love is the platform that we start building with to create strong other types of love? [0:02:48] MB: I think so. I think when you have a good relationship with yourself, when you have a good understanding of yourself, that enables you to then extend that out to others. There's that Jerry McGuire line that's so famous when he says to Renée Zellweger, “You complete me.” No. No. [0:03:15] PF: That's not how it works. [0:03:16] MB: No. You complete yourself. You complete yourself first, so then when you are in relationship, whether it's romantically, with your children, with your friends, they’re complements. They're not completing you. They're not defining you. You do that for yourself. You can enter into relationships in a way that is strong and healthy and not needy. We've all been in those icky relationships, where people just cling on to you so much. They need you for everything and well, it's, one, it’s exhausting on you as a human when you are in good relationship with yourself. You are better able to be in good relationship with someone else, whatever that relationship, because you have the know-how. You understand what it is to be in good relationship. You're not looking for somebody else to tell you how to be in a good relationship. You're not looking for somebody else to define you, because you are in a particular relationship. I think it's really important that you love yourself first, so you can show up stronger for the relationships that you're in, whatever kind of relationship they are. [0:04:49] PF: You really do talk about that. You have to explore, nurture, love in all forms. I mean, from yourself to your family, to friends, to co-workers, to pets, there's so many different forms of love that we need to be more attentive to. [0:05:07] MB: Well, and some of those love relationships aren't necessarily healthy ones. [0:05:13] PF: True. [0:05:15] MB: That's something else to identify. You may have a love relationship, but it is so unhealthy for you, and to recognize it and get out of it. That is across the board. It's not just unhealthy romantic relationships. They could be unhealthy friendships. Going back to that idea of being in those clingy relationships, or those toxic relationships, where people are telling you how you should be, or what you should be doing. They're imposing their limiting beliefs on you and you're buying into it. That's not good. [0:05:59] PF: Yeah. It's something a lot of people end up doing and we feel stuck in the, because they're a friend, because they're a family, because, because, because we cannot change that, or we can't get ourselves out of that. What are some practices that you found first for identifying whether a relationship is good for you or not? Then secondly, if you identify it, it's not healthy for you, then how do you start really, because you have to change yourself as well to get out of that relationship. [0:06:29] MB: Well, it always begins with awareness, followed by choice, followed by action. [0:06:36] PF: Like, awareness, choice, action. [0:06:38] MB: Right. [0:06:39] PF: All right. [0:06:40] MB: Right. That's your baseline. Some of these relationships are difficult to let go of. They’re family members. They’re longtime relationships. They’re work relationships. Then these are sticky, difficult relationships to navigate around. The first thing is you're recognizing when a relationship isn't good for you in that, how are you feeling? How do you feel when you are around this person? How do you feel when you think about this person? How do you anticipate seeing them, or their departure? Maybe it might be written in something that you left. Having that understanding of how do you feel towards a particular person? That should be your cue. Once you identify that there is a relationship that doesn't make you feel good, then you need to consider, how meaningful is that relationship to you? Do you really want them in your life? You have to look at why you want them in your life, because you might be attached to somebody out of habit. You are with somebody who's toxic, but you don't let go of them, because it's familiar and it's too scary to let go of what is familiar. You're afraid of being alone. You find this in abuse of relationships, where the person won't let go of the abuser, because of what I just said, they're afraid to be alone. They're afraid, “Well, I might not find somebody. I'm dependent on them financially.” I mean, all of those things, you really need to get a grip on. Is that worth the price tag that you're paying for an unhealthy relationship? Then, there are those relationships that it's just very easy to cut off and say, “See you later,” and you don't worry about it. Then, there are those other relationships and they tend to be work related, or family related, where the advice is to minimize time. How can you spend the least amount of time that is going to impact you? Also, identify what are the conversations to stay away from? What are the situations to stay away from? Learning the art of redirecting the conversation. If somebody is a big complainer, or they're talking about something politically that you don't agree with, or something in religion, those tend to be hot topics. Learn to just redirect the conversation. I do this all the time with complainers. I will do a non-sequitur to something completely different that's positive and their brain just switches. They don't even realize that I've just redirected the conversation. Just change the subject. [0:10:07] PF: Your book is so great, because it's very interactive. It has these exercises that you can do. One thing I wanted you to talk about is you have this great exercise for bringing more love into your life, and that's through journaling. Can you talk about how people can do that and then what it does for us? [0:10:24] MB: Well, journaling, throughout my book, I offer in each chapter prompts, and there's now an app that's available in the Apple App Store, and soon coming to Android, where all of my book activities are on a companion app. You can be working on your well-being wherever you are. The reason that I have both the photography, the camera phone prompts and the journaling prompts is you were reading about love. You're reading about different concepts about happiness. In particular, we're talking about love here. It takes these ideas that are more intellectual, more cerebral ideas. And by having you take photos and then journal about them, it takes these head ideas and makes them heard ideas. You take these photo images of things that you're prompted in my book to take images of what love means to you. You begin to understand beyond the concepts that you're reading about. How is this specific to you? How does love really factor into your happiness framework? When we think, we think in images. Our images create story loops. One of the things that taking photographs and especially taking photographs about love is you are retraining your brain to look for the good, the good things that make you feel good, that feel loving to you, that feel nurturing to you. You have the experience of actually taking the photograph, which I find is very meditative, because you're just focusing on one image and everything else falls away. Then you have the experience later of when you look at that image, remembering what that experience was, how good it felt to you. Then you may see something in that image that you didn't realize at the time of taking it. Now, you have another level of meaning. Then you're building a storehouse of love images that you can call upon at a later time. You're creating a positive neural pathway towards the good love, not the bad love. The love that makes you feel good. Then the journaling part of it is journaling helps you process. It takes that blob of ideas that you have. Some of it may be fear-based, or you feel anxious around and you start writing. It starts to clarify and organize your thoughts into a way that is constructive and meaningful to you. [0:13:39] PF: That's great. Your exercises are so clear. They're simple, but profound. They're easy to do, but they can also take you very deep. I love that. We've actually worked with you to create an email series, so that people can sign up and get one basic little assignment and story a day with an affirmation and will tell people how to do that at the end of the podcast. It's really a wonderful walk through these exercises of creating more love and really connecting with yourself on a deeper level. I love that you close out this particular chapter with the loving kindness meditation. That happens to be my favorite kind of meditation. Tell us what that is and what effect it has on us. [0:14:24] MB: Loving kindness is a meditation, if you are starting mindfulness, if you are in the Buddhist tradition, loving kindness is a well-known practice there. It is teaching you both self-love and for love outside of yourself, love for others. Ultimately, you are expanding that circle. You're going from self-love to love around you, to love maybe in your neighborhood, maybe in your city, maybe in your country, maybe in the world. You're expanding it. You are opening your heart beyond just yourself in a way that's intentional and conscious. There are different ways that you can do loving kindness. Some people have a hard time directing that loving kindness towards themselves. It's almost easier to first start with someone that they know loves them. Then you're sending out good wishes. It’s, may you be happy, may you be healthy. You're sending those kinds of messages out. As you are saying that out to the other person, then you turn it back into you. May I be happy? May I be healthy? Then you go on to something that's a little bit more difficult. Maybe there's somebody that is annoying you. I mean, you like them, you want them in your life, but they're just troubling you. You call that person to mind. May you be happy. May you be healthy. Then you turn it again back to you. Then you progress to also, more difficult people. It's a way to increase your love for yourself, those around you, and for difficult people. [0:16:38] PF: For me, that's been the biggest thing is being able to say that for people who are a challenge. [0:16:46] MB: Mm-hmm. Right. Yeah. Because ultimately, what you're realizing in loving kindness, we all want the same things. Now, I might not like you. You may be annoying me, but you're a human being. You want to be happy. You want to be loved. You want to be healthy, just like me. That's what loving kindness, that's what that meditation is all about. [0:17:11] PF: What happens to us when we start inviting more love into our lives and consciously making practices to do that? [0:17:22] MB: I feel like, you become softer in a good way. I feel from, and I am saying this from my experience, when I started paying more attention to being loving, is that it physically in my body, I didn't feel so rigid. I didn't feel that contraction. As I brought in more and more love, I actually felt the lightness, an expanding of just how I felt inside of my body. No, I didn't feel that constriction. Then I feel that it also makes you more accepting. You're not as judgmental. You're more open. I think it also leads to being more grateful and it needs to be more loving, which are the subsequent – beyond love of the happiness essentials that I talk about in my book. After love, when you love yourself enough, you love yourself to take care of yourself. You're taking care of your health and mind, body, and spirit. Then that's giving way to be more grateful. Then that love also opens you up to being more forgiving. I think a lot of beautiful things come out of love. [0:18:46] PF: That is true. It's a very important thing. We treat it too lightly, I think, especially in February, I've become so commercialized. Yeah, this is a great time to delve into it. I appreciate you sitting down and talking with me. As I said, we're going to tell people how to sign up for your email course, so that they can learn about bringing more love into their lives. [0:19:05] MB: Well, thank you for having me. [END OF INTERVIEW] [0:19:11] PF: That was Maria Baltazzi talking about how to build more love into your life. Be sure and visit us at livehappy.com to sign up for building love, a free one-week email series with Maria's daily practices for increasing love in your life. I will also tell you how to find her book, follow her on social media, or sign up for the weekly Live Happy newsletter. Again, visit us at livehappy.com and click on the podcast tab. Speaking of love, we would love to hear how we're doing. Please leave us your comments and ratings wherever you download your podcast and let us know what you think. That's all we have time for today. We'll meet you back here again next week for all-new episode. Until then, this is Paula Felps, reminding you to make every day a happy one. [END]

Follow along with the transcript below for episode: The 3-Minute Meditation with Richard Dixey [INTRODUCTION] [0:00:03] PF: Thank you for joining us for episode 451 of Live Happy Now. As we venture a little farther into the new year, that's a good time to pause, take a breath, and if you have three minutes, maybe even learn to meditate. I'm your host, Paula Felps. Today, I'm talking with Richard Dixey, a research scientist and lifelong student of Buddhism. Since 2007, he has devoted his life to teaching meditation, and his new book, Three Minutes a Day, is designed to teach readers how to change their lives with simple meditation practices that truly do take just three minutes a day. Be sure to stay tuned after my conversation with Richard to learn about a brand-new podcast called Built to Win, that's brought to you by Live Happy's sister company, Neora. Let's have a listen. [INTERVIEW] [0:00:50] PF: Richard, thank you so much for coming on Live Happy Now. [0:00:53] RD: I'm glad to be here. [0:00:54] PF: I wanted to talk to you right at the beginning of the year, because this is a time of year when people are adapting to new habits. They're saying, “Okay, I'm going to do it better than I did last year.” Meditation is something that people often want to do, and they're like, “Oh, it's just too hard. I don't have time.” Then you come along with this terrific book that says, we can do it in three minutes a day. First of all, what led you to discover this different way of meditating that we don't have to sit cross-legged for 30 minutes at a time? [0:01:28] RD: Actually, this is not so new. There are traditions amongst the Asian wisdom traditions in which this comes, which stress very short and often, they always say, because the whole trouble with meditation is making it fresh. If you say for half an hour, I suspect the 28 minutes, we'll be sleeping. You're only going to get two or three minutes before it's turned into a blank slate of one form or another. It's innovative to put it in a Western format. But the idea of short sessions that are very focused is not new. [0:02:02] PF: You just made it accessible to us. [0:02:04] RD: I'm the dean at Dharma College in Berkeley, which is a school that's dedicated to revisioning the wisdom traditions. You know, these wisdom traditions are really amazing. These meditation traditions are two and a half thousand years old, and they are unbroken. Ther have been master-student, master-student, master-student for two and a half thousand years. There's a lot of accumulated experience, and they have something really important to offer us today, which is why I was very motivated to teach meditation. Then in teaching meditation, I was really amazed how quickly you could actually get the core point over. That's what really inspired me to say, okay, let's make a 14-week course, three minutes a day, really short focused to give people a real taste of what meditation is. [0:02:50] PF: Yeah. With three minutes a day, we're all like, “Okay. I can do that. I don't care how busy my life is. I can do three minutes a day.” That makes it very appealing, because we live in a society that's instant gratification. We got to have it now and we're on the go. You created this. It's really a step-by-step guide. We need to clarify. It's not a book that you're going to sit down and read all the way through and then come back and try to implement these practices. Do you want to talk a about the setup of it and how – [0:03:16] RD: Yeah. I do. I do. Actually, there's a couple of very interesting points here. Meditation is about our own experience. It's not about anything else. It's not information, as we normally understand it. You're not going to learn about meditation. You're going to address your own experience. Now, this is really quite a challenging undertaking, because our entire educational system takes our experience for granted and talks about the world. Well, the world is actually constructed from our experience. Our experience is like, it's a window that you look out of, or all of these sorts of ideas. It's all completely nonsense. We construct our experience, but we never look at how we construct it. This means that you need to introduce various, simple techniques to give you a little taste of what this construction is. Looking at this construction is meditation. Now, of course, it's a bit like saying, I'm going to tell you about chocolate. You say, okay it's a bit sweet, a bit sticky, it melts in your mouth. You'd have no idea what chocolate was. Give you a piece of chocolate. Oh, I know what chocolate is. It's like that. What I'm trying to do is give these really short, little pieces of experience, not information. The idea is you read this book –we have chapters about four or five pages of introduction, a short meditation experience, and then some Q&A. What I want people to do is to read that first chapter, do three minutes of that particular exercise and read the second chapter. If you do that, you'll build up an experience of meditation. Once you do, it totally alters how you see the world. Everything is different. [0:05:01] PF: Do you find that readers have a certain meditation that they gravitate toward? Like, they say, “Oh, I really like the candle meditation. This is my favorite. This is what works for me.” [0:05:11] RD: Yeah, yeah, yeah. People have favorites. The trick to meditation is this. We're really riled up the whole time, because we're reacting to the construct we call the world. That reactivity is very stressful. Now, the truth is that a lot of what we react to is actually made by us and projected as real. This is what people Google, though, because they know, if you get a little buzzwords, you can make people click. You can force them into reacting. Of course, we carry around these mobile phones the whole time, which are literally doing this to us. The first thing to learn is how to become calm in the face of a rising experience. This is the first thing to learn. This is called Shamatha. Until we learn to become calm in the face of a rising experience, we really have no chance of seeing how the world is made. The first section of this book is all about looking at particular meditation objects, which are things you can concentrate on and learning to become calm. Now, becoming calm is not becoming all free. Becoming calm is engaging with that instantly, reacting with an opinion, or some like or dislike, or an aversion, or whatever it else it might be. Learning to engage without reactivity. If you can develop that foundation, which you can develop relatively quickly, they're on the basis of that foundation. You can start to look. You can look at thoughts, how the thoughts begin, how the thoughts end. What are thoughts exactly? How are my thoughts being manipulated by experiences outside me? Those sorts of questions become answerable once you see as being reactive. What meditation does is enable you to get control of your life at a very profound level. Actually, really, this control is the only genuine control that we have. Our attention is truly our possession. You can't be given it. You have it. The key is to learn how to use it. That's really what meditation is about. [0:07:15] PF: I think it's more important now than ever, because we are so distracted. As you said, our phones are there every 30 seconds, reminding us of what we need to do and what we didn't do and breaking news and all that. Just, we don't get a break. What changes do you see in people when they're able to sit down and learn this three-minute method? [0:07:36] RD: Well, this should be taught in primary school, honestly. Reading, writing, and meditation. Why is that? Well, it's for this reason. As I mentioned, we construct our experience. We actually have a word for it, which is in our language. We say, we recognize something. When you say you recognize, that word re. It means, you do it again. What happens is we have sense inputs, five senses, thoughts and imaginations. Then we recognize them as things, people, things I want, things I don't, good news, bad news, blah, blah, blah. Now that process of recognition is literally a process of world construction. The mechanism that recognizes takes memories and then looks at the cognitions that come in, compares them to memories, ascribes to their names and meanings and represents them as the world. It's that structure that really makes us human beings. What we have to do is make recognition part of our experience consciously. That process is meditation. [0:08:42] PF: Well, one thing that you talk about that I really don't think I've seen addressed much in meditation is the role that imagination plays. We don't really think about imagination and meditation going together. can You talk about that and how imagination helps us meditate? [0:08:58] RD: Yes. Well, imagination, as I mentioned, there are six gates of our experience, right? There are the five senses and then there are thoughts and imaginations. Now, thoughts and imaginations are as much an input into our experience as feeling, smelling, touching, tasting and hearing off. We normally don't really think about imaginations like that. Of course, we spend an awful lot of the day, I dread to think how much, but it's probably well north of 50% imagining, well, what about this? What about that? Well, I could do this. I could do that. These are all imaginations. One of the techniques that happens in this book is to actually say, okay, let's deliberately imagine something and make it a meditation object. Just like you might say, light a candle, look at a candle. You can imagine something and look at that. The moment you get that, you go, “Oh my God. Imaginations aren't actually part of me. They're constructed by me.” That again, releases all kinds of issues, because so many of the things that we think we want, or so many of the things that we think are bad for us are merely imagined. They're constructed by our imagination. The trouble is this mechanism that learns from the past is defensive. It was actually developed when we were on the savannas being prowled by saber-toothed tigers to immediately recognize a threat and run away from it. That's why we survived. Of course, now, this paranoid, defensive, backward-looking mechanism means that all we see is bad news, all we care about is bad news. We're not interested in good things, only bad things. Of course, the result is stress. If people just learn to see their experience as experience, oh, the stress starts coming back. It's like, okay, we can calm this down. [0:11:00] PF: As we're telling people, all right, this is something you're going to do for three minutes, can you give examples of some of the exercises so they can understand what they do for three minutes? [0:11:09] RD: Okay, the book starts with two key exercises, which I think are really, probably the fundamental thing of it. The wisdom traditions of Asia separate concentration into two phases. Now, we all know that concentration has something to do with meditation. Often, people think that you're meant to sit, not moving, thought-free, and just going to some blank, thought-free state, because that's what they think meditation is. Now actually, the trick is to get hold of our concentration and master it. Concentration, I said, has two phases. The first one is adverting. This is to be able to place your attention on a given object. That's what we’re all taught at school. Johnny, Johnny, concentrate. He does all the concentrate. Most contemporarily, educated people can concentrate. The problem is concentration like that is brittle. That's to say, you might be concentrating on one thing, then something else happens, “Oh, I concentrate on that, and then I concentrate on this. Then I can't.” That's exactly what happens to us. The first thing is to make the difference between adverting and another element of concentration, which is totally not stressed in our education system, which is savoring. Once you've adverted your concentration to an object, there's another element of concentration, which is to savor it. Now actually there are technical terms for these two things. One's called Vitaka, that's concentration adverting, and the other one's called Vicara, which is savoring. You can actually access these two things by developing simple meditation techniques. Once you've accessed savoring, then you can make your concentration stable. The trick is to first of all, experience Vitaka, adverting concentration, and I use a candle for that. The people watch a candle. What you'll find when you do this, even for three minutes is everything starts disturbing you. Thoughts disturbing. Car slams, you're disturbed by that. Someone talks in the next room, you're disturbed by that. You find yourself being disturbed. That's why most people say, “Oh, you've got to be in a totally silent room with the windows closed, your eyes closed, and no thought.” This is because they're only looking at Vitaka. Now, if you can then change your meditation object, and what I like to use is a bell, an object that fades, what happens is your Vitaka turns into savoring as you watch the fading sound. After a while, you can fade right into silence. You're still concentrated, but there's no object. You've entered something totally different. It's just like, pick up a cup of coffee, that’s Vitaka. Taste the coffee, that's Vicara. [0:13:53] PF: We're going to tell readers how they can find your book. But in the meantime, what's one thing they can start doing right now? Is there like, okay, this would work for me. I can give it three minutes a day. What's something they can do starting today? [0:14:06] RD: What they can do right now, you can go on to my website, richarddixey.com, and download a free app. What that app does is give you the meditation instructions. Then if you like the first one, get the book. What the app does, which always freaks people out a bit, is it requires you to do seven days of a three-minute thing, before it'll give you the next chapter. It's actually a trainer, it’s not really an – There’s a free trainer. The first exercise is candle-watching. Watching candles in itself is an amazing meditation. Just to watch a candle the three minutes. That itself, “Three minutes. There's nothing at all.” Three minutes is a long time if you do something deliberately. Just that alone, if you do that for a week, you will change. It's quite incredible how drip, drip, drip will fill the bathtub. It doesn't take a long time. It's just repetition that does it. Just do that. Within a week you'll go, “Well, I'm feeling a bit different. This is interesting. Something's changed.” That's because there's a wake-up call being given to your natural intelligence saying, “Hey, you don't have to be kidnapped by your recognitive map all the time. You could actually be free. You could be intelligent without having an object of intelligence. You could just be yourself.” That little wake-up call comes when you start taking that bit of control. Retaking of freedom of choice is a huge moment, where suddenly, we go, wow, so much of what is freaking me out turns out to be freaking out because I'm allowing it to. I'm giving permission for it to freak me out. What I've got to do is take a little step sideways. Oh, it doesn't freak me out anymore. That really is simple. [0:16:01] PF: That was Richard Dixey, talking about how you can transform your life in just three minutes a day. To learn more about his book, Three Minutes a Day, or download his free app and take your meditation on the go, visit us at livehappy.com and click on the podcast tab. Speaking of things you'll find on our website, next I'm talking with Live Happy's Deborah Heisz, who is also CEO of our sister company, Neora, and has a great new podcast named Built to Win that she's here to tell us about. [DEBORAH HEISZ] [0:16:29] PF: Well, Deborah, happy new year. [0:16:31] DH:  Happy new year, Paula. [0:16:33] PF: This is such a great time of year, because everyone's starting new things and excited about the opportunities that are going on. All our shows this month are really tailored around new practices and new ways of looking at things. You have a lot of new things going on, a lot of things you're excited about. I wanted to take a few minutes and talk to you about that. [0:16:51] DH: I really do have a lot going on that I'm excited about. We have a lot going on that we're excited about. There's some great new stuff with Live Happy coming out. Happy Access coming up in March and we're talking about that right now, and we're talking about all the other things related to Live Happy that we like to put out in the world this year. I love the series that you guys are doing right now on new things, new practices. It's great. It's always good to put stuff in your head and new ideas on how you can improve. I love everything that's going on right now. I have something that's a little outside the Live Happy space that I've been working on that I wanted to share with everybody. I think, everybody knows the podcast. I am CEO of Live Happy. I also have a co-founder of Live Happy and his name is Jeff Olson. Jeff and I actually worked together on another company, a company called Neora. He's the founder of that along with his daughter, Amber Olson-Rourke and I'm co-CEO of that company. I'm really excited about what we've got going on, because we have just launched a new podcast called Built to Win. It's available on all your podcast places that you would find Live Happy Now. That podcast features Jeff. Jeff Olson, he's the author of the best-selling book, The Slight Edge, which is really a book that is a roadmap, how to accomplish anything. Then Amber Olson-Rourke, who is a very successful executive in her own right, and then also we have Dave Fleming, who is a seasoned international executive, who has been through a lot of challenges and done a lot of things in his life and then me. Basically, what we all are is we're personal development junkies and we've learned a lot. We spend a lot of time studying business practices, studying things that you can do to get better in life. Leadership. There's a lot of leadership lessons. What we really want to do is put out in the world a lot of our experience and to help those of you who are trying to build a business, who are thinking about managing a team, thinking about anything in your life. It doesn't have to be business. Thinking about challenges that you need to overcome. We're trying to put information out there that you can use in your everyday life to improve your life. It's not quite Live Happy, but it's in the same vein. Interesting, because the four of us just went through a really huge monumental challenge that most people will never see anything of that size in their business career. We navigated successfully and we won a very important battle in the business world. He first few episodes focus on math, but then most of the episodes focus and are going to focus on practices you can do in your everyday life, leadership lessons, how to make decisions in the trenches, how to get prepared for those problems when they come up, how to lead teams, all of those things that are critically important to basically, building leadership skills in your own life. That's what most of the podcasts are going to focus on. We just launched it, and so we wanted to share it with our Live Happy listeners. Because if you're someone who has a business, wants to be in business, is a manager of a team at a company, works in a business, most of us in the world do one of those things. [0:20:08] PF: Having listened to it, one thing that strikes me is even though you're talking about business principles, these are life principles, and they guided your business decisions, but even someone who isn't in a business environment can use those same principles and applications for making difficult decisions and taking on big challenges. That's really what struck me. It's like a movie that's set in a business world, but you could easily change the scene and make it a homework movie, where it's set in someone's house. That's really how it comes through. The lessons are applicable, whether you're trying to run a business, or run a household. [0:20:46] DH: You're exactly right, Paula. Because our intention is not to give people the nuts and bolts of how to do their accounting. You're not going to hear any of that. What you're going to hear is how to prepare to face challenges in life, how to face those challenges in life, how to get yourself prepared to have those challenges in life, and all of that is personal development. I mean, yes, a lot of the principles are grounded in some of our business experiences, but the reality is these are people who have been very successful in their lives. Jeff and Amber and Dave are great people. I get to work with them every day. I couldn't be more blessed. But they have applied personal development in their lives to be successful people. I actually hate the term personal development. I actually prefer success practices, or happiness practices. Personal development sounds like work. The reality is it's work. But really, what we're talking about is discovering and applying the tools that help you accomplish anything. That's why the name of the podcast is Built to Win. [0:21:54] PF: That’s right. [0:21:54] DH: Build yourself. Build yourself to win when those challenges come in. [0:21:59] PF: One thing that really struck me, I think it was in the very first episode, and I believe it was Amber who brought up the fact that you faced this big challenge, and she realized every little challenge that had frustrated her in her business career had also given her the resilience to face this big challenge. She could look back behind her and say, “Oh, all those little things that were bothersome actually strengthened me.” I think that's so great, because that's true in life as well. [0:22:27] DH: It is. There will be a lot less business talk on this podcast than there will be life talk. Amber and I are both parent – well, Amber, Dave and I are all parents with children still living in home. We have to balance our work life with our home life. I think everybody does. That’s where a lot of our challenges arise, too. We'll be talking a little bit about that. We'll be talking about a lot of Live Happy principles we talk about here; being present, being engaged, building trust, building relationships. All of that will flow into this podcast as well. I'm super excited about it. We're just getting started. As you know, Paula, Live Happy Now has been my favorite thing we've ever done at Live Happy. It still is. [0:23:20] PF: Mine too. [0:23:20] DH: I know. I think it always will be. Because just hearing from people who have been there and done that, who have researched happiness, who have their own life experiences to bring, I just love the conversations we're able to have, part of Live Happy Now. Now, we get to have those conversations twice, because I could have it on here and Built to Win as well. Once again, it's going to be people who've been there, people who face things that maybe you haven't faced. But we all have challenges, and we all have goals, and we all have dreams and ideas of where we want to be in life. You have to have the personal tool set in order to accomplish those things. That's really what I'm hoping Built to Win provides to its listeners, ideas and building their personal tool set to be able to face the challenges and accomplish the goals they want in life. [0:24:14] PF: We're going to tell them how they can subscribe. We'll include that on the landing page, so they can go to livehappy.com and click on the podcast page and find how to do that. What do you want them to do once they go discover Built to Win? [0:24:29] DH: First of all, I want them to go discover it. Download the first couple of episodes, take a listen. Know that just getting to hear Jeff is inspirational. [0:24:37] PF: It's a masterclass every time. [0:24:39] DH: It is. Every time somebody asks him a question, or he makes a comment, you’re just like, “I need to start taking notes,” and I'm on the podcast. [0:24:47] PF: That’s a good sign. [0:24:48] DH: Please, take the opportunity to listen to it. Because we've just launched, also, share with your friends, share with everybody, but mostly, please download and rate it. It's really important for new podcasts to get people to rate them and let us know how you think. It helps us be able to be found on the podcast apps and helps more people find us. [0:25:08] PF: Deb, I wish the best of success on Built to Win for so many different reasons. Thank you for coming on and talking about it. [0:25:16] DH: My pleasure. I want to come back and talk about happiness sometime soon. [END OF EPISODE] [0:25:23] PF: That was Deborah Heisz, talking about the new podcast, Built to Win. Learn more about it and subscribe when you visit livehappy.com and click on this episode. That is all we have time for today. We'll meet you back here again next week for an all-new episode. Until then, this is Paula Felps, reminding you to make every day a happy one. [END]

Follow along with the transcript below for episode: How Animals Help Us Heal with Dr. Joanne Cacciatore   [INTRO] [0:00:08] PF: Welcome to Happiness Unleashed with your host, Brittany Derrenbacher, presented by Live Happy. In this episode, Brittany is joined by Joanne Cacciatore, better known as Dr. Jo, a professor at Arizona State University and Director of the Graduate Certificate in Trauma and Bereavement. Dr. Jo also is founder of Selah Carefarm near Sedona, Arizona, which offers 20 acres of farmland where grieving family members can heal amongst rescued animals that have been abused, neglected, or discarded. Dr. Jo is here to explain how animals and humans can help each other through their painful journeys as they recover from their grief. Let's have a listen. [INTERIVEW] [0:00:48] BD: You're doing something really unique and profound out in Sedona with animals. You've created an intentional community where people can come and heal from trauma and grief surrounded by animals and earth-based practices. Can you tell us more about that? [0:01:06] JC: Sure. Selah Carefarm, we have been around literally seven and a half years, but in planning about eight and a half years, and we have 20 acres here, and we are on what's called Oak Creek, which is more like a river. The headwaters are in Flagstaff. So, we have 2,000 or so feet on Oak Creek, and all of our animals are rescued. So, they've all been rescued from varying levels of abuse, or torture, or homelessness, or starvation. We have goats, and sheep, and cows, and pigs, and horses, and donkeys, alpacas. I mean, dogs and cats, of course, and I'm sure I'm missing somebody. But we have a lot of different animals here. They are profoundly meaningful for the people who come here. That's one of the things, I'm a professor at Arizona State University, and one of the things in my research that we have found is that people love the counseling they get here, because everyone is trained in traumatic grief, and everyone has their own – all of our counselors are required to have their own practice and do their own deep work, which is not something that you see across the board with therapists, right? So, people love coming here for the animals and they love – I mean for the humans, the counseling and the nature and each other. But over and over and over again, in the research, the animals emerge as the number one most transformative thing for people. I didn't expect that. I mean, I knew the animals would be meaningful for people. I just didn't know how meaningful it would be for them to interact with animals, who also have known loss, and terror, and trauma, and grief, and sadness, and loneliness, and despair. It's this sort of connection in capital O, Oneness that creates kind of almost – it is. It's a magical, albeit painful interaction. [0:02:54] BD: Have you always had a special relationship with animals in your life? Is there a reason that you chose to bring these two communities together? [0:03:03] JC: Oh, man, that's a great question that I don't get a lot. Yes. I always have had a special thing with animals. When I was one and a half years old, a wild blue jay – we lived in Manhattan. My parents were immigrants. So, we lived in Manhattan and this wild blue jay flew into my house. I was one and a half. I have no cognizant memory. But a wild blue jay flew into our house and attached herself to me, and was with me, I think several days. So, my father called a reporter and they came out and took a picture. So, I have a picture of me, I believe, it was the New York Times, in the New York Times, with his wild blue jay sitting on my little dress. I have always had a soft spot for animals. I haven't eaten them since 1972. I have always known that they had some kind of existential self or soul. I've always seen in them deep emotions, and not just sort of the primal things that you would think of, and not just the domestic animals, but even in my limited interaction, because before the Carefarm, I had limited interaction with farm animals. But even before we had the farm, and I and I interacted so much with farm animals, which people kind of think of as these blobs with no personalities. I had a sense people were wrong about them. I had a sense that they knew. Of course, I saw some videos early on, which is what converted me to stop eating animals. I was only seven years old when I did that. As I watched these videos of these animals, to be honest, in slaughterhouses, I could see the fear in their eyes and I thought to myself, “Oh, when I'm afraid, that's what it feels like to me.” Those eyes, the wide eyed, all the whites around your eyes showing. The look of terror on your face. And I had been afraid. I remember being afraid as a child. I was raised in an interesting religious cult, and they talked a lot about Armageddon. I remember being very, very afraid of Armageddon. So, I really related to these animals who also had this look of fear and terror in their eyes. So, there was just always something in me that knew they were more than just blobs, and it wasn't just dogs who had feelings, and emotions, and attachments. But it really wasn't until we got the farm animals and we started rescuing them, because farm animals until they feel safe, they're not free to be who they really are. That's the interesting thing about them. So, like our goats, when we first rescue them, they run around terrified of you. So, you can't see their personalities. All you see is fear. Same thing with human beings, by the way, who have been abused, right? Human beings who have been tortured or abused, you can't see the full fruition of their character, their personality, because all you're seeing is fear and terror. All you're seeing is the flight, fight freeze response, and it's the same thing with these animals. So, once they started to feel safe, then they could become who they really were. So, now, we know that Gretel, the goat, is very timid and very shy, but also loves affection and warmth. And we know that Kurt loves affection and warmth too. But if food is available to him, he'll take food over affection and warmth. Now, we know that Captain von Trapp, we call him Mr. Loverboy. He gets very jealous when another goat is getting more affection than he is. So, he'll come and push the other goat away. All of their personalities and character illogical propensities come out when they have the freedom to be who they really are. Again, which is the same thing as human beings, when we're free to be who we are, and we're accepted, and we're liberated from coercion and pressure to be someone we're not, then we can experience the full manifestation of what our true character is. [0:06:42] BD: Both spectrum self. The name for the Carefarm in Hebrew, Selah means to pause and to reflect. I'm assuming that's intentional. [0:06:52] JC: It's quite intentional. It's an intentional space to pause and reflect on grief and those we love who died. It's a word that I found many, many years ago, probably two decades ago. I always knew like something special has to come from this word, because it's such a powerful word. So, it was quite intentional. It was quite intentional to give a nod to the poetry of feeling our feelings. [0:07:18] BD: Yes. That's beautiful. How do the animals at the farm teach us to live again? [0:07:24] JC: Well, I think it's a less direct path than that. Right? I think what it is we – our farm is built on a principle called Ahimsa, which is oneness, literally, and oneness and compassion, non-violence for all beings. Once we create this space where we can recognize that there is no capital O, Other. As Chief Seattle said, “What we do to the web of life, we do to ourselves.” And many religious and mystic traditions have always recognized this. But once you realize that, and you have an experience of oneness, it's very hard. It's like taking the red pill. You can't undertake it. It's very hard to see the world through the lens of an anthropocentric view. So, when people come here, and they have this experience of this animal we've just rescued, who won't let anyone within 12 feet of his space, because he's so terrified. Then, they see him six months later getting love and cuddles, and opening his heart to the possibility of trusting in the world again, people start to see themselves reflected in this creature, who without any effort. I mean, I think that's the beautiful thing about it. Animals just by being who they are, show us the way, because they're non-coercive. They just do it naturally. If we can connect with that inner animals, we're all animals, human beings, or animals, we're just human animals, as opposed to non-human animals. So, we're wired very similarly. If we can see ourselves resonated in an animal who has been on death's door, and literally had given up hope, for life. We can see that animal flourish and watch it flourish, watch him or her flourish, and deeper than that, maybe even be a part of that flourishing. Wow. I mean, it's a profound connection for people. So, they start making these little linkages between what did that animal need, and what did that animal do to get where he or she is? Needed good support, tenderness, care, love, non-judgement. The animals don't walk around judging themselves about their feelings. The animals don't walk around going, “Oh, my gosh. I can't believe I'm so fearful. I can't – why am I so anxious.” They just work with what they have and people start making those linkages and it is incredibly profound when you see it happening. It's beautiful, really. Many of our clients in the outtakes surveys call it magical, what happens here. [0:10:04] BD: Explain to the listeners what can clients expect coming in? What can participants expect coming in? What would a day at the farm look like? [0:10:17] JC: Most people come here and average of four or five days. It's a residential facility, so they stay on-site. If they come for an actual program, then it's reasonably structured. So, they wake up in the morning, there's yoga. They don't have to participate in the program, but most people want to. So, there's yoga. There's time with the animals. Usually, a few hours with the animals taking care of the animals, brushing the animals, meeting the animals. They can do more with the animals too, if they so choose. If someone has horse experience, for example, and they want to go spend time with the animals or pick the horse's hooves or something, then we can accommodate that. A lot of people who come here don't have farm animal experience, though. Then we have an art therapist on staff. We have group meetings. We have individual counseling in some of our programs. We have yoga. We have meditation. So, it depends on when they're coming and what their needs are. [0:11:10] BD: What's some of the biggest lessons that you've learned in your time at the farm? [0:11:14] JC: I think getting back into your body, especially if you've had traumatic grief is one of those things that is very difficult for people, because we can't get back into a body that doesn't feel safe, or we're much more reluctant to get back in a body that doesn't feel safe. How do you feel safe in a body when everyone around you is telling you there's something wrong with you? Because that's always the intimation about grief. You're grieving too hard. Not doing it right. You're grieving too long. You should feel better by now. There are all these intimations that surround grieving people constantly, that create a feeling of unsafety and loneliness. So, why would they want to be back in their bodies? Not to mention the trauma alone creates a sense of heightened fear and terror in being in our own bodies. I do think it's a combination of things for sure, as you said, and I also think the animals are tantamount. They're the centerpiece of everything that we do here. [0:12:13] BD: How do the animals on the farm model that safety to feel? What does that interaction look like? [0:12:21] JC: I just think there's a spaciousness about them. They're not in a hurry. They don't hand you a Kleenex and say, time to move on. They just accept people for who they are and how they feel in the moment. If we have somebody on the farm and they go sit underneath the willow tree, and they're crying, Gretel or Captain von Trapp, some of our more affectionate goats will just go and sit next to them and lay next to them. Or a dog will do that. The horses are incredible beings. Horses, there have been several studies that show that horses more accurately interpret and predict human emotion than even our closest relative, non-human animal relatives which is primates. Our horses help people be more aware of themselves, and themselves in space, and their own emotions. For example, Chamaco, my horse, he's the whole reason the farm exists. He can tell when someone is extremely anxious. And if someone is very fearful around him, or is having high anxiety, which is the same thing as fear, he'll back up, he'll take several steps back away from them. Not toward them, but away from them to give them space. Then they noticed that he does that, and then usually what happens is, they'll look to me, and I'll say, “Just notice how you're feeling.” And they're saying, “My heart's beating really fast. I'm having a lot of fear. I'm afraid of horses, or I'm thinking about my son and his love of horses, and I'm missing him. And I'm having a lot of fear come up.” Or whatever. But it helps raise their self-awareness of their own current emotional state in the moment, emotional state. And as they talk about it, and process it, it starts to dilute it or dissipate. And as it does, Chamaco will come toward them. So, I mean, and the beautiful thing about it is it says without any words at all. Words get human beings in trouble. Brittany, I don't know if you notice that. But word get human beings in a lot of trouble. We have way too many words, that when we should just, “Sshh, sshh.” Animals just naturally communicate compassion and care, and also boundaries without any words at all. [0:14:28] BD: Animals show up for us so differently than humans do, which is, I mean, it's humbling, right? Because as a therapist, I can watch my emotional support dog, Violet, go lay on my client and sooth them in a way that I cannot. [0:14:45] JC: Myself and colleagues conducted a study and we asked – we wanted to find out who was providing the best grief support subjectively from the experience of grievers. I mean, there's all kinds of talk about grief support in the empirical literature, but very few studies allow grievers to define what good support is. So, we asked about the actions and actors of good grief support. One of the first things that we found was that emotional acts of caring and emotional support were the types of support that grievers most often wanted. They also appreciated practical support, like meal trains, people cleaning their house and help with childcare. Those were helpful. But by far, in the data, emotional support and emotional acts of caring were significantly more important than any other kinds of support. That was the action. And then we asked, who are the people who are providing the best kinds of support? You name it. We asked about every human group there was. Then, just before we were getting ready to hit publish on the survey, I had a thought. I said, “You know what, I'm going to throw pets and animals in there. Just to see what happens.” I can tell you that pets and animals blew every human group out of the water, blew every human group. They came in at 89% satisfaction. The next highest group, the second highest group came in at 67% satisfaction and that was support groups. That's one of the things I say when it comes to good grief support, be an animal. Just sit and stay. [0:16:11] BD: Yes. That's beautiful. How has your work with animals empowered you in your grief journey? [0:16:19] JC: Oh, wow. Well, there's somewhere out there as a video, where someone was interviewing me and I said, pretty much every adult around me abandoned me. That's how it felt. They all wanted me to be who I was before, they wanted me to be better. They wanted me to stop crying. They thought I was going on and on and on. Just have another child, it'll be okay. You can't interchange kids, guys. That's not how it works. [0:16:45] BD: It doesn’t work that way. [0:16:47] JC: So, I remember that my dogs, I had two dogs at the time, and they were amazing for me. I would just be in a moment of absolute utter despair, sobbing on the couch, and my dogs would come up, and just put their heads on me and just sit with me. They didn't say, “Oh, you should stop crying or you should feel better by now.” Or, “You're taking this too far.” They just sat with me and accepted me. And the other being who sat with me was my three-year-old who is smarter than every adult around me. I remember the time when she sat on the arm of the – I was crying and it was a hard morning. And she came and sat on the arm of the couch with me. She said, “Mommy, it's okay to be sad. And it's okay to cry because babies aren't supposed to die.” I just looked at and I go, “You're a genius. You're a genius. All the adults around me are idiots, but you are a genius.” So, I guess I realized, I mean, I've always had a love for animals. But I guess I realized in that moment, that the smarter people, the more sophisticated people around me didn't really know what was happening. We’re not emotionally intelligent, and that animals and children seemed to be much more emotionally intelligent to me. My dogs played a really key role in helping me feel a little less lonely in the grief experience. And then fast forward to eight years ago, going on nine years ago, I met a horse named Tumaco. His video is out there as well. He's sort of a famous horse. He was the most tortured animal we have on the farm. His entire back, had bones protruding from his skin. He was 600 pounds underweight. He had huge, this big, gaping wounds on both of his sides, where the metal of the saddle was strapped against his bare muscle. He was tortured, literally tortured beyond anything I've ever seen. And people just wanted to go on their vacation. They just wanted to have fun. And they walked past him over and over and I just came upon him. But people literally were doing this as they walked by, so they didn't see him. They were averting their gaze, literally averting their gaze, because they wanted to have fun. I remember thinking to myself, that's what it felt like when my daughter died. People averting their gaze. They didn't want to see my pain because it made them sad. Because it ruined their holidays, or their good time, or their football game, or whatever was happening. I knew I was going to have to fight to rescue him. I did. It was quite a fight to rescue him. But I did because he was worthy of rescuing. And also, because he was me. I am that horse and that horse is me. We are no different. He was on death's door, and hopeless, and terrified, and uncertain he could live, and I was the same way in 1994, 1995, 1996, right after my daughter died. I was the same way. No one wanted to look at him. No one could bear to really see him and many others could not bear to really see me. So, rescuing him, saving his life, very worthy life, was saving my own life. My decision every day to live a compassionate life, and to make choices that don't harm others. Others broadly defined, both human and non-human animals. Both the planet that we live on. My decision to live that way, is a decision to also take care of myself, because I am one with everything, and they are one with me. I think animals taught me that. Again, I've always had a soft spot for them. But I think they taught me that. I think they helped me awaken from this very human-centric model of the world and see that what we're doing to this planet, we're doing to ourselves and our descendants, and all beings with whom we share this planet. And what we do to a baby cow and her mother we're doing to our own babies, and to ourselves. That, for me, is the only way I can live my life. I can't live my life any other way. So, I would say animals probably have played more of a role than anything in my life more than spirituality, my spiritual practice, more than my academic studies, more than friendships and family relationships even, because it's helped deepen all of those things. It's helped me really stay awake. [0:21:12] BD: We've spent a lot of time talking about how animals show up for us. How animals can teach us mindfulness. How they can teach us to feel. How they can support us through our trauma and grief. How can we show up for them? How can we better show up for them? [0:21:28] JC: Well, I'll be honest. We have to stop exploiting them. We have to – so, here on the farm, for example, we don't ever say use animals. We engage our animals. We invite our animals, but we don't use them. The animals are never haltered and never forced to interact with anyone they don't want to except for the vet. They don't love the vet, but they have to get their health care, and they don't always love it. But they're never coerced, they're never forced. This is an egalitarian model. Egalitarian is built into our model. It's called the attend model. And it's an acronym and, the E stands for egalitarianism. That means that we balance power. The humans here are not more important than the animals. So, the animals well-being is prioritized just as high as the human well-being. We try, we make every effort never to exploit our animals, and to give them free choice, and free will around with whom, and when they interact. If they're tired, and they don't want to come out, they don't have to come out. Having said that, this is a unique place. So, how do we live in accord with nature and in a way that respects the autonomy of our animal brethren? That's a tricky thing, because our agricultural system is set up in such a way, our research system is set up in such a way, our beauty system is set up in such a way that animals are routinely exploited for human benefit. That's a tough thing. It's a tough system to crack and all we can do is vote with our dollar and change. So, what I tell people is just start educating yourselves. Just start slowly. We move mountains. The Chinese have a saying, “We move mountains one stone at a time.” And so slowly, slowly start to learn about the agricultural system, about big agriculture, and how animals are exploited and what they do, for example, to ducks for down. Or what they do to sheep for the wool. Yes, of course, sheep need to be shorn because they're bred to have too much wool. But the ways in which we do it matter. There are several videos that people can watch. Start with something like what, the health. The beautiful thing about animals is when we treat animals with respect, our bodies end up benefiting from it. The same beauty that we give to animals, if we choose with our dollar, to eat differently, to put our makeup on differently, or do our hair differently, or wash our bodies differently. It happens to also benefit us. [0:23:58] BD: Dr. Jo, thank you so much for coming on Happiness Unleashed. This has been an honor to talk to you and thank you so much. [0:24:07] JC: Thank you for having me. [END OF INTERVIEW] [0:24:08] PF: That was Brittany Derrenbacher talking with Dr. Jo Cacciatore. If you'd like to learn more about Selah Carefarm, follow Dr. Jo on social media or discover her book, Bearing the Unbearable. Visit our website at livehappy.com and click on the podcast tab. Of course, Brittany will be back here next month to talk more about how pets can bring us joy, help us heal, and be some of our best teachers. Until then, for everyone at Live Happy, this is Paula Felps reminding you to make every day a happy one. [END]

Follow along with the transcript below for episode: Take an Inner Field Trip With Leesa Renee Hall [INTRODUCTION] [0:00:01] PF: Thank you for joining us for episode 449 of Live Happy Now. If you're looking for an adventure to start the new year, why not take an Inner Field Trip? I'm your host, Paula Felps, and today I'm sitting down with Leesa Renee Hall, a mental health wellness advocate and author of the Inner Field Trip Workbook, which helps us explore what drives us, what oppresses us, and to recognize our personal biases. Armed with that information, Leesa says, we can change the way we move through the world and transform our relationships, which seems like a great way to start the year. Let's find out more. [INTERVIEW] [0:00:38] PF: Leesa, Happy New Year. [0:00:40] LRH: Happy New Year, Paula. Thank you. [0:00:43] PF: It is. It's a shiny, brand-new year. We're all excited about that. We wanted to kick it off with you, because you've got this terrific workbook that really helps us explore a lot of things inside. This is a time when people are looking at new beginnings, and your workbook fits so well into that. To get started, tell us what an Inner Field trip is. [0:01:06] LRH: The Inner Field Trip, it's a way to go internal within, and ask yourself those deed questions about the internalized messaging that you have, that you hold, that you've been socialized to believe that hinders your personal growth. The way I conceptualize the Inner Field Trip, I'm a hiker, I hike all the time. The way I conceptualize the Inner Field Trip is like a hike. We go, we hit the trail, and we go along a rugged, rocky terrain, get to the lookout, and then circle back to the trailhead. The Inner Field Trip is similar to that, but instead of going and driving to a trail and trudging along the rugged terrain, instead we go inner, internal, and we traverse our internal rugged terrain, and see what sights and sounds are along the way. [0:02:03] PF: What's so interesting is a lot of times, even if we think we know ourselves, we might be surprised at some of the pitfalls, some of the uneven terrain that we encounter when we go inside. [0:02:15] LRH: That's one of the reasons why doing the Inner Field Trip, or any introspective work, is so difficult for people, because it's Amanda Palmer, the musician said in an interview once that, it's like you go in to confront your inner part of yourself, and they're in the dark basement lifting weights. You confront them, and they're like these big, muscly things, and it's like, oh, whoa, whoa, whoa. So, it can be scary to go within and ask yourself those hard questions. [0:02:51] PF: Well, tell me how you came up with this idea, because it's very – I've seen a lot of work books I've seen – there's so many ways that you can approach self-discovery and awakening and change, and yours is truly unique. So, tell me how you came up with this. [0:03:04] LRH: I always held a diary, but I hadn't written in one for a long time. I had one when I was young. The typical pink with a nice fuzzy exterior and a lock on there, when I was a teenager. I wrote in them a lot. You fast forward decades later, and I had a few personal setbacks, and I started journaling. I found that it was very therapeutic. At the time I didn't even know it was a thing. I didn't know that one can journal to improve their mindset, to improve their thought process, to improve their health. There's a lot of study around it. It's called expressive writing. There's a doctor or psychologist who's done almost 25 years' work of research into this. So, the time I'm journaling, and I'm just working through these personal setbacks. I was sharing my journey, or my log book, my dispatches, on Facebook at the time when I was using it quite regularly. People were asking me, “Oh, wow. I love what you're discovering. Can you help me out, too? Could you take me on this journey as well?” I started a group on Facebook in 2015, and I offered some writing prompts that came out of my own experience, and people started doing the same thing, journaling. A couple of years later, I wrote a blog post with some writing prompts. I had a very problematic interaction with a person who holds skin color, and gender privilege, and wealth privilege as well. So, I said to him, I said, “You seem so angry. Why are you so angry? Maybe take these writing prompts and sit for 15 minutes and journal.” He told me all sorts of terrible things about who I am. [0:04:54] PF: Oh, wow. [0:04:55] LRH: Yeah. It was terrible. It was awful. I threw the writing prompts in a blog post, and in the first three weeks, it was shared 10,000 times. [0:05:03] PF: Oh, my gosh. That says a lot. [0:05:05] LRH: That says a lot. Then people were sending me small gifts, financial gifts, $5 here, $50 here, through PayPal, saying, “This is such a gift. Thank you so much.” That's when I started a paid community to offer more writing prompts to those who like the process of journaling and being introspective. Then that's how Inner Field Trip was birth. [0:05:32] PF: I love that it was so organic. How it started as your own journey, and then just became you, wanting to share it with others. Then others really clamoring for it. I mean, I love when it evolves like that. [0:05:42] LRH: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Then it was during the pandemic when I started adding art exercises, because many in my community were sharing with me that their inner oppressor, and the inner oppressor is who we meet on the Inner Field Trip. This is a part of ourselves that bullies us and pressures us into aligning with the status quo. So, what we do is we use the writing prompts to meet our inner oppressor, as we go on our Inner Field Trip, and we capture the ramblings of our inner oppressor through the journaling. Many during the pandemic said to me, many of my members in my community said, “My inner oppressor has become raging, angry, or nonverbal.” That they would sit down to journal to meet their inner oppressor, and nothing would come out. That's when I started adding expressive arts. There's a lot of research around the power of expressive arts and helping us to heal. Helping us to give language to what we don't have words for. Now, the Inner Field Trip combines the power of self-reflective journaling, along with expressive arts or expressive doodling to help us to have a holistic encounter when we go on our Inner Field Trip to meet our inner oppressor. [0:07:00] PF: Yeah. That was something I wanted to ask you about, because you do use so many different approaches, like you have the journaling, there's drawing, there's music, there's movement. Why are those different creative approaches so effective in that self-exploration? [0:07:15] LRH: A lot of what we tackle through the Inner Field Trip is, as I said, internalized messaging, but also internalized biases. So, growing up in a culture that tells us that we need to be self-reliant and pull up your bootstraps, and all these messages of individualism. It can be quite harmful to some people who don't have sheer – where sheer willpower is not enough for them to be able to create and maintain habits. There are environmental factors that prevent them from doing so. There are systemic barriers that they face. Some people are experiencing generational poverty. When you don't have enough time or money to create a space to create new habits, that's going to affect whether or not you can go and do these things, whether you can go on an inner field trip. The power of using all these different modalities is to meet people where they are. If you're experiencing generational poverty, well, maybe you can pick up a marker and sketchbook or even a piece of paper and just do it all for five minutes, and see what happens. There's people in my community who have been diagnosed with different mental health disorders as they've gotten older. I have a lot of my community that got a late-stage ADHD diagnosis or autism. If that is the case in how they learn and interact with content is going to be different. So, being able to do the dancing, or listening to music, or doing the doodling or journaling, helps again to meet people where they are. [0:09:01] PF: I think the book is so well laid out as well, because you build in these what you call active rest stops. I love that. Going back to the hiking thing. They put little things in the trail where you can sit and drink your water and catch your breath. You do that same thing. Talk about an active rest stop and what that is. Because to me, as I was going through your workbook, I felt like, boy, this is something you could do, even if you're not doing the workbook. You could build in like an active rest stop day where I do this. Tell us what it is. [0:09:30] LRH: When I hike, I usually go out. I usually do day hiking. I'll be out on the trail for two, three hours. As I'm marching along and hiking along, I will take a rest here and there. It's a long enough rest, so that I can grab a snack, and check the maps to make sure I'm going the right way. [0:09:52] PF: Important. [0:09:53] LRH: Right. So very important. What I'm not doing is I'm not going to pitch a tent and throw up in a sleeping bag and set up overnight. So, the active rest stop is the same idea within the Inner Field Trip. When it comes to creating and maintaining habits, we often try to do too much too soon. Then we end up burning out along the way. In fact, there is a study or something or stat that says, that most people will abandon their New Year's resolutions by February 12th. I believe that's the date. Then you start a cycle again in the next New Year, where you say, “I'm going to do this on January 1st.” Then by February 12th. It's done. It's abandoned and you spend the next 10 months not making the change. What's important to add to this pathway of trying to create new habits is to incorporate rest and pleasure and play. I recently held a gathering with workbook participants, people who bought the workbook, and we're doing what I'm calling a three-day jumpstart to help them get motivated to do the 30-day challenge in the book. One person said that as they've gotten to know themselves through the Inner Field Trip, they understand that they have this fun, dorky side. Then they said, “I'm a dork.” Then others agreed with them. Having the active rest stop means that we can slow down, rest, have some play, incorporate pleasure, so that we are nourished, nourished enough, so that we go ahead and we meet our inner oppressor again. It can't be all work, because rest is not a reward for the work. It's part of the work. [0:11:46] PF: I love that. That is something that is so often overlooked. I love that you've integrated that, and made it such a central part of this whole journey. That is so well done. Now was there a reason you chose 30 days? [0:12:00] LRH: It takes 66 days to form a new habit. 66. At least the inner field trip will get you half way. [0:12:09] PF: What do you do? You bring up a great point. We need this to be a habit. We need to change our way of thinking, but we get half way there. Do you go on the field trip again, or what do you do for that next 36 days? [0:12:23] LRH: Yes, yes, yes. So, yes, going on a field trip again is a great idea. Some people will repeat the book and keep repeating it over and over and over. Another thing to do is to get into community with others, where there's a chapter in the workbook that gives you some tips on how to form a book club, if that stuff interests you. You could do the first 30 days by yourself, do the next 30 days in community with others, and then that will get you closer to that 60 days. You see, the problem, one of the problems with habits and the forming of habits is that it teaches us – most of the advice out there says that if you don't have the willpower to stick to this habit, then you just need to change your mindset. Here's some mindset work for you to do. As I had shared before that people are experiencing systemic issues, which are preventing them from using sheer willpower alone in maintaining habits. A de-colonized approach to habit forming is to get into communion and/or community with others. Because it's when we are with others that we are more accountable, we're more likely to stick with the habit and we're with individuals who are also working towards the same goal. Doing this alone is not fun. [0:13:48] PF: Right. There's also a lot of research that shows just how good community is for our mental health. Just being with others and sharing that. That in itself, do you see changes in people when they're able to, instead of writing – I love journaling, it's such a valuable tool, but if instead of journaling, they're able to sit in a group and say, “This is how I felt and this is what I said.” Then someone else is saying, “Oh, my gosh. I didn't know someone else felt that way. I have the same thing.” What does that do for them? [0:14:18] LRH: Exactly. When I do the inner field trip, either in my community, virtually or in person in a workshop room, not only are we meeting our inner oppressor through the journaling, not only are we meeting the inner oppressor through the arts and the expressive doodling, but we also dance. After we journal and everyone's in their emotions, I throw on Madonna's Material Girl and we prance around the room until that song ends. [0:14:47] PF: I love it. [0:14:48] LRH: It's interesting, Paula, because some people, there's tears dripping down their face, because of the journaling has brought up things, and then you'll see them with their shoulder slump down, their hands hanging at their side, like spaghetti noodles, but yet, and they're still weeping, but they're prancing about the room with everyone else. It is so funny to witness. We do this, we do the music after such an intense journaling, because not only are we doing it in community with each other, but it helps us to discharge some of that energy that might be trapped within. So, that when we sit back down in community, we now feel more freedom in sharing what has come up in the journaling and the expressive arts. [0:15:34] PF: That's terrific. Can we talk a little bit about the effects that you've seen for people going on this journey? What happens when people start looking at their unconscious biases and really drawing those out? [0:15:46] LRH: Yeah. Oh, my goodness. It's so magical, Paula. It's so magical. I love it. I love it. I love it. The inner field trip itself was developed in community. People will pick up the workbook, do it on their own and they're great. Some people are like that. I'm a solo hiker. I prefer to go hiking by myself than in a group. Sometimes I want the group, because it's all about the socialization and all that. Some of the things that I've seen happen with people who've gone through the inner field trip is that people's relationships improve, so you can call me a relationship fixer. [0:16:21] PF: Now, there you go. [0:16:24] LRH: But also, for some people their relationships don't improve. I know that sounds weird, right? [0:16:32] PF: Is that because they recognize that they've been putting up with things that – [0:16:37] LRH: Ah, yes. [0:16:38] PF: - they shouldn't? [0:16:39] LRH: Yes. That's what happens, right? There's an awakening that they have that, wow, look at all this toxicity I put up within this relationship. Whether that relationship is personal, or whether that relationship is professional, like in a workplace or so on. Others have, for example, I've seen a few people in my community who have boldly come out and said, “The gender, or the sex assigned at birth is no longer the gender I identify with.” I've watched over several months, or years how they've transitioned and have become more confident and more assured of themselves. Perhaps, that's not going to be your story. Maybe your story is that you found your voice. I have a lot of people pleasers that come through my community. Weak boundaries, porous boundaries. Then they go through the inner field trip and they're able to have much stronger boundaries. Not rigid barriers, but stronger boundaries. [0:17:39] PF: Is that because they have a stronger sense of self? [0:17:41] LRH: Yes. They have a stronger sense of self and they're able to – they're able to find their voice and use it in a much more effective way. Again, it's not about creating rigid barriers. It's not like, they come out with a much more angry, stern voice, but now they're able to advocate for themselves. Ultimately, when we do this work with the inner field trip, it's about holding compassion for ourselves. It's about recognizing our own humanity, that we are messy, that we will stumble along figuratively on this path, and then when we can see how messy our own humanity is, then we can look at someone else's humanity and treat it with grace and love and compassion. [0:18:30] PF: What are some of the stories? Is there any one that stands out of this incredible transformation that you never would have anticipated would happen by someone going on this field trip? [0:18:43] LRH: Yeah, there's several. There's someone who used to be in my community, and unfortunately, she passed on. Just a wonderful advocate for the inner field trip. Her first name was Rachel. When she first came across the inner field trip, she was very timid, very timid, and broken as well. As I got to know her, she shared more about her experience, her life. Over and over, just many people taking advantage of her kind spirit. Once she went through the inner field trip, and she'd been in part of the community for many, many months, and she, in one of our gatherings, in one of our circles, she shared that she was able, finally able to communicate with her ex-husband, what her needs were around the co-parenting. She broke down in tears with us, because she said she had never before stood up to him that way. She thought he was going to rage, or get upset. But instead, he accepted her boundaries. She said, “Wow, who knows how different our relationship would have been,” had she known how easy it would have been to express her boundaries around co-parenting. [0:19:58] PF: That's amazing. [0:19:59] LRH: We cried, yeah. [0:20:01] PF: It sounds like, going through the field trip doesn't just change internally. It really changes the way these people are moving through the world. Then they are having an effect on the people that they come in contact with, because they're interacting with them differently. [0:20:19] LRH: Exactly. When people go through the inner field trip, one of the things that comes out is that they recognize that how they take direct action, whatever that looks like, that they feel more confident doing so in a way that aligns with their personality and their uniqueness. There are a lot of causes that we care about. Whether it's about saving the trees, or saving the pets, or maybe there's a conflict happening around the world where you really care about the plight of those who are suffering. Whatever that cause is, we each have something that we care deeply about. The way that people believe direct action should take place is you've got to go up there and march. You have to hit the – bodies on the line, boots on the ground is what I often hear. For some of us, that's not a form of direct action that we can take. Either, maybe you have a disability and you're not able to put those boots on the ground. Perhaps, you're not able, maybe you're time deficient or under-resourced in terms of time and you can't get to these marches and sit-ins, and so forth. When you can understand yourself better and you're able to work through your internalized issues, that confidence builds because now you know that, hey, my form of activism is writing letters, or my form of activism is holding space in a therapy room, in a session with someone who's gone through some trauma. If, as a therapist, you can sit there and provide compassion and help that person heal, that's your form of activism. Activism, taken direct action, doesn't have to look like this. There are so many different ways that we can show up in the world to help those who are suffering. [0:22:11] PF: I love that. I love that. Again, your workbook really lets people discover what's right for them. They're going to run into some uncomfortable characters on rough terrain inside that field trip. Again, what's so wonderful is there is a community that you've built, that they can reach out to and they can become part of and they can help process it with someone else. [0:22:34] LRH: Yes, absolutely, absolutely. [0:22:37] PF: As we start this new year, what is your wish for the people who are listening to this? What do you hope that they can do and accomplish by going inside themselves? [0:22:49] LRH: What I wish is that we stop trying to become allies. Instead, we look at becoming better ancestors. My wish is that we stop passing on pain and we start to pass on healing. That even if you don't have biological children, or you're estranged from your biological children, we each have something that we can pass on to the next generation. That's what I would like to see us do, that we look ahead and we take on the Iroquois Nation thinking, which is all about looking seven generations ahead and asking ourselves, “What decision am I making now in terms of the habits I'm going to form that I can pass on healing that will resonate seven generations from now?” I wonder how much different we would all be if seven generations ago our ancestors did that. They looked ahead and said, “Okay. I don't know what their faces will be. I don't know what their names will be, but I want to make sure I make a decision now in terms of the habits I develop, so that seven generations from now, my descendants look back and say, “Well done. Well done.”” I think a lot of the things we focus on and the things that are grabbing our attention is a distraction. A distraction away from the work that we need to do, so that we become better and we pass on better things to our descendants. [0:24:23] PF: That is so well said. We are very fortunate to have you in this tumultuous time on our planet – [0:24:29] LRH: So tumultuous. [0:24:31] PF: Yeah. To be able to guide us through this. I mean, this is – your timing on this and obviously, you were put here at this time for a reason and this workbook is such a wonderful way to help us navigate it. I thank you for doing that and I thank you for joining me here today. [0:24:48] LRH: Thank you, Paula. [END OF INTERVIEW] [0:24:53] PF: That was author and mental wellness advocate, Leesa Renee Hall, talking about her Inner Field Trip Workbook. If you'd like to learn more about Leesa, follow her on social media, or learn more about the Inner Field Trip Workbook, just visit us at livehappy.com and click on the podcast tab. That is all we have time for today. We'll meet you back here again next week for an all-new episode. Until then, this is Paula Felps, reminding you to make every day a happy one. [END]