Hey, I'm Wilma Valdarama, executive producer of the new podcast Dave My Abolita. First each week, the incredible Vico Ortiz and fabulous Abuelita Liliana Montenegro will play matchmaker for a group of hopeful romantics. Right, Vico?

You know it. Listen to Dave my awolita first Thursdays on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.

And remember, don't do anything I wouldn't do.

Just do it better.

The Therapy for Black Girls podcast is your space to explore mental health, personal development, and all of the small decisions we can make to become the best possible versions of ourselves. I'm your host, Dr. Joy Harden Bradford, a licensed psychologist in Atlanta, Georgia, and I can't wait for you to join the conversation. Every Wednesday, listen to the therapy for Black Girls podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Take good care.

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You can be yourself or you can be accepted, but not both at the same time. At some point you start wondering, who the heck are we anyway?

We know him as the bestselling author.

Of a number of books.

His work on the relationship between addiction and childhood development.

Please help me welcome Dr. Gabor mate the top regrets of people who died before that time. You know what it is that they weren't themselves. They spent their whole life trying to please others. That's a top regret.

How do we fix broken people? Before we jump into this episode, I'd like to invite you to join this community to hear more interviews that will help you become happier, healthier and more healed. All I want you to do is click on the subscribe button. I love your support. It's incredible to see all your comments and we're just getting started. I can't wait to go on this journey with you. Thank you so much for subscribing. It means the world to me.

The number one health and wellness podcast, Jay Shetty Jay Shetty the one, the.

Only Jay Shetty hey everyone. Welcome back to on Purpose, the number one health and wellness podcast in the world. Thanks to each and every one of you that keep coming back every week to become happier, healthier and more healed. Now, today's guest is someone that you absolutely adore, that you love, that I admire so deeply. I feel honored whenever I'm in his presence. I'm a huge fan and follower of his work and I would also like to say that we've been developing a little bit of a friendship behind the scenes, which I'm very grateful for as well. I'm speaking about the one and only Gabel mate, who spent 20 years working in family practice and palliative care experience and worked for over a decade in Vancouver's downtown East side with patients challenged by drug addiction and mental illness. Gabor is the best selling author of five books, including the award winning in the realm of hungry ghosts close encounters with addiction. Gabor is an internationally renowned speaker, highly sought after for his expertise on addiction, trauma, childhood development and the relationship of stress and illness. And Gabor's latest book, the myth of Normal Trauma, illness and healing in a toxic culture, remains a bestseller globally and I highly recommend you get a copy if you haven't already.

If you have a copy, grab one for a friend and really, this would be my recommendation. Make it your book club pick for your local book club. For your online book club. Make it a book that you discuss and share. Please welcome back to on Purpose Gabor mate. Thank you for being here. I am fondly remembering not only the last interview we had, but the last time we were together in Vancouver when I saw you just before my show and we spent a few moments together and I genuinely look forward to seeing you whenever I can. So thank you for doing this.

Well, it's such a pleasure. And I remember bicycling down to your hotel, and I wasn't in a great state, and we talked, and I'd helped Aggrandi. And then I think it was my idea that we should meditate together. And we did. And that was just so helpful for me. So it's just good to sit with you in any capacity.

No. Well, I remember I walked away from last time's conversation both times, the first time we recorded and second time from that. And I always feel you create tiny mini shifts in my mindset through very subtle points you make. And it takes someone who's deeply studied their subject, not just theoretically, but practically, to be able to do that. So thank you, but let's dive straight in. I wanted to ask you this question. I've had the burning desire to ask you this question. So I read this quote the other day, and it says, it's by Frederick Douglass. And the quote goes, it is easier to build strong children than fix broken men. And my question was, how do we fix broken people?

There's a wonderful song by Leonard Cohn called come heal or come healing. So it begins, oh, gather up the brokenness. Bring it to me now. The fragrance of those promises you never dared to vow. And then he says at some point, and here's the answer to your question, o troubledness, concealing an undivided love. The heart beneath is teaching to the broken heart above. So this poet, prophet, poet, visionary saying, we have two hearts. There's the brokenness above and the undecided love that's below that's underneath. He's saying, there's the broken heart above, and then there's a heart beneath that teaching, the broken heart. So that implied in that is that nobody's broken. Then underneath the brokenness, there's wholeness. And that's not only Leonard Cohen. Any spiritual teachers you know will tell you the same thing. So it's not a matter of fixing anything broken. It's finding the wholeness that's underneath the brokenness. Now, Douglas is totally right. Studies have shown that if you get children who suffer for first three years and then things get okay for them, they do much worse than those children who are well treated and have a good life for three years, and then everything goes to pieces.

The latter group does much better because those words where it says, the child is the father of the man. So that what happens early in life shapes our worldview and our sense of ourselves. So, yes, Douglas is totally right. But ultimately, when I look at people, whether they agree with me or don't, or whether they are suffering or not, or whether they. Even when they do terrible things, there's a wholeness. There's an undivided love underneath it, isn't there? There's a show right now in Los Angeles by somebody who's in a death row prison in Texas, and his name is Obi, sentenced to death. And he's in death row, has been for the last 20 years. While these appeals wind their slow way through the courts. If he wins the appeal, the best thing he can hope for is life without parole. And he's in love with life. He's had a transformation. He's dealt with his addictions. He's dealt with his brokenness. He learned meditation. He's an artist. And some of his art is being shown in Los Angeles right now. Unfortunately, I can't go see it because it's only open certain days a week, and I'm not here.

But there's somebody who came from a totally broken childhood and found a kind of presence. If you saw him, you and I could only envy the kind of presence, at least to speak for myself. Can't speak for you. The kind of presence and the kind of engagement of life that he's got in a death row prison. Well, if that can be healed, if that brokenness, the wholeness can be discovered underneath, there's no be broken.

Very well said. I would agree to at the core, at the root, at the essence, none of us are broken. And our engagement with that which is broken and imperfect often rubs off on us. But what would you say are the most detrimental experiences that people have in those three years that end up creating horrific ripple effects long term?

Anything that makes them disconnect from themselves, from their true selves, from their gut feelings, from their connection to their bodies, anything that deprives them of hope. Now, I remember taking part in a retreat once. It was called an enlightenment intensive, where you do intensive spiritual work. I won't go into the details, but.

Please go into today.

Well, it's dyads and two people at one time sitting across from each other in a meditation posture, putting a question to one another. First one person asks, the other one listens. And then you switch places for four times, and then you get a different partner. And the question is, tell me who you are. The original question comes from Ramana Maharshi, whose work, I'm sure you know, one of these indian rishis and gurus who just asked everybody, tell me who you are. And the idea is that by emptying your mind and saying, whatever is in your head, clearing out the mental space, the direct experience of who you are, will come to you. A direct experience. Not a thought nor an emotion, but a direct experience. Now, I never had the direct experience, and I was embittered at the end. And at the very last dyad person said, tell me who you are. And I just started shaking, and my whole body was tingling. And instead of paying attention to that, I plunged into bitterness. And I said, is it my fault they turned up the light in me? They killed the light in me so early.

So I truly believed that the light in me had been killed by what had happened to me as an infant. And for much of my life, even after, became a healer, and even after I became a healer that was respected by so many people, I thought I could help heal everybody else, but I can't be healed myself. So to go back to your question, whatever early experience kills your faith in your own possibilities, that's what's so damaging. And for that, it could be evidence or experiences of severe abuse. It could also be a very sensitive child who the world doesn't see for who they are, who the world doesn't permit to express themselves. So they shut off from themselves in order to be accepted by the world. So any early experience that deprives you of yourself, and that happens to a lot of us. So trauma is a huge spectrum. But anything that breaks your connection to yourself and your genuine. Not your false, egoic belief in yourself, but your genuine belief in your wholeness, that'll do it. And that happens to a lot of us.

I've always personally experienced it as the volume of my inner voice.

Yes.

So I found at that, at different points in my life, my inner voice was extremely loud and clear. And not only could I hear it clearly, but the direction was clear. And then I've had moments in my life where, as you're referencing, disconnected from yourself, that voice is extremely quiet, maybe even nonexistent, or it's screaming out for help.

You mean the voice of your inner self is very quiet?

Correct. It can be.

Well, the Bible talks about the small still voice. They actually call it that, the small still voice. And it really takes attention to notice it, because there's so much noise in the world and so much noise in our heads, and there's all these other voices that are much louder. You know, the singer Cheryl Crowe, she had breast cancer. And she said afterwards, and this could be, and I quote this in the myth of normal, and it could be right out of my own work, but she doesn't know about me. She just came to this awareness because the disease taught her something. And she said that she always used to be serving other people and trying to meet other people's emotional needs and the breast cancer. Now she's actually listening to herself. And she says, there used to be these loud voices inside myself telling me that whatever I did wasn't right enough. She says, now I've still those voices. So on the one hand, the voices of self disregard and self loathing or self seduction are very loud. And that true voice for most of us is just so quiet. So it takes a lot of attention to notice it.

A lot of what you're saying today, we experience it as this idea of people pleasing, shapeshifting, mediating, wanting to make peace. Often in our families, in our friend circle, all of which can be good, noble things, but often we find ourselves disconnected from ourselves trying to play these different roles. Not only does that seem to be stemming from a form of trauma, of being disconnected from yourself early on. What steps can one take to regain one's connection with oneself so that we're not running around shapeshifting people pleasing, but at the same time have genuine connections with others.

In the book, we talk about this tension between authenticity and attachment and authenticity being connected to our true selves, our gut feelings, which is necessary. Nature gave us gut feelings for a good reason, gave us emotions for a good reason. Attachment is our need to belong. And if we can be authentic and belong, that's ideal. So if you can find relationships in which you can be our true selves and be accepted and loved, that's ideal. But a lot of our families of origin, our parents, just couldn't give that to us. They had their own limitations. They couldn't see us, or they had their own traumas like I did as a parent. And so kids then get the message that you can be yourself or you can be accepted, but not both at the same time, at which point, for sheer survival sake, for sheer survival's sake, we go with, well, what do we need to do to get accepted? And then we get that message reinforced in school and on the playground and with our peers and at our work. And at some point you start wondering, who the heck are we anyway? And whose life am I leading anyway?

Well, how to get back to it? Here's the question. Prior to your awakening, and I'm sure that for your awakening was probably both a series of unique events, but also it was a long term process. For me, it was mostly process rather than distinct experiences. But say, prior to awakening, did you sometimes know that you're not being authentic? Because I sure did. I didn't know why I was choosing not to be authentic. I wasn't even choosing it. But something in me knew, well, here's the question. Who inside us knows only that authentic self that's always there? And so I say to people, don't try and look for the authentic self. Just notice when you're not authentic. Just notice when you're not saying no. When there's a no that wants to be said, just see where you're not saying yes. But there's a yes that wants to be said inside you. Notice the impact on you when you don't assert your true self. How do you feel afterwards? Resentful, ashamed or tired or whatever. So notice the difficulty being authentic and ask yourself, well, what is the belief that I'm carrying that if I'm authentic, then what?

So in other words, all that noticing, what does that do? Who's the one that's noticing? It's the authentic self. So just by asking those questions, you're strengthening, you're empowering that authentic self. And just going back to that. The heart underneath is teaching the broken heart above. Well, that wholeness is teaching the disconnection. It's always there.

I find that in between those two hearts and in between those two layers, there's almost a layer of guilt and shame. So when we go against our authentic self, we do it because we're scared of whether we feel guilty or we may feel shame or fear. And if we act authentically, we then sometimes feel guilt for acting that way because of how it impacts others or shame and fear. So walk me through the construction of fear and guilt and shame, which seem to be such. Like if you thought about the emotions we all experience most on a daily basis. I mean, let me ask you that, actually. What do you think? What are the emotions that you believe people are experiencing most often, most repetitively, on a daily basis?

I was going to give you an easy answer to the shame guilt. Fair question, but then you threw a curveball.

Sorry, I went off. I'm following my authentic voice.

No, I love curveballs. I just have to think about it.

Yeah, please.

So what are the emotions people experience most often? I think anger, rage and resentment. I think there's a lot more of that than we acknowledge. Not often unacknowledged, experienced, but not acknowledged for fear of consequences. I think also love that we also are often afraid to acknowledge because it's so vulnerable. And we might see, if I want you to love me, but I'm afraid to be vulnerable, then I may try to impress you, which may be the closest thing I can get, so that you will pay attention to me. So that emotions, shame, I think, is very frequent for a lot of people. That has to do with trauma more than anything else. Fear is something that people experience a lot, much more than they can admit to themselves. Joy. People are not so afraid of it. Well, you know what? There might be. Joy has been very difficult for me in my life, and I think some part of. Actually, some part of me used to say, what right do I have to feel joy when there's so much suffering in the world? Now, that's logically a good question, but it's a nonsensical question.

Why?

Because there is a lot of suffering in the world, and there's a lot of joy in the world, and one doesn't negate the other. So for me, it was like, what right do I have to experience joy? When my grandparents died in ashes, I quote this in the myth of normal. My friend and colleague and teacher, Bessel Vanderkolk, psychiatrist who wrote the book the body keeps the score, he said to me once, gabo, you don't have to drag Auschwitz around with you all the time, which means that you don't have to allow, not to forget about Ashwitz, but not to let that control your consciousness, which means you do have the right to feel joy. You do have the right to be happy, even as the world suffers, not because the world suffers, and not ignoring the suffering in the world. But there's no contradiction.

The therapy for Black Girls podcast is the destination for all things mental health, personal development, and all of the small decisions we can make to become the best possible versions of ourselves. Here we have the conversations that help black women dig a little deeper into the most impactful relationships in our lives. Those with our parents, our partners, our children, our friends, and most importantly, ourselves. We chat about things like what to do when a friendship ends, how to know when it's time to break up with your therapist, and how to end the cycle of perfectionism. I'm your host, Dr. Joy Harden Bradford, a licensed psychologist in Atlanta, Georgia. And I can't wait for you to join the conversation. Every Wednesday, listen to the therapy for Black Girls podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Take good care.

Hola, mihail.

There.

This is Wilmer Valderama, executive producer of the new podcast De May. Abuelita. First part of iHeartRadio's Michael Tuda podcast network. Each week, hosts Vic Ortiz and Abuelita Liliana Montenegro will play matchmaker for a group of hopeful romantics who are putting their trust in Abuelita to find them a date.

Your job right now is to get on Abuelita's really good site. Our awelita definitely knows best on date my awalita first three single contestants will vie for a date with one lucky main dater. Except to get their heart, they have to win over awelita. Liliana first. Die, Liliana.

Yes.

We are ready for love. Through speed dating rounds, hilarious games, and Liliana's intuition. One contestant will either be a step closer to getting that bandulse, if you know what I mean, or a step closer to getting that chancleta. Let's see if cheesebas will fly or if these singles will be sent back to the dating apps. Listen to date my hourlita first on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

My name's Laverne Cox. I'm an actress, producer, fashionista, and host of the Laverne Cox show. You may remember my award winning first season. I've been pretty busy, but there's always time to talk to incredible guests about important things.

People like me have been screaming for years, we gotta watch the Supreme Court. What they're doing is wrong. What they're doing is evil. They will take things away. And I can only hope that Dobbs is that, like, pearl harbor moment.

Girl, you and I both know what.

It took to just get through the day in New York City and get.

Home in one piece. And so the fact that we're here and what you've achieved and what you know, that's momentous. It's not just us sitting around complaining about some bills. The only reason that you might think, as Chase said, that we're always miserable is because people are constantly attacking us and we're constantly noticing it.

Listen to the Laverne Cox show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Be sure to subscribe and share.

Let's dive into some of those emotions because, and I love how they were easy answers for you and then the curveball. But I think, as you said, fear is a repetitive daily emotion thought for so many people. A lack of safety, emotionally, mentally, physically, on so many levels, we feel unsafe. How does one process and heal through and with fear? Because it seems to be so consistent.

The way that fear shows up in most people's lives, is in the form of anxiety. See, we are wired for fear. There's a great neuropsychologist, died a few years ago, before his time, Dr. Pancsep, and he identified all these emotional circuits that we share with other mammals, and fear was one of them. We have a circuitry for fear. Good thing we're not afraid. We die out there in nature, but that can become anxiety. So let me tell you a story. I want to show you this bracelet that I'm wearing.

It's beautiful.

It is beautiful. And I never thought I'd ever be wearing a bracelet, but I was given this just shortly after the time that I met you. And this comes from a place called Haidaguai, in Haidaguay's islands in northern British Columbia, where I live. They used to be known as. Well, they used to be known as Haidaguai. Then with the british colonization, they became known as Queen Charlote Islands. That's really funny, because I was speaking in London once, actually a couple of months ago, to an audience of 2100 britishers, and I said, does anybody in this audience know who the hell Queen Charlote was? Nobody knew.

Nobody knew.

Yeah, apparently she was some german princess who married King George, the mad King George, who was king of England when America became independent. Anyway, so the British came. They named it Queen Charlote Islands. All of a sudden, these indigenous people whose ancestors have been living there for something like 13,000 years, all of a sudden they were living on, not on Haida goi anymore, which means land of the people, but they were living in Queen Shalom island. So I was giving a trauma workshop there for Haida people. That's when they gave me this bracelet. And the meaning of the carving set means these words matter. At the end of two days, almost at the very end of the trauma workshop for the Haida people, a woman in her seventy s at least comes up and she said, I used to speak perfect Haida until I was five years old. And then I forgot my language. And even when I've gone back to school as an adult to learn my native language, the words don't stick in my brain. And I said, what happened to you? Well, what happened to her? She went to these residential school, residential schools where the indigenous kids were forced to go, run by the churches mostly.

And she dared speak her native language. And the teacher took a stick and beat her mercilessly in her body and her head and her limbs. Oh, native kids in my own lifetime is when I was a teenager in British Columbia, a four year old Indian. Indian. They're not Indians. Indigenous, canadian, First Nation. Kid spoke their own language. They'd have a pin stuck in her tongue. So they literally. So I said to her, look, you're losing your language. Was your organism protecting you? It was your fear system telling you that if you do that again, you might not survive. Because she hated herself for it. She hated herself. Hated herself for the anxiety. She hated herself because I was so passive. She said. I said that passivity was your organism's only way to protect you, because had you fought back or had you asserted your right to speak your language, much worse would have happened to you. So that fear protected her. But it translates into anxiety, where it's no longer fear of a specific thing. It's just fear of the world. Now, the rate of anxiety. So we have a system for fear, and the greatest danger to a young child is the loss of relationship, because without relationship, we can't survive.

I mean, we're defenseless, we're vulnerable, we're helpless. So the loss of protective adults is the biggest fear that the child has in this society. A lot of parents can't be there for their kids the way they need to be, the way they want to be, because of the stresses, economic, social, racial, political, whatever they're going through. Just the nature of the disconnected culture that we live in. Parents are not there for their kids the way the children need to be. The fear becomes chronic anxiety that we're never safe. And now that becomes part of our sense of self. So what you say, but this lack of emotional safety, what it actually is is that early childhood fear is when a child is afraid, they will ask for help, but when repeatedly, the help is not available, and the adults don't come because they're too busy, too stressed, too traumatized, too preoccupied, too downtrodden, or too propagandized by parenting experts to ignore their kids cries, the child gets the message that there's no safety. So that original fear that's meant to result in a cry for help now becomes chronic anxiety. So fear not dealt with gets ingrained as anxiety.

It's no longer about anything specific. It's just being in the world is a source of fear, which you shouldn't be.

It almost feels like, as you were saying, that what should result in a cry for help externally becomes a perpetual cry internally without a feeling of being able to help yourself.

Exactly. You know that Beatles song, help, help, I need somebody? And not just anybody. And John Lennon sings, and he was a very traumatized child, as you know, whose father left him when he was born and whose mother abandoned him a few years later. And then he sings in his song. When I was younger, so much younger than today, I never needed anybody's help in any way. But now those days are gone I'm not so self assured, so I open the door, please help me. No, that's not the way it was when he was younger, so much younger than today. He needed everybody's help in every way. But because the help wasn't available, he had to shut himself down and make himself sort of like a self created, self sufficient person. And only later on, as they realized, you know what? I actually do need help. But he was never that person who didn't need help. He just believed they didn't need help. Why did believe that as an adaptation? Because the help wasn't there. So, so many of us. One of the biggest things that people are afraid to do is to ask for help.

When I give workshops and I myself is my automatic reaction when somebody offers help. Oh, no, it's okay. I'm fine. Even though the help would be very welcome.

Yeah. How do you find that? Because I feel so many people today have someone in their life who's closed off from help. It might be your partner, it might be a child, it might be a parent. We all have someone in our life who, in our limited capacity, but a little bit of awakening, we can notice that someone is really closed and won't receive help.

Yeah.

How do you help someone who is rejecting help or not accepting that they may need it because of the position they've experienced? Based on what you just said, I.

Myself used to believe I was one of these people. I actually used to believe. Can you believe this? I used to believe that everybody else could be stressed, but I couldn't be.

I used to feel like that, too.

I used to believe that I can help everybody, but I don't need to help myself.

There used to be a time when I used to.

So how do you help somebody that you help them? By accepting that that's how it is for them right now and not trying to push your help on them. Because when you try and push help, you're just going to get resistance. So if you can handle it, you can be around them and be open, but not insist, or try and prove to them that they need help. Life will teach them. When I meditate these days, I do the compassion meditation which says that may I face and overcome all of life's inevitable setbacks and challenges and failures with patience, understanding, strength and determination. And may I rise above them with compassion and morality and integrity and wisdom and mindfulness. If we can stare on people compassionately without trying to prove to them that they need something that they don't believe they need, then at some point, life will bring a challenge that may prove to them that, yeah, they need help. And if you're still around open, then they'll reach out to you. If you try and convince them, bring them over, prove it to them, force it on them. And I, believe me, I've done that.

I've done it with my own family. I've done it with others. You just invite resistance. So the best way to help people is not to help unless the help is invited.

And that's almost what most of us don't want to hear, because we want to. Again, going back to our earlier point, we want to fix and solve and make everything nice and perfect right now.

Yeah.

And I guess that is also a form of trauma. There's something there as to why we want that.

And when I write about people who are prone for chronic illness, it's often people like autoimmune disease, for example. This is not just my own finding. Other researchers have found this as well, that there are people who tend to ignore their own emotional needs and are compulsory concerned with the emotional needs of others. And they tend to believe that in the metanormal, I quote, an obituary. And obituaries are really interesting to me because they often highlight as laudable qualities the very things that I think contributed to a person's death.

Let's talk about those.

Yeah. There was a book written by an australian nurse twelve years ago now called the top five regrets of dying people. And she, like I, used to work in palliative care, working with dying people, as you mentioned in your introduction. And for seven years, I was the medical coordinator of a big palliative care and the dying people at Vancouver hospital. And this nurse, also palliative care health worker, wrote this book, the top regrets of people who died before that time. You know what it is? That they weren't themselves. That they spent their whole life trying to please others. That's the top regret. Now, this obituary, you have to believe that I'm not making this up. This is a physician in Canada who died age 72 of cancer. And the obituary says, sydney and his mother had an incredibly special relationship, a bond that was apparent in all aspects of their lives until her death. As a married man with young children, Sydney would have dinner with his parents every day. Then he would go home as his wife Roslyn and their three children waited for him with yet another dinner to eat and to enjoy.

Not wanting to disappoint either woman in his life. Sydney kept eating two dinners a day for years. Until gradual weight gain began to raise suspicions. This man suffered from two fatal beliefs. And when I say fatal, I mean fatal. One is that he was responsible for other people feel. And the other is that he was never disappoint anybody. Now, so many of us go through life like, no, actually, I'm not responsible for how you feel. I'm responsible for how I act, for how I speak, what I do and what I say. I'm not responsible for how you feel in response. When you were in Vancouver and you contacted me. And if I hadn't feel like seeing you, but hadn't slept all night, say, because I was off with some other duty or looking after somebody. And if I had said yes and still come met you for coffee. Because I had fear of disappointing you. And because I didn't want you to feel disappointed. What would that have meant for me? It would have meant for me more fatigue. And probably I would have resented the hell out of you. Even though I was pretending to be, thank God.

And you, on the other hand, if I said no. If I was authentic, and I said, look, jerry, I'm sorry. So glad you're in town. But I was up all night. Now, if you had felt hurt and perceived yourself as rejected by me, that's not on me. That's your interpretation of my behavior. Nothing to do with me. I just said what was true for me. But that fear of disappointment. Had I been afraid to disappoint you? Because I don't want to lose your friendship. And I don't want to lose your friendship. But if I believe that if I'm authentic, I'm going to lose Jace friendship. That's going to keep me inauthentic. And you'll never know me. And even when you like me, there's still going to be a fear in me. What if he really knew me? So it doesn't even work. But we're so afraid of disappointing others.

And then one day, I may feel we have an inauthentic friendship. Because I can notice that you're not being fully yourself. And then I can even feel that way. You can let me down. Even by trying to be everything I wanted you to be. That's what I so find so fascinating in life. Is that you can let someone down. Even after becoming everything you thought they wanted you to be.

Well, exactly. Well, go back to that example of coffee. If I said to you, Jerry, I'm sorry, I can't do it today, which honors you more? If I believe that you're so weak and vulnerable that you can't handle. No. Or if I honor you by telling the truth, which shows you more respect?

Definitely.

So that I can be everything you want me to be and still not honor you.

Yes. It's fascinating how we can be so opposite in our perceptions and viewpoints. And a big part of that comes also, we talked about fear, but I wanted to talk about guilt because.

Oh, yeah, guilt, guilt. What do you want to say about guilt?

No. Well, I want to hear from you about guilt. But when I think of guilt, I think it's such a strong driver for so many actions in the world today.

It is.

We're guilty of something in the past, and therefore we do something strange in the future or the present that we wouldn't have done. We feel guilty right now, and that makes us say something that we don't mean or something that we.

Exactly.

How do we untrap ourselves from the trappings of guilt?

Great. Well, let me tell you a. You know, in the Bible, in the Old Testament, Moses is a hebrew boy born at a time when the pharaoh's soothsayers declare that some hebrew male born around this time will rise up and challenge the pharaoh. So they decide to kill all the hebrew newborns by throwing them into the Nile river. But Moses'mother, rather than throws the boy into the river, but in a wicker basket. And so Moses flows down that river, and he gets plucked out of the water by the pharaoh's daughter, who adopts him. So this hebrew infant is adopted into the royal court, treated like a prince. That's why Walt Disney could make a film called Prince of Know. All this happened just so Walt Disney could make a film. In any case, there's an extra biblical legend. It's not in the Bible, but it's ancient legend. And you think, what the heck is this guy talking about? I just asked him about guilt, and he's talking about, no, I love this.

This is my favorite type of answer, is when I'm curious, and I'm following because I don't know where you're going.

Okay, great. But believe me, I'm going to come back to it.

I trust you.

So the legend is that Moses is a toddler, and the pharaoh's soothsayers divine that he might be a danger, which eventually he proves to be. So they decide to put him to a test they put in front of him two sparkling objects. Now, I don't know if you remember, but in the Bible, Moses is a speech impediment, and it's his brother Aaron who has to do the speaking for him. How does he get the speech impediment? Well, the pharaoh suitsayers say, well, this boy needs to be examined. And they decide to put him to a test, and they put in front of him two sparkling objects. One of them is a royal diamond of Egypt, and the other is a sparkling, glowing ember of coal. Now, if Moses reaches for the royal diamond, it means he's got oil, ambition, and he needs to be killed. So there's this little toddler delightedly looking at these two scintillating objects, and his hand starts moving towards the diamond, at which point, standing behind him is Gabriel. Gabriel, which is the hebrew version of my name, gabor, by the way, and grabs his hand and takes it away from the diamond and puts it to the coal.

Now, Moses, finishing the motion that kids will do, picks up the coal, puts it to his mouth and burns his lips, and that's how he develops a speech impediment. Now here's my question to you. Is the angel Moses'friend? Or enemy?

Hey, it's Debbie Brown and my podcast, deeply well is a soft place to land on your wellness journey. I hold conscious conversations with leaders and radical healers in wellness and mental health around topics that are meant to expand and support you on your journey, from guided meditations to deep conversations with some of the world's most gifted experts in self care, trauma, psychology, spirituality, astrology, and even intimacy. Here is where you'll pick up the tools to live as your highest self, make better choices, heal, and have more joy. My work is rooted in advanced meditation, metaphysics, spiritual psychology, energy healing, and traumainformed practices. I believe that the more we heal and grow within ourselves, the more we are able to bring our creativity to life and live our purpose, which leads to community, impact and higher consciousness for all beings. Deeply well with Debbie Brown is your soft place to land, to work on yourself without judgment, to heal, to learn, to grow, to become who you deserve to be. Deeply well is available now on the iHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Big love. Namaste.

Something about Mary Poppins.

Something about Mary Poppins.

Exactly. Oh man, this is fun.

I'm AJ Jacobs and I am an author and a journalist, and I tend to get obsessed with stuff, and my current obsession is puzzles, and that has given birth to my new podcast, the puzzler. Dressing. Dressing.

French dressing.

Exactly.

That's good.

We are living in the golden age of puzzles. And now you can get your daily puzzle nuggets delivered straight to your ears for ten minutes or less every day on the puzzler. Short and sweet.

I thought to myself, I bet I know what this is. And now I definitely know what this is.

This is so weird.

This is fun. Let's try this one.

Listen to the puzzler every day on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

That's awful.

And I should have seen it coming.

He's trying to be a friend, but he hurt him.

Had to hurt him to save his life, right? He was a friend. Guilt is that kind of a friend. Okay. Guilt comes along in early childhood, not because you did anything wrong, but because you sense that whatever you did displeased your parents, and you can't afford to do that. So there needs to be an internal mechanism that keeps you close to your parents that says, for example, if you're authentic and you're sure your anger, you won't be accepted, there better be an internal mechanism to keep you on track. So guilt comes along as this friend that says, no, take your hand away from where you want to put it. You have to stifle your real desires. So guilt comes along to maintain a relationship, not because you did anything wrong, because a two year old, three year old, they can't do anything wrong. By definition. They may do things that are not good and they need to be taught not to do it, but it's not wrong. There's no guilt there. There's no, I'm going to do something evil here. So guilt is totally not appropriate. And there's ways of teaching children without guilt, but guilt comes along to keep you in line.

Now, is that your friend or your enemy? It's your friend, but it's hurting you. The problem with these early friends, and I call them, sometimes people don't like this word, but I say, call them stupid friends. The stupidity comes in the fact they don't realize that you're an adult. You can make your own decisions now and look after yourself. You don't need to be controlled by their advice. That was meant for a two year old. So that's really. They're just not educable. So when I say to people these days, now, most people who feel guilty when they act a little bit on their own behalf, I say to them, for God's sakes, have a party, celebrate. I've done something for myself. Call your friends. Have a celebration that you were so quote unquote selfish, like Cheryl Crowe said. All these voices that always told her that she has to ignore herself and serve others, now she doesn't listen to them anymore. That's the guilt. So recognize the guilt. Say hello to it. Thank it. Now, is there such a thing as healthy remorse? Yeah. If I promise to meet you for coffee and I don't show up because I find something more pleasurable to do, I should feel some remorse.

So remorse is about specific. That's healthy remorse. If I break my word, if I hurt somebody where I should feel remorse, but that's not a long term thing. It's not the chronic guilt that you're talking about. That's nothing. What happened a long time ago and now it limits me or controls me. It's a healthy remorse for some specific thing that's different from guilt. Guilt is this old friend that's along outlived their usefulness.

And the challenge is that we still treat it like a today friend.

Exactly.

It's almost like we're so scared of breaking that dependence as well, we are thinking, well, I feel guilty that I'm not around, so I'll stay around this individual, this group of people, whatever it may be. But there's a part of me that wants to depend on them as well. And I don't want to break free completely as well, because I don't even know what that looks like. Like you're saying as an adult, you can take care of yourself, you can walk your own path, but you're actually scared of doing that. And so you accept the pain of guilt because it allows for dependence.

Well, that's a good point. And I often say to people, you're going to have pain one way to the other.

Yes.

Which pain would you like? Because sometimes in life, there's no pain free options. You can have the pain of suppressing yourself for the sake of being accepted, or you can have the pain sometimes of being yourself and not being accepted. You can have pain one way or the other. Now, I have my own bias that the pain of not being ourselves ultimately is by far the greater and more chronic pain, and that the pain, the short term pain of being ourselves, brings liberation and genuine independence, which means I can have genuinely independent relationships with other people who are willing to accept me as independent. But in the short term, which pain do you want? There's no pain free know?

Yeah, for sure. That you reminded me of this beautiful idea that Nat Han shares, that there's familiar pain and unfamiliar pain. And these are our two choices. And the challenge is we're so scared of unfamiliar pain that we would rather choose familiar pain and go through the same pain because we know how it's going to feel.

Exactly.

And we think, at least I'm aware, at least I am conscious of how bad it can get.

Exactly.

But hearing you speak, being independent or being dependent, both has pain. Yeah, but the pain of dependence far outweighs the pain of independence.

Well, just put a bit of a nuance in mean. Tick Nadan. Also talk about inter being how we all inter are. So in a certain sense we do depend on each know and that's okay. The question is, do we depend on each other authentically or inauthentically? The fact that I'm independent doesn't mean that I'm not going to reach out for help or that I won't offer it, but it does mean that I will be honest with you and I won't pretend to be somebody else that I'm not so that you'll accept me. So there's interesting word difference between two phrases that sound very familiar. One is called individualism and the other is called individuation. Now, rugged individualism is I don't need anybody and it's me against the world. And this is the north american capitalist ideal. Well, human beings never would have evolved had we been those rugged individualists. The rugged individuals wouldn't last more than one generation. But individuated means that we can be ourselves, truly ourselves, in genuine relationship with others, not rugged individualists. I mean, the most boring people are rugged individualists because they all look the same. So you can be individuated and be truly yourself and still belong and still vulnerably desire human contact.

Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I think there's a lot of rhetoric around, well, don't care what anyone else thinks and it doesn't matter. And you just do your own thing. And that's almost a bitter response as well because we do have to care what people think. If we lived in a world where you didn't care what anyone thought, it wouldn't be that healthy because we would do all sorts of obscene, horrific things.

I trace it differently.

I'm intrigued. Yeah, I'm intrigued.

Yeah. I don't care what anybody thinks, but I do care what I do and how it affects other. So there's another spiritual teacher, Guna Rotana. He wrote a book called mindfulness in plain English, which I've just been working through recently. And he's talking about a higher morality that comes from being truly yourselves and in touch. And he says, well, you don't need rules anymore because it's like St. Augustine said, love and do what you will. So if you actually love the world, you don't have to give yourself rules because that love will dictate how you act towards other people. I can't worry about what other people think. Look, if I worried about what other people think, I would not have written any of my books. Because each of my books challenge the reigning orthodoxy in, say, medicine, or whether it's around attention deficit or stress and disease or addictions. And every time I write a book, I'm saying something that I'm not saying that I invented it, but that I've come to understand and fervently believe and want to communicate. But I can't worry about what other people think. Or when I make a political statement, I'm responsible for what I say, how I say it, but not what other people think about it.

But that doesn't mean that I can ignore other people's experience. So as long as my intention is purely to speak a truth, and I do so with integrity, I can't worry about what other people think. I can't. But that doesn't mean I'm going to go around just doing terrible things, because I don't care what you think, as long as I'm convinced that what I do, if I've done that kind of inventory, and I haven't always, but if I do an inventory about, well, what is my intention here?

Is there a hierarchy of pain or hierarchy of trauma?

What do you mean by hierarchy?

I feel like people feel like, well, this trauma is worse than this trauma and this trauma is better than this one. We often hear about that as a conversation. Is that accurate?

So one could say so, because if you look at a child who say, sexually abused, as opposed to a child whose parents just can't honor and accept and validate their emotions, well, my God, you're talking about two different set of experiences. So that there's certainly horrific things happen to some people to wound them, and other people suffer wounds in a very different way. But the question is, is it useful to make that distinction? It's one thing to recognize it, but let's say you were my four year old. You come to me and you say, dad, I'm afraid of so and so. And I say, snap out of it. Only cards are afraid and get out of here. Take care of yourself. And then you went to your mom. I tried to talk to daddy, but would it be helpful for your mother to say, oh, snap out of it? Think of all the kids that are being sexually abused. Think of all the starving kids. Think all the kids that are being bombed. What are you complaining about? Would that be helpful?

No.

So that it's not a helpful game to play. I don't compare people's traumas. Trauma simply means a wound, and people are wounded in all kinds of ways. When I try to help people, the least helpful thing I can do is to tell them that somebody else's trauma is much worse than mine or much worse than yours. So objectively, yes, practically, it's not a helpful distinction. People are wounded and you have to tend to the wound, whatever it is. If you came to me with a cut on your arm and you asked me to stitch it up, it wouldn't be helpful for me to tell you that, oh, what are you worried about? There's people with broken arms out there or people with broken. So, no, it's not a helpful thing to engage in, even though there's truth in it.

Yeah. What's really fascinating, every time I speak to you, girlboy, is that there's such nuance, subtlety, and there's a quote that I want to share with you to get your thoughts on. I want to bring it up here.

Yeah.

So this quote is from F. Scott Fitzgerald, who famously wrote, the test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless, yet be determined to make them otherwise.

Absolutely. So that's brilliant. And what Fitzgerald is talking about there is what is called integrative intelligence. And integrative intelligence is when you can say, on the one hand, on the other hand, both things can be true, and I need to somehow come to some conclusion about them without rejecting the one truth or the other. Now, little kids are totally incapable of integrative intelligence. So a three year old would either say, I hate you, daddy, or, I love you, daddy, but they can't say, I love you, daddy, but I'm very angry with you, which is really what's going on. It's either love or hate. So integrative thinking is a capacity of intellectual and actually emotional maturation. A lot of people are completely incapable of it. It's one or the other. You talk about the deadness of the heart and the moral apathy. And all my life since, I've been conscious of the horrors, including and beginning with the Holocaust, that nearly killed me and killed my grandparents, nearly killed my parents. And I, when I became conscious of that at age eleven, what happened was that my parents had a book on a high shelf they didn't want me to read.

And when I was eleven, I climbed up on a chair and it was a book called the scourge of the Swastika. And it was the first book about the nazi horrors. And I saw photographs and I read the story. And for years, Jay, afterwards, literally every day, my head would be dizzy. I'd spin, say, how is this possible? How is our heart not broken every day? I'm asking you now because I'm wrestling with this question. I suppose I have an intellectual answer, or more to the point, maybe along the lines of what Shigel says, how can our heart be broken and not be broken at the same time? Because I think both are necessary.

Yeah. And I find everything all across the world that occurs. I feel like people's hearts are broken, but they break an ache for different things. And I think that that's why the words of Fitzgerald resonate so strongly with me. Because just to repeat those last two lines, one should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless, yet be determined to make them otherwise. And what you're saying, it's how I was trained in the monastery as well. The goal was always, how can you be a helper? How can you be a server? How can you be useful? How can you help heal? Like, that's what you look for in moments of tragedy, whatever they may be. And I just think that not much unites us on the heart level as equals across the world. I don't think there's many things that we look to globally as the human race, as we were once referred to or called to. That creates a sense of connectivity and there's genuine fear that makes us feel, well, if my heart breaks for this, then what will happen to my heart?

But the grief might be too much to bear.

Yeah. Or not that. I mean, more so that, well, if my heart breaks for this event, some part of it is, yes, there's too much to think about, for sure. It's overwhelming. And then the other side is, well, if it breaks for this, then is it allowed to break for that as well? This idea of holding two opposing ideas seems to be such a need in the world, just generally. Even the belief of, I have to work on my health, but I'm happy I'm alive. These are two opposing ideas. We're not looking at it from I'm unhealthy or I'm healthy.

Well, you know what's interesting there is that when I was working in palliative care, sometimes people would say to me, and this is amazing. I don't recommend it, but they'd say they'd be dying. They'd actually be dying. They'd have a couple of weeks left. They'd say, doc, I don't know to how explain this exactly, but this disease is the best thing that ever happened to me. I don't wish it on anybody. But what were they talking about? Now, there's a guy, a quote in the myth of normal, who wrote a book called blessed with a brain tumor. Blessed with a brain tumor. Young australian guy who was diagnosed with a brain tumor, did have surgery, did accept treatment. He also had a spiritual transformation, has lived longer than his prognosis. I don't know what his current status is, but wrote a book called blessed with the brain tumor. And by the way, he developed a brain tumor at exactly the same spot that he used to point at with an imaginary gun to shoot himself in the head when he was thinking of suicide. I said, what do you mean, blessed with the brain tumor?

And he said, well, knowing that I'm going to die or that I might, means that every moment is precious. He says, that means that when I'm talking to you or anybody else, I'm fully aware that this may be the last conversation we'll ever have. That means that every moment is absolutely precious. I've never been so engaged with life, and that's what people meant. And so that even a disease that was going to take their lives and why? Because the disease taught them to be authentic for the first time in their lives. And they found out that was much more precious than anything else. That's not a bargain I'd recommend to anybody.

Totally. Yeah.

I'm just telling you that I've witnessed it, and it's quite astonishing how many people do find authenticity. To go back to our previous theme, they value that over anything else, over even longevity. Now, most of us would probably run the other way. Again, I'm not recommending it. I'm just saying I've seen it.

Yeah, but it's always those opposing ideas, that feeling of I'm good and I want to be better. Yeah, I'm a good husband or a good dad or a good mom or I'm a good whatever. At the same time, I'm not good enough, whatever it may be. Not that that's negative, but the idea of I know, I can do more and I want to do more. So there's such a need for this dichotomy almost to be held.

Well, is there?

Well, the ability to hold those two opposing ideas is needed. Right. Because I don't want to live in a world where I think I'm perfectly healthy. Everything's amazing, because then I may miss certain challenges and I also don't want to live in the other world of, oh my God, everything's falling apart and I'm dying every second of the day.

But what if we just looked at it in a unitary way? Then it's a matter of growth, that I'm not as fully grown as I might be. But there's nothing wrong. Yes, I'll be 80 and we talk about.

You said 80.

80, yeah, I know, it's a big number.

You're doing great. That's amazing.

Well, do the numbers. I was born in 44.

Yeah, I always forget, I forget when I'm with you.

Yeah. There's this expression, I've been thinking about this recently, this expression growing older. So we could just say being older or becoming older or getting older, but we say growing older now that's an interesting phrase, isn't it? Because actually as we get older we shrink. So what are we talking about, growing older? Well, because growth being an emotional and spiritual process that continues, that can continue forever. So for me it's not a matter of I'm good, but I can be better. It's a question of can I continue to grow? Not whether there's anything wrong now, but can I continue to grow? Which is really the essence of life. As long as there's life, there's growth, isn't there? And the growth may be at some point purely physical, at some point physically there might even be contraction, but spiritually and emotionally there can always be growth. So it's rather than a dichotomy, it's more like a unitary process.

I do appreciate that. I do feel that you just sparked something for me. You were giving this example, this story just told about how the gentleman, when he thought he was going to commit suicide, he would hold his almost like a gun to his head. And that's the place he developed the trauma.

Yeah, the tumor.

How does trauma intercept the body in that way that feels such like a physical example of that?

I can give you other example.

Yeah.

When I was working in palliative care, I was looking after a young woman, she was 38 with ALS, amyotrophic glider sclerosis, which is a disease in the nervous system. You basically get paralyzed. The muscles that or the nerves that activate your muscles, you just die. They harden. That's what sclerosis means. So they become rigid and they become unable to move. This woman, she was a dancer, a beautiful woman. And we talked a lot in her last weeks. She told me that all her life she used to have this dream of being buried alive. Boxed in, unable to breathe, unable to move. She was a dancer. And she began to notice that on the dance floor, she couldn't execute the movements anymore. Something was wrong. So she was diagnosed with ALS, and she went to the office of the ALS Society. And on the wall there was a poster that said, having AlS is like being buried alive.

Wow.

The cellist Jacqueline Dupree was a great, classic british classical cellist. Died in her 40s. She was a big international rocket star in the classical music world. She died of Ms, multiple sclerosis. She couldn't move anymore. By the time she was in her mid 20s, she couldn't play the cello anymore. When she was eight years old, she said to her sister Hillary, don't tell her mummy this, but when I grow up, I won't be able to move or walk. Now all of these people, these three people, the guy with the brain tumor, the woman with the ls, Jacqueline Dupre, they'd been deeply traumatized and childhood, I'm not going to go into how, but they had been. That woman's dream that she couldn't move. Her walk was literally an expression over emotional experience in her family of origin. In her deathbed, nobody came to see her from her family. She was all alone, like she had been all her life. She couldn't be herself. She couldn't speak or move or get enough air to be herself. So that dream was metaphoric to start with, then became a physical reality. Now, how does the metaphor or how does the emotion, how does the trauma translate into physical reality?

That has to do with the scientific little secret. Don't tell any doctors this because they might not know what to do with it, but, well, some of them don't. They're not taught in medical school. Mind and body are inseparable. Our emotions, our nervous system, our emotional system, in our brains and our bodies, our nervous system, our hormonal apparatus and our immune system are actually one system, all serving survival and growth and reproduction. So they're not separate. Even to say that they're connected is a bit false, because it's one.

Yes.

Which means that what happens emotionally can have a significant impact on the nervous system, on the gut, on the heart in an immune system and on our hormones, just obviously. So without going into the mechanisms of how trauma affects. But trauma can affect genetic functioning, how chromosomes function, trauma can affect our immune system, actually. For example, a study that I quote, women with severe post traumatic stress disorder have doubled the risk of ovarian cancer, according to a Harvard study a few years ago. Well, but that means that the severe emotions endured by the woman with PTSD can declare themselves in a form of malignancy because they affect the immune system. And the milder the symptoms, the less the risk of ovarian cancer. So mind and body being one unit, obviously, our emotional lives and emotional traumas and wounds can show up in our physiology, which is why autoimmune diseases are much more common amongst racialized women, both in Canada and the US, because they're hurt a lot more as women and as racialized people. So it's just all one thing. And again, is that a new finding or is that something, or is that ancient wisdom?

And it's both. It's both modern science, not taught in medical schools for reasons that are interesting but rather distressing. And it's ancient wisdom as well. It's all one.

And with that approach, I mean, we can't minimize the number of steps and the uniqueness of those. But the hope is that people can work medically and mentally to be able to release that trauma.

I have photographs on my cell phone, on my computer of a woman that I met five years ago. I gave a talk in London on this subject of mind body unity and how stress and trauma can lead to Autoimmune disease. And autoimmune disease is where the immune system attacks the body itself. And this woman sent me photographs a year ago. Now, when I met her, she'd been diagnosed with autoimmune disease called systemic lupus, which has got a typical presentation of what's called a butterfly rash. So her face is red, like here, like the wings of a butterfly, with the body of the butterfly as a red rash over and over. It's called a butterfly rash. It's typical of that disease. And she sent me a picture of her fingers when she was diagnosed. They were like yellow as wax because the blood supply had been constricted. She was told that, you got this disease, we don't know what causes it, can't cure. It probably will get worse and you'll be on medication for rest of your life. I could send these photographs. You could actually show them, because she's given me permission. She sent me pictures a year ago face totally beautiful, pink as anything.

No rash. Fingers are as pink as mine. Yours. No medication, no treatment. She just dealt with the emotional part of it. All her life, she had suppressed herself just along the lines I've been talking about. She dealt with her trauma. She's become fully, authentically, and vigorously herself. The disease is gone, doctors would say, or some doctors say, well, that's just an anecdote. Yeah, it's an anecdote, but has to be a true anecdote. I pay attention to anecdotes. Not only that, this has been studied systematically by others, and there are people who, once they deal with the emotional side of things and take charge of their lives, they recover from diseases that are supposed to have been hopeless. And if you just look at the example of Stephen Hawking, the great physicist who was diagnosed with ALS at age 20, he lived another 55 years. Now, the disease progressed, but he outlived this prognosis by a good half a century. Folks, I hate to tell you this. We doctors don't know everything, and especially we don't fully understand, I should say, as a profession, the wondrous workings of mind and body and the spirit and how they all interact.

So when you look at the indigenous healing practices, like the north american natives, they got this medicine wheel, the four quadrants, which is the physical and the mental, which means also the emotional and the social and the spiritual. And those four quadrants have to be imbalanced for us to be healthy. Now, they didn't have the science we do, and they didn't have the amazing achievements of western medicine, which are truly miraculous. But they did have a wisdom that if only we adopted and combined it with the incredible achievements of western medicine, boy, what a health system we could possibly have.

That's definitely what you're helping try and build for the future. And all of our platforms are dedicated to that. Hopefully, we can get to a place for that integrative, holistic viewpoint.

And there are more and more physicians practicing that way. There are people, functional medicine and integrated medicine, not as holistic as I'd like them to be, but far more holistic than mainstream medicine. And these are medically trained physicians, like I was. So there's not, like some fly by night alternative weirdo cult. I mean, these are just doctors who, like myself, at some point, came to terms with the limitations of their education and needed to infuse some more ancient wisdom into how they practice the arts of healing.

Gabo, I'd love to end with, I'd love to hear from you what your wish your prayer, your hope, however you'd like to word it, for humanity is right now, today, at this time. If there's some words that come from.

Your heart, if we could just wake up to our possibilities. You know the famous story of the Budha, where he's walking along the road and somebody sees him with his radiant face and confident gate, and he says, who are you, a God? And the Buddha says, no, I'm awake. And if only we could be awake to our possibilities, like in every conflict, on the deepest human level. It's so unnecessary. We could actually be a human race together. We could be that. We don't have to hurt ourselves. We don't have to hurt others. We don't have to take from them, demand from them. We could be. This is actually possible for all of us, and it's possible for all of us as individuals and for all of us as creatures. Let's just wake up to our possibilities.

It's beautiful. Gabba, thank you so much again for your time, your energy, your presence, and everyone who's been listening or watching at home. If you don't already, please do grab a copy of the book myth of normal, because our first and second conversations were very different. And I guide you towards the book for the deeper resources. The step by step guide. What I try and avoid doing in these interviews is minimizing the amount of work it takes or oversimplifying what Gabor's beautiful work does in his deep books, because I believe he and everyone else would want you to take those steps. So I wish you all the best in your journey of trauma, illness, and healing. And, Gabor, I thank you for your work and your contributions today as well, and forever to humanity.

Well, it's always so peaceful to be with you, and believe me, these days I enjoy an oasis of peace. So thank you so much.

Thank you so much. Thank you, Gabor. Thank you. If you love this episode, you'll love my interview with Dr. Gabor mate on understanding your trauma and how to heal emotional wounds, to start moving on from the past.

Everything in nature grows only where it's vulnerable. So a tree doesn't grow where it's hard and thick, does it? It goes where it's soft and green and vulnerable.

Hello, this is Laverne Cox. I'm an actress, producer, and host of the Laverne Cox show. Do you like your tea with lemon or honey? History making Broadway performer Alex Newell. When I sing, the Holy Ghost shows up. That's my ministry, and I know that well, about me. That's the tea, honey? Whoever it is, you can bet we get into it. My guest and I, we go there every single time. I can't help it. Listen to the Laverne Cox show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your dressing.

Dressing?

Oh, french dressing.

Exactly.

Oh, that's good.

I'm AJ Jacobs, and my current obsession is puzzles, and that has given birth to my new podcast, the Puzzler.

Something about Mary Poppins.

Exactly.

This is fun.

You can get your daily puzzle nuggets delivered straight to your ears. Listen to the puzzler every day on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.