Latest / Lucid Interval Podcast / Chinese Medicine, Trauma-Informed Meditation, and the Psychology of GRACE - Dodge Rea, Psy.D
Transcript
- Andrew Heacock: So how is kung fu and clinical psychology alike? Dodge Rea: Man, that's a ringer of a question right off right from the jump. Well, I practice a form of wing chun, a it's known as ying wing wing chun. N G which is a particularly soft form. And it has a lot of of yielding principles in it, sticking and yielding, which are you know come out of the Tai Chi tradition, which I also practiced for much longer than Kung Fu. And there's a way in which when I'm at my very best as a therapist, I'm not doing all the things that in our form of kung fu we would consider mistakes. One of them is to imagine that I'm safer going backward away from this person than forward toward them. In in Wing Chun you're actually safer making contact and then sticking. And that doesn't mean grabbing. It can mean literally just sticking even with the back of your hand, but making sure you at all times are touching this this one whose you're needing to grapple with in some way. And it involves a lot of that that kind of sticking is very, very soft. and so instead of trying to control the other, manage them, defend, block with heavy, you know, karate like strikes like this, we're much more likely to block with something soft and counterattack at the same time. So as soon as you've made contact, you're redirecting their strike and you're coming at them in one simultaneous movement. They call that full cycle movement. And I think that's like the best of psychology because when I'm at my best, I meet the person where they are and not where I want to be. And instead of taking big clumsy performative technical actions like, well, you're just thinking about this wrong, let's think a better thought and you'll have a better feeling, which has some truth to it. Like karate, it works. but that's not how kung fu works. And it's at its best it's softer. I meet them where they are. And Especially in the Tai Chi world, they would say you never really want to make more than about seven ounces of pressure on somebody. So your timing is essential and you need to stick to them, yield, and then just when they're most hopelessly off balance, give them a little nudge and it takes very little force. so am I answering your question? Are you getting kind of a sense for like ha ha what that looks like? Andrew Heacock: Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. I love I just kind of wanted to see what you did with with some metaphor. Dodge Rea: Yeah. Andrew Heacock: and and we just had a session this morning that we're gonna talk about shortly on the show. So for anybody who's listening, we're gonna talk through something that Dodge and I have done this morning that was extraordinary. and I'm grateful for the opportunity for us to to kind of unpack it here. but from having just sat with you for a few hours this morning, what you just described is exactly your approach. It's soft. like a light touch and there's not not a whole lot of doing. But when you were describing just some some of the principles of Wing Chun, which I I think was it Jackie Chan that was no no Bruce Lee that was Wing Chun master or how did that feel? Yeah. Okay. Ibmon. Ibmon. Okay, yeah. so Dodge Rea: He came out of Wing Chun initially, yeah, and then he kind of created his own art form. But Yipmon would be, you know, the Yipmon series of yeah, he that's classic stuff, yeah. Andrew Heacock: I I kept thinking of the word flow and was thinking of like water and fluidity and Winshun's a Chinese art, correct? ordinarily when I think of Chinese, any kind of Chinese philosophy or art, I think of Taoism and which is like the philosophy of flow. Has that been like an influence on can you can just kind of place where these Dodge Rea: Huge. Andrew Heacock: some of these principles like you mentioned, Qigong and Tai Chi and all of that? I mean, where do they where does all this kind of fit together in Chinese philosophy? Dodge Rea: I don't know that I can speak to it in the most general sense of Chinese philosophy, but I might be able to get close. I'm much more practitioner than scholar in my natural way, but I'm insatiably curious, so I learned things along the way too and can say a bit about them. Taoism is you know, comes I think is really essentially named for the Tao Te Ching. a piece of text that came out something around the time of Buddha. I think they're th they're guessing 2700 years ago or so. And it was an alternative art in or philosophy in in Chinese culture to Confucianism. And Confucianism is much more linear and rule based, if this then that. We know this because of that. Taoism is the exact opposite. It's highly paradoxical. And the Tao De Qing reads like poetry. you can spend a year and a half on one tiny little stanza just trying to understand like what is he really saying there, right? Taoism works it comes much more out of the energetics of an old master who, as myth would have it, was trying to leave the country and a guard at the border said We know what you know, like you can't leave until you write it down. If you have to go, you can, but you have to write this down first. And so he sat down and wrote this exquisite little book that is the very most translated book in the whole world next to the Bible. so Taoism is really a way of understanding like how things work. Like what is the natural flow of life itself. The Tao is kind of it's like the great flow of life energy. And to me, all of the best parts of Chinese philosophy fit that. I don't get Confucianism very well, but five element theory is absolutely exquisite. It's so beautiful. we can talk about that. But they look at how does energy flow through the body, through the room, through the seasons, through architecture, through kind of all of the natural cycles of the relationship between yin and yang between sinking, contracting, darkening, softening energy and brightening, rising, expressive lifting energy. And the universe is constantly in this dynamic. in a kind of tension but also a kind of beautiful dance between the two. And so Taoism and five element theory and ultimately when done well, Tai Chi Chuan and Kung Fu and Qigong and Negong are all ways of working with that energy in in hopefully skillful, useful ways. Andrew Heacock: Hey guys, if you've made it this far, please subscribe to our channel on YouTube. It's free and it helps us bring you more conversations with great guests like this. Now, back to the show. I'm infinitely fascinated by people who synthesize what I would say the Western and Eastern thought, especially when it comes to the study of the mind, or you could also say old and new. Dodge Rea: Yeah. Andrew Heacock: and you you, you know, have one foot squarely in each, assuming that it's a dual thing. can you tell us how that came to be? Dodge Rea: I can try. I if I mean if I really gave you the most honest answer, I think I walked in with it. Like I have always had a weird sense of both. My son did too. just as an example for him, strangely, when he began to learn Mandarin, he from literally day one spoke without an accent. And the his teacher kept asking, No, when have you lived in China? and he kept saying, I don't know what you mean. I think we have got some extraordinary ways in which we know things before we can know them. And I think I walked in with something like that too, though not an ear for Mandarin. the first awareness I ever had of Chinese philosophy beginning to make a difference came when I locked myself out of my apartment in graduate school and my roommate wasn't gonna come home for a few hours, so I went down to a Barnes and Noble. back when bookstores were really a thing. And somebody was giving a wonderful talk on Chinese medicine. He was a Chinese medical doctor himself and was talking about his practice. And the longer I listened, the more mesmerized I got. The idea that this medicine should meet you where you are to such a degree that any herbal concoction or or needle arrangement they may make as an intervention, if it gives you any negative side effects at all, the doctor missed something. all of the side effects should be positive. so you may be working on, you know, what's going on with this sore throat, but it also might make your feet sweat less because you're working with some kind of internal heat. you does that make sense? So like all of the things that work about it, work because all things are connected. And so if you push exactly right in one place, and bring that back into balance, it brings other things into balance at the same time. And if if anything goes out of balance because of that push, you're not pushing quite right. So the longer I listened to him, the more I was like, I have to know what in the world this guy's talking about. and so I immediately ran up and signed up for the earliest appointment he had and then went to him every Wednesday night for the rest of graduate school for regular acupuncture and herbology. And because I was his last guy every Wednesday night, he would entertain my insatiable questioning and he just taught me a ton about, you know, how Chinese medicine works and how they see things and how, you know, and it just was so freaking enthralling to me that then when he began to talk about Tai Chi, I was like, holy cow, I gotta get to that. So I when I left grad school and ended up in Nashville. I joined a school and began to learn it here and you know, the rest is history 'cause that then led to just more and more interest in Taoism and eventually studied medical qigong and became a practitioner of that. so those principles end up in my practice too and have since begun to study Jinxin Do, which is another beautiful way to use five elements in in either body work or psychotherapy. There are just so many. And so Andrew Heacock: Yeah. So what were you in graduate school for at the time that you were learning this? Dodge Rea: So I was in graduate for in graduate school for clinical psychology and a traditional doctorate. and much as I love Western psychology, there's something about it that always feels just painfully incomplete, you know, partly because it feels so Western and because it often tries so hard to be scientific. And and that's great. But there's like something else, like I wanna know about the ineffable. Like what's the stuff we can't even put into words, let alone measure in an experiment? I wanna be good at that. and not just the stuff that we can measure. and so that's that was part of my interest in in Chinese medicine, is that it the it was just endlessly mysterious. It's like makes absolutely no sense. Like, well, how does this happen that tiny little needles in places that I don't understand? or that herbs I can't pronounce, can have an effect that, you know, is so helpful to me feeling better and better. And it began to heal a lot of health things that I just had never had any luck with in Chinese and I mean in Western medicine. So along the way in grad school, you know, that that same part of me that was like, I like this the hard science knowable, conscious, measurable stuff, but I want the other at the same time. That led me to then study clinical intuition as my essentially my dire my dissertation. They call it a directed study for that particular degree, but and that led me down just kind of another fun track of helping make a point and believe it or not, published f the very first journal article, peer reviewed journal article in Clinical Psych on the subject of intuition. Like that had been done in law and medicine and nursing and I mean everybody else had been talking about it, but we were so afraid to sound unscientific that it had never been published. So I managed to publish an article saying, Hey everyone, we're missing something amazing here. Why don't we weave that into what we do? Andrew Heacock: Have we presumably hopefully learned more about intuition or has it been studied more in the time that you published? Dodge Rea: I think it has been written about more. I haven't really bothered to go find out. Like, you know, are are we finally talking about this? Like, you know, I just I got to say exactly what I wanted to say and brought in a bunch of cool studies from other disciplines and managed to make a point and then I've really focused so much more on my practice, on clients, on you know, mixing the east and west. Andrew Heacock: So we were just talking about intuition. I I I find it surprising. It it was actually quite a surprise when you said that people had not really been studying it at the time. Because today I know a lot of therapists, I'm friends with a lot. I've had many on the show. So many of them will just say, I mean, I I think it's probably almost universal, they'll say something about intuition or instinct that they just feel things. And you just kind of have to learn. Dodge Rea: Yeah. Andrew Heacock: I think part of the job of becoming a clinician, if you want to think of it that way, a practitioner is To trust your instincts, to be able to listen, to hear them, Dodge Rea: Yeah. Andrew Heacock: to notice them and then to trust them. Yeah. Dodge Rea: Yeah. Yeah. It it it's and that was true even then. We just weren't writing about it. And I think a big part of it, I mean, when I tried to shop this around to professors, what I kept getting was you're never gonna publish on that. Nobody in clinical psych wants to be associated with any of this soft stuff like that because it makes us sound so unscientific. thankfully, finally, one guy said, Yeah, that would be a really interesting project. Let's see if if you can do it and so we did. Andrew Heacock: You know, I w one of the I mean the main areas of interest for me with this show is why spiritual practice and especially like self-transcendent transformative spiritual experiences are so beneficial to mental health and in some ex in some cases, I think in a lot of cases where they're vital. and I think there's I th there seems to be a growing interest in that, at least among people that are therapists. and that seems to be with your practice from what my experience with it so far is. It is integral to what you do. Can you speak to that? Dodge Rea: Yeah, I think you're right that it is integral. Well, I could speak to several parts of that. One is I've just been reading a book called The Awakened Brain. Do you know this one? Andrew Heacock: Yeah. Dodge Rea: I think you're gonna love it. And this is a a psychologist, I th she may call herself a neuropsychologist, who got very interested in how one's spirituality affects one's actual n neurologie. And is able to show, like definitively, that it awakens parts of the brain that are vital to mental health. especially anxiety and depression like disappear when this part of the brain is awake and are much more likely when it gets, you know, when it's underused. So there's something about the way we orient in the world when we get out of ourselves a little bit and It's already helpful, I think, when we are available to others, you know, sometimes just being of service, let's say, or being helpful to somebody else makes us feel really different. But it seems like it goes past that when the thing we are in relationship with, whether we think of it as a being or a presence or an energy or a a phenomenon or somehow the essence of the universe, doesn't seem to really matter. When we are in touch with something we don't fully understand, there's something about the way our brain opens into for lack of a better word, awe. Even if it's a subtle awe, but especially if it's a huge one, that I think is profoundly good for us and for our sense of maybe it's safety in the world, you know, purpose, direction. A lot of things? Yeah. Andrew Heacock: Yeah, I've had experiences from a few different modalities, different spiritual practices that have led to like awe. and one of the things that is interesting about them is that after, I sort of have the same problems, but I really don't want to dwell on them because it's like, and it's not like a spiritual bypassing thing. It's more like it's a drag to think about the problems of little old me when there's like a much bigger story out there. You know, there's Dodge Rea: Yeah. Andrew Heacock: just there's way more important things to worry about. It's something about feeling small in comparison to something, you know, unfathomably huge that's quite comforting. And I guess that feeling Dodge Rea: Yes. Andrew Heacock: of smallness is pertaining to like our ego or our or our sense of self. Dodge Rea: Yes, that's right. A friend of mine said years ago, you know, I do better when I stop telling my God the size of my problems and start telling my problems the size of my God. and I think it speaks somehow to what you're saying there when there's some sense of like I'm held by something I can't even understand, but feel loved by or protected by or seen by or I don't know. It the problems just don't seem important in the same way. They're there. I mean they're you know, there's something you gotta deal with today or this week or something, but they they don't feel like the point anymore. Andrew Heacock: That's great way of putting it. It's it's a different thing than saying, like, I'm enlightened now, I have no problems. Okay, it's like that's just kind of donning a Dodge Rea: Right. No, it's not done. Andrew Heacock: new identity. Like you take go to an ayahuasca retreat and you become you go from old Andrew to spiritual Andrew. And it's just still the same charade. It's a different experience Dodge Rea: Right. Right. Andrew Heacock: where you're just like, yeah, I mean, like the problems are still there. They're just smaller in comparison to like what seems to actually matter. It's an interesting thing about there's something about, and this I'm I think this is a good time to transition to what we did this morning. there's something about this feeling of like being small and being held, like it is quite reassuring. so we did this morning something that you call the grace sequence. And I'm gonna turn it over to you and I think allow you to lead the discussion so that I can feed, give you some feedback and reflection as for whatever you'd like to ask about. But can you start just by telling us I guess how would you like to introduce this conversation about what grace is and how it came to be? Dodge Rea: Yeah. It it is so funny. I've been working with this for close to twenty years and I still find the elevator pitch really hard to get my hands around, which I kind of like now. Used to drive me crazy. And it's because you can say it so many different ways that my brain always freezes and goes, Well, which person am I talking to? In one way, it's a modality and can be a you know, a clinical practice that sounds like a spiritually informed version of say EMDR or brain spotting because it's got elements of bilateral stimulation in it. What's cool about it though is that unlike those, you can learn to practice this on your own. And then it becomes like some have called it it's like trauma informed meditation. Others would say it's like a very active form of mindfulness. Others would say, you know, it's like trauma informed prayer. others would say it's like the only way I can stand to be with my most painful parts because for once I'm not in it there, in there by myself. And so it's like it's got elements of of Trauma theory, and I'll explain where this comes from and it'll become apparent why that's in there. along with something that feels like s th the practitioner's own sense of what is divine to them. A little bit like out of the twelve steps where it's vital that you are not adopting someone else's higher power. that it is exactly your own and only the higher power you want to relate to will this work. There is a way in which you're invoking something that feels like it is outside you and far more expanded than you and beyond your comprehension that ends up helping this work much faster. And having practiced EMDR for a very long time, I find it as a modality much softer, more efficient, safer, much more much less likely to be just exhausting or depleting and much more kind of inclined to automatically install resources than most of the trauma techniques out there. But it's also much more doable and more efficient than most of the meditation systems I know out there. and I've practiced a lot of them. It's not that they're it's better. It's not that it goes further and deeper than a profound Buddhist say practiced or You know, the the deep Yoga Sutras, you know, bring a kind of profundity and complexity that this isn't meant to have, but it's really accessible as a practice in that way. Andrew Heacock: Having done it this morning, as someone who's like dabbled in lots of meditations and then forgot that I was doing them the next day because I have a ADD, this is very accessible. It's embodied. It's something I can do with my body, which automatically is gonna make it stickier. but it's also something that just, I don't know, it just feels more accessible and something that's more likely for me to understand well enough to under know why I'm doing it, which seems to matter for me. Like I need to kind of understand the benefits and like what's going on here. Dodge Rea: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Andrew Heacock: But also it's it's simple and it's also embodied and yeah, it was it's it's an interesting. I'm really, really eager at this opportunity to be able to talk about and what we did. Yeah. So how would you like to proceed? Dodge Rea: Yeah. Yeah. Well let me tell you first a little bit where it came from and then let's talk about what your experience was like and we'll just sort of, you know, see where that goes. So it was I've forgotten now, seventeen, eighteen years ago or so. back when I really specialized a lot in trauma, that a clinician had done what often would happen, which was to refer somebody to me that really needed some deep historical trauma work while she was doing day to day work. And so this guy came, lovely gentleman. he's one of those guys where like that phrase the salt of the earth was made for this guy. Like he just was sort of feet flat on the ground, so direct and honest and wonderful sense of humor. He just was kind of a heart centered dude and not stuck in his head. But man did he have a difficult history to live with. And so we fell into this rhythm every Friday afternoon. He'd come in and we were just unpacking a childhood full of unspeakable, awful events. Just terrible things. That you just, you know, nobody should be walking around having to think about that stuff. and I would mix together kind of my EMDR, my brain spotting, a bunch of interesting Taoist stuff, kind of different ways of being mindfully aware of things, bringing in some breath. I mean, just, you know, like i if if you're eclectically minded and you read widely enough, you mix together your own blend and there's just nobody else's brew. It just was kind of the th the way I did it. And it was working so beautifully for him. And so for quite a long time, you know, he'd come in with something awful and you could just see it written all over his face, and when he would leave I would Have him revisit that memory and his face would show something entirely different. Like you just let it go. And then one day he came in and he said, I have terrible news. I have run out of money and I gotta move back to the Midwest. And and so we're gonna have to stop our therapy. I was like, no, that's that's tough. you know, there are trauma therapists in the Midwest too, though, right? And he was Yeah, but I I I've seen a bunch of people. This thing you do is I've just never seen it before. And so I'm really bummed to leave working with you in particular. so why don't you just teach me to do it to myself? And I laughed. And then he looked at me just like dead serious. And I was like, shit, you're serious. And he was like, Yeah, I just want you to teach me to do it to myself. And I started started to explain to him how like, Let's see, you want me to summarize the doctorate and then all the trauma specialty and then teach you to do it to yourself while you're in the midst of a trauma response? And he was like, Exactly. And I'm like going, you know, this is totally impossible. And he's like, Not today. We have one more week. You can tell me next Friday. And I was like, shit. So obviously, Andrew Heacock: Certainly. There you go. Yeah, no problem. You got a week? Yeah. Dodge Rea: like any therapist with any ethics at all, I was gonna say, that's not. a thing I can do and but what came out was, man, I'm I will try. 'Cause he just kept saying, It's my best shot, man. I do I'm literally out of money. I'm not gonna be able to see anybody else. Could he teach me to do this to myself? And I don't know why I said I'll try, but I did. And then as soon as he left, I was like, my god, what have I done? so when I have no idea what to do, on my best days at least, what I do is just sit down and meditation and ask for help. And so I I remember it as a pretty bossy prayer. It was sort of like, God, I have no idea what to say to this guy and I have no idea why I agreed to this, but if you're in in on this at all, you're gonna have to give me something 'cause I don't know what I'm gonna do. And then I would meditate and my the idea was then I would come out and I would have an idea. And all I would get was this really, really, really simple procedure. And every time I was like, Well, that doesn't sound like anything God came up with. So I would try it again the next day and every time I would try and throw it back, it would just come back as the same basic idea of like, can you join it, bring love to it, experience the divine in your own way and make an offering of it in this way that involves some eye movement. I was just like, I there's no way that would work. so we come to the next Friday and it w every like a locked file, it was all that I could get. And so I had to teach that guy something 'cause he was came in like ready to go and I so I showed him that. And about three quarters of the way through, he was like, Man, this is better than what we were doing before. See, I knew you could do it. You got a pen, I want to write it down. So he writes it down on a piece of scratch paper and off he goes. And I was like, What? That doesn't make any sense at all. Cause like we weren't doing any of the cool stuff we normally do, right? Like you it was seemed so simple to me, but he loved it. And then he would write me these emails and he kept saying, This this is really cool. I use it all the time. Tried it for this. Have you tried it for this thing yet? So I kept thinking it was something unique to him until I ran into other clients who would get stuck somewhere. One guy in particular came in saying, you know, I wish I could come in every day because I feel better for a little while after we do something like EMDR, but then it all comes back. so I sent him out the day out the door with this thing. The next time he came back, he was not complaining of the same thing and told me he had released it in a concert. sitting with his wife and she was like, What are you doing? He's I don't know, something Dodge taught me to do. He said, I don't know, it seemed like something left through the top of my head, and I haven't really thought about it much since then. Then I started going, damn, maybe this is a thing. not too long after that I began to teach it some more, and one woman came in and shared with me that she had used it on the fly. She was a psychiatrist with an uncle who was sitting with a gun on his in his lap on the other end of a phone line saying he was gonna die that day and he sounded very serious and she tried everything she could think of and then walked him through the best she could remember of this and he said it was the best he'd felt in thirty years. so over time this has just gotten reinforced as as useful in its in a distinct kind of way that that can be used as a modality but also as a practice. So that's kind of the origin story of it. But you know, all these years later I wonder like, what was it like for you? Andrew Heacock: just now I was thinking one of the benefits of having just done it, I can say one of the benefits of the gray sequence is as opposed to just like a traditional insight meditation practice, or really any other in meditation practice, it was really obvious that there's a there. like that's one of the challenges with meditation is that you have to just basically it it could take you potentially years to notice the benefits that you're Hoping to get, but you would have to stick with it, you know, which is just again, is like kryptonite for an ADHD brain, is to do something without any apparent reward or feedback. I absolutely felt different after having done it. and a lot of what we talked about after was how perplexing it was to try to, to try to compare it to another experience I've had. I mean, it was like it's kind of like this. I mean, it, you know, it felt like the thing I kept coming back to is like, it felt like I just cried an ocean of tears, but I didn't. But it there was a sense Dodge Rea: Yeah. Andrew Heacock: of like calm and relaxation that comes after you do a lot of crying, like good crying. Kind of a sense of relief. and you know, there was also, I mean, I'm I'm interested in this as you are. I mean, we we're doing this kind of experiment so that we could we could unpack it after. And there was a sense of I don't want to say disbelief, exactly, more like incredulity. Like just like I I can't believe like this is incredible. Like I I can't Dodge Rea: Right. Andrew Heacock: believe that I feel this differently without having any conscious experience of having let anything go really. And I know a you know a little bit of the techniques of what you're doing at the at the brain level. And so I was kind of reflecting on that and I was like, man, this is I left your office kind of excited to think about what are where where are more opportunities where are more times in my life and situations where I could be using this sequence because it was like, well, if it works for this, what if it works for that? Dodge Rea: Yes. Andrew Heacock: So it also piqued my curiosity and again I'll say it was it was embodied. So that's one of the big advantages, you know, for contemplative practices for me is you know, like yoga, things like Ashtanga yoga are just better for me than just sitting on a cushion. Dodge Rea: Yeah. Andrew Heacock: Cause it it gives me an extra anchor of awareness in my body. Dodge Rea: Yes, that's exactly right. Our minds are so inclined to run away with us unless you've gotten to a you know, pretty advanced state, in your meditation, yoga, tai chi or something practice, our minds tend to be wildly busy. And so it can make seated meditation hard, and really unsatisfying. And this brings a lot of awareness back to the body kind of in the somatic psychotherapy traditions, in ways that really help. We just keep asking over and over again and where do I feel that in my body and we go with it there. and I think of this whole thing as in terms that that an old teacher of mine here in town, Jerry Campbell, talks about this. He said to me many years ago that we favor problem solving skills in this culture in a to a such a degree that we aren't even aware that there is an alternative to that. And where they are helpful, they're fantastic. problem solving skills let us in some direct way apply force to an issue and sort it out and change the issue. And that's great. Except where they where it doesn't work, where action isn't helpful. Sometimes that's the case, especially for our internal kinds of problems, the things we want to call problems at least. And a lot of the suffering we create in our lives is all the shit we do. trying to solve a problem that doesn't that can't be solved. It's meant to be dissolved. And we mostly have very few dissolving skills, you know? so we will go and pick up a drink to make ourselves feel better and then in taking our pain into drink or shopping or hyper exercise or anonymous sex or any of the other places we, you know, our phones, most of all. Whenever we take our pain to those kinds of places, trying to take action to solve the pain, we just make the new thing painful. We'll do it until it hurts us instead, right? And it's really only in the dissolving skills that we have, you know, an alternative to that. But what is it that dissolves stuff? Well, I think one of the great solvents is awareness. Sometimes just holding our awareness on something is enough to begin to change how it functions in our lives greatly. So one example of that. I worked with a woman years ago who had this really painful cycle Andrew Heacock: Mm-hmm. Dodge Rea: going with a man she was married to. He had left the home and had been out for maybe a year, but kept insisting to her that they were not separated. And She would be exasperated by the way they were relating and what how you know how this was not working for her. And every time she would be about ready to go, he could find some way to indicate that he was going to do some work on himself to bring her back in. Right. And so she would end up like almost about to leave. And then she would start all the way over with, I love him so much, I can't go. So I asked her, let's map that out. And then this time I want you to go all the way around the circle. And when you get back up to the top. Instead of changing anything at all, please don't. Just I'd like you just to say to yourself, Here I go again. And then let's talk about it. And within five or six days I got a text message saying I just contacted a divorce attorney. And when she talked about it later, she was like, just watching myself with like great awareness and no effort to change it do the thing I do. I couldn't stand it anymore. But I'd never really watched myself do it. I'd only seen it in retrospect, right? So I think awareness is one of the great solvents. There's something also about a presence in the Andrew Heacock: Okay. Dodge Rea: like being in the presence of something we hold in awe. For some it's even nature. One guy when he uses the gray sequence, he uses the sound of wind in trees. This brings this feels otherworldly to him more than anything else. So in his mind he sits under a tree and he just uses the sound of the trees talking to each other and that is his sense of that brings up awe for him. Works like a charm. Cousin of mine uses acoustically perfect rooms in his mind. He's a musician. He goes into a space in his mind, an acoustically perfect room, just there's something about it. He can't describe the kind of awe he feels that works perfectly. That's it also a solvent. There's a way in which you can't help but start to feel different if you're open to its influence. So the gray sequence uses both of those. But a third one. Is anything we can do to stimulate the brain in a way that downregulates the amygdala, the the alarm in our minds. It's like a a smart smoke detector that, you know, adds new dangers, dangerous items, you know, as it goes. And when an alarm is going off in our heads, we can't let stuff go. if we are vigilant about it. we are not likely to let it go no matter how much we want away from that experience. And so the combination of self-awareness with some self-compassion, some sense of being attended to by something outside us, beyond us, and a way in which we can turn off the amygdala's alarm response helps us dissolve stuff better than anything else I've ever found. Andrew Heacock: Yeah. So the process works by essentially as you've described it so far, is holding, you know, being being present with something or being aware of this. Let's let's call it a painful feeling. and we'll just start with there. I guess there's probably a lot more things you could you could do this with than just painful feelings. But let's say there you feel you're feeling shame to bring that into your awareness while you're doing some side of bilateral stimulation, like you would do an EMDR. And that'll down regulate fear. Because this is one of the questions I was going to ask was, well, how do you keep people how what do you do about the overwhelm? and I guess this the bilateral stimulation will help soothe that and keep you in on earth, basically, would be my problem. And then allowing in the pr this experience of like this awe-inducing experience or force or being or presence, and it sort of dissolves it. Dodge Rea: Hm. Yes. Andrew Heacock: So when you use the word dissolve, my first thought was, but isn't that cheating? I mean, it was an automatic thought. And I mean, of course, I could go and I could mentalize about it. But I just thought I should name that because it came came up a few times of during this morning was, it can't be this easy. It's not sp right. Dodge Rea: Right. Andrew Heacock: We have this, we have this sense, this I guess this bias that the solutions to our problems have to be equal in magnitude. You know, like if it's if it's a life Dodge Rea: Yes. And difficulty? Andrew Heacock: changing problem and I'm totally impaired by it, the solution must be really hard to come by. Dodge Rea: Yes. We do have that idea. Yeah. And it's a great one to let go of. because yes, well you and I kind of did, right? You Andrew Heacock: Could you could we do the gray sequence on that? Yeah. Yeah, we did. Yeah. Dodge Rea: got to a place where y what you were noticing was I feel light and easy, but I have this feeling like I'm forgetting to be afraid. Andrew Heacock: That's right. Dodge Rea: Right? Like I feel like I should be scared about this thing that I don't think I do feel scared about. What's going on there? And so we did another round to work with that. Andrew Heacock: Mm-hmm. Yeah. it's amazing because what what I've what that meant to me in that, like in the moment was I've just laid a new new neural pathway that I didn't have before. Cause that's Dodge Rea: Yes. Andrew Heacock: really what this feeling is where I, you know, I described it to you. It's like a feeling when you feel like, wait, I forgot to do something. And it's like, let's say turn off the pilot light or your, I don't know if people have this anymore, you're a coffee maker, you forgot to, you know, feed the dog, Dodge Rea: You're right. Andrew Heacock: whatever it was. It's just like, God, I forgot to do this thing. It happens in the middle of the day. It's just like an alarm goes off. And I that happens for me mostly when I'll be in moments where a new experience will happen where I used to have this automatic pattern of behavior or really more like automatic chain of feeling and thought. And then all of a sudden I'll realize I had a choice and it didn't happen automatically. And it's as if I forgot to feel guilty. That's a common one. We're like, I wait, Dodge Rea: Yeah. Andrew Heacock: wait, nothing happened. And you're just it's weird. It's a little offset unsettling. It's like what what just happened? I realized like, I you know, for most of my life, I would have just automatically been, I call it being like sucked down a hallway, which really like automatically firing down this neural pathway that leads to guilt. And then all of a sudden it doesn't happen and it feels like you're you're like you're on a it's another example is like being on a tight rope and then you realize, shit, there's no net. you know, it's Dodge Rea: Right. Andrew Heacock: just like, my God, I just look down. It it's a little bit startling. And my interpretation of that experience is that I've got new neural pathways. So now it's not automatic. Like there's some element of choice, but it's a little weird and unsteady. It's like, I guess if you had learned to swing a golf club in a certain way and then you learn a new way to swing it, now both options are available and it feels weird no matter what you do. Dodge Rea: Yes. Andrew Heacock: and so I noticed that coming up, and it's weird because it's like this, I didn't have this other neural pathway five minutes ago. And now I do. It was real it's the first time in my life I've ever experienced that in real time because there's a coming back. Dodge Rea: Mm-hmm. Andrew Heacock: Like in grace, you you keep circling back. Almost seems a little different than EMDR. I would describe in the EMDR from my limited experience with it, it's more like you drift. Dodge Rea: Mm. Andrew Heacock: You know, there's just like a drifting in the stream of thought and consciousness. But you don't you're not Dodge Rea: Mm-hmm. Andrew Heacock: coming back to where you began really. I guess maybe do you do towards the end, but this seemed to be more cyclical and Dodge Rea: Mm-hmm. Andrew Heacock: there was like a there was a flowing, it was like a wave, like it would it would go around and around and come back, which was soothing. I I also can recall that was it was the the repetitive cyclical nature of the way the practice worked was hypnotic. I I felt within like I don't know, before the first revolution was done, I was like, I feel like I'm in a trance. Dodge Rea: Yes. It's phenomenal as a hypnosis tool. even if you don't know you're using it that way, whether you're using it on your own f for your own stuff or you're helping somebody else with it, it does seem to draw people into a really kind of deep alpha, high theta state. Feels dreamy. and part of that is because over and over again the insistence is whatever is coming up we're gonna make it more so not less bring it more love not less right like over and over again the idea is if we don't resist this, if there's nothing to fight about it, if there's n if I don't treat anything like that like there's something wrong, pretty soon like all the vigilance has to just sit down and let go because it there's no point. There's something really relaxing and then I don't know. So dissolving is one word. When you were saying earlier, isn't that cheating? it may be almost more accurate to think of it like helping somebody digest something. Andrew Heacock: Metabolize is the word that I often use. Metabolize, yeah. Yep. Dodge Rea: metabolize, integrate, right? Right. Like we we kind of have this idea that that we have to get away from the experience we're having inside or the experience we had in our past. And makes me think about it something a friend said to me years ago picking me up for lunch. This is a friend who has this way of saying profound things by accident between like bites of food. forgets completely that he said it by the end of the conversation and then I'm the one thinking about it twenty years later. So one of the things he said like that was, Well, you know, if you think about it, like the problem isn't that traumatic things have happened in the past. It's that they've never receded into the past. And I was just like, God, that says it so well. That's exactly it. It's the stuff that hasn't receded into the past. Right? Like they're still alive today because some aspect of the system hasn't let them go. And that fits exactly with kind of my idea of how change works. Like I don't know where this came from. I think I was just heard myself explaining it to somebody at some point, and then it came out and I like I've been thinking about it for I don't know, ten plus years since I said it, going I still can't find a c find a counterexample of that. My idea is the change process is let it in, let it out. Let it go. And that you have to do it in that order, even though what you really want is to get to the part where you let it go. So we're all trying to race to the part where I don't have to feel this way, or this memory doesn't hurt me, or this belief about me can just be, you know, expunged. And we can't really get there that way. We have to pass through what I think of as gates of change. Like in that order, I gotta let it in first. And the weird thing about letting it in or letting it out or letting it go for that matter is you can't do any of these at as of an act of will. I can't make myself accept something. I can't make myself have the feeling fully. I definitely can't make myself cry about it or really express or I really I kind of can I can get close. I definitely can't make myself let it go. I I mean believe me, I've tried. But As an act of willingness, I can get really close. I can get to a place where let's say I want to work on A part of me that just doesn't feel worthy. Well that's dumb, right? Like there's a part of me wants to say, come on. Let's like let's not do that. in fact, let's play with this. Let me let me show you instead of telling you, and then I'll we'll go back to talking about it. Like, find a place in your body where you feel some tension, and I would ask your listeners to do the same. Right? Find a place where, you know You notice a little more tension than anywhere else. Let me know when you've got it. Andrew Heacock: Okay, I've got it. Dodge Rea: Got it. Okay. Well make it stop. This is dumb. You have nothing to feel tense about. We're having a perfectly lovely conversation, doing a thing you love to do. It's your favorite thing to do. We should just make it stop. And your listeners, for God's sake, you're not in any danger. Make your tension go away. Tell it to cut it out. This is dumb. I've got tension in my traps right up here around the neck. I don't know about you, but mine haven't budged at all trying to make it stop. Alright. So now you just feel right. Now you've just added the tension of feeling kind of ashamed. Right. But we Andrew Heacock: Yeah, I've got the same. I just feel worse about it now. It's still there plus a bunch of other things. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. Dodge Rea: do this all the time. Like, dude, get over it. I shouldn't feel afraid about this. Why am I anxious? This is dumb. Come on. Right? Like, how often do you hear something like that in your head? You know? so now try the other thing. Go focus on on attention for a minute. And just let your breath keep moving while you let the tension get a little more so if it wants. Give it permission to grow 10 or 15% more so. And watch it with a kind of warm curiosity, like hmm. Breath's still flowing. What do you notice now? Andrew Heacock: it sort of grew for a while, but it's like it grows and then it eases off. Dodge Rea: Yeah. Andrew Heacock: It's smaller a little bit, just the the energy gets dissipated in a way. Yeah. Dodge Rea: Yeah. Now if we've added a little Taoist stuff just for fun, breathe in through the top of your head and down through your feet while you accept the tension. Andrew Heacock: Wow. Dodge Rea: Let it do whatever it wants to do. Now isn't that weird? Andrew Heacock: I was wow. And instantly, just putting my feet flat Dodge Rea: Right? Andrew Heacock: on the floor and br like what you said, breathing in through my head and out through my feet. it was it basically disappeared immediately. Immediately, yeah. Right, yeah. Dodge Rea: Just like that. Now we didn't do anything. That is not a problem-solving technique. We didn't we didn't address anything that was causing tension. We didn't rub your shoulders. We didn't identify a problem and repair it. Like all we did was accept it exactly as it is in a way where our breath wasn't frozen. And something began to shift. So Let it in, let it out, let it go is notice the tension for a minute, whatever that is, and then for a moment part of letting it out is let it begin to move. That might mean journaling. It might mean telling somebody. I don't know about you, but I often have the experience of people telling me things they've never said out loud to another living soul. And you can watch the energy drain out of their bodies as they say it out loud. I haven't said a word. I'm just listening. But just the expression of the thing begins to change it in huge ways. But sometimes what we're also doing is letting it out almost like we're we're letting a knot out. Like if you pull on a knot, the first thing it does is get bigger and far messier. But the next thing that happens is it does it begins to kind of untangle, it's a lot easier. to get to that third part where we finally can let it go. It seems like the letting it go part is the easy part. Sometimes it is. It'll be just like right there where you're like, wow, what happened? I don't even know where it went. Like sometimes you just you get to have a big cry and you're not even sure what the problem was ten minutes ago. Sometimes you finally get to yell into a pillow or go for a run or move your body in some new way. Or Tell somebody or journal or pray or who knows what and it just vanishes. But sometimes, if you've had that experience of I know what the problem is, I'm feeling it like crazy, I'm letting it out again, I'm crying again, I'm telling someone again, but I'm just going in, let it in, let it out, let it in, let it out, and I never seem to let it go. We gotta look at what part of me isn't willing to. Andrew Heacock: That's really hard for Dodge Rea: That's a Andrew Heacock: me. Yeah, is like we have something I've talked about on this channel a few times is just this idea of meta emotion. and like we have these we have feelings, emotions, which are instincts basically. I think I I think they've got to be purely involuntarily, like to just have an emotion. It's just a it's an energy. But then we have beliefs about the emotions that we have that cause us to have a second layer of emotion. So we might feel ashamed that we feel ashamed. That's really unhelpful. Like, you know, the Dodge Rea: Right. Andrew Heacock: second layer, especially if it's shame, feeling ashamed that you have feelings which are involuntary, is really it's really and like, you know, it's like feeling ashamed that your dog needs to go out once or twice a day. Like it's involuntary, you know. I mean, there's just nothing that he can do about it. and of all the things you could feel about that, like shame is probably just like not helpful. That that's the thing that has helped me with this problem in particular is instead of framing of is it right or wrong for me to feel shame? Cause if it's wrong, that's More shame. Like it's just doubling down on it. Or if it's right, there you go. You you're right to feel shamed. of just being like, Yeah, even if it's merited in the moment, it's just not helpful. and that's been my trick to letting it go. But there's a lot of these second layer of emotions where I found today was fear of a fear of letting the things go that we were talking about. Of like, no, I can't I can't do that. And like, it it It kind of relates to this question about dissolving was isn't that cheating? And it wasn't that that's not exactly the experience, but there is for me, and I think a lot of people have this experience of when faced with an opportunity to truly let something go, of having like a visceral response, like instinctually, that it's wrong to do that, either because it would be like a form of betrayal of something. like I I experienced this is a domain where I experienced lots of guilt. and the interesting thing, Dodge, is I've sort of been dancing around this. my instinct usually, my process is to I've learned somatic experience therapy was how I literally learned what emotions were. Like I could intellectualize why we had them, but to really understand what they were to to kind of work through the alexathymia I used to have was somatic experience therapy. And then we would start by finding an energy in the body and then There apparently is a science to like, well, based on where it is in your body, it's kind of a known quantity of what emotions are likely to arise there. And then you sort of consider that there was a guy, like a chart of a stick man with words on different parts of his body, stick person. And you would sort of use context to say, okay, well, this is coming up. So like I think maybe it would be situationally appropriate that I would be feeling guilt right now or fear or anger based on what's going on. And that's sort of how you would triangulate it. But doing it that way. necessarily requires narrative, like a narrative understanding of what is this feeling, what does it represent? Why do I have it? And with your, with Grace, it did not do that. In fact, there really wasn't any time or space for that. I'm not sure I could have done that if if you had called on me to do it, I don't know if I would have been in a in a space to to to to do that kind of cognition. And that's Dodge Rea: Right. Andrew Heacock: the part that I'm almost feels like bypassing. It's like, no, no, wait, I've got to do this hard work of meaning making. You know, to go find Dodge Rea: Right. Andrew Heacock: a narrative, you know, essentially a memory, you know, a procedure or like an episodic Dodge Rea: Right. Andrew Heacock: memory or something that I have to go and understand it and I gotta feel it and it's gonna be terrible. And I've got to muster up all this courage, which is my experience. You know, it's like you gotta you gotta really feel it. And it just to if you can just breathe in your head and out of your feet and it goes away, it's like, no, no, that that can't be it, right? Like that can't be, and there's a resistance. Dodge Rea: That's cheating. Andrew Heacock: It's right. It's a resistance of like it's either morally wrong for me to do it this way or this isn't gonna work. Or it's really probably more the first. It's like I'm I'm doing something wrong. And I guess it's because probably has something to do with a sunk cost fallacy that I've spent all these years doing it this other way and like buying into this really, I guess, at ki at times really painful way of doing it. Because it's like some like if if the problem is pain, you gotta let the pain in. but then for a while, I guess I just would like dissect it for a while, you know, like Dodge Rea: Right. Andrew Heacock: dwell on it, ruminate on it. And there's a saying that psychotherapy, talk therapy makes you really good about talking with your problems, talking about your problems. You know, and I'm like, I have the best problems. Like I'm so good at talking about them. They can't just go away. Like I can't just breathe them away. That's that's not fair. You know, like I'm invested. I've got a lot invested Dodge Rea: Right. Andrew Heacock: in these problems, a fortune. You know, and that that was some of what was coming up was like, no, I can't It can't be this easy. I can't let this go like this. that sounds so silly and petty that this is the way the mind works. But I'm I'm just struggling to find Dodge Rea: You know, it's so it's it's Andrew Heacock: this explanation for why I was so resistant. Dodge Rea: It's a perfect example of of something I found in my own notes. I've just got, you know, decades of notes about about this phenomenon. It's somewhere and y I don't know when. I wrote something down that I came across last night when I was thinking about this podcast. I'm just wandering around just to see if there'd be any inspiration, cool stuff to talk about. And I'd written this. that sometimes this this internal experience, this problem we're trying to send away, is not so much a g a ghost as it is a prisoner. It's being held hostage and ridiculed as much as it's being asked to leave. Like this feeling I'm having, this let's say belief I'm not worthy, right? Like I have s such an intense idea that I can't get rid of that. this thing that I don't want to believe anymore, and then I go to lots of therapy to, you know, get fit and I take these medicines or I take the you go on these medicine journeys, or I like I can do all these things about it, but if I were to really let it go, at some level I would feel like I'd lost something. And so I hold it hostage just so I can call it names instead of you know, like it is it's weirdly a kind of an experiential prisoner. It's stuck in me because it's so much a part of who I think I'm supposed to be now that I can't let it go. So here'd be a really weird e you know, a b a lovely, beautiful, unforgettable example of this was a woman had reached out to me to just to experience the gray sequence, because she had been to lots of therapy, many, you know, three different wonderful therapists over seven years, since a profound loss in her life had occurred, and she still wasn't past it and didn't feel any better. and so we were talking about these gates of change and she got to this third one and she was like, well, why in the world wouldn't I be willing to let it go? So I asked her, well, seven years ago, how many other people do you think died in the United States? And she was like, I mean what, tens of thousands? I don't know. Right. How many of those are you still grieving today? Well only one. Right. Why? Well because I loved him. Right. And what would it mean about you if you weren't grieving that anymore then? And she rocks back like this and puts her hand on her chest and goes, my God. And we just went straight into the gray sequence around what was she feeling in her chest right there. But the feeling was around I can't stop grieving 'cause it would be like not loving him anymore. That would mean he didn't his death didn't even matter. And within one session, it had shifted so much that for months, even a year later, I kept tracking with her, like she was in a really, really, really different place. But she finally had like gotten some insight around why am I why would I not be willing to let this go? With a way in a way where she could find compassion for herself. Like she didn't just identify, yeah, that's just this dysfunctional part of me that isn't willing to stop. grieving for the rest of my life or right. We tend to like wanna call not only the problem names, but then the part of us that isn't willing to let go of it yet. That that guy's also d deserves a bunch more names. And so they both end up being kinda prisoners for us to ridicule. Andrew Heacock: Mm-hmm. Yeah. So it sounds like there is Dodge Rea: And Andrew Heacock: there like a narrative a little bit, just a little bit. I mean, just a brief bit of insight into, you know, how is this serving you? Is another way of thinking of it. Dodge Rea: Yes. Andrew Heacock: that that even that even questioning it, raising the question that way almost seems condescending in a way. If you think about it, it's like, damn it, and it makes me sound so neurotic. You know, and which of course you are, I mean, if you're Dodge Rea: Right. With Andrew Heacock: in the therapist's office, you know, I mean, most likely for after seven years, there's something. You know, with a mental pattern that's causing you discomfort. but Dodge Rea: Yeah. W like what's the secondary gain, you know? And Andrew Heacock: Yeah, yeah. Dodge Rea: and and it's kind of accusatory. It's like, you're getting something out of this, right? Andrew Heacock: Right, right. Like it serves you to have this problem 'cause it makes you, you know, the center of attention or something or Dodge Rea: Yeah. It tricks all these people into paying attention to you when you just as easily could quit faking it. Yeah. I think that's one of the cruelest things that happens in the world of medicine, but especially in therapy, is when we collude with the part of them that wants to judge the aspect of self that isn't done hurting yet. Andrew Heacock: Mm. Dodge Rea: And that part deserves our loving attention more than any other. because it is so often blamed. I was thinking about that after we worked this morning, like over just this lunch hour, and I was just thinking about a part of you that had held on to an idea about yourself for a long time. And I was thinking, yeah, well, damn straight. Like, life taught you that. It made sense to hold on to it for a long time. It it served you very well for a long time. That should be honored. And then very gently To shift to acknowledging I'm not quite there anymore. We don't have to barrel into that new place. We can go very gently toward like, yeah, but there's this other part that wants to talk too. And the first guy wasn't broken or wrong or dumb, right? I say to clients a lot, like, one thing I'm clear about about you is you're not dumb and you're not broken. Life taught you to feel this way or do this thing or repeat this habit or Hold this pattern, right? So it's not your fault, but it's also not your fate. You don't have to do this forever. Not your fault, not your fate, but it is yours. Andrew Heacock: Yeah. Dodge Rea: So how will you relate in in some new way to it? It's the idea. Andrew Heacock: Yeah. Yeah. it's a powerful idea. I mean, I'm just sitting with it, I'm moved of what you're saying. And I can totally relate to it because one of the things I've been in therapy on and off, basically on for more than eight years. and it's kind of, you know, it's become an important part of my life to learn about mental health. And it's a lot of what this this podcast is about, is just like learning the science of it, the different approaches. And I'm Become interested, it's kind of become my project, my hobby. I'm more important than that than just a hobby. But Dodge Rea: Uh-huh. Andrew Heacock: the work of my life, you know, that my hero's journey involves a lot of this work. And one of the things that has been I, you know, today, you know, what we worked on this morning is I have this sense of frustration that of how sticky some of the problems are. I mean, you know, one in your email you suggested me to come with something that I'm feeling stuck with, you know, of like what do you do when you're stuck? And I'm like, man, that's like been the norm. Of therapy. It's like, damn it. I talked about it once. Like, we talked about it. Why didn't it go away? You know, I don't want it anymore. Dodge Rea: Right. Andrew Heacock: You know, and and then at the same time realizing, like, I think it's because I'm not letting it go. You know, so it's like, of course, I'm the reason that I'm it's still stuck. I'm still stuck with it. One of the things that I can I have run into really my first guest on this podcast is Laura Martinez. She's known as the neuroshamonic healer. She was, I met her at a treatment center that I went to, and I went to the treatment center to work with her because she had written a book on neuroplasticity and addiction. And it was a science, it was a clinician's desk reference. And I get there and she's she's deeply immersed in shamanism and and you know, old, old and you know, Eastern thought, the the synthesis we talked about. And one of the first things she told me, it was incredibly confounding, but it in retrospect, it's really changed the course of my life was you are not your thoughts. And It I was just flabbergasted at that because first I was like, that's preposterous. Of course not my thoughts. What what else would I be if not my thoughts? And then was a little like unsettled because I was like, but I have the best thoughts, you know? And, you know, I've got a lot invested in these thoughts. Like my identity is my thoughts. What do Dodge Rea: I've worked very hard on these thoughts. Andrew Heacock: you mean? That's not like what well then what would I be? What if anything, if not my thoughts? What is that? Dodge Rea: Right. Andrew Heacock: And so it raises this question of what is the self? And like I'm in some, you know, I'm in some treatment center and eight, nine years ago and was I think I want to study cognitive neuroscience because I was so confounded by this question of Wait a minute. It was the first time someone had even raised the possibility to me that the sense of being an I or the sense of being a self is maybe not what it appears to be on first, you know, on you know, I guess an uncritical observation. And this has been coming up in this conversation as we've been talking about change and grace and like the resistance that I experienced this morning. My best articulation to you of what's happening is like my ego is resisting, because I think that's what the ego's job is to do, is to resist change, Dodge Rea: Mm-hmm. Andrew Heacock: basically. to pr to protect the identity. And I must have some identity built around some of the things that were at risk of being kind of metabolized. And that is it's a it's a deep and complicated subject because sometimes you can build an identity around being a sick person and then you can't get well. You you know, you Dodge Rea: Mm-hmm. Andrew Heacock: you're you're resistant to it. Or one of the things for me is I notice a lot of guilt come up in my life. And it's I you know, when I learned, I was told taught the difference between guilt and shame. And it kind of makes sense if you really think about it, is I was told, you know, shame, guilt means you have done something bad or you have transgressed your moral code. and shame is this that you are bad, like that you're inherently bad, defective, et cetera. And One would think that a lot that it it is a little bit counterintuitive for some people that I feel guilt in the situations where I feel guilt because if you say, Well, it's I've transgressed a moral code, the things that are causing me guilt are things that I don't believe is wrong for anyone else to do. Right. So like how could they, you know, maybe that's a shame thing, but for me it's like it's about being deserving. You know, you you were talking about being unworthy. Well, if it's like if you feel like you deserve to feel unworthy. Then it's a moral transgression to do otherwise. And it speaks to identity, but I I think that the shame comes in as like what would they would call a shame-bound identity. Like if you believe that you're a bad person, you're unworthy, and you don't deserve good things, that is shame. But what registers in the moment when you start acting in Dodge Rea: Yeah. Andrew Heacock: contravention of that is guilt. Like it's like, I'm doing something Dodge Rea: Mm-hmm. Andrew Heacock: wrong by essentially taking something that doesn't belong to me. Right. Like it may belong to someone else. They deserve it. It's not bad. Like I they would, they shouldn't feel guilty for having it. But if it's not mine and I'm taking it, then I'm, you know, I'm doing something that's morally transgressive. That's how it arises for me. And it goes back to this concept, I think, of identity. Like we, for whatever reasons, we build identities around some of these ideas. And man, that's they're hard to unpack. And that's, I think a little bit of the resistance was like, well, we can't just flush that down the bathtub because then I won't be me anymore. Dodge Rea: Yeah. You're right. What if we were to hold these identities much more lightly? Like who's the I wish I could remember who said the wonderful phrase, You're under no obligation to be the person you were five minutes ago? What a freeing idea. Like, I am in a state of becoming. That means I'm gonna be letting go of a lot of this stuff I think I know about myself. Andrew Heacock: State of unbecoming. Boy, do I know what that feels like. Sometimes Dodge Rea: Yeah. Andrew Heacock: it's like abrupt and not, you know, unplanned and sort of life Dodge Rea: Right. Andrew Heacock: forces it on you. It can be disorienting, but having looking back on it, my memories of it are much fonder than my my experience of what of thing of those kind of moments was. Dodge Rea: Yeah. I I keep having this image while we're talking, which always tells me I should say it out loud if it keeps coming back. I'm having a picture of like have you watched any professional soccer, especially among men? Do you know about kind of their tendency to try to draw fouls by acting like they've been fouled in some way, falling on the ground, rolling you know, hysterically around, and doing a lot of and they literally practice their faces in you know, they bring in experts. They literally the team will hire experts to teach the guys how to make faces that are more likely to draw fouls. You know, the things like, you know, like they do that all the right. So they Andrew Heacock: Wow, I didn't know that. Yeah, I've seen that. Yeah, I've seen that. Yeah. Dodge Rea: and and so they'll fall on the the ground and they'll roll all around and then sometimes the game just if you see those guys fall on the ground and flop all around, sometimes the whole game stops and they all attend to this injured person and they even manage to draw the foul they were trying to draw. Sometimes though the whole game just moves on like it never happened, and the guy's still rolling around, and the game's like move down to the other end of the field, and at some point the dude has to just like stand up. somewhat sheepishly and you know, get back into the game, right? Like that can happen whether he's completely faked it or whether he actually was hurt, but they just didn't call the foul, right? But he just kind of has to like get over it now and move on. And you can see that sometimes even when they've been f pretty flagrantly trying to draw the foul, they still have to limp for a while to like look like I mean they're saving face a little bit like, no no, it really did hurt, hurt terribly. Trust me on this. It really hurt. but I always laugh at them a little bit when that's going on, but I also kind of feel this empathy. And the thing that I relate to about it is like I think if I were to get over some of the things I have considered problems of mine too quickly, like just poof, gone. Couldn't find it anywhere inside me. It would be almost embarrassing to just hop up and rejoin the game like nothing ever happened. I mean I've been kind of rolling around in the grass for a long time on a few of these. I would it would be very strange to just let it go. People be like, Hey, whatever happened to that thing about yourself? I was like, no, disappeared on Friday, I think. moving on. Andrew Heacock: Yeah, th right, like this life right. Yeah. I just yeah, I did this, you know, I I went to this thing and I s stood on one foot for a little while and I sang Yankee Doodle and it's gone. So it's fine. Yeah. Yeah. I mean embarrassing is a good Dodge Rea: And there went, but what if we did? Like Andrew Heacock: word for it. Yeah. But the thing is, here's the thing. You have to make a decision as someone who deals with these problems of like, how bad do you want to be free of the problem? Cause like if that did work, you'd be like, That can't like I mean, that that's the hard thing that did kind of come up with the grace was like, no. Like it this this like we're not gonna do this in one hour. Like and and Dodge Rea: Right. Andrew Heacock: I'm not gonna feel great after. Like it's gotta hurt. Dodge Rea: Come on. Andrew Heacock: it went as you were describing the soccer analogy. the one of the things that came to mind w th w was histrionics. Like there's this behavior that people will try to get to to gain attention, basically, pity to like this extreme reaction. There's a personality disorder that but that's been named after it. But also little children, like baby toddlers, when they're running too fast and they fall. And they look around to see if anybody's watching. And if so, they'll start losing their shit, right? If other people, and depending on the parents' reaction. And I it's obviously because they want to be comforted in that moment. And I I think part of being a parent, I don't know for sure, but must be judging when it's time to let them know, no, you're okay. Like I got you, but you're okay. and sometimes you just kind of gotta let them be like, nope, you're fine. You're we're not doing this right now. And they're like, all right. Like, and they're a little sheepish, but they gotta keep going on to save face. There's something about I felt this way before. There's a a YouTuber named Heidi Priebe who's she's did her master's in attachment theory. And she studied with somebody who's in like the Winnicott line of of like of research of over in the UK. And she has a great channel, min amazing psychoeducation. One of her videos about complex PTSD, she was talking about this idea that there's a need, there's this. Attachment to the idea that your life's dysfunction is a testament to your pain. And that it's like if the pain never gets properly acknowledged, you can't let the dysfunction remit because then like then you'll never get, you know, the the acknowledgement will never come. Of course, the the challenge there is for people who've been in that position is sometimes that acknowledgement's not going to come regardless, especially if it's from certain people like who have hurt you. There's just some people who are never going to admit that they've wronged you. They just they're they're not capable, arguably. Or, you know, maybe they just don't see it that way, or maybe they're not around anymore. maybe it's better for you that you don't ever see them again. I mean, there's a lot of examples where you're not gonna get that quote unquote closure. And at a certain point, you gotta realize no one's coming to your rescue. But it's very hard to let that go. It's very hard to let go of the need to have that the real pain acknowledged. And so I think that there's a tendency to wanna like make the face. make the faces that we know to really just accentuate to signal to other people like, please Dodge Rea: Yeah. Andrew Heacock: comfort me, I think. Dodge Rea: Well, I I think that yeah, I wanna name l let me say something to both of those points. The first being about little kids when they fall jump up and look around. and the second one about kind of the the what was what was her phrase? It the it's a testament or a Andrew Heacock: My life's my life's dysfunction is a testament to my pain. Dodge Rea: Testament, yes. I so the to the first one. Sometimes they're looking around to see who's gonna pay attention if I cry. But very often what they're looking around for is a reflection on the face of the parent. Do they look worried about me? Do they look like fuck that would hurt? Or do they look at me like that was kind of sweet? Like, you know, right? And and so if the parent comes in with like, hey That was a big fall. You're okay, you know. they tend to respond really differently from a parent who goes, my god, my god, right? It comes running over there like they get scared, right? Andrew Heacock: they get scared. Right. Dodge Rea: And so a lot of how we know how we're feeling is we've had the experience regularly of an accurate mirror who can not just mirror back to us what's happening on our faces with their faces. But also over time begin to use words to do that too. you're very angry with me today, aren't you, little guy? Tell me, what why are you so mad at me? Right? Or, very scary, I see you. And then they we pick up and we hold And most parents want to say, No, the what happened? Tell me the story or It's okay, it's okay, you're fine, you're fine, you're fine, you're fine. Don't be afraid, right? I think in our best moments as parents, we say, I got you. Yeah. You can cry if you need to cry. Sometimes we'll even say, Man, I'd be wailing. That was a big one. Right? And we give permission to have their experience. And very quickly, if we are that attuned, they metabolize their experience and on our other side of it, and they just get wiggly and now they want to get down and run off and play with the very kid who just, you know, knocked them down. So some of that is like an attunement thing. They are I think instinctively will pop up and look to see from the adults around them w what do what should I be feeling about this? And lots of adults aren't very attuned. and or don't teach them, you know, the names of these things they may be feeling. They mostly teach you shouldn't be feeling that way, you should feel this other thing. Right. So Andrew Heacock: It's like you're getting you're you're being reflected back by a fun house mirror. It's basically you're too too Dodge Rea: Yes. Right? It's not a Andrew Heacock: tall, too short, too fat, too skinny. Right? Yeah. Yeah. Dodge Rea: Right? It's the wrong feeling. Yep. Shouldn't look like shouldn't sound like that. And so no wonder we have these living testaments. I call them monuments, you know, like we will build this statue the way we would on the DC Mall of you know, Korean soldiers walking through their rice fields, right? and it's a way of remembering in a very concrete, lasting way. Something horrible happened. These people went through something really painful that deserves to be remembered. But if nobody else is saying, Hey, you went through something awful, and that had something to do with me, and I am so sorry, what do we need to do to make it up to you? And I'll I'm glad to stay with it as long as you need me to. If we don't have that, then we in some ways. Keep wailing on our insides, hoping finally the parent will come to us and go, wow, you're hurt. Can I pick you up? Can I hold you? 'Cause otherwise, as you say, what's the alternative? We just get over it and it goes completely un unacknowledged? Andrew Heacock: And that kinda the problem with that is it it's almost like saying that it was okay. Like if you just move on, you know, without any sort of like intervention, you just let it go. It's like saying that it's it's gonna happen again because it was okay in the first place. Dodge Rea: So that gets back to the gates of change. Why don't we release why wouldn't we be willing to pass through that last gate of letting something go? Well, if we're angry, it's like saying what this person did wasn't was okay. If I'm no longer mad about it, it's like I shouldn't have been mad in the first place. If we're scared and we release that, it's like saying, I was never in danger and I don't need to be vigilant about it being dangerous again. And sometimes if we release sadness it's like saying, This person or this event didn't really matter. That's the fear in all three. Andrew Heacock: And so what's the way through that? Dodge Rea: That's a huge question right there. we have to find some way, and it often is wonderful if it's ceremonial or experiential, but we have to complete the process somehow. One beautiful one, especially if it's related to a person who's done something awful, and let's face it, ninety five plus percent of our traumas really end up being relational. Andrew Heacock: People. Yeah. Yeah. I mean that it's Dodge Rea: It's about people. Andrew Heacock: very rare that a proverbial piano falls on your head. Dodge Rea: Right. Even if even if a terrible event happened, if we felt like we were in it with people who were in it with us, we remember it as a terrible event. But it it finally does recede into the past, like my friend said. It doesn't feel like it's eternally present. Because we don't have to keep it eternally present in order to either honor the past or protect ourselves from the future. We finally can let it go. So it's mostly about relationships. One beautiful way to let stuff go is to finally write the letter to yourself on behalf of that person that they're never going to send you. So you write it for And you remember like forgiving isn't forgetting, it's remembering and letting it letting go. I'm not doing this for this person. I'm doing it for me. I'm releasing ul ultimately the samskara that you mentioned today. Well let's talk about what that is in a minute. for my sake. I'm disentangling for the this so that I can be free and fully alive again instead of trying to change you. As one person put it brilliantly, forgiveness is giving up all hope for a better past. Like we're finally releasing the body English, you know, but we know body English is like if you, you know, roll a bowling ball and then you kinda want to lean like this, hoping that if you lean hard enough it will change the path of the ball. Like we this idea of if I hold enough tension in my body, it will somehow change an outcome that I otherwise can't control. We're finally just deciding I'm just gonna stand up straight and be relaxed no matter where that damn ball's going. You know, I don't have to do that anymore. Yeah. Andrew Heacock: I love that. Dodge Rea: So when we write a letter like that to ourselves, it's it's wildly powerful, especially if you read it out loud to somebody else. I had this experience with my mentor a number of years ago. I'd never had this I'd never done that exercise. And he sent us all out into the woods and had us write a letter to ourselves from one of our parents and come back with it. So we're sitting around this campfire and All of a sudden somebody volunteers to read hers out loud and I realize, this is the expectation we're all gonna read these. And I was like, shoot. Well, I'm glad I didn't know that. and the first person starts to read and bursts into tears. And I'm like, how interesting. Like this is so emotional for her. Well, that I mean, I I wonder why this wasn't very, you know, emotional for me. Finally comes around to me, I start reeling I can't even get past Dear Dodge before I've sobbing. I'm like, what the hell is happening right now? And I'm reading a letter to myself from my own mom. who, to be fair, is actually one of the few people in the world I know who would be fully capable of writing this letter, like of amends. But she couldn't write it exactly as I could write it because she doesn't know exactly the things that still hurt for me, but she would be willing to. Anyway, writing this letter to myself from my mom was incredibly powerful in just helping me finally feel like Those things were acknowledged and I can put them down. Andrew Heacock: That's beautiful. It's powerful. And I can also feel myself resistant to the idea of writing it. Dodge Rea: Yes. Andrew Heacock: You know, you said something earlier that stuck with me and is sometimes people aren't done finished hurting. Dodge Rea: Yes. Andrew Heacock: and there's an acceptance in that too, where I'll all I think one of the benefits of having a therapist is having a third person to kind of look at things a little bit more objectively to help you understand when you're not done hurting or when. You're you're making your life a testament to your pain. Cause Dodge Rea: Right. Andrew Heacock: at a certain point it does become counterproductive, not to like where more hurting is not going to lead to to any real change. Like I think there's probably a point of diminishing returns on that. This is kind of the second idea of rock bottom and addiction. of Dodge Rea: Yep. Andrew Heacock: like, you know, some people say, you know, they hit their bottom on the way up, you know, like, and it's just I I'm not sure I You know, I don't we've we've mentioned twelve steps before and you have an interesting connection with the twelve steps. But you know, my experience with it was not good. I mean, with with twelve step programs, it made Dodge Rea: Yeah. Andrew Heacock: me want to drink more. and one of the ideas that I never really could make sense of was this idea of rock bottom because it's like I mean, there's there's a moment at which somebody begins to change, but I think that tethering that to their life circumstances from an objective perspective. is makes no sense because they're, you know, for a lot of people, they will have horrible circumstances that relate to their addiction. And then the point of change comes sometime later from something relatively mundane. it just is a matter of like whatever it whatever they needed to do at that point that they got sick of it or, you know, the right the right confluence of events happened and they they started working their way up. Dodge Rea: Yep. I I th I gather, you know, I've heard some who spent a lot of their lives in the room saying you gotta remember step zero is not you know, steps if step one is finally like acknowledging I am powerless over this experience I'm having and can't can't effectively change it myself. step zero is, as they sometimes say jokingly, Finally hearing yourself say, This shit's gotta cease. Like like whatever I'm experiencing is fucking not okay. Whatever that is. And it might be in a mundane moment and it might be right in the middle of something absolutely terrifying, but usually like finally somebody has had it. And whether it's the twelve steps that gets them out of it or it's something else, there was a point where you must have realized this alcohol used to be my friend and now it's not. It seemed to help and now it doesn't. There is no more down that road of, you know, that's gonna feel good. It's just gonna keep feeling worse and worse. I don't wanna do this. Andrew Heacock: That that's really it for me. I mean, with alcohol and also with cannabis, I used to smoke a lot of cannabis. I mean, like constantly, and then all of a sudden it just wasn't fun anymore. And the interesting thing is I I don't ever think about drinking alcohol anymore. Every now and then I'll have a fond memory of cannabis, but I got to the point where the the not fun memories have become more powerful. Like like Dodge Rea: Yes. Andrew Heacock: they just that's basically what it is. It's like I have more emotional memory of it not being fun than I do of it being fun. And they're both there. But one slightly outweighs the other where I'm like, I'll be like, it'd be nice. And then I remember like, wait, no, like the last two years sucked. Like it was just not fun for me anymore. And that's Dodge Rea: Yeah. Andrew Heacock: that's exactly it. I just had to realize like, this isn't this is it's been a while since I actually enjoyed this. Dodge Rea: Right. And it can lead to one of the stages of change I hear, you know, in the Buddhist tradition is revulsion. You finally are just kind of disgusted with the things well the way they are, and you just go, yuck, I don't want this anymore. I don't even like this anymore. Yep. Something begins to shift. Andrew Heacock: So there's something that's a a pin that I set somewhere in my mind I want to come back to. We were talking about like a child falling on the ground and needing to be acknowledged and when the soccer players will go into these histrionics to get to draw a foul. and you were talking about how like children do that in a way so that their parent can sort of attune to them and give them reassurance, let them know that it's okay. I felt that a this was a critical part of the grace sequence that we did. That this was integral to what was taking place. As I definitely felt it with myself, it's kind of a like a radical acceptance. maybe radical is too violent of a word. It was just like a sense of like acceptance, like, okay, it's it's okay that I'm feeling this thing. And that's great. Let's let's love that, love more, not less. Dodge Rea: Yeah. Andrew Heacock: and let it grow. That is just an instantly a softening of just being like, yeah, it's not like let's stop pushing the feeling away or stop pretending it isn't there, let's invite it in. And there was this acceptance, but then there was also a second layer of that where there was allowing it to be witnessed by something bigger, right? This awe-inspiring force. And there's an idea that I'm very interested in that higher powers are essentially like ultimate attachment figures. Dodge Rea: Yeah. Andrew Heacock: and there was a there was I did a particular movement with my arms that you instructed me to do. Can we can we demonstrate that? Is that okay? Dodge Rea: Sure. Yeah. Andrew Heacock: Yeah. Okay. So like I you you had me place my palms out like this if anybody's watching on YouTube. I call it the Spider-Man. Like I could just do this, but it's like putting my my wrists up basically, like Spidey's gonna shoot some some webs out of his fingers. there's I just emailed earlier with a neuroscientist named John Waithy who studies the neuroscience of religious belief and he's really an attachment researcher. And one of the things he's gonna come on the show in a few in a couple of weeks. One of the things that people point to with this idea that religious figures are attachment figures, like higher, you know, deities or attachment figures, is people will do this. If anybody's watching on YouTube, I'm like or listening, I'm holding my hands up and looking at the sky. You'll see people do that in in you know religious ceremonies. and it's also what children do when they want to be picked up by their parent. And there was a sense of this, was something that was on my mind, this example is of I'm holding my arms out. And once again, it's an embodied practice. So, like I'm doing something Dodge Rea: Mm-hmm. Andrew Heacock: with my body, which just sort of anchors it, you know, at least I'm not distracted by thought I'm doing something. But there was a Dodge Rea: Mm-hmm. Andrew Heacock: sense of like, here, I'm giving like take it. You know, help. Like I, or it's also like a, you know, you just go like, shit, I don't know. Like, you know, I it's just like I'm throwing my Dodge Rea: Mm-hmm. Andrew Heacock: hands up. I mean, there were some of these gestures that are kind of universal, being like, I I don't, I take it. where that felt as if I it was I was being seen, or I was allowing myself to be seen by. something external. And that was quite profound. And it was so simple. Again, where it's like, it can't Dodge Rea: Yeah. Andrew Heacock: be that easy. Right. Like, of course, I mean, it it, you know, it's taken me many, many years to get to where I was able to allow in any sort of like higher power or anything that made any sort of sense. I had to go looking for a lot of things. And I had to go refer back to certain transcendent experience, ecstatic experiences I've had. Where I could be like, okay, this is this is what I remember that is, whatever. I don't have a name for it, but that's what I think we're talking about here. so that helped, but it was this sense of like being reparenting myself is a term I've heard many times, reparent yourself. The thing is that I just that very phrase has always conjured lots of shame. You know, like, Dodge Rea: Yeah. Andrew Heacock: and it was this sort of bypass that, which I it just it again, it I use this word bypass. I I don't mean it in spiritual bypassing. That's not how I mean it. I mean it really more like it just sort of cut there's this term cutting the Gordian knot. Do you know that? Cutting Gordian's knot. Have you ever heard this phrase? Dodge Rea: I haven't I don't remember what it means. Andrew Heacock: Gordias was a, I think his name is Gordias or Gordian. he was a king in ancient Greece, I think Mycenae, maybe something, some one of those states. And he didn't want anybody to succeed him as king. And so he tied this giant rope into knot, like this giant knot, and declared that no one could become king until they could untie the knot. And so for hundreds of years, there was no king of this of this city state in Greece. And Alexander the Great came along and they told him, like, okay, you can be the king as long as you can untie this knot. And he looks at it and he just pulls his sword out and he just cuts it. And it's called Dodge Rea: Mm-hmm. Andrew Heacock: cutting the Gordian knot. And it's it's basically a phrase that refers to any time where you're quickly and ruthlessly s cutting to the heart of a of a seemingly intractable problem. where it's really like, that that that's quite to the point, you know, like, all right, I guess that you're the king now. I mean, what were they gonna do? Tell them no. And Dodge Rea: Right. Andrew Heacock: that there's a sense of that of like this is so complicated that it just goes right through it. Dodge Rea: Yes. It's that's a that's beautifully said. And that is my experience of it also. keeping in mind that like I was the last guy to get it that this thing worked. It took me years of other people saying, Seriously, man, there's something really interesting about this. You should teach more about it. When are you gonna write a book about it? I sort of like yeah, man. Like I it took I was I think it was given to me first 'cause I was gonna need the biggest head start. Like it took me a long time to get it that That it is really true that to change anything you have to join with it first, right? And the Gordian knot for me is a knot of thought. I get so bound up in my thinking and my believing, because I believe every freaking thing I think, apparently. At least I historically have. I'm getting much better about that. but something about the gray sequence lets me bypass all of my ideas about shit. and just be in my experience of it most directly, which is in my body. And rather than fight with it, to join with it, and rather than kind of crawl into a cave by myself where I can lick my wounds in shame, imagine that I am lovable as I am, and then kind of surrender this back to the universe in some way. and interestingly that that wrist position actually is important and intuitively I knew it needed to be bent, you know, the wrists flexed forward like that, as you demonstrated a minute ago, rather than my palms facing back toward me. And I didn't know why for a long time. And then I was working with a a friend of mine is a teacher of Nekong and extraordinary, just like remarkably intuitive and Very advanced in his Negong work. And he was hurting about something. And so I said, Hey, can I show you something? And I showed him the gray sequence. It was really helpful to him. He was like, I don't know what ja the hell just happened, but that was really powerful. so we were talking about it for a Andrew Heacock: Yeah. Dodge Rea: minute, and he was trying to understand, like, what I I mean, what what was that? didn't make sense in his tradition. Finally, I asked him. The only thing I can't really explain is why you have to tip your wrists forward. Do you know anything about that? And he said, yeah, actually that's the only thing I can tell you about this thing. That opens the Lao Gong points in your in your poems. And it's it's a big part of releasing energy from that place, which is a kind of a known area for expressing of energy, whether it's releasing something or or you know, or treating others like this is why we very often heal with our hands and not with our say elbows, you know. Feet, right. Although Andrew Heacock: Feet. Right. Feet. That'd be weird. Yeah. Dodge Rea: there are there are points in the feet too. But it's a lot easier with your hands. In theory, but I think it seems to work better with your hands. The laying on of feet, right? It's Andrew Heacock: Okay, yeah. So you can place your feet on someone and you know, heal heal them. Laying on a feet? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Dodge Rea: time honored tradition. Anyway, yeah, there is something about that that wrist flex there that is that's part of it. Andrew Heacock: I k I knew that there was. Like I knew that was intentional. It was but it was for for lack of a better word, it's a little too weird. It was too specific not to be, you know, not to have been informed by something. I was for I'm glad that I was able to just trust that. Dodge Rea: Yeah. Andrew Heacock: for a long time I would have been too skeptical. of course, and I was until I was just basically like, I'm so desperate to feel better, I'll do anything. Like I don't need to believe in it, I'll try it. I'll just do it. And Dodge Rea: Yeah. Yes. Andrew Heacock: I think my first experience with that was where where of that really paying off was Kundalini yoga. And my very first time in I mean, I'd been told for been I was been told for like six months you need to be doing this by my therapist. And I didn't really know what it was. It was like, okay, I'll try yoga. And I, you I thought I showed up in like, you know, a a tank top and gym shorts and like, you know, we I didn't move off a cushion for two hours. And I had you know, you could call it a psychedelic experience or a transcendent spiritual experience. For my very first time, you know, the people that were there after I stayed, and I was like, I hope y'all thought, you know, I'm sorry if y'all thought that I was laughing at you. And they were like, that's exactly what we thought you were doing. I was like, no, I was like kind of dripping a little bit. And they were like, Yeah, you a lot of people will go years without ever having that experience, but you did it for the very first time. But I was also in such immense pain and discomfort from sitting on it that that sort of like I think that sort of aided in the process because pain has a way of like distracting. Sort of. And I think the way pain works is preventing you from thinking about anything else. So that I think to a certain extent that includes ego. Like the resources required for ego kind of get diverted to making the pain stop. And I was breathing and all these things. And nothing that happened in that. I mean, it was a totally non-ordinary experience. I wasn't on any kind of drug. I was just sitting on a cushion, breathing and and saying some things in a rhythmic motion. And And the most inch most fascinating thing is it didn't require me to believe anything about anything. Like I didn't go in there with any belief. I was just like, I'm gonna do it. I mean, I guess at a certain point, there's an like there would have to be a sm like, I mean, I was doing it. So there wasn't so much cognitive dissonance that I was like, this is never gonna work. This is stupid. Cause I still did it. I still agreed to go do it. So at least there's a kernel of faith there that you're like, shit, I'll try it, even if for no other reason than to shut my therapist up about it. Dodge Rea: Mm-hmm. Andrew Heacock: but I didn't there was nothing I had to take on faith. There were no deities involved in it. I was just doing this stuff without any expectation, and this experience happened. and it was there were things that we were doing with our wrists and fingers, making these mudras. and it was like this non-ordinary experience. so after having had that experience, without and and had that come from like taking a psychedelic drug or something. You could have just easily attributed it to the drug. whereas this was that was not that, I wouldn't on anything. so knowing that there's kind of like a there there, like I said about meditation, if we had just meditated, hell, I I could have done it for 20 years and not ever experienced something that was so with there was a very clear before and after with grace this morning. Like Dodge Rea: Mm-hmm. Andrew Heacock: I felt very different after. I felt better. I don't know exactly how or why I felt better. And it was almost like, well, I guess I'm glad I don't really need to know to know that it's like valid. Dodge Rea: Yeah. Andrew Heacock: and that was like the thing with the wrist movement. I'm like, okay, yeah, sure. Like I'm I I didn't know if that was informed by neuroscience or like Chinese medicine. I mean, it could have been anything, and I was I didn't I didn't even stop Dodge Rea: Yeah. Andrew Heacock: to think like I I guess I didn't even bother to be skeptical, which is was helpful because one of the things that was good about the thing. about the gray sequence was having just done it and you know after like one or two rounds, I was like, something's moving. Things are moving. Things are changing. Dodge Rea: Yeah. Andrew Heacock: So that's almost all it takes is just to know that there's something something's going to happen. Like you're going to get a result. Dodge Rea: Yes. Andrew Heacock: Even if it's not a great result, it's reassuring to know like something's going to change here in in a matter of minutes. Dodge Rea: Yes. Yeah, it it I I think I'm inherently a bit impatient, and so it's it's a very happy accident that this works quickly. Now the thing about it working quickly that's interesting is especially when people are you know, when I start to teach people to practice this on their own, I have to remind them the I the goal here isn't to find a new fancy way to control your feelings. like the whole idea is to find a new way to finally have your feelings. Does that make sense? Andrew Heacock: Mm-hmm. Dodge Rea: Like we've got kind of this this thing in us that says like if I can finally control my experience I'll be okay. And what unfortunately it means is we end up binding a lot of our aliveness up in not having or allowing through us like the fullness of our experience. So you know, maybe an hour ago you were asking, so what else can you use this with? Right? What's really cool about it is that it's very, very adaptive. It's highly malleable. I teach coaches to do it, body workers to do it, ministers to do it, sponsors to do it, definitely therapists to do it. Like there's there are a whole lot of ways this can work. And it doesn't have to be only applied to Difficult things. Like if all the universe is cycling from expansion to contraction and back, which is a fascinating truth to observe for a minute. we tend to call the contractions the bad ones, and so we are less alive to those, but in many ways we are very much skeptical of expansive feelings too. And so we got to work first with your contracted ones, and then when they Very quickly shifted to much more relaxed, expansive ones, your resistance to that came up. And so then we got to work with that. Yeah. I shouldn't feel this way. Andrew Heacock: Yeah, I felt like I was doing something wrong. Yeah, I felt like I was doing something wrong. Yeah. And the and the and the the applicate the approach was the exact same, which was also that's profound. Like 'cause you're it's Dodge Rea: Yes. Andrew Heacock: accepting the good feelings was more confronting than than accepting the the hard ones. Dodge Rea: And as I said to you, it often takes more courage to express to to accept the expansive feelings than the contracted ones, 'cause it feels so unguarded. Andrew Heacock: Can you say more about that? What do you mean by unguarded? Dodge Rea: When we're in a painful state, we tend to be vigilant for additional harm. And when we're in a joyful, easy, calm state, we tend to be much more free and no longer on guard. And lots of us have had painful things happen when we were least expecting them. And so we start to get scared about. red re dropping our guard. It's like finally taking the armor off. The knight has come back from battle and is behind castle walls and imagines himself to be safe and he takes off all the guarded armored burdensome elements of self that are rigid just enough rigid that you can't stab through them easily with a sword. But you take all of those off and man, you can be murdered in your sleep is the way it feels. Like If I am free and fully myself and playful and at ease, am I you know, am I gonna get blindsided? Will I be mocked? Will I be will I feel foolish later if I let myself feel this alive? So one interesting place here would be an example back to this question of so where else can you use this? as people start getting good with it, I'll often coach them to work with r really good feelings. And so one example came up a couple of Christmases ago in the Nashville Symphony was performing the Ode to Joy on the something like two hundredth anniversary, you know. I don't know if you've ever seen those lyrics. translated, but in this particular performance, I'd never seen this before, they had the translation of the lyrics about kind of us being f you know, finding safe to embrace joy. You know, like this this is a a coming of a a more beautiful time and we can allow ourselves to feel good. anyway, the the mix of the music and the the lyrics and the timing in this world, I found just deeply moving. And I could feel myself holding back tears. And I was like, why am I doing that? Like, why can't I feel the full joy of this? And so instinctively I found myself starting to use the gray sequence. I was just turning my hands over in my lap really subtly. My eyes were moving back and forth. I was just trying to join with what does this joy feel like in my body? Could I allow myself like to fully immerse myself in that? Like could I fall all the way into the beauty of this and not be self conscious and you know protecting some image of myself or staying keeping things under control or being appropriate or I don't know what I was doing. but what I found was that I could and that the tears were just sort of streaming down my face, but in a way that felt really relaxed. It didn't feel out of control, it just felt so beautiful. So when you and I worked together today, we did sort of three different phases of this. that, you know, two of them going beyond kind of the the simple form of it. Normally what we're mostly working with is what experience I'm having right now that I would like to be more open to, more alive to. Often we start with something uncomfortable, but it can also be something really wonderful. maybe like somebody's on their way home from a date and it was freaking fantastic and they're scared to feel hopeful and they're just letting that all the way in. Or maybe they're celebrating something and there's a part of them that's like it's too good to be true and they're just letting themselves relax into that. so but often it's I feel anxious, I feel sad, I feel angry, I feel resentful, whatever. So you're usually something contracted. After we got through that first phase, what started to come back for you was like I feel like I'm forgetting to feel afraid of this thing that I am usually on guard against. This part of me that you had just unclenched in a really big way was now starting to go, wait, is this okay for me to be just at ease about this thing? And so then we started play with like a whole different level of question, which is Who's is this fear? This fear that's coming back to say I should feel afraid or I should feel badly about myself. Remember me asking you like ask your heart, not your head, whose is this? We as yeah, Andrew Heacock: Yes. Yeah, I remember that. Dodge Rea: go ahead. Andrew Heacock: Yeah, no, I I remember that. That was that was profound because it was hard to like there's the first thought and then there you think, no wait, that's gotta be something else. Dodge Rea: Yes, right. human beings are remarkably capable of of taking in other people's ideas, beliefs and feelings and carrying them as their own. And it happens all the time. And rarely are people aware of it because even most therapists don't ever help their clients ask, is this even my pain? It's a really weird nonsensical question in a way, right? and yet it's vital to ask because at some level, like we can digest our own experience, but we can't digest someone else's. We can't digest someone else's food. It's like we've swallowed a plastic hamburger that is not meant for our bodies, and it just sits there like this chunk in our GI system somewhere for sometimes years and years. And It can be very, very helpful speeding up the process of working your way through something if you can ask the question, whose is this? And if you like, I can tell you some interesting stories about that that concept. but then the third thing we worked on after we'd noticed, twice, what you found was that fear was not mine. That was another major person in your life who had probably been afraid for you and afraid about that for a long time, and you had learned Kind of the way a kid looks at a mother. Kid has fallen down and mother's freaking out, so kid needs to freak out too, even though their knee doesn't really hurt that much, right? But I guess I should be terrified. This is how I should see myself, this is how I'm seen. And so we can absorb that stuff and carry it around for a long time. Right? Andrew Heacock: Yes. So I wanna ask there's some banging out here, so I'm gonna let you talk. you it we talked earlier about why you weren't gonna go through the sequence in detail and teach it on this podcast. You do trainings with it. Can you talk about your decision about how you wanted it why you wanted to do it this way? Dodge Rea: Yeah, it so part of it is when when in the past I've guided somebody through it on the air, first of all, you really don't know what's gonna come up or how fast it's gonna go there. it there can be a a major catharsis that happens and if the person is having to sort of guard for the sake of their audience, it sets up this internal conflict where they just don't get that as much from it as as they as they might otherwise. So I I wanted to be respectful of you having a chance to work with it, you know, authentically and not have to worry about who's listening. the other part that can be a little problematic about sharing a ton about it, is that in some ways it's a very simple process, but it it also has some real subtleties to it. It's great to go use on your own. But often people will hear it and they'll be like, Cool, I'll go try it out with my clients and then next thing you know, it n hasn't necessarily gone very well. and it was because they didn't have any training in it. there's some some predictable pitfalls. The first time I learned about this, I had taught it to s well, a a friend of mine said, Hey, weirdest thing happened. My therapist, said we're gonna try a practice today called the gray sequence. Dodge Ray came up with it. And she's like, that's weird. I know Dodge. And I said, Wow, that's totally weird. I don't even know who your therapist is, so I have no idea how he taught it to you. How did you like it? And she said, Well, if I can be honest, I hated it. I was like, Really? Can you walk me through what happened? And what they were going through was not at all what I would have taught somebody to do. It was it was his own version of how it worked for him imposed on her. Not very helpful. And so when I showed it to her the right way it was much more helpful. Like it and so sometimes I don't demonstrate it sort of point by point without a training because I don't want folks to go out there and hurt somebody with it and then wonder why it didn't work. Andrew Heacock: If someone would like to be trained in it, how can they contact you? Dodge Rea: well, they could go to my website, just dodgeray.com, R E A. they can read a bunch more about it there and some of the kinds of workshops I do. I've been thinking about actually having one again. I'm just pulling up my cal calendar to see when that might work. I had a date picked out and then I think I'm gonna do one probably the maybe second Friday in December. or maybe I'll have to see. If if people start showing some interest, I might do a Saturday, Sunday. I tend to do it the initial introduction I tend to do in two days of two hour of two two hour blocks. So like, you know, two mornings so that they have a chance to learn about it and what's going on here and then go home and practice it and then come back with questions and talk about. what just happened there. so they have a chance to practice. but we could find some dates if if people are interested and and what I'd encourage them to do is not just sign up for like the listserv, but you know, just contact me directly through the the website. Andrew Heacock: Okay, so we'll p we'll pin your website and the first comment on this video on YouTube. so we're coming to an end and I guess I just want to give you an opportunity to take the last word. Dodge Rea: Hmm. Well, I really appreciate a chance to talk with you about all of this. this ends up being a very versatile way to work. and you know, we talked about two of those ways, addressing your direct experience, addressing somebody else's. And the third way is is to imagine a future experience you want to be having and to work with it from there. And so one of the things that happens to us a lot is We are more afraid and hold more resistance internally to the thing we think we want than we know. And so we played for a minute there with you imagining you were well past this thing that you've carried around as a kind of an identity for you for a long time. And your first thought was, There was a sadness you felt, and then you realized, wait, that's not even mine. And then there was kind of a a f a fear or a doubt around it. And we process that through. And when you got to a like, no wait, I could imagine that and feel at ease about it. I knew you were at a place where you could go create that anytime you want. But if your body feels fear, the moment you're thinking of a hopeful scenario, the very scenario you want desperately to create, your body's gonna probably win that argument. Your brain is saying, I will will this into be existence, and your body's like, I don't know about this. This feels pretty terrible. Especially if it's unconscious, it will win. So as Carl Jung said so many years ago, until we make the unconscious conscious, it will rule our lives and we will call it fate. Well the unconscious is held in the body. And so the gray sequence ends up being a really cool way to work directly with how we are somatically holding the remnants of our histories and, you know, our own vigilance about potential futures. And and I think are really elegant and and s and fairly easy way to release those. Andrew Heacock: Okay, Dodge. Well, thank you so much for the opportunity to do this. This has been it was a pleasure this morning. It's a pleasure to it was just so cool to be able to unpack this with you a little bit right after we've done it. for anybody that's made it this far, I hope this has been concrete enough of what I've talked about that you could kind of understand what what I went through without I was going through a point by point of it. But if you're interested in getting the training or learning more about it, you can contact Dodge at his website. Okay. Thanks a lot, Dodge. You you two Dodge Rea: Yep. We'd love it. Thank you so much, Andrew. What a pleasure. Andrew Heacock: by there.