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The Psychology of Healing: Why We Fear Being Seen & Heard · Radiant Voices

• Jeremy de Tolly: The degree to which one can lie to oneself in the head is extraordinary. And I mean just everybody does it all the time. The body is you know, is is is much more truthful. When you get to something that's truthful, your body opens, relaxes, it knows. And you know, what most people don't realise is that the gut alone has the same number of neurons as a cat's brain. It's got quite a significant brain, plus it produces eighty percent of the serotonin in the body and so on, so on so on. You know, the heart has fifty times the electromagnetic radiation of the brain. It's a massive system, so one needs discernment in the head and the rest can go. Okay, welcome everyone. I have a wonderful and esteemed guest with me today. I'd like to introduce you to Bill Petri, who's been a mentor of mine and supported me and my process very deeply. And he is a coach and mentor, originally also a psych psychologist and a psychotherapist, and a number of other hats, which we'll discuss today. And we're gonna have a very deep conversation about the process of healing. And what it is to create a life that you really enjoy living in, one that feels meaningful and purposeful, and you feel deeply aligned with. And obviously, within the context of this, we're also going to talk about what it is to have a voice in the world and to own up to the human, squishy reality of what it is like, even in a moment like this, to put one's voice into the world to Prepare to be on camera, to expose ourselves to the internet. Cause even though it might look kind of easy, it's a big vibe putting yourself out there like this. I can feel in my body some tingles in my solar plexus and some flutters in my belly. And I've been kind of waiting all day to have this conversation with Bill. And so first of all, Bill, huge welcome and thank you for being here. Thanks, Jeremy. We're really happy to be here too. You know, to discuss these things with you, learn from you, le learn from each other. Thank you so much. Yeah, how are you feeling in your body right now? So tension in my chest, tension in my stomach, you know, not too bad, but anxiety. It's it's exposing, I'm not used to this. I've avoided this sort of thing like the plague. I'm a very introverted person. And yeah. But it's it's manageable. And I don't know if you want to know what I found really helpful. You know, I mean you've got your own mechanisms but you know, in the internal family systems model you you become aware of different parts of yourself. And there were a lot of parts of myself that were felt a lot of shame in childhood and adolescence. So it was a matter of going into an adult self and just saying to them and connecting with them and just saying, you know, I'm gonna deal with this, you don't have to deal with this, you know, I'm gonna do it. I'm old enough and big enough and ugly enough to deal with this and and and that that helped considerably. Yeah, so right in this moment as we speak, I'm tapping gently on my on my legs with a slow left and right tap and bringing awareness down into the my lower body. And part of the reasoning there is that most people find that their lower body, especially from the below the hips all the way to the feet, tends to be still. neutral, less anxious than, for example, the chest and belly and solar plexus. And so I'm just tapping and regulating my body and bringing awareness down and slowing myself down and grounding in the moment. But I also did some prep too, like you did. And I love the sound of using IFS parts as a a kind of a negotiation and a decision about who's in charge. How Long did that take you? Was that a process you did days before or just before? How did what did it look like? It really didn't take long. You know, it it's so the process would be tuning into the body, seeing where the anxiety is, asking the parts to come to the fore, you know, that are feeling those feelings, getting a sense of them all, and then, you know, just talking to them and just saying, you know, don't worry about it. I've ca I'm gonna deal with this, you don't have to do it, you're young, I'm you know, sixty eight, I'm I've been around a bit, I can I can do this. And they yeah, they they settled quite a lot from that, you know. I think the mind's very good at producing little people inside. I mean it's one of the things it does, you know, if you think of yourself at fifteen, you know, you most people can get an image or a sense. And so if you if you work a lot with that sort of thing, it's it's it's it's a very quick process, maybe a few minutes. Hmm. So we've all got parts. Can you describe archetypally what kind of parts we might have? And then you also seem to speak of a part that is more senior, that can lead lead in a more constructive fashion. Yeah, just give us some detail. Well, there are lots of kind of levels if you like. You know, at at at the base level there'll be neglected, abandoned baby elements or, you know, trauma birth trauma elements for some people. You know, then you go into the developmental stages, you know, like autonomy versus self doubt and shame as, you know, between two and three and and so on. So different parts can be established at different ages. Adolescence is difficult for a lot of people. And then a lot of people experience trauma along the way, so they're traumatized parts. So then you get into adult parts, and there's a kind of ordinary adult that deals, you know, with a world of kind of thirty year old kind of part that's kind of s worked out what you like and what your weaknesses and strengths are. And then things change a lot in midlife if you really manage to make that transition to You know, what are you what are you really serving? What are you being called here to do? What's your authentic place in the world? And and it's it just keeps on develop developing, you know, people are retiring, people are facing death. you know, it's it's it's but those child parts, because we're in a certain mental state when we're very young, those child parts are very strong. And if we don't familiarise ourselves with them You know, they're gonna be acting out unconsciously. And and assuming, for example, that they've got a previous podcast, you know. But this is all stuff that you're very familiar with, but your audience might not be. Yeah, no, it's this is perfect. Yeah, so so when people experience public speaking anxiety and the fear of being seen and heard, for example, what is then happening from a parts point of view. Are those young parts or will they be a blended part? For me for me and for many people there's sort of there can be well, let me step backwards a bit. I think Jung's idea of a complex is really helpful. He said that there a complex is an association of experiences that have a common feeling to it. So shame, for example, which is dominant in fear of public speaking. Can occur at multiple ages, so there'll be multiple parts. But you can access them all through the same feeling. let's talk more about that. you know, we've spoken about schemas, for example, or core wounds. Will you just speak a little bit more about that topic? And let's just say from the point of view of a fear of being seen and heard, of being highly visible in the world, how might that big clump of conditioning come to be? And and what is what technically from a psycho psychotherapeutic or scientific point of view, how would one describe that and then how would you work with it? Well the schemas is a a term I think Jeffrey Young came up with that, the cognitive therapist New Yorker. so the the schemas are mainly beliefs, very core beliefs that one is not good enough. Right, so I'm too fat, I'm too thin, I'm ugly, you know, I'm not bright enough, I'm not social enough, I'm not confident enough, I'm you know, I'm stupid or whatever, and it's it's I'm defective, going right through to I'm bad, you know, I'm evil, I'm irredeemable, I'm unlovable. And most people are too scared to look at those parts of themselves. You know, we develop personas. Okay, I'm this kind of guy in this kind of context, and you know, as a professional I'm like this. But underneath that all is a whole gamut of different parts that feel different things and have different modes of behaviour. So when one's digging down, one goes through parts that might have doubts or fears, or button might be traumatized and so on. But It's really important as a therapist to get to the parts that you call schemas that are fundament have fundamental beliefs, that they're bad or and you know, just they damage in some way or not good enough. Yeah. So I mean how f how important have you found it to get to to schemas with your clients, you know, when it comes to public speaking particular Yeah, as you say, there there are layers. When I begin to work with clients, we work with the core pattern as it shows up now. And already there's enormous benefit to just finely processing. I'll I'll use EFT mostly, and then processing the thoughts, feelings, and if we can access them, the most superficial belief systems, and really recognizing and coming to terms with them because at first you know the mind will have this habit of wanting to push it away. I don't want to think about it. It makes me anxious to think about it. And there's even a lack of familiarity with the pattern. So even though I might experience a lot of public speaking anxiety, I will also avoid as much as possible thinking about it. And then after a public speaking event or a podcast or speaking in a meeting, I might go into a whole pattern that I like to call a shame hangover of self-recrimination and shame will come up and all of those. And well, it'll feel like embarrassment and frustration with self. But there are incredible riches in that shame hangover. And processed, we can begin to do the work of dismantling it or at least facing it and processing it and reducing some of the charge in it. But then there's a process really of I suppose of dissent, I think is almost the way you described it, of potentially going back into core early life memories, where that shutting down process where really got firmly placed into the psyche, where it became really clear to that little human being that it was potentially scary or dangerous to speak up, or that they'd be rejected and so on. So yeah, it there there it depends. To answer your question, in a kind of a short tranche of work, we'll do deal with the the more superficial aspects. And then over time, if we have the luxury of that time, we'll go into the deeper material to really reduce charge throughout the whole psyche and the whole person and their body to being seen to allow them to recover really a sense of play. The ability to be frivolous and their full selves, to be serious, frivolous and their full selves in the public domain without that same degree of fear. How does that sound? Is that It sounds great. You know, for for your aud audience, you know, the kind of thing is you you're describing is, you know, you you might be f well, one might or I might have, you know, a thought, god, I'm gonna make a fool of myself, you know. It's not actually a thought that came up, but that kind of thing might come up. That's not at the level of the schema. The schema is a shamed person that's been shamed for speaking up that, you know, for example for me standing up in a at a university giving a talk and actually dissociating completely to the degree that I couldn't he I could I didn't know what I was saying. Right. I had no idea. And You know, so that was another cool thing and then it goes back in time to little people that you know, to a little person that wasn't listened to. You know, I can't handle the this kind of situation. I prefer this, this works for me, that doesn't work for me. That wasn't allowed. Right. So, so you as a child you assume it's your fault. you're bad, you you can't do what mom and dad and teachers expect of you. So you you you must be defective, right? so you're going down those levels. And the other thing, sorry, you know, that I think's really, really important that I I'd love everybody to get, and that is at a personal personality level we're all screwed up, right? There's no way around that. so we've all got stuff. And it's very scary to admit that to oneself as one goes in if one's not used to it. But that for me is what healing is about, is coming to know yourself, coming to accept that and and accommodate it. I think that's so powerful. And and and I really recognize that in the work that we did together, is really learning to recognize and live with our incredible messy humanness and to learn to lean into it and As opposed to this kind of masking that we seemingly need to do of I'm fine, I'm okay, I've got it all together, I need to be perfect, we all need to be perfect. I kind of expect you to be perfect. I think the whole world expects me to be perfect too. And it's incredibly tiring having to be perfect or to tr at least pretend that it that one is. And there's a huge or at least the beginnings of a sigh of relief when There's license to recognize that we're in hot mess and pretty much gonna be that ready till the day we die, we can do some magnificent work to live in more purpose and alignment, but we'll also stay messy, right? Does that sound about right? Yeah. Ramduz called it moving the furniture around the room. You know, you can get a a neater, prettier room, you can upgrade the furniture, but you know, you're still gonna be just stuck in this one room, right? a as a personality. You can go deeper than that. And then we're talking the kind of spiritual route or the presence mindfulness route, you know. But at a personality level, yeah, it's it's gonna be a mess. Mm. Mm. Let's talk then a about the process of healing. Healing patterns, healing negative conditioning. Because it almost sounds from what you're saying, and I know you're not saying that, but that one can't really heal. I know of course that you you you you believe people can heal. What does a process of healing look like? How much can we heal? On the one level, it's like yes, we could just move the furniture around, but we're still that same messy creature. And yet transformation is possible. Can you talk a little bit about that? Yeah, you know, it's it's very hard to generalize. You know, I'll give you one example that I was given permission to talk about, and that was a guy that Came to see me, he couldn't work, his work involved flying a lot. And he couldn't fly, he was too anxious. All of a sudden. And I was very lucky that we were able to trace it back to an incident in early childhood where a boat capsized and he was trapped underneath the boat. I processed it with one session of EMDR and you know, for years afterwards the guy would email me and say, Thanks so much, I've been fine, it's miraculous, you know. But that was the EMDR. through to people who, you know, were deeply wounded, traumatized, neglected, abandoned, sexually abused in childhood over an extended period of time. You know, the worst cases of those are, you know, a DID dissociative identity disorder, what we used to call multiple personality disorder. And sometimes you can get it right. I mean, I had the very good fortune to work with somebody who had sixteen personalities and after seven years of horrendously difficult work, she had one, she came to see me you know, twenty years later and, you know, was living a pretty good life. So sometimes but sometimes, you know, you get clients that where you just can't help them. it it's they're not willing to do the work, they're not willing to face what needs to be faced. It's just too much for them. doesn't matter what what you do. you know, you don't don't always make great progress. that's a reality. what's your experience been? Yeah, I think my experience has been much the same. I think there are obviously a kind of a middle ground of of folk who have got manageable trauma, and then there are some people who have got really, really devastating psychological trauma and And their capacity to heal is is low. And and I think it's I I think it begins with at least the desire and a real focus and intention on healing and overcoming those kinds of of life events. Where there's a willingness and a focus, a lot can be achieved. And sometimes it can be very hard and very long. But when there's that kind of commitment, just a real and you can feel it in some people. I'm sure you you know, you'd agree that when you start working with people, some people just rarely show up in their internal process, in their self-healing journey. And they they they invariably will go very far with that. And some folk don't have that kind of commitment, or some people have got very, very gnarly trauma and it's really hard. it's hard for them to heal. But I I would just say that if I was to generalize most people who are deeply committed can make progress. I would hate I'd hate people to consider that if they weren't committed they wouldn't get anywhere. But I I I don't know if that springs true. Yeah, absolutely. I think there's another factor too, and that is their ability to face truth. You know, I was listening to Uval Erari the other day and he he w he was saying that, you know, truth is a very expensive thing, that it's much simpler, much easier to to you know, he's talking more in a geopolitical arena to to face you know, an untruth, you know, make America great again or whatever it is. You know. but it at a personal level too, he was talking a bit about it and saying, you know, how how much mess there is in the psyche and how we need to allow time and space and silence to allow that to appear and to know it. he meditates two hours a day. you know, does to to allow that and he's an introvert, public appearances are scary for him and it enables him to do that, you know. So I think I think the ability to to be really truthful and to face truth is another very important factor. It's not easy. Yeah. Yeah I remember you saying that to me in previous conversations This willingness to also face one's blind spots. In fact, beyond a willingness, almost an eagerness to be shown parts of yourself that are uncomfortable. In other words, the desire to see even your ugly parts is greater than your desire to avoid them and and your fear of of knowing yourself. And that willingness to kind of walk into the fire. You were very courageous. thank you. Thank you. Yeah, I'm even reminded I've I've worked I've I've been interviewing some public speaking coaches, and at least two of them have said the willingness to take on feedback is probably one of the biggest factors in people becoming better coach better speakers. It's just that willingness to take on board feedback and Criticism, even, and just to sit with it and not run away. I want to go back. We were talking about this perhaps an arc of healing, and we we're covering a lot of territory. And I I wanted to drill into a few things. So we're we've been speaking about that people do heal, and at the same time, there's this weird paradox where we more or less they are kind of awkward or beautiful selves at the same time as healing. I mean in my life experience, I that's very true. I think there's also we have an extraordinary opportunity to emancipate ourselves from a lot of negative conditioning. Does that ring as true? yeah. Yeah. No, I've certainly seen that with most of my most clients and certainly with myself. I mean it's I was almost completely dysfunctional as as an eighteen year old. So you know. and not Certainly not so now. yeah, so a lot of people can heal to a great degree, which doesn't mean that they don't feel anxiety, that they don't their patterns don't sometimes create suffering for them unnecessarily that they don't want things that they can't have, that they don't want things to get rid of things they have and so on so on so on, you know. And a a lot of people spend a lot of time fighting reality, you know. How can the government do that? You know? Well the government did that, you know. Well, how could he invade Iran? Well he invaded Iran, right? So it's a it's a it's a great shortcut to say, okay, well this is actually happening and this is true about me. Well, where do we go from there? You know? That's a a beautiful point. There are a few things in there. I mean, th that that one of fighting reality is probably one of the obviously the most pointless things we can do. And also energy consuming. In other words, even with public speaking anxiety, it'll generally when I first start working with people, one of the first things we'll need to work with is their self-rejection, their frustration with themselves, the rejection and avoidance of the pattern. And I I often describe it like this: like here's the social anxiety or speaking anxiety pattern, and it's pretty awful for that to experience that. But then to throw on top of that, this shouldn't be happening, why am I like this? I'm so frustrated with myself. We it's really hard to even get to the core pattern when we're we when we're rejecting what is. And so this kind of release of a rejection of of of reality and a kind of a okay, you know, it sucks, but this is what's going on. And I I I I'm gonna try and begin to accept that, begins to allow a softening that allows healing to take place. And and surrounding that, I mean, you know, you and I pay a lot of attention to enabling our our clients to be safe, to feel safe. You know, before one goes into the difficult places, there needs to be a sense of safety between yourself and the people you work with. If that's not there, then you know, you're not helping them to hold the difficulty of facing reality. Yeah, that's a really good point. So th you know, just to r repeat that. It's this thing about the healing process will really struggle to happen unless the container feels safe. So it's all well and good kind of going into a healing process. But one of the most important things to do when meeting someone like Bill or I to decide to do some work is to sit with us and see how you feel. Because unless there's some sense of connection and safety, those parts that are protecting you are are really gonna struggle to let go. And really that's probably one of the things that we both really endeavor to offer and to provide and to be inside ourselves for our clients is as ethical, as safe, as clear, as human, as authentic as we can possibly be. Yeah. Just want to take a moment here 'cause I wanna go back to something. we'll probably edit this out or maybe we'll just keep in this human moment as I try and regather threads for a second. Was there something you wanted to say there or while the issue of safety is up, you know, it's it's I don't do couples work anymore, but in in in relationships, I think, you know, not a therapist client kind of relationship, but in love relationships, marriages, you know, and so on. I think that's also the critical factor. You know, I was talking to somebody this morning that said, you know, what's fair for the goose is fair for the gander. And I disagree. You know, we've got different needs, different trigger points, etc. etc. What needs to be fair is that we both in a relationship, both people endeavour to try and make the a situation where the p other person feels safe enough to engage. And we really only feel engaged and connected and have a sense of well being when we feel safe enough. You know. And polyvagal theory has been really great about that. And it's it's fundamental. Otherwise we're in f you know, fight or flight or freeze or, you know, collapse or fawn or, you know, just r yeah you know, any of the other defenses against it and like my avoidance of you know being in this kind of thing. Previously and and which is a defense, right? And you know, with you I feel safe enough. Hmm Yeah, I I d I definitely had on my my kind of list of of stuff for us to talk about was relationships and communication, but I just want to lean into what you were saying around polyvagal theory and safety and really just also remind everyone listening about the ventral vagal nervous system as described in polyvagal theory, which is a A place that we can, I'm gonna use that phrase, lean into again, or an aspect of our nervous system where there is safety, where oxytocin will pump in the body, where we will feel grounded, safe, and natural connection arises, a real natural sense of being c interconnected with others and able to relate. And so even though and there'll be many people who watch this. That suffer from senses of social anxiety and struggle in groups and potentially one-on-ones and and feel like it's hard for them to connect with other human beings. And I always like to share with them that there's a place in their nervous system that is ideally built for that, and that they're probably have a pattern of becoming anxious and dysregulated, or maybe even frozen and dissociated around others. And one of the aspects of the work will to will be to in real time seek out and regulate the nervous system into a sense of grounded safety as best as possible, where the natural inbuilt mechanisms that include oxytocin will help the person relate and connect. In other words, it's not some kind of mystical thing where other people just know how to be friendly. There's a kind of a natural part of us, if we can just work out how to access it, that that does bond, that wants to bond, that that even creates a s sense of safety in us that then gets I'm gonna say, almost transmitted to others so that we feel safe to others. Can you talk a little bit about how we share our sense of safety with others? It it's actually in in in live connections, there's there's actually an electromagnetic connection with the other person's heart, believe it or not. The this has been studied very carefully, I mean I'm sure you know about this. And what what they found is that people who knew how to regulate their heart and to produce a nice smooth curve could do that sitting opposite somebody else and would change their heart pattern, would get would regulate their heart for them. So that that also happens to some extent online because people will be watching your rate of breathing. the tension in your shoulders, the constriction in your voice, or the quaver in your voice, or whatever it might be. And y you know, people are monitoring this unconsciously most of the time. And if if somebody seems okay with themselves or relaxed with themselves, it it allow i it's it makes the situation much safer for the other person. you know, and then of course there's engagement and you know, feeding back to the person and understanding of what they're experiencing and you know, careful exploration and so on, many other factors. But but behind all of that is a genuine caring. Very, very important, you know. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I'd like to add on our mirror neurons which are reading each other the whole time. And so as we lean into safety, we can generally transmit that or we would we may feel safe to others. And I think you've described this heart coherence, which is incredibly important. And so there's a huge amount we can do to create safety in relationships if we are taking responsibility for how we feel inside. And I think that's what you're saying is or I think when you're describing in relationships that providing safety is one of the most important things we can do. Are there other things about relationship communication and managing or nurturing and fostering health in relationships that we should be doing, especially from a cu communication point of view? I encourage people to to s you know tell me exactly what's going on. So if they're r reluctant and say, well it sounds a bit crazy and immediately I'll go say, well look you know, tell me about it and then, you know, normalise it, which yeah, which is you know, there's nothing that pretty much that I haven't seen over the years. So encouraging people to be honest, saying if I say something, well you that might I mean there was a c a session yesterday where I said to the person, You must be exhausted now. This kind of work is exhausting he said, No So you know and he's he's an incredibly blunt, straightforward client and I value that enormously. He'll just give me the truth, right? And and that's what I asked for. you know, I don't get upset about it, I take it as, okay, this is really important. You know, this guy can do deep work and he can do a lot of it, and I don't have to worry about him getting exhausted by it, you know. What about in love relationships? How does one keep communication healthy? Are there any do's and don'ts? Take a breath. You know. you know, just pause before you re w react. Because you know, what happens in long term relationships is that we set each other off, right? And w one triggered person sets the other triggered, you know, triggering in the other person and then you just end up with a a mess. And a very common example would be A woman that's unhappy about something in a relationship. And this is a bit of a stereotype, but boy, does it come up often. and and she's coming on in a way that to the man feels like he's been criticized. So he'll get really defensive and pissed off and you're always criticizing me and so on. But what she's actually doing from her point of view is expressing her feelings and fighting for the relationship. So You know, th there's a lot of education again and again, educational work with men to them to understand that if your woman is you know, what sounds like you're criticizing you, fighting for the relationship, she's fighting for the relationship because she wants it to be safe enough so that she can connect with you and have a good relationship with you. And if it's not, she's gonna have to leave. Right? So that's what she's fighting for. Yeah, that's so powerful. And I think what you're describing there is for him to learn to welcome her voice and nurture her voice so that she feels free to let it out without him deciding, without him taking it all on. To let her you know, some people are verbal processors and they need to speak out everything. And that could be include the kitchen sink, and not everything is actually meant or even believed and to allow that and to accept it and to welcome her or his voice so that the the relationship is one where speaking happens, where venting can happen, without an immediate kind of crumbling and withdrawing or defending. And to nurture and welcome that that voice and to even allow multiple viewpoints to simultaneously coexist, to not hold people to their viewpoints. To let it be a bit more of a fluid place where expressing is welcomed and not fixated on. And and rather than taking someone else's the your partner's opinion and kind of turning that into a blade which we actually then end up really hurting ourselves with, to let each other speak. And you know, I think this is expressed so well with nonviolent communication, where we take responsibility for speaking to to de weaponize speaking, to reduce blame in speaking as best as we can, but then also to really allow the person their viewpoint and ideally even mirror it back, to speak it back exactly as it's been put out. And though those kinds of practices, increasing safety, hopefully, and learning to decrease defensiveness. Not always easy in the moment, right? So what does one do to decrease defensiveness in the moment? Well, meditation helps. You know. if if you meditate regularly you've you've got more capacity to just listen and not take it personally. There's space around the particular reactions. so for me that that's the the most im important thing, most important practice. And then just trying to take a breath. If you know when I'm I'm dealing with men that are frustrated with their wives. I say you've got to develop stainless steel balls, you know. You've got to just be able to sit there and just listen, right? And it doesn't matter how many knives are coming towards you, listen because this is important. It's important for your relationship. And l you know, listen to the tone, listen to the feelings. What's underneath the anger? You know, that she might be very angry, but that might mean that she feels humiliated, belittled, hurt, abandoned, neglected, you know. or or whatever. And that's what's important to get to. You know, what does she really f feel? I know I'm I'm stereotyping a bit, but it's you know it's just one of one common pattern that we're talking about here. Well let's let's let's give ourselves license to talk about this as men with partners and so yeah from that point of view. And let's stick with with mindfulness and presence for a moment because I think we we just began to touch on it. You know, like you said, meditation and let's parallel that with mindfulness seems to introduce space. So w let's what are the benefits of meditation and mindfulness? Why does one bother to do it? Everyone talks about it. What is it and what what does it do? I could give you a very long answer to this because there's so many different things that are called meditation. But the the the the two Big Junyun, you know, from a Buddhist point of view, what would we call meditation or concentration practices like following the breath, paying attention to one thing, getting distracted, realizing you've got distracted, bringing your attention back. Those are concentration practices. And it the more you do that, the more you're able to move your awareness to whatever you would prefer it to be moved to. after that's kind of insight. meditation, Vipasna of various kinds. And so through being able to move one's awareness, one can move one's awareness to the awareness itself or to the space in which feelings, thoughts, etcetera appear. And then the reality changes. The the personal sense of self diminishes or the attachment to that. And one can be much more aware to gr greater and greater degrees of just the stuff that's arising. They're these feelings, they're these thoughts, they're these perceptions and so on. And that's incredibly valuable because that bigger perspective can hold anything. Particularly when you just let your personal sense of dissolve self dissolve, you actually become identified with the awareness itself. That's the non dual approach. So the deeper one goes into that, the more one can tolerate, I think, is it as a general principle. That makes sense. Yeah, that's it's beautiful. Yeah, it's so so rich. There's so much to say about this. Yeah, I often describe in in my work around anxiety or and social anxiety and speaking anxiety that people will enter these particular states. You could say parts are in charge, but they're in a meeting, and they have been completely hijacked. So they are inside a set of conditioning, a kind of a clump of anxious conditioning that involves overthinking. It involves very particular thought patterns, fear of fear, projection on those around them that people see them as stupid or unworthy and so on. And they're it's it's an embodied experience too. There's all kinds of feelings in the body. It's a full system. I I I'll talk about it as a communications system. That includes thoughts, beliefs and memories and emotions, nervous system patterns and body sensations and all sorts of stuff like that. And this ability to move out of being inside a very dysfunctional narrative, it trapped inside that narrative into whoa. There's a much bigger perspective, a kind of a bigger sense of self, or b, I mean, technically speaking, you've said e even a dissolution of that sense of self has got extraordinary potential for us. And we, as Ekhartola said, we potentially enter in the now out of a out of this bundle of conditioning, and that can have extraordinary effects on us. So From a a parts point of view or a psychological point of view, what happens with us when we meditate and introduce this mindfulness or presence? It depends on your your point of view. Yeah, you know your world view as to to w how how an answers are, I guess. You know, if you believe in a materialist world and you know, they're what most people believe in, what you're accessing is a very deep part of yourself, Jung called it the self with a capital S. so you know, which is the totality of one's psyche in in his view. So for Buddhists it's going way beyond that. And it's going back to what they call they've got many names for it, but they're Buddha mind or natural mind. I like natural mind. It's the kind of mind that's there when you're very relaxed, you're on holiday, you're sitting on the beach, you're watching a sunset. Nothing much to think about, nothing threatening, feel completely safe. And you're just watching, you're just open. That's natural mind. Right? So it's it's not some kind of enlightened thing with sparks coming out of your head. It's it's it's just the awareness that's there all the time. Right. And then you brought up a very important thing, which is the noise in the head is enormously corrupting, if you like. most of the stuff that the mind in the head thinks i is not true. Most of it is is just commentary or judgmental mind and judgmental mind only happens in humans. it doesn't it doesn't seem to happen well, maybe in in pets that have been around humans a lot, some of the time. dogs might feel ashamed when they've they've stolen the food again. for example. But but yeah, it it's I'm losing the track now, but the deeper you go one goes into what this awareness of the things that one's experiencing, the wider and broader and more mysterious it becomes. And you know, one enters the world of the mystics eventually. It's it's really inherently mysterious. And it's driving scientists nuts at the moment. The harder so-called hard problem of, you know, how how can consciousness just come out of matter? We don't even know how thought happens in the brain, if it happens in the brain. Yeah, or does matter come out of consciousness? Yeah. Yeah. As you said, you described this move maybe from the small self with a small s into the capital S self. It seems to offer us this Access to a broader, wiser self. What what are the characteristics of this big self? This yeah, self with the capital S? Yeah, lots of characteristics. So obviously, awareness, you know, consciousness, breadth, creativity, confidence. the what The Buddhists talk about is the seeds of compassion and kindness, altruistic joy and so on. And I think that's a true sort of metaphor because when one opens to the the field of consciousness, one can actively develop compassion, kindness, etcetera. so those those the seeds of of those things are are in this wide open awareness. It's It's really important that that awareness is brought down into the body, down down to the the heart of the lower belly. because because they're different aspects of reality that are perceived through them. And one of the big differences that the heart is that one has access not only to wisdom but also to conscience, which is very different from the guilt and shame and all that sort of thing. It's just a felt sense, this feels right and that doesn't feel right. so one also has that access to that felt safe. This and then I haven't really understood how this happens, but there's also i it does very clearly happen that if one's really open at the heart one can connect with what's is right or authentic for one. In other words, there's you know, if you ask if you're more mature and you're asking the question, what am I being called to here? Yeah, if you arrive at the correct thing, you'll get a f a sense of this is right. You'll just know. so it has that kind of wisdom too. Yeah, like an internal navigation system. I'm I'm reminded of Saint Augustine's Oculus Cordes, which is to see the world through the eyes of the heart, and another particular author who spoke about working with your internal GPS. And I think from the context of the work of Being a human being around other human beings, communicating, standing up to speak your point of view. There are levels of that we're describing here which are to not only heal the anxiety, but then to level it up by being authentically fully present, to bring your full self. And I think many people feel like when they are speaking that they struggle to be them their full self, struggle to be authentic. And this notion of tuning in at the heart level, which introduces an alignment maybe with a sense of purpose or who we really are, plus compassion, if there's a sense of open heartedness. In other words, just a warm sense of connection. And then deepening this to include our guts, where a real sense of yes and no, and I feel okay, I don't feel okay, and learning to live with a connection to our lower body, to our all our gutsy feelings while being with others. Because for the longest time, and you know this well, I would dissociate habitually from my lower body while being while opening my mouth. you know, what what what is the effect of being out of the body when speaking? What do you think? Well it it's not grounded and other people will tend to dissociate too, right? So if I let me just i if I'm I'm I'm now sort of dissociate I'm just at a open at a head level, right? And you you might be able to feel the feeling that's a result. If I go down to the gut now, it feels like there's a much more solid person there, right? And that that influences things. It feels more solid, it feels more gritty. one's sense of identity, you know, personal identity is most strongly unshakable at that point. so yeah it has strength. And then there's a a kind of a sense of alignment too that if one's feeling aligned, people can also pick that up. People are Are very sensitive generally to these sorts of things, although not consciously often. What what do you think one comes across like then? Let's just say one felt calm and grounded, but also really aligned with yourself. So in one's gut, or just really connected to the the the belly, heart centered, but also really just awake and aware and present, and then speaking from that point of view. What do you think that feels like for other people? First of all, I think it it tends to engender respect. I I think it it's it gives one as a therapist a facility to to help because it it encourages trust. because it doesn't look like the person's hiding from themselves or pretending to be a therapist or any other thing at all, you know, spiritual guru or whatever. so I i it it also you know something Irari was saying was, you know, in the in podcasts and in social media, you know, people are wanting to be excited all the time. that's interesting. And the, you know, social media's mechanisms have discovered that that's most eas easily done through hate and greed and fear, you know. So he said I'd rather meet somebody who made me feel peaceful. And I think that, you know, peacefulness and safety go together. It's part of that ventral vagus system and the open heart. Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting. As you said, peacefulness and safety go together. And it it sounds like what you're saying is is this sense of presence and mindfulness and moving out of the kind of contracted narrative inside the head into this wider perspective, but then with the supportive foundation of the body. You it's this combination, am I correct in in that w in that's what you're describing? Yeah, yeah. It's a subtle body as well as a physical body. If the thing's not embodied, you know, th there's no point in going for most of us to live on a mountain or in a cave on a mountain. You know, it what matters is how we are in the world and what we're contributing to the world and how much care and love, kindness we're bringing into the world and so on, right? To me that's what that what's what's mattered. So You know, just living in the spacious awareness, well, it becomes pretty meaningless quite quickly, you know. So so what? whereas if one if one's in embodied awareness embodied presence, that's a whole different thing because it it's it then means when one can act in the world like that. How would that how would that look then if one was public speaking or a manager leading a meeting? Are these practical things that one can bring into the workplace even. Totally. You know, I went on retreat with Ecotolia. I was really lucky to do that. And so I was you know, I've I've I was burned by really badly by a spiritual really prominent spiritual guru. So I'm skeptical and I like watch this guy with a like a hawk for for fourteen hours if we had time with him, you know, big screens and not sitting far away anyway. What w what was really telling was that well there were two things. The one thing was that he would have reactions, you know, he would be triggered by things. You know, somebody would make a noise and he'd jump, right? But the recovery period was not even a second. Right? He would just come back to presence, right? Just straight back, straight back, straight so the stuff was just flowing through him. It was very impressive. And at the end of the retreat somebody asked You know, are you always like this? And I saw his wife sitting at the corner of the stage nodding. And I thought, no, that's terrifying That's really telling. Yeah. Yeah. So it is possible. I mean it's you know, somebody somebody doing that. and I think it's less intimidating than say somebody like Ram Das, for example, was very powerful figure. I remember going on a retreat with him and and, you know, being quite intimidated. by, you know, he's a very v capable entertainer, verbally capable, big guy, you sort of coming from a bullying background and so on. So I think that Acatolik was portraying all of himself in a in a sense through these triggering reactions. Yeah, it's a amazing that confidence or that settledness in self that one doesn't need to mask and one introduces a safety of hey, I'm okay to let myself be human and for feelings to move through and perhaps I there will be tears in my eyes and and to release the the fear and the shame of being our full selves and that I think it's beautiful because it gives other people that shame. And I think many of us carry this belief system from childhood that if if I cry or if I'm vulnerable or emotional, that makes me look weak. And it's really the the the opposite is true. The the embodied confidence to be our full selves. In other words, to be that safe inside yourself that you know. Being vulnerable is it feels just completely normal and safe too. All all emotions are welcome and most emotions are welcome, just to be more reasonable. Well, I I I wanna just leap sideways for a moment and just while we've got a bit of time here, to talk about power tools like EMDR, EFT, and so on. So those are May, I just wanna hand over to you and just can you talk about these processing tools. Why do they have a place? You know, why are they different and what do they do relative to cognitive only work or coaching only work? And yeah, just can you just talk about them a bit? They you know, when people have been traumatized and you know, not necessarily big T traumas, you know, we would talk about big T traumas and rape and seeing people being killed and you know, being in life threatening situations and so on. But traumas like just being bullied, you know, through your several years at high school or being told that by your mother that you're not a pr not a very pretty your sister's very pretty, but you know, poor you kind of thing. th those tr processes can be treated with the with the MDR or the clinical EFT you're talking about, or an development of that called matrix reimprinting, all of them are found very effective. much more effective than cognitive therapy for trauma. as trained you know in cognitive therapy for trauma, but it's it's nowhere near as effective as EMDR for example, or or EFT. So, you know, it's been demonstrated now using MRIs to show that with it with the tapping for clinical EFT the amygdalite two little almond shaped things in the head that trigger off our alarm systems calm down. You know, you can actually see it in real time. It's logged, it's scientifically validated. We don't understand why, but it we know that it happens. And it's it's similar with the MDR, where you can see a whole shift in brainwave activity as the E D R takes place and that's been logged in and shown and demonstrated and you know, both have been shown to be very effective tools for trauma, treating trauma, over and over and over again. And that's hugely different from when I first trained, there weren't any of these things and talking therapy and you know, psychoanalysis and Jungian analysis and those sorts of things. And and behavioral mechanisms. Some of which are actually useful. you know, d For example, I will feel less anxious after this to do a similar thing again because you know it it's go presuming it goes bumbling along as it has been. and but you know, so behavioral experiments, which is why is one, putting yourself into situations you fear, for example, can be very effective. But that was about it. So yeah, I I I trained in EMDR in the early nineties and got in on the the early stage in the UK certainly and that I've thanked my lucky stars for it ever since. It's it's been that helpful. Let's talk about it's been it's been that helpful. I'd love to just dis discuss some of the mechanisms or what it offers. You know, EMDR contains the words desensitization. What is it that one is hoping to achieve with memories, belief systems, and so on that contain charge or emotion. Like what is the promise of these power tools? So what what happens with trauma is that that when somebody goes through trauma, they they end up with fragment fragments of memory. If you interview somebody, I think of somebody in a train crash, for example, have a fragment of flying through the air, a fragment remember smashing into a seat, another one standing at the doorway of the train, not knowing what to do, climbing into an ambulance next step, you know. And and over you know, period of more or less a month one makes up a story unconsciously. well this happened and then that happened and you fill in the gaps and you know, psychiatrists call it confabulating, we call it lying to ourselves. And you make up a story about the whole thing. But if you don't manage to assimilate the trauma, what happens is it gets split off and it gets parked or parked somewhere. So let's say you you put on a horse and the horse gallops away and you fall off and you really injure yourself. And you're terrified of horses and then you take a walk in the countryside, you know, twenty years later And you didn't notice a horse over the field and comes galloping towards you and you suddenly find yourself panicking. You don't know why. That's that trauma coming to the fore again. So with these methods what one's trying to do or what one does generally is one gets to the core feeling in the trauma in the body. And that's and then with the MDR the cognitive elements and belief systems and all sorts of things. associated with that. But the main thing is the feeling in the body and particularly the earliest memory that that had that particular feeling, going back to Jung's complex again, those associated ideas held together by a common feeling tone. And you you then ask the person to either tap and or in the clinical situation you might ask them to move their eyes backwards and forwards or there might be sounds alternating. What you're doing is you're stimulating one side of the cortex and then the other side and you're alternating that. And that triggers off a natural processing mechanism in the brain. and as I've said with the clinical EFT, what you're doing is you're getting the memory, the f based primarily on the feeling in my view, and then you you tapping down the a the activation of the amygdala, the those alarm systems. so what you're doing is two things is that you reducing the emotion in the traumatic experience. So you can remember it happened, you know, you've had lots of traumatic experiences. You remember you fell off your bike and, you know, really grazed your knees or whatever, or something, even big experiences, and they don't really affect you in the present. That's a process trauma. And what a lot of people don't realise is that if you still have feelings about some memory, it's not processed. processed memory means there's no particular feeling about it anymore. And so that's that's the aim with EMDRN EFT, clinical EFT, and is to get down to a zero or one level out of ten level of emotionality in it. So then it becomes fully integratable. Okay, well, you know, I was bullied in, you know, in these years and you know, it I felt terrible then, I felt ashamed and da da da da. Led to a belief of, you know, which I called, you know, blah blah. And well, that happened. You know. Yeah. Part of life. And it's a so that's that's where you want to get people to, you know, and it's it's you can do that with terrible things, rape, which was life threatening and all sorts of things. You know? Yeah. Yeah. So big traumas. Much more difficult when they're repeated traumas, extreme traumas over a long period of time. Yeah, particularly when very well. Yeah, with public speaking and social anxiety, it's exactly the same process where there will be shameful events like you described at university where you really froze and dissociated while speaking. That'd be a real core memory. But Obviously would want to trace it back, as you said, to really early life memories of being shut down potentially or dissociating and and your voice not being welcome. And yeah, I like you said, if there's still emotion in it, I like to say if if if there's still charge in the memory, if you still feel something in your body or you feel something emotionally negative emotion about it, then it's still active essentially within one's communication system and still Creating or supporting your current pattern. And so th these are powerful techniques and they've only really emerged in what the last 35, 40 years. And did they did was there anything before EMDR that did anything like this? Not that not that I know. You know, as I say, expos exposure, you know, carefully thought through. you know, whenever the cognitive the way I was trained at Oxford in in c cognitive treatment for social phobia, for example, the most effective aspect was taking people out into the community and exposing them. So, you know, it r it was really fun doing it because you you'd take somebody to a pub and they, you know, they'd for example, they described going to order a beer and they wouldn't do it because they feel their hand would shake and then they make a fool of themselves. So I you know, I'd go and order a beer and then I'd shake like crazy and beer would go everywhere. And in England nobody nobody pays any attention at all. Right. Or or Yeah. At that stage of a checks and not go to it till then they'd be scared that their hand would shake while they were writing a check and you know, and you go then you scroll all over the place and you know, shaking hand, give the check across and you know, nobody nobody butts an eye. So and then you get them to do it, you know. And over time they build up confidence. So their assumptions as to what's going to happen don't play out. Thank you for that. Mm. Just as a a last place for us, like I'd love to check in with, and that is about embodiment. You know, we know of Bessel von der Koch's book, The Body Keeps the Score, describing an arc in human understanding of how we heal. And we went through a kind of a psychological era, the arrival of pharmaceuticals for managing our our psychological states and emotional states. And maybe a a a discovery that that wasn't as I mean it's th they can be helpful, but it wasn't everything. And really a movement into an understanding that the body was a critical component to living a full life, but also to healing. What can you just share about embodiment and its role in being our full selves and healing? It's incredibly important. You know you know, my personal hi history I went through probably by the end of my clinical training, seven years of psychotherapy altogether. and lots and lots and lots and lots of cognitive input. I mean I had to get firsts all the way to get into masters, it was very competitive. So, you know, I was a living head, basically. and completely screwed up by the end of my clinical training, which didn't make sense to me. Much, much later I trained in an African traditional healer system. And that really brought me down into my body in a big way. If you asked any collect intellectual question like why do you do why do we do it that way, they just say we do it this way. That's it. No cognitive overlay. It's just experience. And so through that and through I think Buddhism has changed a lot. Western Buddhism has changed a lot in this respect too. You know, there were very few people that emphasized feeling in the body. and now it's ubiquitously recognized, I think. Gayenka's work on Vipassana, you know, these ten day retreats emphasize the body a lot. He was one of the first that c got on that that hobby horse. But it makes all the difference in the world because the degree to which one can lie to oneself in the head is extraordinary. And I mean just everybody does it all the time. And a really good demonstration of that would was you know when they were doing split brain studies when the brain was the one half of the of the s cortex wasn't communicating with the other because they'd cut the the connections. And in one one example they they asked in the one ear, so only half of the brain could hear it, they asked the chef please go and close the door. And he came back and sat down and then they asked the other ear, why did he close the door? And he said, Well there was a draft. And and that's how we are most of the time. We make up stories, right? We we we make assumptions about all sorts of things. you know, I don't feel well today because I ate so and so, but it could have been ten thousand other things, you know. So the body is you know, is is is much more truthful. When when you get to something that's truthful, your body opens, relaxes, it knows, right. And you know what most people don't realize is that the gut alone has the same number of neurons as the cat's brain. It's got quite a significant brain, plus it produces eighty percent of the serotonin in the body and so on, so on and so on. You know, the heart has fifty times the electromagnetic radiation of the brain. It's communicating through the smoothness or irregularity of the impulses to the brain. i you know, is a massive system. So one needs discernment in the head and the rest can go. And and and deep connection with the body to be healthy I think. And a a important distinction is kind of compulsive thinking is almost never worth listening to. But when you get quiet, thought pops in, that's g that's interesting. It's a d it's a very important distinction, I think. Yeah, I I was just gonna say that you were a very powerful mentor for me and and and and continue to be for bringing my awareness down into the body. I I For the audience, I I worked extensively with Bill as a mentor, as a a clinical supervisor, really overseeing my work and and even the development of my Radiant Voices work. He had a lot of looks at it critically, and it was it's been very, very powerful for me. So, apart from anything else, I also want to say just really share Bill's work. He is a mentor and a coach, also psychotherapist and and psychologist, but really his focus is on meaning and supporting one through life transitions, to live a a a life of depth and integrity, meaning, purpose, and to really transition into feeling deeply settled in one's own life and simultaneously deeply settled in in one's body. I came from a history of being completely in my head and it's been a huge journey and it's an ongoing journey really probably till the day I lie till the day I lie, till the day I die. There goes my head. to really pull this awareness down and to live embodied. And I think there comes a time when living in the body feels so safe and it's where the settled settled safety of beingness really is. And our heads are designed to really think of problems to switch that default mode network on and to scan for what could next go wrong and to live inside that is kind of hellish. And we have an opportunity in this lifetime to live more aligned, imperfectly, squishy and human, but from a place of much greater depth. And Bill's been in such a huge support for that. So just huge thanks and huge thanks for being here today, Bill. Well, as I I talked about earlier, you know, you in terms of willingness or actual interest in facing the truth, you you're one of the most courageous of of c people I've ever worked with, I think. And you know, I've seen you you grow and to develop into a really good healer, really capable healer and you know, it's it's it's a real privilege to have worked with you. So thank you very much. Yeah, it's been such a wonderful conversation. I I'm really excited to share everything we've spoken about with the radiant voices out there. Yeah, it's really good work. I'm looking forward to your book too. Yay, thank you. Yep, book is in process, but yeah, it'll come. Thank you so much, Bill. Much love.