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Motherhood as an Initiation: Satya Doyle Byock on Anxiety, Meaning, and Becoming Whole · Motherhood Uncut

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome to the Motherhood Uncut podcast, where we talk honestly about the reality of motherhood.
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_01: I'm your host, Kate Kripke.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_01: This is a space for mothers to feel seen, heard, and understood, especially those navigating the intersection of raising young kids while also maintaining passions, purpose, and work outside of motherhood.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_01: And it's called Uncut because we do not hold back here.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_01: Through expert conversations, personal stories, practical tools, and honest reflection, we explore what it means to care for ourselves, stay connected to our kids, and remember that we can feel hard things and still be okay.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_01: I'm so glad you're here.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_01: Together we explore why so many intelligent, capable, high-achieving women find themselves struggling when they become mothers.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_01: Not because they're doing anything wrong, but because motherhood asks something fundamentally different of us than that achievement-focused world that we've been trained to succeed in.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_01: We talk about initiation, identity, uncertainty, spirituality, individuation, community, and what happens when the strategies that helped us thrive in school, work, and life no longer work in motherhood.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_01: This conversation is both deeply practical and profoundly philosophical.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_01: If you've ever found yourself wondering why motherhood feels so disorienting, why anxiety can feel so intense, or why you seem to have lost access to the version of yourself who used to have all the answers, I think you're gonna find a lot of comfort and insight here.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_01: This is a rich conversation about what it means to become fully human, not just a mother, and how some of our greatest struggles may actually be invitations into something much deeper.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, let's dive in.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_01: The women I work with are often deeply thoughtful, capable, ambitious mothers who care tremendously about their children and also about the work, passions, and purpose they hold outside of motherhood.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_01: But somewhere along the way, anxiety, guilt, overwhelm, and pressure begin pulling them out of the present moment and away from the experience they long to be having.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_01: The Calm Connection Accelerator is my 12-week experience designed to help mothers move from survival mode into greater calm, confidence, steadiness, and connection, both with themselves and with their children.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_01: If that resonates with you, I'd love to invite you to book a call with me.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_01: We'll talk through what's feeling hardest right now, what you most want for yourself and your family, and whether the Calm Connection Accelerator feels like the right next step for you.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_01: You can find more information and the link to book a call in the show notes.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_01: I was practicing.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_01: Actually, let me give you background, background.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_01: And we may get into this on this call, we may not.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_01: I really think of this more as like as if this this episode right now is like we're sitting down with tea.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_01: Like there's no formal interview questions.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_01: I just actually really want to pick your brain, Satya, because I think you're gonna have a lot to offer on this topic.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_01: So, um, as you know, I practiced really traditional clinical psychotherapy for almost two decades.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_01: Um, trained at Smith College School for Social Work.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm trained psychodynamically, um, have adjunct my knowledge with things like interpersonal psychotherapy and cognitive behavioral therapy and, you know, um parts work, you know, internal family systems.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, I sort of have dabbled in, you know, mindfulness-based work, like dabbled in a lot of this stuff.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_01: But really felt towards the end of the pandemic that I could not practice traditional work with this population anymore because of the nature of pathology that we were, we, meaning me and my community, were looking at early maternal mental health, the lens from which we were looking at it.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_01: And my clients were not getting better.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_01: Like they would feel better and then they'd freak be back again six months later.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_01: And I really didn't want to practice within the four walls of traditional psychotherapy.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_01: I've always been more of a kind of directive therapist, but I just knew I wanted to do something different.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_01: My client right now, the the ideal woman that so I'm doing more coaching, more important for you to know.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_01: So mentoring, teaching, coaching, less therapy.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_01: So it's a sort of a different model, it's a different approach.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_01: But my client is this overachieving, high-performing type A woman who's really good at life until she becomes a mom.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_01: And then everything falls apart for her in motherhood.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_01: She gets stuck in ruminating, catastrophic thinking.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_01: She has a lot of anxiety, she feels a ton of guilt, she feels a lot of burnout.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_01: So, this is the woman who's trying to navigate both a career and being a mom.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_01: And she is unraveling.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_01: And I want to tell you that this was also me until I did this thing around when I was about 40.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_01: So Britt Kinley was born.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_01: I had my first kid when I was 34.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_01: I'm now 51.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_01: And I realized that I needed some sense of spirituality in my life.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_01: One of the things I loved about your conversation, and this is where I want us to dive in today with Elise is the intersection between all those things you were talking about, right?
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_01: And I and I took a bunch of notes, so I'm gonna pull those up.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_01: And I do want to say that I am going to, you know, we won't keep referring back to this amazing conversation you had with Elise during this call because I will link it.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_01: I want people to go listen to this conversation you had.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_01: It is special and amazing all on its own, and this will be different.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_01: But the concepts that you brought up were so important for this woman who's struggling in early motherhood.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_01: You know, the material and the spiritual, the rational and the irrational, the concrete and the elusive, the truth and the meaning, that like intersection that you were talking about.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_01: And I am so curious to hear what you have to say about the value of that in new motherhood.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_01: Now I know you're not a mother, and I actually would love to hear you speak a little bit about why if you're open to, because you said something profound on our text about that.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_01: But I'm gonna sort of say this and then I'll introduce our conversation again so it's not so muddled for our listeners.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_01: But what I'm really interested in, Satya, is what do we do with these Jung?
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_01: How can we utilize these Jungian concepts in this stage of life when the achievement-oriented brain that's gotten these women so far in dare I say a man's world, in their careers, does not work in motherhood.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_01: Did I make any sense just now?
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_00: Oh my god, you well, you made so much sense that I'm digesting all of it and I'm excited.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_00: I'm just really excited to talk.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_00: I'm ready.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_00: I'm ready.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_01: And I don't know where this is gonna go because I literally have no agenda, but what I know is when I was listening to your conversation with Elise, I was like, oh, this is the conversation we need to be having over here.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_00: Great, great.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_01: Because there's yeah.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_01: So let's see where it takes us.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_00: Great.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_00: No, I mean, we we have 20 points of entry now, so I'm I'm ready.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_00: Um and I'm interested what what I said to you about motherhood in our text exchange.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_00: So I'll tell you a little bit about my relationship with motherhood now.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but please feel free to remind me, you know, when I'm right.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's um, you know, my my relationship with non-motherhood is is um, I think, well, I want to say it's complicated, but it's actually kind of depthful or something.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_00: Like this is something I've thought about my whole life.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_00: It's something I still think about, it's still very much a part of my sense of self and all.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_00: So where I want to begin with this, in everything you've expressed to me about this conversation, is something that my mother expressed to me many times growing up.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_00: My mother is, in many respects, as yours is, I think, in many ways, the precursor to my career.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_00: She's she, you know, my mother was a therapist growing up, as I was growing up.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_00: And I later learned she was a Jungian therapist and actually um, you know, helped create or found the the Montana Friends of Jung when I was a child.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_00: I knew none of this until my sort of breakdown post-college.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and and I'm now, you know, I'm now fully into the Jungian world and totally devoted to this work.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_00: So it's very much her her life and work um has been a huge inspiration for me.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_00: That mother line is extremely important, going back to my grandmother as well.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_00: So um part of what my mother would say is that for her and for all the women she knew who had given birth, motherhood and the experience of pregnancy and delivery was a an archetypal initiation.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_00: And that there was very little conversation happening around that, but that everything we know from initiation rites uh as they used to be performed in smaller tribal cultures or all over the world.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_00: Very frequently, men and boys would have certain initiation rights, walkabouts, trials, they would have certain near-death experiences, but often they weren't performed in the same way on girls because as we know, pregnancy and delivery are a near-death experience.
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_00: It is a death and rebirth journey.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_00: And so part of what I'm already really hearing as you're talking about your clients and the work you do is the very deep initiatory journey that is being that is being kicked off uh at pregnancy and delivery, and then having a new child, especially having a new child in such an individualistic culture.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's sort of horrifying to me the the absence of support that we have on every level for um mothers and new parents.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_00: But but just archetypally, this has always been part of how girls and women were initiated into their adult lives and their larger selves.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_00: I, for myself, have sort of worked to separate a little bit motherhood from that process for girls and women, because I think in the opposite uh way it's almost been too bound up so that girls and women who choose not to become mothers sort of have no archetypal grounding without the idea of motherhood.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_00: And part of my journey, I'm very clear, uh, it is that my mother also had never herself really planned to have children.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_02: Interesting.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_00: Um, both my sister and I were, you know, I would say sort of hippie unplanned pregnancies.
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_00: They were practicing the rhythm method and um probably doing a decent job at it.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_00: But lo and behold, they had two pregnancies.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_00: And so um, and my mother, I don't my mother was a phenomenal mother, she still is a phenomenal mother.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but I think a part of her journey was a woman who did not have children.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_00: That was that was sort of a sliding doors path for her.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_00: And I think I'm living forward that part of her journey by by not having children and really explicitly feeling clear that my journey is uh to parent in different ways and to mother in different ways.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and before I stop here, I'll say because I've sort of been called out on this recently, I do have a stepson.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, you do.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_00: This somebody, you know, kind of jokingly called me out on this recently.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_00: Like, you talk a lot about not being a mother.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_00: And it wasn't until much later that I learned you actually have a stepson.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_00: So I do have a stepson, he's almost 15 years old.
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and he's a huge part of my life, and I'm grateful to have him uh in my life, just as I am our shared nephews.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, they're such important parts of my life, all these kids.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, but you know, he my stepson and I also are very clear about what my relationship is in terms of, I think he calls me a bonus mother, which I love.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I love that.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_00: He has a very devoted mother.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_00: This is not, you know, it's a different role.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_00: It's a different role.
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_00: So that is uh my current in in a really small um summary, my relationship to motherhood.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_01: I love this so much for so many ways, Satya.
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_01: And and I I have a feeling you use this term a lot in the in the previous conversation I was listening to, the term being archetypes or archetypal.
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_01: Can you just define that for my listeners who may not be familiar with this language?
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_01: For sure.
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_00: I I use the term archetypal a lot more than archetypes for reasons that are maybe too nerdy to get into.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_00: Archetypal is, you know, it's sort of ancient.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_00: It's like ancient-coded parts of ourselves.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_00: Where just, you know, we talk about uh just as we all share the same basic physical makeup worldwide, no matter where you're born, we have the same organs, you know, we have the same number of limbs by and large.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_00: Um, similarly, we're born with very similar, deep uh psychological makeup.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_00: And that is part of what Jung termed the collective unconscious.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so it's where when people all over the world dream, we're dreaming in similar patterns.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_00: Um, when we launch out on our journeys in life, what Jung termed individuation and and some massive transformation sort of gets kicked off without our knowledge and mostly our desire, we're being sent in the direction of a certain kind of larger development of who we are, uh, that is not really accorded, it's not about the ego.
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_00: It's not about wealth and fame and all this.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_00: It's a there's a larger story.
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_00: This is where hero's journey stories come from, global storytelling, mythology, all this.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_00: So when I speak about things being archetypal, it's like it's like that timeless route, the deep tap route that's going down, uh, that really doesn't care much about the particular moment in time that we're in right now.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_01: Beautiful.
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_01: And I want to come back to these ideas of individuation and collective consciousness, because I actually think they're things that get very lost in motherhood for most people.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so I do want to come back to it, but but I appreciate that because I have a feeling we'll keep we'll talk about those words uh a fair amount here.
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_01: And what I love about what you're saying, what you said to me was um I didn't have, I'm gonna, you know, summarize this, but I think what you said is I didn't have children because I believed it would break me.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_00: Oh yeah.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_00: We'll talk about that.
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_01: And and I actually think uh both what you're talking about now and that very profound statement is really interesting because one of the things that the women who I work with go through almost universally is a sense of confusion around themselves when they go from non-parent to parent, right?
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_01: When they go from being an individual in the world who's responsible for her own stuff to suddenly being a mother.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_01: And my experience of that is that it's confusing for them slash us because there is a way in which the identity can get so tied up in again, I this is this language again, masculine feminine, but this sort of masculine world of achievement, right?
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_01: Success and achievement based on achievement of external goals.
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_01: And so much of motherhood is felt.
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_01: So much of it is a felt sense.
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_01: There's so much uncertainty, so much unpredictability, and so much chaos.
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_01: And there's an interesting thing that happens of the birth, the rebirth, the becoming that happens when someone suddenly sees their baby on the outside.
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_01: Of course, women are becoming mothers even while they're pregnant, but it's something about holding that baby on the outside that is, you know, motherhood's been written as a psychic trauma.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_01: People have talked about it as a psychic trauma.
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_01: It is so disorienting.
• 19:20
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that this, in my perspective, is what begins that process of we could call it postpartum or depression or anxiety for so many mothers.
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_01: You know, research says one in five women, I'm telling you, it's so much higher than that.
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_01: So so there's this breaking that happens or this rift that happens that's very confusing for people's sense of self.
• 19:53
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_01: And what I found, Satya, when you said that thing about breaking you, I think a lot of the women who will listen to this podcast are women who feel like they quote unquote should be able to do motherhood because they've done everything else out there and don't actually realize this significance of this new rule.
• 20:16
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, they do on one level, but not on this other level.
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I've had a lot of conversations with people who um are pondering whether or not they should have children or want children, and and uh don't feel that they have cultural permission not to have children.
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_00: Yep.
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_00: And that no one really understands it.
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I was certainly in the position, I think I'm sort of past that now.
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_00: I'm I'm in my early 40s, but forever people were like, oh, you'll change your mind, you know, all the standard stuff, you'll change your mind.
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_00: And I was just like, I really don't think so.
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_00: Like this has never been part of my self-image.
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_00: And and actually it's been part of my terror, which I've had actually, I had an OBGYN tell me I needed therapy, and um just that that I was obviously going to change my mind or regret it if I didn't have children.
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_02: Wow.
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_02: Wow.
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_00: Female OBGYN, I mean, very deep stories in culture.
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_00: So I say this to I mean, I'm I'm I'm really glad we're talking about this because I do think it's important to add narratives to culture in which there are women who I feel quite connected to my feminine nature.
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_00: Yep.
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, part of my, there's I don't know how to say this without it sounding kind of tacky and dumb, but like my experience of caring is so is like a, you know, it's like a live wire and it has been since I was tiny.
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_00: Um my sort of overwhelm with the amount that I'm constantly caring for, literally the insects that I don't want people to kill on countertops and the, you know, the worms in the garden that I'm afraid aren't gonna find their.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: Spot.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: Like it's it's huge, let alone every other human being and animal in the world, right?
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_00: So I felt that in in part, my the amount that I am caring without my outside of my control, that having a tiny creature that was my responsibility, if you know, 24 hours a day, maybe more than one tiny creature, I genuinely did not feel that I had the ego strength, the emotional strength, the physical strength to actually do that without it sending me into psychosis.
• 22:35
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, yes.
• 22:37
  SPEAKER_00: And I felt extremely seen much later.
• 22:39
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I read it much, much later, really, probably than I should, but ended up reading the Belljar, Sylvia Plast the Bell Jar.
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_00: And felt like that is the level of grief and psychosis that I experience with the prospect, the very prospect of getting pregnant.
• 22:55
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_00: Felt that it would completely break me.
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I will say, while I still do not, and I say this to the universe, I do not want children.
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not looking for pregnancy.
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_01: Make sure you make that clear, Satya.
• 23:11
  SPEAKER_00: Very clear.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_00: But I actually feel that now in my early 40s, with the things that I've known, I I needed to put the book out into the world that I put out, for instance.
• 23:21
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 23:21
  SPEAKER_00: I needed to teach the students I've taught and have the clients I've taught, and things that I felt that's that was my creative nature that felt desperate to me.
• 23:31
  SPEAKER_00: And the way that I see a lot of women craving children, you know, I had different cravings, sort of desperate cravings.
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_00: But now that those things are out, uh, and I'm in a very happy, comfortable, solid, supportive relationship, and I have certain structures.
• 23:49
  SPEAKER_00: And we can, this is where maybe we talk about stability and meaning, some of the work I do.
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but there's so many stable structures in my life, and so much that I've put into the world that is what I wanted to put into the world.
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_00: I actually think I could now mother without it breaking me.
• 24:05
  SPEAKER_00: It would transform me, it would completely alter my life in ways I think you're also speaking to, but I but I don't fear that it would crush me in the way that I used to think about it.
• 24:17
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so I've noticed something really interesting about the majority of women who find me from one way or another, right?
• 24:26
  SPEAKER_01: We you and I have done our work for so long, we feel so grounded in our offering to the planet that the right people find us, right?
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_01: The women who find me are women, interestingly, who were raised in families where several things were likely going on.
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_01: Number one, they, which was my situation, they were raised in families where achievement was prioritized, right?
• 24:57
  SPEAKER_01: Even just modeled.
• 24:59
  SPEAKER_01: This idea of, you know, I don't know if you know this, but eight years before my mom died, sorry, the year before my mom died, who died eight years ago, as you know, I was taken to the airport.
• 25:07
  SPEAKER_01: She told me she'd been running for class president every day of her life, right?
• 25:12
  SPEAKER_01: So that's what I mean.
• 25:13
  SPEAKER_01: This like modeling of do more, be more, and it's not all bad because we serve the world.
• 25:21
  SPEAKER_01: We are motivated to do amazing things when we come from that.
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_01: But that sort of hyper achievement focused family, or they had parents who were unwell physically or mentally and couldn't tend to them emotionally, or there was a lot of family conflict.
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, there there was something happening in these families where the deeper, most authentic sense of themselves was excommunicated, was, you know, exiled to use internal family systems work words, right?
• 25:55
  SPEAKER_01: Was really said, no, the messiness, the unpredictability, the uncertainty, the emotion, the feeling.
• 26:00
  SPEAKER_01: There's no room for that here.
• 26:02
  SPEAKER_01: So these women became really, really good achievers.
• 26:07
  SPEAKER_01: They really learned to use the part of the brain that is based on what's what's you know, learning, analytical, intellectual learning, what's, you know, planning, problem solving, strategizing, organizing.
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_01: So much so that their sense of self required all the external motivators for a sense of safety.
• 26:37
  SPEAKER_01: And then they become mothers, and that brain doesn't work here.
• 26:41
  SPEAKER_01: This is where I'm really curious to know from your perspective, what I'd love for you to give a little snapshot on Young and his work, because I actually think it's really important before we go on too far down this rabbit hole.
• 26:52
  SPEAKER_01: But the attempt to use the part of their brain that's so based on realism and what's right here, and how do I plan my way or organize my way or achieve my way through this, it does actually lead to, you know, I'm gonna put quotes around psychosis because I don't mean uh in this statement, you know, medical diagnosable psychosis, but that sense of I have lost myself, I am broken, I this is breaking me.
• 27:27
  SPEAKER_01: I can't do this, like this huge sense of bewilderment because that brain doesn't work here.
• 27:35
  SPEAKER_01: And we need something else.
• 27:37
  SPEAKER_01: We need to be talking about motherhood in a way where we can access, you know, all these beautiful.
• 27:46
  SPEAKER_01: I I hear you talk about young, we're gonna pause and have you introduce this to her.
• 27:50
  SPEAKER_01: My whole nervous system breathes.
• 27:55
  SPEAKER_01: And we need more of this in this conversation of motherhood.
• 27:58
  SPEAKER_01: So can you tell us a little bit about this?
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I let me let me just pause because I there's so much you just expressed.
• 28:06
  SPEAKER_00: And I guess I let me just layer in that my own sense of this is certainly that it's the brain and the wiring psychologically for how we're raised.
• 28:21
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, uh, I always say this, but it's crucial to the work that I do to understand we were raised in patriarchy.
• 28:30
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 28:30
  SPEAKER_00: We were waiting raised in white supremacy, we have been raised in heteronormative, uh capitalistic, individual individualistic cultures, right?
• 28:42
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 28:42
  SPEAKER_00: Now, this is dominant culture, we all have subcultures, etc.
• 28:45
  SPEAKER_00: But for the most part, these fundamental stories, they're the water we swim in to the degree that we don't know that it's the water we swim in most of the time, even when we're giving lip service to, you know, fighting the patriarchy and white supremacy and these things, the level at which they teach us to be exceptional and to rise above and to get to the top of the mountain and to get to the top of the ladder, it's just ingrained.
• 29:16
  SPEAKER_00: And it's ingrained in when we try to go to the best colleges and universities and we try for the best jobs.
• 29:22
  SPEAKER_00: This is how the very vast majority of us uh, I think it's worse on the East Coast than in Montana, where I was raised.
• 29:30
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, in many respects, I think the parents and the community I was raised around had sort of already divorced from a lot of that culture and and decided to raise their families somewhat separate from it.
• 29:43
  SPEAKER_00: But it's all over the United States and in most of the world.
• 29:48
  SPEAKER_00: Uh we have this sense that everything we're trying to do is on the top of something, you know.
• 29:56
  SPEAKER_00: And relationships, parenting, motherhood, community are they're horizontal, they're not vertical.
• 30:06
  SPEAKER_01: Tell us more about what you mean by that.
• 30:09
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I mean, so different people maybe use these terms differently, but for me, it's just a very basic idea of almost gravity.
• 30:17
  SPEAKER_00: Like we're not trying to be the only ones up high somewhere.
• 30:22
  SPEAKER_00: If we want to truly be part of a community that actually fuels our beings and our bodies, it's much more on the earth.
• 30:30
  SPEAKER_00: It's grounded, it's horizontal.
• 30:33
  SPEAKER_00: You're not looking for rarefied air.
• 30:35
  SPEAKER_00: You don't want to achieve anything, actually.
• 30:38
  SPEAKER_00: You want to be in relationship.
• 30:40
  SPEAKER_00: And that means connection, and that means the ability to be in connection and relationship.
• 30:46
  SPEAKER_00: And those are not things that almost anything in our culture, dominant culture, has trained us for.
• 30:52
  SPEAKER_01: Gosh, I love it.
• 30:53
  SPEAKER_01: I'm I'm so grateful that you're saying that.
• 30:57
  SPEAKER_01: I yes, I think that's such a valid and important point to stress here, because many of us who become mothers assume that we should just know how to do that, that it should come naturally.
• 31:15
  SPEAKER_01: You know, we hear that.
• 31:17
  SPEAKER_01: Why didn't I fall in love with my baby at first sight?
• 31:19
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, that's a myth, by the way.
• 31:22
  SPEAKER_01: You know, some women do, but Lord knows a lot of them don't.
• 31:26
  SPEAKER_01: And so I'm grateful that you're bringing that here.
• 31:31
  SPEAKER_00: Well, and it's part of this is, I think, the irony or the confusion is that part of um, you know, white supremacist, I will also say Christian-oriented patriarchy, is that women are expected to be mothers.
• 31:46
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 31:47
  SPEAKER_00: And the idea that women simply know how to be mothers because they have wombs that they must use their wombs because they have them.
• 31:58
  SPEAKER_00: Again, I think that is a is a very alienating myth for women who don't have that feeling that they're supposed to be mothers.
• 32:05
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but also, yeah, there's there's a sense of every uh basic social and cultural support for motherhood has been ripped out, but you're still supposed to have all the natural instincts to do it right.
• 32:22
  SPEAKER_00: So the pressures are obscene.
• 32:24
  SPEAKER_00: And this is also part of why, in addition to everything I expressed, why I felt motherhood would break me, because I did not feel that I was capable of doing this by myself.
• 32:34
  SPEAKER_00: I actually, that entire everything I expressed to you, I think it's very likely that if I knew I was surrounded by a genuine community, and I don't just mean neighbors bringing food by, I mean grandmothers and mothers and aunties and the uncles and the fathers and the grandfathers and the children and the big sisters and the big brothers.
• 32:53
  SPEAKER_00: That's a different story.
• 32:54
  SPEAKER_01: People are that's not built in here.
• 32:56
  SPEAKER_00: No, no.
• 32:58
  SPEAKER_00: So, so there's so many things that I hear you expressing in terms of the kind of masculine achievement.
• 33:05
  SPEAKER_00: And that's part of what I mean by all those other terms I'm using, is they're focused on very specific things.
• 33:12
  SPEAKER_00: Women have gotten very good at playing that game.
• 33:17
  SPEAKER_00: You know, sometimes we get in trouble because we're playing it better than a lot of the men and boys now.
• 33:21
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but it still doesn't set any of us up for for essentially isolated parenting, right?
• 33:31
  SPEAKER_01: Which is interesting because um almost always when someone lands in my community, they've been struggling for a long time, but telling themselves they shouldn't need help.
• 33:45
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 33:47
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 33:48
  SPEAKER_01: This idea that I'm so I am a competent, confident woman, I should be able to do this myself.
• 33:55
  SPEAKER_01: And that's it, it's heartbreaking that pressure and expectation, which is so out of alignment with what, in my view, motherhood and raising babies and children and quote unquote family is all about.
• 34:14
  SPEAKER_01: And I don't just mean family like small, tiny family, two parents and one child.
• 34:19
  SPEAKER_01: I mean family, you know, our arms wide family, whatever that definition is.
• 34:25
  SPEAKER_01: It it this supposed to do it alone expectation is incongruent with what this is meant to be about.
• 34:34
  SPEAKER_00: It's abusive, really.
• 34:36
  SPEAKER_00: Like it's so incongruent and so dangerous.
• 34:41
  SPEAKER_00: Um it's really heartbreaking.
• 34:45
  SPEAKER_00: So Jung.
• 34:48
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, Jung.
• 34:50
  SPEAKER_00: I'm trying to think.
• 34:51
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, there is no way to do a really quick summary on Jung's.
• 34:55
  SPEAKER_01: Well, here's what I'm most interested in you talking about, okay?
• 34:58
  SPEAKER_01: Jung as Jungian philosophy ideas, Jung's work applies to things like major life transitions, like going from, you know, becoming a mother, right?
• 35:18
  SPEAKER_01: Um, individual individuation, which is a word, you know, when we talk about attachment and we talk about raising babies and differentiation and individuation, and there is something that happens again.
• 35:31
  SPEAKER_01: I'm particularly interested in you talking about this idea of being able to be a separate being, to trust that I'm a separate being, and also being a part of something larger than myself.
• 35:47
  SPEAKER_01: And this intersection between materialism and spirit, right?
• 35:54
  SPEAKER_01: This idea of, and maybe materialism isn't the right word there, but this idea of practicality and being open to something so divine and wondrous.
• 36:04
  SPEAKER_01: Because again, the women, many of them who are listening to this podcast, believe that they need to know the answers to things to be okay.
• 36:13
  SPEAKER_01: So when there's uncertainty, they get really anxious.
• 36:18
  SPEAKER_01: And what I've learned in my own life, and I am like a recovering anxious person, like I no longer define myself as an anxious person.
• 36:30
  SPEAKER_01: The thing that unhooked me from my anxiety was my willingness to be open to, I'm gonna use the word God right now, but I could also use the word nature, inspiration, beauty.
• 36:45
  SPEAKER_01: I don't mean a big man in the sky with a white beard.
• 36:47
  SPEAKER_01: I just mean something that I had a lack of connection to.
• 36:51
  SPEAKER_01: And when I finally opened up to that, everything shifted for me.
• 36:57
  SPEAKER_01: The sense many of my clients don't know that they're okay.
• 37:01
  SPEAKER_01: Somewhere in there, they believe I am not enough.
• 37:04
  SPEAKER_01: I am not okay.
• 37:04
  SPEAKER_01: And they've been spending their whole lives trying to prove to the world that they are those things, but secretly believing they're not, so never really getting there.
• 37:13
  SPEAKER_01: But for me, this opening to something else is what set me free.
• 37:19
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm so interested to hear from you about Jung, Jung's ideas around that.
• 37:29
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, well, I love this topic.
• 37:32
  SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna I'm gonna do my best to sort of be concise and get into all of it.
• 37:37
  SPEAKER_00: Let me just rewind for a moment to this idea of the individual in the community that you spoke to at the very start.
• 37:44
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I think this is critical just in regards to the conversation we've been having, because for Jung, the term individuation is slight is is similar but slightly different than the family systems use of it.
• 37:58
  SPEAKER_00: Which is that individuation is absolutely about becoming oneself as separate from your parents, your college friends, your religious community.
• 38:11
  SPEAKER_00: There's all different ways that we can get hooked into feeling that if I do that, I won't be a part of them anymore.
• 38:21
  SPEAKER_00: And what we emphasize for Jungians with the term individuation is all of that, and it's it's many layers of a journey that kind of have have connections to things like uh Kundalini awakenings and really all spiritual and religious traditions that have psychological development interwoven into them.
• 38:49
  SPEAKER_00: Even the journey of enlightenment in a certain respect can be can be sort of uh layered into this idea of individuation, which is that you are we are both sort of a small self and a big self.
• 39:01
  SPEAKER_00: And our society only is comfortable with the small self, and it's comfortable with the small self being uh exceptional and individual.
• 39:10
  SPEAKER_00: Like there's a huge emphasis on individualism, but actually there's very little psychology involved in that.
• 39:17
  SPEAKER_00: It's much more about capitalism and acquisition.
• 39:19
  SPEAKER_00: It's like the biggest house, the biggest 401k, the best degree from the best school.
• 39:25
  SPEAKER_00: That is still really more individualism and acquisition, and it is this quite spiritual and psychological journey of individuation.
• 39:36
  SPEAKER_00: So just to emphasize this, when we talk about community, the most functional non-toxic friendships, relationships, communities, families are collections of individuated people who want to be together.
• 39:54
  SPEAKER_00: Beautiful.
• 39:56
  SPEAKER_00: They're not, it's not mass think, groupthink.
• 39:59
  SPEAKER_00: It's not uh all of us wear the same t-shirt and the same hat and make the same chants and believe the same things.
• 40:07
  SPEAKER_00: It's we know who we are as individuals, we know our work in the world on some level.
• 40:13
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't have to be consistent.
• 40:14
  SPEAKER_00: We can still go through crises and doubts, but there's a sense of we know how we are individuals and how we are a part of a whole.
• 40:23
  unknown: Yeah.
• 40:24
  SPEAKER_00: That's the goal.
• 40:25
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 40:26
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 40:26
  SPEAKER_00: So I I emphasize that because again, it's so it's so not individualism.
• 40:31
  SPEAKER_00: It's so not about exceptionalism.
• 40:33
  SPEAKER_00: In this, it's still horizontal.
• 40:35
  SPEAKER_00: There may be people who are, you know, more well-known than others or wealthier than others, but in a sense, it's sort of an irrelevant element because everyone's part of something together.
• 40:47
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 40:48
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, in my work, you're describing a healthy family, right?
• 40:52
  SPEAKER_01: You're describing what we as mothers want to allow our children to do so that there's not codependence.
• 41:00
  SPEAKER_01: And what's interesting is that in the maternal child mental health world, it's almost impossible for a child to feel free to go through that process at whatever rate that child's going to go through that process if that mother is not also individuated, right?
• 41:23
  unknown: Exactly.
• 41:23
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
• 41:24
  SPEAKER_01: Has to start with us.
• 41:25
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 41:26
  SPEAKER_00: Or your child, as they grow, try to get as far away from you as possible.
• 41:32
  SPEAKER_01: That's right.
• 41:33
  SPEAKER_00: Because they can't, because they can't do what they need to do with with the without you having done your work.
• 41:38
  SPEAKER_00: So Jung, there's a great line from Jung that people repeat all the time that is something to the effect of um the greatest burden on children is the unlived lives of their parents.
• 41:48
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 41:50
  SPEAKER_00: Because a child is unable to really live their own destiny and life if they're still trying, sort of caught in the web of their parents' destiny and life.
• 42:01
  SPEAKER_00: Um so, you know, the there is this now huge piece of uh the larger meaning of things and how that's part of Jung's work.
• 42:11
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm gonna, you know, I'm gonna do my best.
• 42:14
  SPEAKER_00: But there's so many ways we could approach this.
• 42:16
  SPEAKER_00: One one thing that Jung expressed, he said this in a very late in life in a BBC interview that you can find on the internet that's really very beautiful.
• 42:28
  SPEAKER_00: Jung is, I think it's 1959, it's just a couple years before he passed.
• 42:33
  SPEAKER_00: And the interviewer asks him, Do you believe in God?
• 42:39
  SPEAKER_00: And Jung sort of pauses and chuckles, and he says, I know.
• 42:45
  SPEAKER_00: I know, I know God.
• 42:47
  SPEAKER_00: I don't believe in God, I know God.
• 42:51
  SPEAKER_00: And he was expressing this not as a classically religious person.
• 42:57
  SPEAKER_00: Um, Jung was raised, almost all the men in his life were pastors.
• 43:02
  SPEAKER_00: He was expected to be a pastor himself.
• 43:04
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, his knowledge of Christian theology was uh, you know, as as deep and well-versed as anyone really could be.
• 43:14
  SPEAKER_00: And his work in many ways is based on sort of trying to understand how Christianity had actually gotten very lopsided and was creating lopsided people.
• 43:24
  SPEAKER_00: And a huge part of that, it must be said, is his his recognition that Chris that Christianity had excised the feminine.
• 43:34
  SPEAKER_00: That young that rather Jesus's work initially was very much engaged with women in society and with Mary Magdalene as his primary student.
• 43:45
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, but that as Christianity had developed into a doctrine, a religion, and a dogma at times, the feminine was completely eradicated.
• 43:56
  SPEAKER_00: Um, women were discarded with, and Then also really again turned into the mother with a capital M.
• 44:04
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 44:04
  SPEAKER_00: Andor the virgin.
• 44:06
  SPEAKER_00: You were either you were either the virgin, the unsexed virgin, you know, untouched, maiden, or you could be elevated as mother.
• 44:15
  SPEAKER_00: And to be mother, you had to be perfect and good.
• 44:18
  SPEAKER_00: And there's just no space for darkness, anger, anxiety, hatred of children, you know, um uncertainty.
• 44:27
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, none of that is allowed if you're going to play your role within that society as female.
• 44:32
  SPEAKER_01: And I want to pause you for just a moment because I think the conflict that we see almost always is that the mother does feel all those things.
• 44:46
  SPEAKER_00: Of course.
• 44:48
  SPEAKER_01: It's those darker, more shadowy experiences are unseparable from motherhood.
• 44:56
  SPEAKER_01: And yet, so many of us go into motherhood with this story.
• 45:01
  SPEAKER_01: You're right.
• 45:02
  SPEAKER_01: This idea that a good mother wouldn't feel those things.
• 45:06
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 45:06
  SPEAKER_00: And and very frequently, pregnant women have extremely dark dreams, terrifying dreams, nightmares, you know, and that's understood within within the Jungian world, especially, you know, Jungians who work with pregnant people and are dealing with pregnancies.
• 45:24
  SPEAKER_00: Um, it's it is known to be an initiatory experience.
• 45:28
  SPEAKER_00: And initiation is dark.
• 45:30
  SPEAKER_00: It's not if it were, if it were easy, it wouldn't be initiatory, right?
• 45:34
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so absolutely.
• 45:35
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, that's it's it's fundamental to um to being human, going through a massive transition and uh being sleep deprived and exhausted and overwhelmed.
• 45:47
  SPEAKER_00: Darkness is part of it, you know, all those feelings.
• 45:50
  SPEAKER_00: So um so a huge piece of what Jung understood, uh especially as it relates to women specifically and the feminine, was that there was no way for women to be whole in the culture that, you know, they at the time we now are living in.
• 46:11
  SPEAKER_00: It was it was an impossible task.
• 46:15
  SPEAKER_00: Um and so it was sort of inevitable that you were going to have hysterics and women institutionalized and all these things because you it was clear that women were being set up for an impossible argan in life.
• 46:32
  SPEAKER_00: What he also emphasized a lot of the idea of the midlife crisis really comes from Jung's work.
• 46:40
  SPEAKER_00: And it always involved gender, and it always involves what we call um the uh what do we call it?
• 46:49
  SPEAKER_00: The the um uh contra.
• 46:54
  SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna I'm gonna use a different word, but uh you know, for Jung, the midlife crisis always involved gender, but it also always involved the the opposite aspect inside oneself.
• 47:07
  SPEAKER_00: So Jung understood that men, and this was when gender was much more binary and codified than both culturally and the way that I understand it to be now.
• 47:18
  SPEAKER_00: But for Jung, it was very clear that men had to develop their feminine.
• 47:23
  SPEAKER_00: And he used that, he used those words constantly and very uh remarkable things.
• 47:28
  SPEAKER_00: He says things like, it's it's good for men to put on women's clothes sometimes.
• 47:32
  SPEAKER_00: He says this in the red book, this, you know, but he means it.
• 47:35
  SPEAKER_00: He's like, men need to understand what it's like to be a woman in order to both understand women and their own opposite gender internally.
• 47:44
  SPEAKER_00: Women, he says, need to understand their masculine.
• 47:47
  SPEAKER_00: And I have different ways that I develop Jung's work now, but generally he felt that in midlife, men had lived out their masculine self and would have a crisis because they had to begin working more relationally.
• 48:02
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 48:03
  SPEAKER_00: First, they were out in the world, they were pursuing, they were doing all of those things.
• 48:06
  SPEAKER_00: Then midlife, the crisis comes, they have to turn into a more relational and creative direction, and often a more spiritual direction.
• 48:16
  SPEAKER_00: He felt that women were, because women were at the time homemakers focused on parenting, mothering, children, raising their children, and were really quite homebound that at midlife women would need to develop their masculine and be out in the world.
• 48:34
  SPEAKER_01: Can I ask you a question?
• 48:35
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 48:37
  SPEAKER_01: So again, from my perspective, and what I'm seeing over and over, is that many of these overachieving, intellectually minded women are actually going through what you're describing, many men.
• 48:57
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely true.
• 48:59
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 49:00
  SPEAKER_00: That's why there's a lot of ways that I uh when I say sort of develop or alter or augment Jung's work, I think in certain respects he was right for the time in which he was writing, and in certain respects he was actually already off the mark.
• 49:16
  SPEAKER_00: When it comes to women, I I because um women are also raised in patriarchy.
• 49:24
  SPEAKER_00: So so we all come from women's bodies and we all enter into a masculine world culture in which the focus is achievement.
• 49:35
  SPEAKER_00: So again, once you know higher education opens up, all these things, women are focused primarily on the start on on joining the masculine world.
• 49:44
  unknown: Yeah.
• 49:45
  SPEAKER_00: So exactly what you're saying, it really comes to then wait, not only have I not been prepared for the feminine or been developing the feminine in myself, but it's been denigrated my entire life as weak, as less than, as low performing, as low earning, you know.
• 50:03
  SPEAKER_00: Now layer and race on this, it's a whole other massive, you know, ball of white.
• 50:08
  SPEAKER_00: But you're you're not only not developing those things, you're actually denigrating them in culture.
• 50:14
  SPEAKER_00: And now you're asking women to embrace it with open arms.
• 50:19
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 50:21
  SPEAKER_01: Do you have a hard stop?
• 50:23
  SPEAKER_00: No, I'm okay.
• 50:25
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I have an appointment in a while.
• 50:26
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 50:27
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, great.
• 50:28
  SPEAKER_01: Um this is really interesting to me, Sadia, because I think what we're seeing so often, over and over and over, is that crisis.
• 50:47
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that sort of sense of what now?
• 50:51
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know how to do this.
• 50:53
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know how to feel.
• 50:55
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know how to sit in uncertainty.
• 50:58
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know how to lean in to discomfort versus fix it as fast as I can.
• 51:06
  SPEAKER_01: And it really does create a emotional, psychological, and relational crisis for so many women who become mothers.
• 51:19
  SPEAKER_01: We call it a mental health crisis, and then we tend to treat it with things like medication, which by the way, I'm not opposed to medication at all when warranted, but I don't see what we're describing here as a pathology.
• 51:37
  SPEAKER_01: I see it as absolutely normal given the setup that we're coming into motherhood with.
• 51:52
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 51:53
  SPEAKER_00: Um I'm just pausing because I just have this book next to me that I pull this quote from.
• 51:59
  SPEAKER_00: I'm just, I'm not gonna pull it directly, but I'll I'll summarize it.
• 52:02
  SPEAKER_00: But but part of why I'm really drawn to Jung's work is he speaks about every individual crisis is also a reflection of the societal crisis.
• 52:13
  SPEAKER_00: And so when we call these things mental health issues, there's some truth to it as you're expressing, but it's also a very deep dysfunction of the society at large that is leading to that individual dysfunction.
• 52:30
  SPEAKER_00: Just the way we have what we call identified patients in family systems work and psychotherapy, we have the this child who's acting out the pathology of the family, right?
• 52:40
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that's right.
• 52:41
  SPEAKER_00: And as long as that child um, you know, remains sick, there's sort of we we also call it the sin eater.
• 52:50
  SPEAKER_00: I think, you know, they they are the one that sort of is exhibiting the sin of the entire family or the pathology of the entire family.
• 52:56
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, you know, Jung really, in a sense, wouldn't work with children because every child that came in who was somehow disquote unquote dysfunctional that he observed, he was like, look, this is an their parents have some dysfunction that the child is soaking up inside the household.
• 53:11
  SPEAKER_01: That's right.
• 53:12
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm not gonna pathologize this child.
• 53:15
  SPEAKER_00: I I might look at their dreams to get a sense of what the hell is going on in the house, which you know was quite powerful, but something's happening in this in the family.
• 53:23
  SPEAKER_00: The same, he had the same sense of what was happening societally, that people were having all kinds of different breakdowns, a lot of them from a lack of meaning and purpose.
• 53:32
  SPEAKER_00: But for him, that wasn't an individual issue.
• 53:35
  SPEAKER_00: It was a societal issue.
• 53:38
  SPEAKER_00: And so so he was treating individuals, but always within the context of what is the larger story here?
• 53:45
  SPEAKER_00: And again, what he was expressing, and he spoke about patriarchy, he understood, he didn't call it white supremacy, but he very much understood the colonial, he spoke about colonialism as being wildly destructive.
• 54:00
  SPEAKER_00: Um, he spoke about Christianity, despite his having really been um raised within it, it was never denigrating, but it was very clear.
• 54:08
  SPEAKER_00: This is a very specific belief system about how to be a human being.
• 54:12
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 54:13
  SPEAKER_00: It's actually not about wholeness or well-being, it's about a certain kind of ascension and acquisition, you know.
• 54:20
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 54:22
  SPEAKER_00: Uh so many thoughts, but I'm gonna pause again because I want to make sure we're on track here.
• 54:26
  SPEAKER_01: Well, we're uh we're on track because I think you're helping us make sense from this new perspective of what is happening here for so many mothers.
• 54:41
  SPEAKER_01: And it's interesting because I have found myself in a bit of a professional crisis in the last number of years because I'm really wanting to bring more conversations around spirituality into my work with my clients because I no longer believe that I can actually support them to getting to where they want to go without that is a very important part of this work.
• 55:10
  SPEAKER_01: And are you familiar with Lisa, Dr.
• 55:12
  SPEAKER_01: Lisa Miller's work?
• 55:13
  SPEAKER_01: She's a psychologist, and yeah, she's done amazing work around the science of spirituality.
• 55:18
  SPEAKER_01: And again, a lot of my clients they they cringe a little bit and anything that it's quote unquote woo, right?
• 55:25
  SPEAKER_01: They they they like to know the numbers and the you know the and that's how we were trained.
• 55:30
  SPEAKER_00: That's how, you know, if you don't, if you don't want to be cast out or an idiot or an outcast or you know, whatever, yeah, stay with the rational.
• 55:37
  SPEAKER_00: It's not, and this is part of the binaries, right?
• 55:40
  SPEAKER_00: It's not safe to be part of the irrational.
• 55:42
  SPEAKER_00: The irrational is coded feminine.
• 55:44
  SPEAKER_00: It's not safe to be coded feminine, it's not part, it's you know, it's not safe to be coded dark, feminine, um, irrational.
• 55:52
  SPEAKER_00: There's all these words that we use that are part of when we say woo-woo.
• 55:56
  SPEAKER_00: It's all mixed up in that, right?
• 55:57
  SPEAKER_00: It's gee, witches get burned at the stake, witches, right?
• 56:02
  SPEAKER_00: But when we start to reclaim those things without losing the rational, um, because again, I mean, this is part, this is it must be said, right?
• 56:14
  SPEAKER_00: That we don't have to throw out scientific knowledge and science in order to embrace some aspect of the feminine and the quote-unquote irrational, which we might think of as instinctive or part of psyche or part of spirituality.
• 56:29
  SPEAKER_00: It's so hard to even talk about these things because they are so much part of the sort of uh ways in which we castigate each other, mock each other, especially those of us with higher education and families who have degrees and maybe are part of the medical world, whatever.
• 56:52
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, but if we don't reclaim these things in a in a rational way, in a healthy way, they kind of live in this dark zone where it's it makes them, I think, even more prone to being part of conspiracy theories and part of um epidemics that really are quite dangerous for all of us, you know.
• 57:14
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 57:15
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I find it really interesting even to watch where my brain is going in this conversation because I'm aware that like we have not gone live yet.
• 57:22
  SPEAKER_01: I get to, and there's a part of me that's like in my mind, I'm like, oh, I don't want to scare people away, right?
• 57:29
  SPEAKER_01: I'm so caught in this more clinical or I don't even, I don't, I don't even really know what the word is.
• 57:38
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, in my own life, I am very much of two minds.
• 57:42
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, the binary thinking, I I worked hard to to shift that a long time ago because that was keeping me trapped in literally panic a lot of the time because I was like, well, which one is it?
• 57:53
  SPEAKER_01: I have to decide.
• 57:54
  SPEAKER_01: And it was like not the way my nervous system wanted to function.
• 57:57
  SPEAKER_01: And it becomes a really interesting question to begin to think about.
• 58:02
  SPEAKER_01: Like, I even find myself wanting to be like, well, the science of spirituality is like we need the science to explain that when we can sit back and look for signs in nature and the universe, like the the like look for guidance in the creative forces around us that somehow that makes me no longer credible, right?
• 58:24
  SPEAKER_01: Even as we're having this conversation on my fucking platform.
• 58:28
  SPEAKER_00: I I completely understand.
• 58:30
  SPEAKER_00: I and again, I think of um there's so many layers to this, but I want to just talk about bear with me, I want to talk about the witches for a minute.
• 58:40
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, please.
• 58:41
  SPEAKER_00: I really what what witches were or are women by and large, by and large older women.
• 58:51
  SPEAKER_00: They were by and large older women who were living alone and had knowledge of plants and the earth and animals.
• 59:04
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I'm I'm being simple, I am not a historian of witches here, so maybe there are ways here.
• 59:09
  SPEAKER_00: But um, but like what what what was so terrifying, this is about women who had knowledge and did not need a man.
• 59:18
  SPEAKER_00: They actually were often women with money, which was quite threatening.
• 59:21
  SPEAKER_00: So they were easy to project upon.
• 59:23
  SPEAKER_00: It was easy for for the men in certain communities to say that woman's a witch, um, because how does she have so much money?
• 59:31
  SPEAKER_00: How does she have so much power all by herself, right?
• 59:36
  SPEAKER_00: I think there's a certain way that we are actually coded to find this stuff not only collectively dangerous, because it it's mixed up currently in a lot of conspiracy theories, a lot of the the MAGA right that I find not only personally abhorrent, but but violent, dangerous, extremely dangerous to uh public health.
• 1:00:00
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 1:00:00
  SPEAKER_00: I could go on and on and on about that.
• 1:00:02
  SPEAKER_00: Yep.
• 1:00:03
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and I am not comfortable seeding personal experiences and things that to you, as to your point, have eased my anxiety, have eased my depression, have given me a sense of actual felt connection to larger parts of the universe than the kind of ascension acquisition model of patriarchy, white supremacy, et cetera, have trained me so well to adhere to.
• 1:00:32
  SPEAKER_00: I I uh I mean, I will also say, in terms of my parentage, my father is a medical doctor who, by and large, you know, he doesn't think vitamin C is a real thing, for instance, because it's not been proven by, you know, countless studies from what he's expressed.
• 1:00:50
  SPEAKER_00: Vitamin C is bullshit, it doesn't actually help you, et cetera.
• 1:00:53
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know about vitamin C, but we're trying this kind of thing, like vitamin C is part of woo-woo, as far as my father's concerned.
• 1:01:00
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 1:01:00
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, I hear you.
• 1:01:01
  SPEAKER_01: I hear you.
• 1:01:01
  SPEAKER_00: So that's my father, who I have a very close relationship with, and talk, we talk about things, right?
• 1:01:07
  SPEAKER_00: And my mother, who was not only a Jungian therapist, but actually became an astrologer.
• 1:01:12
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 1:01:13
  SPEAKER_00: So most of her career has been as an astrologer.
• 1:01:17
  SPEAKER_00: So this is, I really think of myself as holding this in terms of the feminine and the masculine.
• 1:01:23
  SPEAKER_00: Both of them are extremely rational people, extremely grounded people, and their work led them in slightly different directions, right?
• 1:01:30
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 1:01:31
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I should also say my father primarily has spent he's spent his career working on death and dying.
• 1:01:36
  SPEAKER_00: So there's always spirituality as a part of that, but they've expressed all this differently, right?
• 1:01:40
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm I have always worked on holding the tension between, let's call it the masculine and the feminine and the rational and the irrational.
• 1:01:48
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 1:01:49
  SPEAKER_00: And as far as astrology, for instance, which I was raised with, which for me to throw that out completely is to denigrate my mother line, really, and to say, you know, that my mother is a brilliant, brilliant, soulful woman.
• 1:02:04
  SPEAKER_00: So the idea that this is nonsense is just almost itself an important thought because I trust her.
• 1:02:11
  SPEAKER_00: I know her mind and I know her soul, right?
• 1:02:14
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm forced to kind of hold this tension and make sense of it.
• 1:02:17
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and it actually adds enormous meaning to my life.
• 1:02:20
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not going to speak to a skeptic and prove to them that astrology works because I couldn't give a shit if they believe it or not.
• 1:02:28
  SPEAKER_00: It's irrelevant to me.
• 1:02:30
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 1:02:31
  SPEAKER_00: And and I also, when I enter that part of my rational mind, I don't, I don't know.
• 1:02:36
  SPEAKER_00: I'm I don't even say like I'm absolutely positive, certain that these things make a difference in my life.
• 1:02:40
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't know.
• 1:02:42
  SPEAKER_00: I'm just holding them with interest and curiosity.
• 1:02:45
  SPEAKER_00: And when I'm able to sit in that space of balance, my life is remarkably rich and and and uh valuable, beautiful.
• 1:02:56
  SPEAKER_00: I I love my life.
• 1:02:59
  SPEAKER_01: What's required for that is a willingness to not know, though.
• 1:03:04
  SPEAKER_01: You just said something so important.
• 1:03:09
  SPEAKER_01: It's a different part of the brain or a different part of the whatever you want to call it.
• 1:03:13
  SPEAKER_01: That willingness to say, I don't know.
• 1:03:16
  SPEAKER_01: What I do know is it feels good and it's helpful for me.
• 1:03:20
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 1:03:20
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 1:03:21
  SPEAKER_00: And I think again, this is what's this is an interesting tension within rationalism and the supposed intellectual traditions.
• 1:03:29
  SPEAKER_00: Everyone also knows, this is gonna be maybe a contradiction, but but everyone is conscious that the wisest people in the world hold doubt.
• 1:03:40
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, yes, and the most irritating people in the world refuse to hold doubt.
• 1:03:46
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 1:03:50
  SPEAKER_00: And that has to be part of then if we are going to, and this is I talk about trying to expand science.
• 1:03:58
  SPEAKER_00: You know, expand rationalism.
• 1:04:00
  SPEAKER_00: We're not trying to counter it or even again argue against it or prove anything against it.
• 1:04:05
  SPEAKER_00: We're really just asking it to expand, to open up to wisdom.
• 1:04:09
  SPEAKER_00: And wisdom always involves doubt and questioning, it always involves larger truths.
• 1:04:15
  SPEAKER_00: It needs to be part of it.
• 1:04:17
  SPEAKER_01: I feel like I interrupted you, but can I go back to something that we were talking about a moment ago and see where we you where you go on this one?
• 1:04:26
  SPEAKER_01: So one of the things that is infinitely helpful for us when we become mothers of human babies, although mothers of anything, to your point, because I think it requires the same uh tension to use the word you just used that I'm about to describe, is this willingness to sit with not knowing, to sit with deep discomfort.
• 1:05:00
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, the fear involved in being responsible for your point of a little human, I mean, it's immense.
• 1:05:07
  SPEAKER_01: Like, of course, mothers feel anxious.
• 1:05:09
  SPEAKER_01: Can we stop pathologizing anxiety?
• 1:05:11
  SPEAKER_01: Like, of course, it's freaking terrifying.
• 1:05:14
  SPEAKER_01: But to be able to sit with that and trust I am okay.
• 1:05:20
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and my baby is okay.
• 1:05:23
  SPEAKER_01: Because otherwise, where I see a lot of brains go is I'm only okay if I know all the answers, or if I can predict what's going to happen tomorrow, or if I know what to do when my child is crying, and or if like there's a there's a there's a boundary to it.
• 1:05:40
  SPEAKER_01: There's a condition to whether or not I'm okay or my baby is okay.
• 1:05:45
  SPEAKER_01: That is a paralyzing way to go through parenting and mothering.
• 1:05:51
  SPEAKER_01: And so to me, we it's required that we can have this sense of.
• 1:06:01
  SPEAKER_01: Wonder and connection to something larger and trust in the collective.
• 1:06:06
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, I know, I know there's so much conversation in young about synchronicity, but man, if I were not open to, I mean, synchronicity to me is a way of playing.
• 1:06:16
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's like when you and I were texting and the baby bird like fell at your feet or something, right?
• 1:06:22
  SPEAKER_01: It's like, how do you not just find wonder and beauty in that without having to know why or what it means?
• 1:06:29
  SPEAKER_00: So I think that's it, is does it enhance your life, right?
• 1:06:33
  SPEAKER_00: Um, yes.
• 1:06:37
  SPEAKER_00: This again, these are all to me so much the the residue of a culture that says you need to get perfect grades on the test, you need to have the best score in gym class, you know, on the team, you need to have the lowest possible weight.
• 1:06:55
  SPEAKER_00: Like all of it is quantified and measurable and fixable, and you need to you need to assess the problem and fix the problem.
• 1:07:04
  SPEAKER_00: And everything you're expressing is about actually tolerating doubt, tolerating uncertainty, and holding and and tolerating chaos on some level.
• 1:07:18
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 1:07:19
  SPEAKER_00: Which again, we have been trained in every way to pathologize itself.
• 1:07:23
  SPEAKER_00: Chaos is bad, low scores are bad, depression is bad.
• 1:07:28
  SPEAKER_00: They're not considered parts of existence, they're not considered parts of a day, they're considered bad.
• 1:07:33
  SPEAKER_00: And bad things have to go away, and we need to make bad things go away.
• 1:07:37
  SPEAKER_01: There's this pressure in this, I think it's been building, but now this generation of new moms, right?
• 1:07:43
  SPEAKER_01: Women in their 20s and 30s, right?
• 1:07:47
  SPEAKER_01: This generation who who it are so, I mean, I would put myself in this category, although my work has allowed me to see when I'm being bought into this, so I get unhooked quicker now than I did, but so convinced that our job is to make sure our kids are happy.
• 1:08:05
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 1:08:06
  SPEAKER_01: To make sure our kids are happy and then to feel responsible for their happiness.
• 1:08:10
  SPEAKER_01: Like if my kids are not happy, then there's a problem and I've done something wrong and I have to fix it so that they can fall back into happiness.
• 1:08:17
  SPEAKER_01: Like there, there's so much stress and pressure and paralysis in that way of mothering a child.
• 1:08:29
  SPEAKER_01: And that's the both and, right?
• 1:08:32
  SPEAKER_01: Is how can we, in general, me as a mother, you as a maternal figure, the women who are listening to this podcast, how can we both honor quote unquote happiness or joy or whatever word works best, and trust that when we feel the flip of that or the variations of that, or the whole spectrum of emotions that are not always like tied up in a neat bow, that there's no problem.
• 1:09:00
  SPEAKER_01: There's nothing to fix.
• 1:09:06
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 1:09:07
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I I will say one the one thing that I hold or that I I'm holding as we're speaking is if we really understand that there's a larger journey we're all a part of here, that actually has almost nothing to do with perfection, achievement, even happiness, right?
• 1:09:31
  SPEAKER_00: If if we know there's a larger arc of human development and and um individuation or dharma or karma or the journey, however we want to call that, I think it makes tolerating periods of discomfort, uh periods of difficulty with growth and development at any age.
• 1:09:52
  SPEAKER_00: If we can hold that it's not about constantly reaching the top or the perfect note, it's about the much longer arc of a journey.
• 1:10:00
  SPEAKER_00: Then I think we can hold that we're raising humans or we're being human ourselves in society and culture.
• 1:10:10
  SPEAKER_00: Uh that that is a more interesting conversation, I think, too.
• 1:10:14
  SPEAKER_00: And it's one that allows for all sorts of dips and depressions and pains and moments of suffering without that needing to become the primary focus to be fixed, like to take a bad sound in the car into the mechanic.
• 1:10:29
  SPEAKER_00: It's like we're not cars.
• 1:10:30
  SPEAKER_00: We're we are on journeys, we're much more mythic than that.
• 1:10:34
  SPEAKER_00: We're less robotic and much more living myths.
• 1:10:38
  SPEAKER_00: And living myths involve periods of pain and suffering and trials that needs to be integrated into the larger story of who we are.
• 1:10:47
  SPEAKER_01: And we, it's so easy to fear that.
• 1:10:49
  SPEAKER_01: It's so easy to get scared of that pain, that suffering, that darkness uh, from the model that you've just described, right?
• 1:10:56
  SPEAKER_01: From the kind of the setup that we have moving in, growing as young adults in this culture and society, and then giving birth to people.
• 1:11:06
  SPEAKER_01: It's easy to get fear based around that reality.
• 1:11:11
  SPEAKER_01: We want to put it in a neat little bow, and it doesn't work that way.
• 1:11:15
  SPEAKER_01: Satya, I have a um just a general curious question for me, actually, a professional question uh I'm curious about.
• 1:11:25
  SPEAKER_01: So this all makes so much sense to me.
• 1:11:28
  SPEAKER_01: I thrive off it.
• 1:11:29
  SPEAKER_01: It is truly these conversations and this way of thinking and you know, being open to magic in so many different ways is literally what feeds my soul and keeps me moving when life can feel so hard and heavy, whether that's in the four walls of my house, raising now teenagers or out in the larger world.
• 1:11:52
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know how to introduce this stuff to the general public in a way that is accessible.
• 1:12:03
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 1:12:04
  SPEAKER_01: Like, you know, I keep trying to dumb it down, but dumbing it down misses the point and also plays the game.
• 1:12:18
  SPEAKER_00: I laugh because um, oh let me just well, you ask your question and then I'll I don't know.
• 1:12:24
  SPEAKER_01: I think that's just it.
• 1:12:25
  SPEAKER_01: Like I'm sitting here and I'm like, gosh, I I wanna like again, I tiptoe around these things in my work because I don't want to make my clients too uncomfortable.
• 1:12:36
  SPEAKER_01: I don't want to scare them away.
• 1:12:37
  SPEAKER_01: And yet I want to like speak my truth and show the path and not be afraid to say things that might polarize people.
• 1:12:45
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I don't want to polarize people, but you know, that might make, might make people uncomfortable.
• 1:12:49
  SPEAKER_01: Or I just I find it as a as a woman raised in the culture that you're describing, who has really had to work hard in the last 20 years of my life to unhook myself from these pre-ideas about how I'm supposed to be in the world and to soften my edges a little bit.
• 1:13:11
  SPEAKER_01: I still get caught in the system.
• 1:13:14
  SPEAKER_01: And I don't know how to invite more people in.
• 1:13:18
  SPEAKER_01: My clients, the women who have big things to share with the planet.
• 1:13:22
  SPEAKER_01: They've got careers they love, they're doing work that's important, and they're wanting to or find themselves mothers.
• 1:13:29
  SPEAKER_01: And now they have to figure out this thing.
• 1:13:33
  SPEAKER_01: Anyway, I don't even know if I have a question.
• 1:13:35
  SPEAKER_01: I'm just aware that like I want you to give me something.
• 1:13:40
  SPEAKER_00: Fix it for me, Satya.
• 1:13:42
  SPEAKER_00: Fix it.
• 1:13:43
  SPEAKER_00: I understand so so well what you're saying.
• 1:13:46
  SPEAKER_00: And uh, you know, what something, I mean, one, this is a constant practice for me, too.
• 1:13:52
  SPEAKER_00: I'm constantly in in versions of what you're expressing, uh, and really trying to stay present with the community that I'm in conversation with, and my students and my clients and my readers and all, you know, uh trying to stay present with what's true for me and and trust, and I use this language all the time, but to trust soul and to trust psyche, and I use this much less, but to trust God.
• 1:14:21
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I think that's what again, that's not my languaging, at least not right now.
• 1:14:26
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, um, but if I think of God as a great mother, yeah, you know, it's actually easier for me too, to sort of trust the lap of the mother because I I have detoxed from denigrating that image of mother to from denigrating, you know, this is a long way of saying this, but I think I was both raised kind of post-feminism in a way and anti-goddess.
• 1:14:50
  SPEAKER_00: Like I was raised with like big eye rolls because all the women in my world were like reading books on the archetypal goddess or the ancient goddess.
• 1:14:57
  SPEAKER_00: It was part of that kind of, I think like 80s, you know, subculture of feminist women were really deep into that stuff.
• 1:15:04
  SPEAKER_00: Now I am that woman, but it took me a while to come out of a place of denigration from that, right?
• 1:15:12
  SPEAKER_00: So I try to be as authentic as I can, both in my rationalism and my my intuitive self and let them both speak, first of all.
• 1:15:22
  SPEAKER_00: Um I also think with clients who are really identified with rationalism and materialism, that I actually now see that as its own pathology.
• 1:15:35
  SPEAKER_00: I actually consider it an autoimmune disorder psychologically, in that it consumes itself, it eats itself.
• 1:15:45
  SPEAKER_00: It is actually contraindicated for well-being.
• 1:15:49
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 1:15:50
  SPEAKER_00: And if we can see that dominant culture as a kind of autoimmune disorder, we are we are less inclined to serve it as a as a God figure, right?
• 1:16:03
  SPEAKER_00: Because it's actually itself an illness.
• 1:16:06
  SPEAKER_01: Wow, that's a really interesting perspective.
• 1:16:10
  SPEAKER_01: My nervous system knows what you're talking about.
• 1:16:14
  SPEAKER_01: My brain wants to fight against it, which is really interesting, right?
• 1:16:21
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I was raised by Margaret Shaw, who was the man, right?
• 1:16:27
  SPEAKER_01: Sure.
• 1:16:28
  SPEAKER_01: She broke a million glass ceilings.
• 1:16:30
  SPEAKER_01: I was raised by the woman and women who have carved pathways for other women, but not in this, in the more kind of, I mean, in that feminist era that was like, put your pants on.
• 1:16:43
  SPEAKER_00: Sure, yeah.
• 1:16:44
  SPEAKER_00: And I mean, that was all part of in different ways, but you know, I I know what you mean.
• 1:16:49
  SPEAKER_00: And we were raised in patriarchy.
• 1:16:52
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 1:16:52
  SPEAKER_00: So that all of these things, and and we are we are living in a time with extraordinary violence, extraordinary suffering, uh, it's very high levels of disease, of cancer, of of meaninglessness, of suicide, of gun violence, of climate degradation.
• 1:17:15
  SPEAKER_00: These are not like it's not working.
• 1:17:18
  unknown: Yeah.
• 1:17:19
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so if we can, I think this is part of it too, actually understand if this dominant psychological way of being were working, we wouldn't be even having this conversation.
• 1:17:35
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 1:17:35
  SPEAKER_00: But it's fundamentally, and this is why if we can actually think of it itself as a lopsided approach to existence, it's easier to speak to the other layer and to say what's missing.
• 1:17:50
  SPEAKER_00: So I think the fine point of what I hear you asking is I try to think when I have clients in this mental space as you describe it, is to really try to understand who I'm actually working for.
• 1:18:06
  SPEAKER_00: When they come into my office, they are coming in.
• 1:18:13
  SPEAKER_00: It's almost like their deep self is arriving there.
• 1:18:19
  SPEAKER_00: And we are then tasked with serving the deep self while distracting the hyper rationalist, what I think of often as the dictator.
• 1:18:31
  SPEAKER_00: It's almost like using a baby rattle on the dictator to keep it to keep it distracted enough that we can have a conversation with the higher self.
• 1:18:40
  SPEAKER_00: We will have clients who are extremely devoted, even despite themselves.
• 1:18:46
  SPEAKER_00: They they might make fun of us to their friends and family, but then they'll think, I can't wait for that appointment.
• 1:18:51
  SPEAKER_00: I need for I need that appointment.
• 1:18:52
  SPEAKER_00: And then they come in.
• 1:18:53
  SPEAKER_00: Then they might roll their eyes while they're talking with us, but all they want is for that next appointment.
• 1:18:59
  SPEAKER_00: Because something is happening with their deep self that knows there's medicine here.
• 1:19:04
  SPEAKER_01: That's that feeling I'm describing.
• 1:19:06
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:19:08
  SPEAKER_00: And that then the phrase, you know, who do you work for?
• 1:19:11
  SPEAKER_00: I think is important to keep in mind.
• 1:19:13
  SPEAKER_01: It's helpful.
• 1:19:14
  SPEAKER_00: You know, we're if if we're if we're oncologists, our job is not to serve the cancer because the cancer is being an asshole.
• 1:19:22
  SPEAKER_00: You know, good.
• 1:19:24
  SPEAKER_00: Don't serve the abusive husband in couples therapy because he talks the loudest.
• 1:19:28
  SPEAKER_00: That's not the goal.
• 1:19:29
  SPEAKER_00: That's not the work.
• 1:19:30
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:19:31
  SPEAKER_01: And I think in many ways in my work, I'm serving the soul of the child who's not part of the work themselves, right?
• 1:19:42
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:19:43
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, I'm like, wish I had like 12 hours with you.
• 1:19:46
  SPEAKER_01: Let's wrap up.
• 1:19:47
  SPEAKER_00: Um we'll wrap up, but you know, it's a good thing we're we're related.
• 1:19:51
  SPEAKER_00: So that's a good thing.
• 1:19:52
  SPEAKER_01: It's a good thing we're related.
• 1:19:54
  SPEAKER_01: It's a good thing we're related.
• 1:19:55
  SPEAKER_01: I hope to see you in person again soon.
• 1:19:58
  SPEAKER_01: Can you just let folks know anyone who might want to learn more about you and your work, Satya, where they can find you?
• 1:20:05
  SPEAKER_00: Sure, yes.
• 1:20:06
  SPEAKER_00: I'd love to.
• 1:20:06
  SPEAKER_01: And your book, uh, you've actually, I mean, you there's so many parts of what you do.
• 1:20:11
  SPEAKER_01: Just lay it all out there for us.
• 1:20:13
  SPEAKER_00: So I wrote a book called Quarter Life: The Search for Self in Early Adulthood.
• 1:20:19
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, the book is really focused on a lot of this journey stuff we've spoken about in uh people's 20s and 30s.
• 1:20:27
  SPEAKER_00: But it also talks about parenting from the other perspective, uh, sort of parents of quarter lifers.
• 1:20:33
  SPEAKER_00: But uh, but I wrote it to be as readable as possible.
• 1:20:36
  SPEAKER_00: People read it in one sitting often, it's not very long.
• 1:20:39
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and I talk about the idea of stability and meaning a lot, which we didn't speak to really quite directly, but it's all part of our conversation is how to balance stability and meaning versus being totally adhered, wedded to just meaning, um, you know, uh at the um, what's the word, you know, to the detriment of stability or so wedded to stability that you have no meaning in life.
• 1:21:03
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 1:21:04
  SPEAKER_00: That in a certain respect is part of all of my work.
• 1:21:07
  SPEAKER_00: So uh I am a psychotherapist, I have a very small practice now, um, but I also do consultations uh with folks.
• 1:21:16
  SPEAKER_00: And I teach, I run this thing called the Salome Institute of Jungian Studies and actually am planning on launching a much larger program in 2026 to be able to be having these conversations on an ongoing basis with more students.
• 1:21:31
  SPEAKER_02: Beautiful.
• 1:21:32
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and I have a substack.
• 1:21:34
  SPEAKER_00: So I have a regular newsletter where I also teach.
• 1:21:37
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, pretty frequently I have gatherings at least once a month, but they've been increasing.
• 1:21:42
  SPEAKER_00: So my my substack is called Self and Society.
• 1:21:46
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and you should be able to find it.
• 1:21:48
  SPEAKER_00: Satya Doyle Biock, it's a complicated name.
• 1:21:52
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but there's not many much competition on Google.
• 1:21:55
  SPEAKER_00: So there's some way to spell my name.
• 1:21:58
  SPEAKER_00: You should be able to get most of uh most of my links that way.
• 1:22:02
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you for that.
• 1:22:03
  SPEAKER_01: And I um yeah, I just feel called.
• 1:22:07
  SPEAKER_01: I feel called to learn more about this and um kind of do practice what I preach, right?
• 1:22:13
  SPEAKER_01: To really do, I I often say we have to go first.
• 1:22:17
  SPEAKER_01: As mothers, we always have to go first.
• 1:22:18
  SPEAKER_01: And it's a reminder of to us as providers, as coaches, as therapists, too, right?
• 1:22:23
  SPEAKER_01: We have to go first.
• 1:22:24
  SPEAKER_01: And I think there's something calling to me about this work and these conversations that feels so uh mandatory right now, so important.
• 1:22:52
  SPEAKER_01: All right, listeners, if you found this episode helpful in any way, or if there's someone in your life who you think might benefit from hearing it, I would be so grateful if you take just a moment to subscribe, rate, review, or share this episode with a friend.
• 1:23:07
  SPEAKER_01: Of course, it does feel good to know this podcast is resonating with you, but honestly, the bigger reason I ask is because the more subscriptions, ratings, and reviews the podcast receives, the more accessible it becomes to mothers who may really need this kind of support and conversation.
• 1:23:24
  SPEAKER_01: And as we all know, motherhood was never meant to be done alone.
• 1:23:27
  SPEAKER_01: It really does take a village to raise a mom too.
• 1:23:30
  SPEAKER_01: So thank you for helping us grow this community one conversation at a time.