Gently Dusting Off The Mind: Gabor Maté

I don't think I've had one hour of training in psychotherapy I've listened to not had formal training as such and then as my books came out and gave workshops and so on and I started working with the groups and group therapy and individuals and so on it really emerged that I did have a bit of a gift for it and and then I met Sutter on some years ago and saturon is a naturopathic physician and could you know master kundalini yoga teacher and she and others started asking you to teach my method to them or to other people and I kept insisting for a long time but I don't have a method to teach because I never learned one and I never developed one I just sort of do what I do but there's no method there's no method behind the madness you know and in this case and they kept insisting that there was and I won't persist him during the details except that finally they convinced me yeah well let's actually actually teach it and with her help we teased out what is teachable here so we developed this method called compassion compassion well the point of compassion inquiry is precisely to drill down to those core stories that people tell themselves as to actually get them to see what story they're telling themselves unconsciously what those beliefs are where they came from and show them guide them to the possibility of letting go of those stories or letting go of the hold that those stories have on them so that's what compassionate inquiries it's simply a method of drilling down when I say drilling I don't mean like a dentist table pain can come up but the difference between this method and a dentist is that the dentist necessarily causes pain in the course of their work and so more stuff and they known people before they do their work well here it's the opposite it's not that we cause pain but they may emerge and we don't want you to me know if the pain emerges we want you to feel that pain not that we want to cause you pain there's gonna be no effort here to cause anybody pain however the assumption is that we don't have to cause it it's already there and very often the stories we tell ourselves are attempts to get away from the pain I mean I'm talking with the conscience stories to get away from the pain or someone to manage it and those efforts to manage the pain not to feel it then are the basic cause of illness whether physiological illness well all illnesses are physiological but whether they obviously identified illnesses like autoimmune disease neurological illness from multiple sclerosis to a metric lateral sclerosis to a barrage of chronic fatigue Crohn's disease chronic skin conditions these all have unresolved and unrecognized emotional underpinnings and in my view those underpinnings are rooted very strongly in a person's childhood now last night ray and I went to talk that was given here at 14:40 by Julie and John Gottman and they study relationships and they just fit in the new book there's been studying relationships for decades and they told about one study that not didn't surprise me at all but it it was striking they studied parents relationship to one another what I was a working satisfactory relationship between the two parents or where there was conflictual and laden with tension and stress so they studied that in two ways they interviewed the parents interview the adults the couple and they also collected for 24 hours the urine of their four year or children and they measured over 24 hours the excretion of cortisol the stress hormone in the child's run and they could equally tell from the parents story the parents into you as from the child's urine the cortisol which marriages were unhappy in which were not now that's the degree no I can tell you that the high levels of cortisol are behind a lot of illness but so when I say that things are rooted in childhood they really are not just in a sense of emotional dynamics and the stories we tell ourselves but even very often in our very physiology and so compassion inquiry is one particular method not the only one and it's not so much a method in as an approach it doesn't displace other methods a lot of great methods out there are of great teachers out there but it's an approach to drilling down to what's really really inside you where the spiritual bypass aspect comes in well it's illustrated by somebody came and talked to me on Thursday evening I gave a talk in Vancouver on addiction and the woman came up to me and she told me she said cancer three times and she is the type that just can't say no that is always succumbing to other people's demands and expectations I thought I write about that in my book when the body says no this is a the basis of a lot of illness and Judy got on today and over breakfast she said she calls it the TNS the terminal niceness syndrome and this woman fit the time she says I can't stop doing it I can't stop I can't say no I can't I can't say no for example to my boss's expectations he says I don't understand it I've been chanting 2 hours a day for 20 years she's been doing spiritual work without which her life might be a lot more difficult might be a lot less balanced nevertheless she's still unable to utter the word know despite 20 years of chanting well that's spiritual bypass that's why you do the spiritual work and you might achieve attain great states of even oneness or peace serenity joy all the things that sometimes I gnash my teeth for not having my wife is always laughing at me that's a good thing [Laughter] what's so funny right now okay but one thing you can't accuse me of a spiritual bypass I don't know how to get to a place of serenity never mind staying there and getting away from her my emotional issues that's not totally to of it you know so what did think then to combine the inquiry about spiritual bypass and compassion inquiry how many of you here have had a spatial practice of some kind well most of you do and it may be true for you that it has really transformed your life and it can even be true that it has to inform your life but not in certain areas and where the spiritual work has not transformed your life sufficiently it could be food to reasons maybe haven't practiced well or long enough or maybe there's an emotional side that you haven't dealt with maybe there's some truth that yet and yet glimpsed or known what to do with and that's what the compassion inquiry complements the spiritual work so this is how this workshop came together now often when we give generally when we do compassion course at Dharma and I we do it for therapists teaching it is an approach that they can apply in their practice how many therapists are here by the way whew that's great but I don't see more because this is not gonna be a workshop on hardwood practice compassion inquiry in a professional setting and we didn't advertise it as such it's gonna be an immersion in it for your own particular work now let me mention here that there will be at times when some heavy emotions make them up when I say heavy emotions I literally mean emotions that are hard to there and you know hard to carry that's ok in fact it's probably a sign of lack of depth on our part if that doesn't happen for some of you not that we intend to cause I did you said it it's gonna happen so let's just talk right now about what happens and how to manage it if that happens for you so first of there's nothing wrong if something if you get triggered that's the buzzword these days that's perfectly all right so let's just developer or lay out some strategies as to what to do if that happens well if it happens when you're working with me up front here and I will invite various ones of you to come up here and work with me up front in front of the group by the way an invitation please be sure is not a demand nobody has to accept an invitation nor we will be seen or judged or as seen as insufficient or inadequate or weak or cowardly or any kind of judgment it's you they feel like it or you don't feel like it you don't want to what you don't want but if you get triggered when you're working up here with me well that's fine I I trust I can help you hold that experience and get to it if it happens for you where you're sitting in your chairs you can raise your hand and and and just invite us to to address it and if the time is appropriate and that's fine we'll just address it if you don't do that and there's no reason you should want to do that then one thing you can do is just sit with your and take some breaths and grow on yourself in your body just like sat around was just showing us a little while ago if it makes you restless enough you're really welcome to just to get up and leave and I don't mean leave permanently I just mean step outside the room and do whatever you need to do to to grind yourself until you feel comfortable coming back in so if you do that no really think badly of it and there's nothing wrong it's just a person actually taking care of selves so that's welcome and then at the next opportunity if you feel like it talk to somebody that's sat around talk to me dr. rave she's in the room for the workshop raping my wife again dr. mooi Chios i after here just or anybody you want one of your friends but this just talk to somebody so that's what to do if you do get triggered and I might as well say one more thing about this word triggered sooner or later I'll come up these days a lot of people are insisting that people put up trigger warnings and so on so first of all let me give you a trigger warning this whole week will be get trigger triggered go home when you think about the word trigger and then and of course nobody should go out of their way or deliberately or insensitively trigger anybody else that's an easy game to play but on the other hand for the person being triggered you might want to consider what the trigger actually is so the metaphor comes from what it comes from weaponry it comes from you know instruments of war and the trigger actually is a very small part of the mechanism in the gun or the rifle or the pistol or the revolver machine gun there's a whole mechanism to deliver the ammunition there's the ammunition itself there's something explosive that will propel the ammunition to its target then is a trigger which is this big whenever you get triggered somebody pulled that trigger perhaps but it was still on carrying the ammunition who's the one with the mechanism to deliver the ammunition who's the one with the explosive material inside and where do you want to put your attention you want to put your attention on the trigger purely or a curious about what ammunition what explosive material you're carrying inside so triggers are really great to work with if you want to get to know yourself and if you don't get to myself then what we usually do is we just resent whoever did the triggering and we think they did this to us so compassion inquires really all about finding out what the ammunition is now you know how you handle the people who trigger you that's your call but at least know that you're the one with all the explosives inside you and and and you gain so much liberation if you find out what was what the ammunition is and how you got it and whether you can really diffuse it like the you defuse a bomb you can actually diffuse the ammunition inside you through getting to know yourself and that's where freedom actually lies when nobody has if nobody had the power to trigger you not because you were closed down and shut down and isolated but because you're totally aware of yourself oh that's real liberation actually is and that's what all the spiritual teachers I believe want to educate people to do in their particular way here we do it differently here we do what I would call the archeology of the mind the archeology of the mind where our job is you know the ecologist has got some very fine tools and they they're very careful you know they don't just dig in there with a big shovel and apply force it's more like a very gentle dusting off of tiny little objects and looking and looking at them what it's really about and seeing how they all fit together and maybe what were broken fragments really are a beautiful vaz once the ecologist has has finished their work and in this case you're being invited to be your own archaeologist of the mind and and and really what if we succeed here by the end week you'll have some tools or the tools that you are a would be better honed to do this kind of compassionate inquiry with yourself so this is not a professional training for you to work with others this is videoblog working with yourself those are there are therapists we do to us you'll get a lot out of it that will support your own work and those of you there are therapists I'm going to talk to me about methodological issues you're welcome to come and talk to me [Music] you

Channel: scienceandnonduality

Views: 189,209

Rating: 4.9131975 out of 5

Keywords: Gabor Maté, science and nonduality, Compassionate Enquiry, spiritual bypassing, triggers, trauma, society, consciousness, health, suppression, symptoms, archaeology of the mind, therapy

Id: n9TTdP16FEY

Length: 17min 25sec (1045 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 01 2019