If You're Ready for a RADICAL AWAKENING, Watch This | Dr. Shefali on Impact Theory

there's no such thing as the evil one out there it is our inner that is represented on the outside on a global scale so each one of us does matter so that's why i always hone it down to what are you doing in your life how are you buying into what is toxic and believing it to be true and causing your suffering so that's where we take ownership finally but we can only take ownership when we can see culture for what it is and name it oh this is toxic this is beneficial and discern and not just take what culture gives you as the pill that you're meant to swallow and then wonder why you're suffering you're suffering because there are toxicities that you're ingesting from culture that you are making your own and then you are adding to it [Music] this episode is sponsored by skillshare and the first 1 000 people to click the link in the description will get a free trial of skillshare's premium membership enjoy the episode hey everybody welcome to another episode of impact theory i am joined by clinical psychologist and wildly best-selling author dr shafali dr shafali welcome to the show thank you for having me back i am super excited to have you back very excited to actually be on set and share space with you to talk about your new book a radical awakening you took on a big topic with this homie like you really put yourself out there it's funny how the beginning of the book is like hey uh p.s i'm gonna piss some of you off bear with me rock for the journey and you know by the end hopefully we'll be able to help you have these transformations i thought all right let's see like how hard she goes with this you really like go into it like this was pretty straightforward hard-hitting there were two things that i took away sort of as um really powerful which is this idea that we are animals you said i wanna i wanna make sure people hear me we don't come from animals we are animals and then that we have to own completely own our internal lives talk to me about the idea of what a radical awakening is and like what those two elements mean okay so at its basic core a radical awakening has two layers the first is to understand that we are living in a man-constructed cultural matrix that has pretty much lied to us about our essence and the second layer is while it has done a lot of things to women especially now our radical awakening occurs when we see how we are co-creating and co-participating in the cultural lies so those are the two layers in terms of the two things you you took away which other people may not take away these things stood out for you well one i want to be clear that those are in no way shape or form the only things that i took away they felt um like things to anchor around in terms of the totality of the takeaway yeah and this conversation will be super interesting because there's so much in your book i was like oh my god this is amazing and then there were parts where i had the reaction you told me i was going to have which is this is crazy yeah and talking through both sides of that i think are going to be really interesting okay so um so let's talk about the the first one you brought up about our animal nature and so the reason i i had a whole section on our bio physiology how it impacts our psychology is because we take our biological nature for granted yet every woman knows around her menstrual cycle her hormones are out of whack and it deeply impacts her psychology so i grounded one of the themes in the book around our biology because we take for granted our wiring and males know that they are heavily influenced by their biological wiring and so are we women you know how our bodies are constructed has a deep impact on how our psychologies are you know we are givers in our body you know our vaginas are created to receive and to give our breasts lactate when our babies are born to give you know our very psychology is based on this biology of inherent nurturing giving connection uh oxytocin works in a different way than yours you know females have a different love hormone and connection ability than you and this is very biologically based and i think we are out of touch and out of sync with our bodies with how our biology influences us and because of that we misunderstand ourselves and certainly we misunderstand men and males who have testosterone and your sexuality is very differently driven because of your biology than ours you know our egg gets released once a month so our hormonal cycle ovulates and pendulates over a whole 28th cycle day cycle yours is every day you know 24 hours you all have a different sexual energy about you because of your testosterone which we have way lesser in our body so all these ways cause misunderstanding so when i say we are animals it's to ground us in our biology and to make us remember that we are part of the animal species and i think we as a humanity have forgotten who we really are you know by going to the top of the food chain as we have we've forgotten our place in nature so when i say we are animal don't forget you know we are we we are part of this wondrous kingdom but we're not better than necessarily and our minds have deluded us to believe we are so superior that we have decimated everything around us now you know so we'll be the only one standing and eventually we will corrupt ourselves we are on that path of self-destruction it's interesting so when i look at human nature so the the idea of remembering that we're animals i think is so important and to not lose sight of the words i use for i think a very similar thing is you're having a biological experience right and i'm always trying to get people to recontextualize whatever is happening rage joy love pursuit anything that um recognizing that ultimately it comes down to how you feel which is a game of neurochemistry right and if you don't understand that i could give you a billion dollars and you could still be suicidal and therefore obviously money is not the answer and neurochemistry ultimately is right now becomes a question of what are those levers that we can pull to manipulate our neurochemistry now in terms of maybe stepping up a level to the cultural implications of what it means to be a human to have gotten the bigger brain to not necessarily have more physical strength or sharper clause but to instead climb using culture using this where knowledge stacks right that i can actually hand it off to my offspring in a way not even necessarily just my offspring but everybody in the tribe so that a hundred years later people are still learning an innovation that was learned a very long time ago right right but tom how innovative are we look around us i mean we are as destructive as we are created so that was the that sentence right there is exactly um fascinating to me we are and i'll say it the other way we are as creative as we are destructive and do you see it both ways or do you feel like the destructive force is somehow more powerful so so being a psychologist i am fascinated by this amazing mind we have on and it has to be in quotes because on one hand it has the potential to create amazing things but on the other hand it's pretty deluded too for example we can be holding the idea of evolution on one hand and then believe in creation on the other hand the same mind can do that our mind is constantly creating justifications how can we justify slavery for example a good church-going man can you know on the other hand be on top of a ship which has slaves at the bottom how can we justify cruelty to animals the way we are and how can we justify destroying the planet how can we justify the holocaust obviously the people who did these uh inimitable evils justified were always justifying if you really break down our psychology so on one hand the mind is creative but is it a discerning mind is it a wise mind i i highly highly disagree with anyone who will say we are wise as a default you mean because as a default as a default we're clever and we're really smart people but but are we as a default wise wisdom is something that we talk about has to be cultivated and you and i know how hard it is to cultivate consciousness you know for the most part the consciousness quotient on our planet is pretty a business something that you go into in the book well i it's there's no such objective thing but i talk about just as we talk about the intellectual quotient we've got to come up with a consciousness quotient which has to do with consciousness self-awareness well self-awareness self-governance self-reliance you know the ability to live in an interconnected fashion where we are not destroying each other and the earth right so where our mind defaults is self-preservation right we're really good at indulgence comfort and self-preservation but are we really good at living to living together as an interconnected species look around i don't see evidence of that i see separation i see hatred i see divisiveness that is also part of the human mind so we just have to acknowledge that the human mind is has potential for great creativity but it also has this potential for destruction and when we decontextualize ourselves as being so superior we enter this delusion of grandeur and we forget that we are causing wreaking havoc on our earth right now you know no one has wreaked so much havoc as the human and in the last 30 years you know if you watch any david attenborough uh nature video he will end with some optimism but also with a grave warning that we have caused more calamity in the last 30 years than has ever been caused on the planet so who has caused that if not the great man right so we have to step back and become humble so when i say we're animal it's my call to let's be humble let's learn from how other animals live let's not pretend we are so fancy and superior because we're really not and with that humility now with curiosity we can learn and grow but i think we've entered a great narcissism as a species as a humanity that we are just limitless there's no stop button we're on mars we're in on the moon and we can't even take care of our children and our elderly so what are we doing that's interesting this is such a fascinating game to me of almost fractal-like never-ending complexity yeah which you do a good job of exploring in the book you're constantly moving from one side of hey look there are real problems that have positioned you to be suffering for whatever reason oh but hey you also have to take ownership of your internal world and recognize and i know you don't like hearing that and i thought you navigate that really really well staying on that topic for a second how much of the um the sort of destruction and disconnect do you think is a function of time horizons versus nature because you know knowing that at one point the entire human race was boiled down to the cape of hope at the tip of south africa and reduced to like 6 000 total human beings on the planet and from that we've built back to the whatever 8 billion that we have now so we've done an extraordinary job of keeping civilization alive of accomplishing amazing things and look amazing is very subjective to me getting to the moon is amazing to me the fact that we want to go to mars and i think will eventually go to mars is amazing and yet i also recognize the duality of our how capable of destruction how the madness of crowds can do things like make people think slavery is okay right so they're both of those things exist so now as we bring it down to the individual which you do so beautifully in your book how do you help people navigate like let's set aside for a second sort of the the amoeboid like nature undulating nature of a crowd which we can't really control and there's not a lot that you as an individual can do but you can now get into your body and develop that self-awareness how do you help people walk through that so that they lean to the side of the better angels of our nature and not to the more destructive elements sure so when you broil it down to the micro you have to understand that this cultural matrix which is so infinitely complex is chasing something uh akin to dominance of the entire globe like you said going to the moon is amazing to me it's a thirst for dominance you know and then i as a psychologist will say why why do we need to dominate the moon right why are we incessantly dominating it comes from ego for me for you it could come out of curiosity and exploration so that's the good side of the ego which is which does have that adventure spirit but i get worried about it because in the micro right when we bring it down to the micro i see this thirst for dominance and superiority we are now trying to over dominate our aging process we're trying to over control it all we're coming from this desire of perfection and control so on a micro level i see that delusion playing out and increasing this connection to who we authentically are right i want to put a point on something in there so is the reason that is problematic because it generates suffering in the mind of that individual or are you still looking at it only as a macro problem both right the macro is the micro the micro becomes the macro suffering is created because the more craving we have the more we think we need to have so for example you and i talked about this in our last interview with our children just take it just a two-year-old right now because the the two-year-old down the street is learning 16 languages or going to the alps on a skiing trip and learning how to ski backwards and then this one is going to the third world country so-called third world country uh to live in the jungle and then this one is going for lacrosse and this one is going for sign language now that technology has allowed so much more exposure it creates an insecurity that we should be doing it all we can go to the moon why not go to the moon so we don't go to the moon that creates insecurity oh you've been to the moon and i haven't been to the moon we have that same philosophy with our children and it's a rabid delusion of endless craving that doesn't end now i mean i see it as a parent everywhere it's like constant craving constant insecurity the the fact that we can doesn't mean we necessarily should and we we see that mania on a very personal level i see it in my office when women come feeling constantly insecure because now the other one has you know these huge implants that make her look amazing so now my ordinary shape doesn't look amazing now i'm feeling more insecure or that one has lashes that come out like till here and mine are so stunted now i'm feeling insecure or her kid is studying you know and going to fancy museums every day and studying with the best artists in the world and mine i don't have the money so mine is only playing with clay you understand it's become a culture of endless consumerism and it affects the world i talk about the woman especially because she's the one who culture is objectifying and great and grave insecurities are being caused within her and a schism between her accepting her authentic self and her essence to this idea of perfectionism the idea of that woman i want to produce and curate that child we have endless imagination which is the beautiful thing about us but it creates endless craving and endless suffering okay you know yo yes uh this idea in your book about we're animals i think it's so brilliant for the reasons that you're touching on now so putting it back in that context of beauty has utility yes now we can argue that it shouldn't right sort of ought almost moral imperative but in terms of the natural world we are an animal it does and there are things they've done these studies on peak shift so you take a mother bird that has this big red nose and she feeds her babies so of course the baby sees the big red nose and they react that they're going to be fed the bigger like if you make an artificial version of that mother and make the nose bigger and more red then the baby actually eats more and gets like more hyped up to eat and they call that concept peak shift it's the reason women get just hilariously large breasts and do all that right because it it does get an amplified reaction from the male right so now you get into the tragedy of the commons where if i don't extend my eyelashes wear the tight-fitting outfit have the good body get breast implants somebody else is going to do it and it does have utilities yes it has great value it takes the attention if i'm heterosexual and i want the attention of the man that man is going to look at that woman so i'm the wife first i'm pissed off with the man i'm really in big trouble then i want to be like where i want to be the object of desire 100 percent so there is some biological basis for why that man looks at that buxom woman it's biologically wired in the man to be attracted to that signs of fertility yeah signs of fertility productivity youth and uh and and health right so that's very valuable however where we have gotten stuck as women right now is that it's not just beauty for utility there is a standard of beauty and in some areas it's been to look anorexic to be completely androgynous looking today it's to be all you know shapely it the idea of beauty changes with cultural standards and we like puppets keep running after that standard trying to match it you know of course the male will be wired in a certain way to be attracted to a certain kind of body just in terms of the the what we talked about fertility health and productivity but when we women succumb to cultural standards based on what culture imposes on us and we defy our own natural bodies and we go and mutate our own natural bodies to become that cultural standard now we are falling into the patriarchy and actually genuflecting actually serving the patriarchy by falling prey to it so women need to own that yeah a male could be wired to youth and beauty in that productive sense and we need to be okay with that and not get enraged and hold the man possessive but we also need to not fall prey to it in our bodies so we need to accept our aging we need to accept our saggy bottoms we need to accept our wrinkles and our cellulite this is part of our nature but we want to control our nature i want to use some of the language you use in the book because i thought you handled this issue so well explain to us how because you talk about if i see a part of me that's flabby i'm just going to call it flabby yeah but what what is the key insight that you've had there that makes that not self-diminishing so we women have been raised to fit the standard of beauty which is this ideal of perfectionism so we are always seeking our worth through our beauty you know most of us are and it takes honesty to accept it i hope women can accept that we all want to be desired and be seen as youthful and beautiful hence the cosmetic industry is booming and will always boom and the plastic surgery industry is filled with female clients but we don't want to own it that this is what we call it so when we are conditioned to want to look pretty and young now when we see flabby parts of our body we don't want to accept that this is part of nature we want to make it beautiful so if you if you were a woman and you said to me hey you know i have flabby underarms i as your friend knowing that we are all conditioned will say no you don't it's so beautiful now by imposing the judgment of beauty and beauty is a judgment we actually don't allow the woman to accept yeah you flabby you know so we are constantly seeking to make everything fit this paradigm of beautiful and actually that makes us more insecure instead of going yeah i have crow's feet yes lots of cellulite instead of somebody my best friend telling me no you don't have cellulite no i do you know so when my daughter comes to me and goes oh my goodness i have pimples i go oh my goodness yes you do you know oh she goes oh my goodness i have a big nose i go oh my goodness yes you do i don't say no you don't i go call it whatever big small it is what it is you know i my daughter will say sometimes maybe that oh why am i not you know a size zero i go because you're not i don't go yes you are or you can become skinny tomorrow you are your body except your body how do you frame that for your daughter like if she said my arms are flabby do you say hey you should be completely fine with that but if you want non-flabby arms go to the gym or do you have a totally different mechanism for that well so with my daughter if the complaining gets too loud i'll go okay you could change your diet or you could exercise more but i fundamentally want to tell her that you're fundamentally made the way you're made you know and you've got to accept it you cannot be a different skin tone you cannot have a different eye color can you pair contacts yes can you not ever get tanned more yes but it is what it is you know i always want to communicate to myself and to all women at the end of the day ex-self-acceptance is your greatest sword that is what is going to make you the most desirable to yourself and to others do not fall for standards of beauty it is our wiring to want to be desired but it is also part of our wisdom to understand that the desire can sometimes be sexual sometimes it can be emotional it can be intellectual and after a certain youthful phase of our life we can surrender to letting go some of that desire that comes from youth right and and i want to us women to go to the bottom of why we need to be desired so much right it's natural on some level to be desired every woman wants a compliment the 80 year old grandmother wants to be told she's beautiful of course men want to be told they're handsome and desirable too but we in this modern era have gone so far to want to cancel our our aging we want to act like we're not growing older that is a fundamental problem that causes us suffering and then we play into the patriarchy you know by by wanting to look younger we actually get oppressed by the patriarchy by our own internal oppression so the patriarchy is probably the thing that you and i are the farthest apart on help me understand your side better why does it seem important to tie that to masculinity to men i'm not sure which of those no it has nothing to do with men or masculinity it's it's like racism has really nothing to do with any one singular white person it's a systemic reality that we live in right now in this modern era we happen to be living in a very toxic patriarchy it has nothing to do with men can you define patriarchy then sure so uh patriarchy is a systemic endemic set of beliefs uh where the woman in the in the system is subjugated is conditioned to be in service off is silenced to put the other in this case the male before them and the male is the leader the ruler the governor and the initiator of the cultural norms and while in tribal communities there was shared responsibilities there was a great reverence for the woman while the male may still be the leader because he's maybe bigger there was a great reverence i believe for the feminine force of the woman but in today's culture it is it is suppressed she's taught to be serva she's thought that she's not good enough and that is the underpinning of a patriarchy now does it mean that one man believes in it and another does it doesn't matter at this point what one of one man or believes in or not it's the overarching system that places men in the stronger than position physiologically intellectually emotionally spiritually they just have the run of the of the way right now and women are trained to be in service of that you don't agree with me as many of you know i'm all about constant self-improvement a growth mindset and a relentless focus on progress and skill acquisition that's why i'm super excited to tell you guys about skillshare skillshare 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and skillshare is also incredibly affordable an annual subscription is less than 10 dollars a month and right now the first 1000 viewers to click the link in the description we'll get a free trial of premium membership so you can explore your creativity don't miss this one guys sign up right now i the way that i look at it is if i think about trajectory that we're on a good trajectory like if you were to transport somebody from [Music] mars somewhere far away where they've never encountered the culture that we're living in now and just transplanted them here and asked like is there equality um between sexes i think they would say ah it's probably it's not perfect for sure and there are definitely areas that you can improve but it's good and if we were having this conversation in the 1960s that feels way more like just sort of where nobody's yet questioning it and so obviously we're all colored by our own experiences and because my experience is i have a wife who is my peer in every way who went from a traditional housewife because that's what she was raised just subconsciously to be and she decided one day that she wanted to be an entrepreneur and so i had to go from i have someone who cooks cleans lays out my clothes every day like runs the household top to bottom there's so many things i don't have to think about because she's doing them all for me to her saying hey by the way i'm not going to do any of that for you anymore you're on your own for that and now i'm going to step in as a business leader and to me that was a very difficult transition just because it was so foreign but it was so easy psychologically to say i want you to be whatever you want to be right so there was no sense of well but you're a woman and you should be some kind of way it was and this is why this is one of my favorite shirts like to me that's if you're human like you should be able to come to the table and play to the best of your ability and do whatever the hell you want to do and you shouldn't be judged on race color creed sex right any of that so right to me because i grew up in that it is so hard for me to like see this top-down oppressive what it feels like to me and this is sort of my take on i don't think of it as a patriarchy because that word is so tied to men and that's so foreign to my experience what i look at is certainly imperfect and i see certainly over the last you know 50 years women really having to fight to come into their own but when i think about how did they get left in a position where they had to fight this hard because that's super unfair right and my answer to that isn't top down it's bottom up it is the nature of for the vast amount of human history life was what cruel short brutish and deadly i forget the the like exact quote and it was two sides of an equation doing the best they could and accidentally creating structure i don't think it's possible to um like we see monarchies have fallen throughout history we see that empires come and go it's ultimately some a ball gets moving and then it takes on a life of its own that well outlives whoever may have intentionally i agree i agree with you it's not created by a man it's a system right and that's why i said systemic but i don't know whether i would agree with you so much that life before and we don't know what we're talking about when before right so the way i see a a strong demarcation point is when we began to live owning land right with the agricultural revolution and we we decided to domesticate animals and to have property and along with that then another few thousand years later came the marriage and the contract of that marriage where the man not only controlled the land but also the women and the children and the cattle and the marital contract ensured that property went down the lineage his lineage um and so he he wasn't an evil man he was just the stronger one physiologically and so began to own and then own and own and we began to create institutions that took us further and further away from living interconnected in nature i mean we are so far from nature you have to go looking for nature now you know we have dominated nature we don't live in an interdependent relationship with nature and i think along with that as man grew in his dominance women went further down in their submission now of course you don't see that in your very microscopic male female relationship but if you just pan out globally there is a scourge of any sense of equity between males and females i mean i grew up in india and i know india today and i know the middle east and i know women even in the west you know when i came to america i pedestalized the western woman thinking surely she has a voice surely she's in her power but then look how hard even the metoo movement has shown how hard it was for women to speak out against real abuse because they have been subsumed in a culture that has conditioned them to stay mute we have been disconnected from our knowing and you as a male cannot have full appreciation for that because you didn't grow up like we did you know and i'm not saying oh you're clueless you just can't know what we grew up with and what we face on a daily basis in terms of how we've been conditioned to be the good girl to be uh silent to be second to be at the back this is just every girl will say yes i have to fight that i have to fight that idea that i need to be the perfect woman the perfect wife the perfect mother i have to fight it you know and and the fact that we have to fight it says that there's something to fight and there's a system in place that we constantly have to buffer ourselves against and that takes energy it's exhausting and most of us don't have the financial or intellectual resources or a great partner like you to do this fight to fight the fight so we give up there's a subtle difference i think between how you and i see it that may or may not be fruitful to explore but let's try okay um so the way that i think about everything is utility and so somebody has a goal right so let's say a woman doesn't want to be subservient they want to make sure that their voice is heard and there is some hurdle that could be the way that they were raised the things they've internalized the frame of reference or it could be outright oppression certainly in other countries i'm not blind to that [Music] where i think this it becomes really important and in your book you talk about this and so i don't in any way shape or form think i'm introducing you to a new idea i'm putting i guess more emphasis there there are two sides that you present a vision of a top-down culture that is actively holding you back like the the way that i the image that spontaneously popped into my mind when you called it the culture of the culture was a villain right that the culture is a villain and but you're very clear that people have to take their power and you give very amazing steps and so i really want to be heard in the context of i think what you put forth in the book is extraordinary and there is only one minor shift which is i think people will end up chasing their tail if they're trying to fight the villain of culture but it's not a villain it's the unconsciousness culture is unconscious agreed so that's not a villain but we must battle and discern the unconsciousness and call it what it is we cannot on the other hand glorify culture culture has passed down toxic messages for men and women and children and animals and we are seeing the effects in the ravaged earth and mental illness is on the rise today more than it has been at any point in history now you could say because there's more reporting and more testing i don't think it's just that but i do think it's complicated so for instance i think if you said as a lay person and i do not claim to be an expert but i am very well read on the subject what's the number one cause of mental illness i would say it's diet and when i think about what people do to their neurochemistry just by what they eat sure i think we will find on a long enough timeline that that's been the biggest tragedy which is why i resonate so well with your you have to take ownership of your life correct so where does diet come from even if i go with your thesis that that's the cause where is diet coming from from our increasing disconnection to living off the earth living in an interdependent way are increasing greed and consumerism and machination and production over production everything is industrialized now so who has done that the modern human mind has done that we have literally taken every industry the fisheries whaling uh dairy and mechanized it to such a level of over production and destroyed the natural nature of the cow for example which then overpopulates the earth and which then pollutes the earth through methane in every if you go down any path we will see that the modern human has created a culture of consumerism greed and exploitation and our women and children suffer because we are in the underbelly of that now i'm not blaming the man and blaming the system that is set up to dominate the weak so my thesis as slightly different from yours is that the culture is a not entirely random artifact but it's a bottom-up phenomenon that's born out of the biological realities of who we are so you start god only knows how many hundreds of thousands of years ago and it continues to echo while you can draw demarcation lines like the um agrarian revolution like the industrial revolution and they really do have very market very rapid changes but they're still in many ways an echo of just like what we are what the human mind is at its base layer and the thing that i am trying to thread the needle and get your insights on are this idea of my hypothesis is that if we over emphasize the culture is what you're fighting against versus the way your mind works is what you're fighting against so my like really court you have two thesis in your book one your mind is messing with you two the culture is messing with you i think does that feel but they're very interconnected agreed right you and i are culture i ask audiences all the time who do you think is culture it's you who's going to go out there and deal with your children now you are your child's culture right and now you're in your child's mind the child then carries it on so the individual is the micro and the macro at the end of the day right we are constantly interconnected and uh influencing each other right so where is culture i can't touch it right there's no such thing as the evil one out there it is our inner that is represented on the outside on a global scale so each one of us does matter so that's why i always hone it down to what are you doing in your life how are you buying into what is toxic and believing it to be true and causing your suffering how are you co-creating and co-participating in your reality in your marriage in your in your divorce in your parenting in every in your diet right so that's where we take ownership finally but we can only take ownership when we can see culture for what it is and name it oh this is toxic this is beneficial and discern and not just take what culture gives you as the pill that you're meant to swallow and then wonder why you're suffering you're suffering because there are toxicities that you're ingesting from culture that you are making your own and then you are adding to it makes a lot of sense so now talk to me about how are the ways that we navigate that if if our biology and the culture at large are giving us what i'll call beliefs but you might have a more nuanced take on that and that's what's sort of toxifying our minds and trapping us right how do we begin to sure hope so let's take just the example of our sexuality as women you know so we are biological beings we are highly sexual beings we may not have a high sex drive as males do but we have a highly flourishing sex drive i'm sure but look at what culture has done to our sexuality as a female sexual being we have been marauded we have been abducted from it we have been pillaged you know from it and because of it you know we have been raped and we have caused within ourselves great shame and uh divorce from our own sexuality yet it's being taken away from us by culture all the time ask any woman she's nervous if she walks down a dark alley if she gets into an elevator with five men if she's in a room alone with with men she waits for the woman to come why because that's partly biological right we're always going to be smaller we're always going to be prey but culture has kept us from our voice to speak up and fight against that and kept us divorced from our own sexuality right most of us have grown up with huge inhibitions from religion from education that we should not be or or you know brazen vixens and we we're not even taught to explore our sexuality those are things that bad girls do so now we go into relationships not even knowing who we are sexually but we're in sexual relationships that immediately sets us up for lesser than dynamic we are disempowered we're disenfranchised you know so that's just one example right this is how young girls are raised and it's in the culture be a good girl we hear that so much growing up be a good girl oh good girl boys don't hear that as much boys will be boys so we're given a different message and we want love and worth so we're very good and we try to be very perfect and we try to people please and we're trying to conflict a void and that's how we're raised and then what that does to us is that systematically because we're seeking to get love and worth from the outside we don't listen to our own inner knowing and we're increasingly disconnected from it and then when we're in a situation where our boundaries are being violated we can't speak we don't speak up and then we enter shame because we divorced ourselves we abandoned ourselves we betrayed ourselves but we don't find a voice you know i took 40 years to find my voice and i was outspoken but to truly find my voice not the pleasing voice not the voice that sought simply to get love and worth and desire from outside but the voice that truly believes herself who understands herself that took years to come did you find it or build it cultivated it because well i first had to find it because it was taken away from me and i'm not blaming my parents and i'm not blaming culture it just is the way i so was raised to want love and worth from the outside i just gave up i was like okay i'll be who you want me to be just love me let me think i'm worthy and i will do whatever it takes so i began to live a false self as most of us do to get love and worth from the outside so it was first lost so i had to first reclaim it and then nurture it back to life so my own true self didn't believe me because i had betrayed it so many times so the true self is like no i don't believe you i'm going to stay small hidden behind my rock so we have to say i'm going to back you i'm going to listen to you i'm going to follow your way i'm going to honor you i won't give you up for the love of the other i'm going to water you i'm going to blossom you so this is the journey that i outline in this book for women to follow you've lost your voice it was taken from you but here's the pathway if you're sitting right now on your couch feeling dislocated feeling discombobulated disenfranchised loss to yourself this book will give you the path to reclaim that voice and to build her up again it's interesting in reading the book it was it felt really universal to me meaning that it felt like it applied to men as readily as it does women and i'm curious to know if you feel that way or if you feel that there's um and and i i have really heard you in terms of the cultural message of um boys will be boys versus uh be a good girl so i i totally understand that part but in terms of i would say finding your voice not being afraid to be who you are and again this is me sort of in context of me what i had to learn in my journey was to speak up to be heard to be more aggressive to be tougher to channel masculine energy which you would not think that a guy would have to do but that really has been my journey do you think that the strategies that you lay out in the book will work for anybody or do you think this the particular strategies that you lay out are distinctly useful for women strategies for the reclamation of the voice is for everybody i just hone in on some very key female-oriented messages that that have been passed down to the girls years that are unique but you know my next book is probably going to be on the awakening of the man so there will be more specific you know male oriented messages that are kind of nuanced but the pathway how it gets lost and how to reclaim it is universal as you said so this book is for anyone who's lost their sense of self and their place in the world and so afraid to reclaim that that is universal but there are some nuances that girls will understand more than a boy when they read this yeah yeah it um i hear you i understand why you're saying that but it is it it is very useful information i'll be very curious to see if you do the next book on the awakening of the man that'll be fun today as well um talk to me about sex and marriage you you wrote this after you got divorced while you were getting divorced i was i was awakening through the whole process and then finally wrote the book maybe after my divorce yeah so it's it's really intriguing to see you sort of break out of you know talk about cultural norms break out of that introduce new ideas ways for people to be um you touch on monogamy um being polygamous like you you go into a lot of places um that i found really interesting what's your take on sexuality in the context of a marriage specifically well so before i zero in on sexuality let's take a step back and understand marriage and how marriage has been severely controlled by religion and the judicial system right so legality of marriage that's why you have a contract and the prohibitions that come from religion around how you have to be married right many people don't want to even have sex before marriage because religion has said you need to be pure and chaste and sex is for procreation in some cultures you know so religion has played a heavy hand in coloring the marital understanding in a couple and the judicial system has really laid down the legalities and made it very hard to break the contract right so now the person is entering this contract with very stringent ideas around what that relationship will be and because it's a contract there's some sort of like you owe me something and you better fulfill the contract and if you don't fulfill the contract you are going to be judged in a particular way right breaking the contract is frowned upon right you looked at looked on as a failure or cheater or betrayer you're not meant to break this contract so marriage has severe cultural pressures for longevity right you're praised if you stay and stick it out and uh it has religious implications and legal implications so already it's heavy duty it's not just like oh i love you no now it's like a lot of baggage with it now sex within the marriage can be you know again misunderstood that you your sex belongs to me now your sexual desire belongs to me you can't even desire anyone right most men will say i cannot talk about my desires to to my wife right it takes real open communication for the woman especially to feel secure if her partner the male talks about desire outside and vice versa so now because marriage is about possession control and ownership sex becomes about ownership control and possession on top of the fact that we are not an openly sexual culture right sex is not something you talk about at the dining table it's not something you know you like having coffee with your buddy you're like hey how many times did you orgasm last night you don't talk about these things this is taboo right so sex is is severely legislated within the mind inhibited within the mind especially the mind of the female and now you're supposed to have great sex in the marriage but look how loaded it is before we can even talk about it right so all of this needs to come out of the closet and we need to adult up and talk about sex in a more normative normalized non-judgmental non-shaming way and open up to the possibility of all possibilities you know and i do see a trend going of people talking about being fluid in their sexuality and and that's wonderful let's talk about it we've not even been able to talk about it till now so in sort of post awakening so we've got the post awakening female we've got the post awakening male what does that look like to you is it at one point i think um i'm going to get close this is almost a quote that the rules of monogamy are a lie and i don't know if you mean that biologically because you also give the stat about i think 83 86 something along there uh pre-agree society indigenous societies use 83 or 86 percent religionists and all animals non-human animals are polygenous by nature so so so when i say the lie of monogamy i i say it because it's been sanctified as holy monogamy monogamy and that's the lie it's a great choice it's a wonderful choice but it's a choice but it's been given to us as the only way to have relationships that's the lie and that it's sanctified and that somebody who is not part of that box is a cheater a horrible human being a villain an evil person how do you help people cross a chasm between sort of i'm encountering these ideas probably when i'm pre-awakening how do they navigate like when they've got insecurities and they've got jealousies and they have a fantasy about you know i'm with one person how do you how do you help them is it like compartmentalized don't think about that yet first first you have to claim your voice right right all of what we're talking about on the individual level boils down to our lack of worth i call it the pill that kills it's our unworthiness so we can't really have any wise conscious discussion about heavy topics like monogamy without an acknowledgement that we're coming from great deep grave insecurity within it's the insecurity within us that makes us want to dominate and control the other and i believe like you said the scourge of humanity or mental illness is the diet for me the scourge of humanity and mental illness is our deep void our insecurity which is causing us to want to go to mars and colonize it and go to every corner of the earth and dominate it similarly with our partners dominate their every part every thought every desire it comes because we are not whole from within so we are an attachment to our partners we have attached to the idea that we own them and they owe us something this is a faulty idea which comes from insecurity so at the end of it all i talk about how we can heal the deep grave insecurities that we have which is why we can't have open honest authentic transparent relationships with ourselves leave alone with someone else we're not even authentic with ourselves because we're with a false fake personality trying to get love and worth from the outside and how do we and this is a theme in the book that the one person you need to fall in love with is yourself yes how do we fall in love like do is there so i would say to have self-worth you have to do something you believe is worthy do you think there's anything like that or no this is a pure realization that you are enough right now it's a pure realization it doesn't come from your doing the doing can help with your worth but the doing can only truly be aligned doing when you are aligned with your own inner self so we are worthy as we are it comes from deep self acceptance as we are and this is what is sorely missing and it starts from our childhood conditioning because our parents were conditioned to seek to crave to be successful to achieve to get love and worth from external sources this is what they pass down to their children children grow up with a void who am i i guess i'm only as good as the love and worth i get from the outside let me keep seeking it so we're all seeking something from the outside we're all on a hamster wheel looking for love on mars and going to the ends of the earth when it's all right here and this is why i don't look at going to mars as an accomplishment because we're not even here and so when you talk about that thing inside is that an unbreakable spirit that there's no amount sort of of child abuse like as much as i hate that this is true your childhood really seems to impact the trajectory of your life yes sadly it really does so can that thing be broken and would need to sort of be reconstructed or is it a simple stripping away and you will find something waiting for you so people have different ideas you know who knows what there's no real thing we're talking about so it's a model of looking at it yeah it's a theory so the way i look at it is that there's an essence that is indestructible but we are taken away from it and we are taken away from it because we're we're conditioned to look for love and worth in these fake false ways that i call the layers of the ego so we all create these disguises and layers of the ego that take us further and further away from this essence so part of awakening is not an additive process it's a subtractive process where you subtract subtract undo unlayer unseduce yourself from the lies that you've been told by culture don't buy into it don't buy into it the more you let go you get liberated from these tethers and there's your true self but it's a hell of a process dr shafali thank you for writing the book thank you for coming on thank you for letting me play with some of these ideas in real time that was really wonderful i think your book has just extraordinary gifts in it in terms of how to navigate this stuff very powerful i hope you do write the next book that would be amazing where can people find you and continue to engage with these ideas so uh on my website dr shafadi.com i do a lot of courses i help people in real time through hours and hours of practical courses so they can go on my website and explore that's amazing guys trust me whenever we have somebody on that has clinical psychology work behind them it is such a gift she's bringing an untold number of hours of actually working with live real people to help them get through their problems and she's put all that magic in the book be sure to check it out and speaking of things that you should check out if you haven't already be sure to subscribe and until next time my friends be legendary take care

Channel: Tom Bilyeu

Views: 150,889

Keywords: Tom Bilyeu, Impact Theory, ImpactTheory, TomBilyeu, Inside Quest, InsideQuest, Tom Bilyou, Theory Impact, motivation, inspiration, talk show, interview, motivational speech, Dr. Shefali, Radical Awakening, Mental Health, gender relations, gender roles

Id: yat2kOmJNLQ

Length: 58min 21sec (3501 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 22 2021