Understanding Trauma: A Conversation with Dr. Gabor Maté

addiction is seen in the legal world there's some kind of a choice somebody makes well believe me i've worked with hardcore addicted people nobody ever chose to be an addict i've had my own addictive issues i've never chose to be i didn't choose it [Music] hi marianne williamson here and welcome to this week's podcast you know i began lecturing on a course in miracles back in 1983 and uh the world in many ways was quite different then but many things were very much the same and one of the things that became a very big issue in the middle of the 1980s was the aids crisis and because i was giving lectures about miracles and spirituality i had a lot of experience very up close and personal with people who were suffering through that crisis but there was another issue that i came up close and personal with during that time because of all the people who came to the course in miracles lectures and who were reading the course in miracles um who were involved with it and that was people with uh 12-step program issues also in my own life dating someone who was an addict for quite a while uh even though at the time i thought because of his involvement with aa with na actually i didn't realize he was still using but in my own life two years living with an active heroin addict although like i said at the time i didn't realize he was active uh definitely puts you in a situation where you have a lot of understanding where you have a lot of experience of some of the trauma that is involved there not only for the addict but also for the people who is a who are around him or her so i had a lot of exposure uh to 12-step programs uh certainly went to my own uh went to my own share of al-anon meetings which were very very helpful to me and i came to have a deeper understanding that addiction applies to a lot of things not just substance abuse you might not be an alcoholic you might not be a drug addict but when you have a deeper understanding of what addiction is all about then you do come to understand that any activity which brings you pleasure but at some point uh carries a craving with it carries negative consequences with it if you don't have it when you don't have it right when you want it you begin to realize that you might have some addictive tendencies that you might not have associated with an actual addiction and that conversation has permeated the culture now people realize this if you've read the if you've seen the film um social dilemma everybody gets who among us doesn't have some aspect of addiction to social media these days to your phone to all of those things i remember when my daughter was a little girl and i would say to myself i had to have my phone with me just in case she needed me and then i remembered when she was an adult and uh it really wasn't such an issue that she might need me at any given moment i noticed that that thing was in my hand not just because of my daughter but because of something else deep inside myself so the conversation around addiction now has grown to the point where people realize that it's a continuum and it's a journey that many of us are on because the society itself uh is redolent with so many factors with so many aspects workaholism uh the way that we work the very way that we are in this culture so often carries with it behavioral patterns that you could look at from uh from a distance and go somebody's addicted to this or somebody is addicted to that well uh back in 2008 a book came out that everybody was reading everybody that i know it was very much a book that was became part of the cultural conversation among anybody deep into spirituality issues of spirituality and addiction and that's a book called in the realm of hungry ghosts by gabra mate and uh i had never met gabriel monte and i haven't met him i'm very much looking forward to the interview that we're going to have here in a few minutes but his thinking has been absolutely seminal and the thinking of the book uh in the realm of the hungry ghosts and also a book he wrote called when the body says no takes the conversation around addiction to an even deeper level of root cause and that has to do with trauma you know i've been around long enough that i've seen certain words become trendy at certain times and certainly the word trauma is out there a lot it wasn't like we weren't discussing people's traumas before but now they're more of a cultural mainstream understanding of how traumatized we are as a society and how much personal trauma underlies not just addiction but so much of the of the suffering that people go through when i ran for president one of the main pillars of my campaign and one of the main reasons that i ran for president was because of my awareness that we have tens of millions of american children who live with chronic trauma we have millions of american children who clinical psychologists would refer to as victims of ptsd that is at least as severe as the ptsd of returning veterans from afghanistan and iraq and if somebody is a veteran who's come home from a war zone it's post-traumatic stress but many of these kids are living with present traumatic stress because of situations in their home situations in their streets i don't know if americans realize how many millions of american children are growing up in what are referred to as america's domestic war zones and even before the pandemic we had 40 percent of americans who were unable to absorb a 400 unexpected expenditure and now it's deemed given covet that a majority of americans are living with financial insecurity poverty is a trauma and a child growing up in a in a poverty stricken home are is definitely more vulnerable to trauma and and more probable it is more probable that that children child is experiencing some level of trauma so many of the societal dysfunctions that we have in our country today arise from deep deep levels of trauma one of the things that gabra monte talks about that i think are so important is how much of this begins during childhood how much of this begins with with neurons in the brain that literally become different when somebody is exposed to childhood trauma so now we have terms like mental health crisis but we need to go a lot deeper than just talking about it is this mass epidemic of a mental health crisis we have to have a deeper conversation in our society about where this mental health crisis emerges from not only what are the external societal factors but what are the deeper personal factors involved and how we relate to each other where does spirituality come in what is the role of of of the larger economic and political system in addressing these various factors of trauma that are causing so much damage in people's lives things like trauma-informed education things like community wrap-around services this is why when i was running for president i wanted a department of children and youth our political system is completely systemically neglectful of the needs of america's children children aren't old enough to vote so they're not a constituency they're not old enough to work so they don't have any financial leverage therefore the political establishment has only the most superficial conversation about the trauma of america's children it talks about child child tax credits all those kinds of things which are all very good they talk about things like um emergency nutritional services all of which are very good they're very much in the air right now having to do with america's coveted relief plan but none of that goes deeper when i when i was running for president i would talk to so many people who were child psychologists who were experts in early childhood who were educators who were dealing with the unbelievable trauma of so much of america's children and social workers people who were dealing with state agencies and i would hear the most amazing stories horrifying stories about the pain of so many of our children but also very hopeful stories about the work that these professionals had done to make a child's life better but all around this country i would ask i would say so often of the kids in this district and the children of your in your community who need the kind of services that you provide about how many are you able to reach and over and over again all over the country i would get the same answer and that would be this about 10 about 10 percent so this is a huge sea of human suffering a huge sea of human trauma that goes unaddressed in our world today and certainly in our own country and so much of it is within the lives of our children we will pay a terrible price for this this is something that has been uh emergent from huge amounts of of despair that have been that have been building up in the united states in large part due to economic pressures over the last 40 years and now with a coveted uh pandemic and everything that has happened in people's lives over the last year i shudder to think what's happening i shudder to think what's happening in the minds and in the hearts in the lives and even the bodies of so many of america's children and i fear that we'll be paying for this for many years to come it's an area where america better wake up i've seen it over and over again i've seen it in 12-step meetings uh when i would be going to so many al-anon meetings i've read about it enough in books about things that relate to my own life where there are behavioral patterns that we have to look at in terms of trauma in terms of addictive tendencies i've seen it so much in working with people who are dealing with life-threatening illnesses aids cancer and others i've seen it so much and people dealing with deep poverty i've seen it so much dealing with people who are incarcerated and who were not born were not born as children to end up on a trajectory to where they have found themselves people like gobber mata are putting the mirror up to western society it's almost like we're being forced to look at some things and to talk about some things that we need to look at and we need to talk about there's an extraordinary documentary based on mate's work called the wisdom of trauma i really look forward to asking him about it because this this documentary is fantastic uh walk don't run to see it the wisdom of trauma we need wise people to explain this this stuff to us we need some real leaders to tell us how to handle this gargantuan gargantuan amount of pain in our midst we can't avoid this any longer we must do this just as when you know a person who is an addict and it gets so bad that you that you're thinking if this doesn't stop they might die and enough of us have known people who have died of alcoholism enough of us have known people who died of drug overdoses that's now it's part of our mainstream cultural conversation we've all either received the phone call or made the phone call it's very common now where somebody says to somebody did you see how she acted at that party somebody says yeah and you say you think we ought to do something everybody knows what that means today it means you think we ought to have an intervention you know what one of the reasons i ran for president and i said it while i was running is because america needs an intervention we are moving in a direction that is maladaptive for the survival of our democracy and possibly even for the survival of our species and we're not going to be able to turn this around unless we do what any individual addict does take a good look at your pain at your addiction and at your trauma no one knows more about it than gobber mate here he is gabor mate thank you so much for being on my podcast it's a real honor to have you here thank you it's a pleasure to be with you what you have contributed with your books with the recent documentary with all of your workshops and talks to the whole conversation not only around addiction but around the trauma that lies underneath it is something not only of great interest to people in fields of recovery psychotherapy etc but now i think to the entire culture because the entire culture now is traumatized um one of the things that makes your own work particularly compelling is that you speak from your own experience so much of what you talk about has to do with the traumas that we carry over from childhood so i know that you have told this story many times but for people who are listening who have not heard it i think it gives such a foundation to your work can you tell us um something about your own traumatic experiences your relationships with the holocaust etc so that people can have a deeper understanding of where you're coming from well thank you for asking i will but i have to begin by telling you that something that you said recently or that was quoted by you that the suffering is not because of the pain we experienced but because of a refusal to accept the pain and i i just really got that very clearly very recently so all my life i've been carrying on the pain and the resistance to the pain of what happened to me in infancy and what happened to my family which is that being jews in hungary under the nazi occupation my family was devastated by the genocide my grandparents were killed in auschwitz my mother and i spent my first year of my life a little bit more under nancy occupation under conditions of privation and terror and and uh daily dire difficulties i was sick i was hungry multiple times i was separated from my mother as a one-year-old and all that left a deep imprint in my brain and in my mind and in my body and uh it really hurts you know all that stuff really hurts but what creates the trauma is not that something hurts but that we don't know how to be with that pain and of course as a one-year-old how would i know to be with that pain so we build all these defenses against it we close our hearts we try and do too much to fix things um we take on too much responsibility or we deny responsibility all together but we try and protect ourselves from the herd of it and so it's almost like a scar that forms around the wound and the wound is very sensitive and it's very painful if anybody touches it but the scar tissue is also very hard and it's not very flexible it's very rigid so it's almost like trauma is a combination of a sensitive wound that if somebody touches it it just triggers you and you hurt like crazy or if they touch scar tissue there's no feeling there there's hardness there's no flexibility so drama is the combination of extreme sensitivity and hardness and that's what i experienced in my life and i've had to do a lot of work to to come back to myself one of the things that you talk about in your books and in your talks is that the neurons of the brain are literally changed when a child is traumatized uh one of the things that you've said that is so impactful is when you were an infant and your mother called the doctor and of course the nazis had not arrived in hungary yet but they were on their way and your mother called the pediatrician to say that you were crying all the time and the pediatrician said all the jewish babies are crying yeah so this actually happened to the the day after the germans came hungry the very next day so i was two months of age and and and and you know of course my point was that i didn't know anything about nazis what was i picking up on i was picking up on the stress and terror of my mother two things are being brought up here then not only the trauma of the child but that small children are picking up on the trauma of their parents my proposal for a united states department of children and youth and of course what i talk about in there is something that you really gave to the world the whole idea of trauma-informed education community wrap around services all of those issues that we need to deal with in our children that go way beyond what we think of as an educational curricula that they need and you talked about emotional education and and it's not that i gave it to the world it's something that i certainly endorse um but the point i want to make is it doesn't take severe circumstances like my family endured it just takes parents they're economically disadvantaged or stressed or haven't worked out their own trauma or who don't even have time to spend with their kids or who have their relationship issues and the children already in the uterus are picking up on that stress and that is affecting their brain development that affects the neurons in their brain it affects the chemical messengers and the receptors for those chemical messengers in the brain and so that when we look at what's happening with children today and you get all these millions of kids being diagnosed with adhd and oppositional defined disorder and bipolar disorder and conduct disorders and reactive attachment disorder and depression and anxiety learning difficulties one will go on and on and on and we think that these kids have some kind of a biological problem while they do but the biology is the result of the stresses under which they were developing from the womb onwards so we have this epidemic of children's so-called mental health issues and what's really going on is an epidemic epidemic of stress that's affecting the parents and i'm not talking about whether parents love their kids or not i'm talking about the stresses that unwittingly they pass on to their children a lot of the stress today and this was true even before the pandemic but definitely with the pandemic a lot of that stress of course is economic and when i hear a political system acknowledge that we have a huge mental mental health crisis when politicians have asked me what i think uh that they should do about the mental health crisis my response is stop driving everybody crazy uh because when you were completely when you were always passing policies that make it more and more probable that people are dealing with chronic trauma day after day after day poverty is a trauma poverty itself is a trauma and so often of course this is passed on to the weakest person in the family system who happens to be the child yes and of course yeah and and poverty is a trauma but you know when you look at the literature these days even the obvious so-called middle-class person is under tremendous stress i mean people are losing ground they were having to work extra hard to just to keep up i'm talking before covered so in a lot of so-called middle class families um parents are having to work really hard to maintain the standard of living and children are deprived of the presence of their parents for most of the day but that's stressful for small children well be in the 1970s a one one parent in the household working full-time was enough for the average american family to be able to make enough to live on so you don't have that constant pres presence of one parent who is there mainly uh mainly for the nurturing and the nourishment of the child and then also and you talk about this in in this excellent documentary the wisdom of trauma about how there's a lot of trendy thinking today that actually makes young mothers feel that they should not pick up their child when the most natural thing in the world is to pick up their child there's all this talk about self-comfort i know my mother told me when i had a child she said you cannot spoil a child before the age of two and i think that was some of the best advice i ever got i was in a car once it was several years ago and i've been visiting someone in the hamptons in new york and i needed to go back into new york city and there was a couple that i didn't know and their infant and they offered me a ride back to manhattan and i was in the back seat there was a car seat with the baby and the parents were in the front seat the father was driving the mother was in the passenger seat this child was just crying hysterically and the mother refused to do anything and she goes on this long spiel about how the child has to learn to self-comfort and the father even it's interesting because he wasn't comfortable with it he was like looking at her and deferring to her while she's the mother i was getting so upset i wanted to scream out i'll pick up your baby pull the sign let me pick up your baby but i've met so many young mothers who have been led to believe that there's something unnatural about with in in these years of infancy wanting to do the bonding that people for thousands and thousands and thousands of years have done with their young have you seen that as well well not for thousands millions of years actually i mean all mammals do that try and tell a mother cat not to comfort the kitten when she's upset try and tell her mother gorilla to let the baby go when the baby is distressed and and aboriginal peoples carry their babies everywhere they go now going back to dr spock you know who in many ways was a very fine man but in the 40s he was writing to young mothers that they should not give into the tyranny of the infant who wants to be picked up the tyranny of the infant and the infant just needs to be held it's a natural human bio biological emotional need and and generations of mothers this has been trained out of them basically we've lost touch with our gut feelings and with our hearts you know and and people are giving this advice all the time and then when a two-year-old misbehaves so-called misbehaves now two-year-old cannot misbehave by the way let me tell you a trio behaves but it's not misbehavior she's just acting out something parents are told separate from the child time out well the child's biggest need is connection with the parent so basically parents are told to go against the child's needs in order to discipline them and then we wonder why so many kids end up with difficulties we live in a culture that you know not you must know the my friend the singer rafi you must know him yeah i do well rafi has this concept of the child honoring society and the child owning concept that he's got looks like very much like your idea of a department of children's and your affairs or whatever you know and then and what what would we live in if we actually realized what the needs of the child really are and we know what they are but we believe in a very different world these developmental needs we now know and i think even in the last 10 years has been such so much more information that's been disseminated about the brain development and the personality development of a child in those first five years so what we have is a situation where all of these children are are are living with with needs unmet and then by the time they arrive in kindergarten they're already traumatized sometimes these kids are traumatized even before preschool so what are what are the elements of this child honoring society particularly in terms of our educational system that should be introduced in such a way that possibly some level of repair could be accomplished well if i can even i'll get to that but let me take a step back from that is that um given that we know that the emotional states of the mother has a physiological impact on the brain development of the child i mean i'm not going to go into the details here but i'm just telling you what the undisputed scientific years that means that the support for healthy child development needs to begin at the first prenatal visit and we have to make sure that that mothers or carrying babies get whatever support they need to deal with their stresses not to be in under financial pressure to get emotional support the prenatal visits should not just be for blood pressure and blood tests and measuring the size of the increase in the uterus but also attending to the mother's emotional needs then we have to make sure that our birth practices don't traumatize mother and child which very often these days they do so modern gynecology upset obstetrics has made undisputable contributions to saving lives and and preventing dire events from occurring but it's gone way too far and now it's become very interventionist and very non-heart centered and we're actually interfering with the mothers and their child's natural release of chemicals that promote bonding between mother and infant this is again pure science so we need to look at how we can manage birth then you look to look at particularly in your country which is even from canadian perspective and we're far prefer far from perfect but it's barbaric what happens with maternal leave in your country a quarter of american women have to go back to work within two weeks of their child's birth now nature wants that child to be with that mother for a year or more that's i'm talking about natural development separation from the mother any time before then is a trauma for the child period and a trauma and a trauma for the mother and a trauma for the mother now i'm not talking about keeping women barefoot pregnant in the kitchen i'm talking about the development needs of the child now so so women need to be given and families need to be or the father should stay home and when i say mothering it doesn't even have to be a female mother you know but from the point of view of breastfeeding which of course only women are equipped to do that should go on you know in aboriginal societies you know what the average age of weaning is what is it four years wow four years and goes on between two and five years the average is four years this is the natural way to do things now i'm not saying we should try and import aboriginal ways of being but we should understand the wisdom of of the natural wisdom of human beings that we've lost so so in terms of child development they need to be in a warm nurturing context for much longer than they are these days now the schools so there's an article from harvard university that appeared in the journal of pediatrics in february 2012 and they talk about the necessary conditions for brain development and what they say is that the the brain develops from the womb until adulthood so from room to adulthood is a period of brain development and the most important influence on brain development is the mutual responsiveness of adult child relationships particularly in the early years that's the most important factor in promoting the physiological development of the brain the mutual responsiveness so in any society where parents are not able to respond to the children the way that children need to be responded to because of stresses on the parents but we've talked about is interfering with the brain development of the child as far as the schools are concerned us our educational system is convinced that their task is to teach facts and skills no it's not primary task is to promote healthy brain development and and and how do you promote healthy development by the mutual responses in those vital child relations means that the schools just as you suggest in your document need to be in the emotional development business not in the intellectual development business why not intellectual development because that follows spontaneously and naturally from healthy emotional development and so that's where the emphasis needs to be and teachers need to be trained in trauma they need to be trained in attachment they need to be trained to deal with their own stuff so they can react to their children their students in a way that doesn't threaten the child that supports the child that embraces the child if the schools did that their intellectual task would be so much easier because kids with emotional security they want to learn they're curious they're sponges for knowledge there are such terrible stresses that have put on teachers in most public schools these days as well they have so many children in the class and also there are strict laws these days a child might need a hug but now the you know the teacher isn't allowed to hug the child etc so sometimes even when teachers see things that they feel they could do differently between the things i just mentioned standardized you add to that the pressure of standardized testing et cetera we're clearly going backwards we're clearly going in a in a wrong direction given these surgeons if i just make a comment that of course from a certain point of view we're not going in the wrong direction because if the intention of the school system is to create not curious not critical minded not independent thinking but [Music] cooperative malleable controllable employees who are emotionally hurting and therefore will buy all the products that are being sold to them to suit their emotional pains then then we're doing brilliantly so from the point of view the system there's something that works here it just doesn't work from the point of view of human beings that's exactly right and we're living at a time when clearly there's more and more of a divergence between literally a sustainable future for the human race and an unsustainable future for the human race and what you're describing will give a certain kind of unfettered capitalism a little more time to do its thing but the human race less time to figure out how to survive and thrive on this planet what's worrying to me particularly now with covid is that the economic st stresses uh and desperation is growing so much among so many people these children are home alone with their with their parents in more and more cases and we don't even know the kind of of of problems that will be growing out of all this in the years to come does this concern you i can't imagine that it doesn't well the we're already seeing signs of difficulties kids having more problems more takes more difficulties parents getting some parents getting more abusive more impatient with their kids so that's on the one side on the other side um there's been in this culture way too much pushing of kids into the peer group and making them rely on the peer group rather than on nurturing adults now that's completely unnatural you know in an animal group when you remove the parents when you remove the the adults the children become bullies i'm talking about elephants and so in our society there's been way too much of that so because adults have been missing from kids lives and kids spend most of their time with each other now they become each other's mentors and and influences and and guides which is developmental is a disaster now some parents are finding that oh my god i get to know my kids all over again i get to spend time with them i get to build a relationship with them i get to see them learn i get to see their milestones on a daily basis and so some parents are embracing that so what i'm saying is there's going to be a divergent effect those family that are those families that are emotionally or economically resourced they will find a lot of blessings in having to spend time with their kids and i've heard some parents saying this as well i know when people say because i've been very concerned about reopening the schools before it's truly safe and when i hear people say oh marianne you're you're underestimating the the mental health need of these kids to go back to school and i've often felt what you just said and have said what about the mental health need of these kids to be bonding with their parents more which should be considered just as important connect this in those families where the parents are not resourced emotionally or economically of course it's a totally different picture yes we're going to see a lot of negative effects and some people will find the benefit so i think you know it's going to go both ways is what i'm saying connect all this for me to addiction and the propensity of addiction for addiction and where addiction fits into all this well it's interesting we we use the word attachment in two different ways there's the sense in which we're too attached to things we want things too much we compulsively crave them then his attachment in a psychological sense which is the nurturing connection between parent and child here's the deal when our fundamental developmental attachment needs are met we don't need to develop cravings and attachments of the other kind because all addictions and we you know every there's such nonsense spoken about addiction out there in the medical world and in the legal world addiction is seen in the legal world there's some kind of a choice somebody makes well believe me i've worked with hardcore addicted people nobody ever chose to be an addict i've had my own addictive issues i've never chosen i didn't choose it then there's the idea that it's a disease that you inherit which is equally nonsense i'm not gonna go into the genetics of it but there's just zero evidence for that zero real evidence for it what addictions are really all about and if you ask anybody who's got an addiction well i mean i don't know if you're open to this experiment but let me give you a definition of reduction and see how you respond is that okay okay so an addiction is manifested in any behavior that a person finds pleasure or relief in the short term and therefore craves suffers negative consequences and doesn't give it up despite negative consequences so pleasure relief craving long-term negative consequence inability to give it up i said any behavior i didn't say drugs could be heroin cocaine like with my patients crystal meth could be caffeine nicotine could be sex gambling pornography power profit work eating bulimia self-harming one could go on and on and on so let me ask you this and again i'm not asking for any details of what when on how but according to that pattern have you ever had anything that might fall into that pattern oh absolutely and when i read that exact description in your book i underlined it with a yellow pen and put three stars next to it so i absolutely that it was fun up to a point it's passionate up to a point something you really love up to a point then at what moment does it become craving without which there are negative consequences due to your behavior absolutely absolutely and i i think i know very few people who wouldn't recognize themselves in that description to some extent very good then let me ask you the next question uh thanks for being my volunteer um not what was wrong with it or what it was but what did it do for you what did you like about it temporarily what did it give you um affirmation love okay thank you that's very similar to a lot of people tell me no our affirmation and love good things are bad things great things okay in other words the addiction wasn't your problem your addiction was your lack of self-value lack of self-affirmation and the lack of love in your life in your heart you know and so that the addiction is not a disease and it's not a choice it's an attempt to solve a problem and when you ask where did the problem come from it came because your attachment needs as a child we're not met that's all like your attachment needs a child being met i'm not saying your parents weren't good people i'm not saying they didn't love you not saying they didn't do their best but in some ways your attachment needs were not met you did not develop a sense of self-affirmation that was healthy enough nor a sense of love enough and so that's why the addiction so addiction is very much a response to the stresses that this society imposes on so many families and that's why it's so common now if i look for instance at um you know you look back at your parents generation the different kinds of things if i in in my case would definitely that person would definitely be my father but then i look at his parents i think it wasn't just what society imposed on him but his own what would have been attachment issues with his own parents for various reasons etc do you see a lot of difference in your work i know you're a physician um but in this work and having to do with attachment children and parents do you see much difference really or do you think it's very significant what's with the mother you know the mother if it's a boy child the father if it's a girl child all of that issue about gender and which parent do you think that that's particularly relevant to getting out out of the problem and also my question to you is if you know that and basically to be honest i knew that what what is the then what of that if you didn't get that kind of a time i know me i had a boyfriend used to say to me he said every time we say goodbye you seem to think some great tragedy is going to happen why can't it just be bye see you later but but the level of panic he said that you go into every time i'm going to work that's all that's happening here what do you so you can see that and i can see i didn't get it from my father etc what what's it what's what's the solution there doctor so i thank you doctor doctor's gonna answer it um there's really two questions that i understand folded into one here one is if i understand it right um one is the relative influence of mother and father is that is that the case yeah i'm curious about that okay let me answer that one first and then what to do next okay so look it's not a question of blaming any gender here but how did how did nature set it up mother nature sorry mother yes that's how nature set it up and so the task of uh of the family the extended family and the society is to support the mother in a nurturing role that doesn't mean leave her stuck or isolated in a nurturing role but actually to come in as supportive nurturers and so there's a wonderful psychologist that notre dame university darcy narvaez who studied aboriginal societies and she talks about aloe mothering when other mothers come in not the beautiful beautiful terrible news item last year there was an explosion in some afghan hospital including mothers were killed in the maternity ward and mothers would come in total strangers would show up to breastfeed the babies that's what's alo that's what's alone mothering is he's going in instinctively and intuitively and from their heart they just wanted to come in and breastfeed those babies so mothers need a lot of support under the best of times as the chug it now where the father comes in let me tell you something else this is um it gets so complex but it to me so fascinating there was a study in sweden we know that stress on the mother mother's depression actually increases the risk of prematurity premature birth so this study showed that but the father's depression prenatally predicted the child's premature birth even more than the mothers and you think well why is that the case you know why that's the case why it's the same it's the same reason that women get autoimmune disease much more than men do because the women absorb the stresses of the men so he's depressed she's absorbing his depression he's taking it on and this happens to women all the time and that's why women are given tranquilizers and anti-depressants a lot more than men are because they're carrying the stresses and that's why they get autoimmune disease a lot more they carry the stresses of the whole society and particularly their men so the job of the man is to take care of himself and to take care of the mother and as the child gets older the father comes in more and more in a nurturing role and so that we know from one study that was done that they looked at the genetic functioning of teenagers and they looked at 150 different genes and 120 had been affected by stress on the mother in the first years and 30 were affected by stress on the father in the preschool years so the more the father comes into it the more his presence and how he shows up makes a difference so to make a long story short it is the mother according to nature breastfeeding and everything else and in the father's role is to be there as a solid ground of support and then to come in as a nurturer himself and so much of that doesn't happen in our culture i think that young parents people who are prospective parents so many people can hear this and gain great wisdom about changes that can be made and the way we raise our children particularly our babies but what about someone who is already at the point which gets to the second question they're already nodding their head they're listening to you they're saying yep that was me and they're dealing with either addictive tendencies or other expressions of their own trauma and their own suffering what do they do now and i want to move one of the things that you've talked about is the failure of modern psychotherapy to answer deeply enough the issues of suffering and tr and trauma so i'm i'm very curious uh what your answers are and also the fact that you've become someone you yourself practice yoga you've talked about how important yoga is in your life and you've also talked about the role of psychedelics you've talked about ayahuasca as part of somebody's spiritual journey so as we move into the area of how we address the deeper deeper layers of the trauma to change things i'd love to hear what we do once you know for the person who says yep that was me then what well so um let's go back to understand what trauma is so trauma is not what happened to you trauma is the wound that you sustained now the good thing is that's a good thing because if trauma was what happened to me when i was a year old i'm 77 i'm 76 years too late aren't i but if trauma is the wound that i sustained wounds can be healed at any time and so the the and and if you look at the essence of trauma as my friend the traumatologist psychologist peter levine defines it it's a disconnection from the self and so when you didn't experience affirmation and love you were just disconnected from yourself that's all and and that's why you turn to the addictive substitute so that self-affirmation that love that can be regained not regained but it reconnected with because it was never lost it was just covered up by this wound and this fire so airy fairy is it my sound the work is really to reconnect with one's true self uh and and and to heal the wound and that can be done for anybody who opens themselves to it it can't be done for people who don't realize they're wounded a lot of the people don't realize that wounded become president of the united states i was going to say the most dangerous people of all some of the most successful people in our society uh as society uh defines success are people who within communities such as yours and mine look at and go they're the biggest sociopaths out there and that's the most psychotic behavior that is not the most healed and hold and looking to those people to solve things is a scarier and scarier prospect man these people are terribly these people are terribly humble yeah they call they're called high achievers and some people would call them the great destroyers so so you know freud himself called nerosa separation from self and i think the reason why so many people look to religious and spiritual answers the word religio comes from a latin root to bind back and yoga itself yolk to to to find back that yolk and one of the things that i've read that you've said or heard you say in one of your talks is and i think you even mentioned it here in terms of mothers that when we are disconnected from ourselves we're disconnected from our own gut responses we're disconnected from our own sense of radar which only makes us spiral down even more and more because we're always looking outside ourselves for answers correct that's right that's right and and and the nature of this society is to give us so many distractions from ourselves and so many people are so uncomfortable to spend even a moment with themselves and i know that for myself you know the the the the urge to check the cell phone every minute or if i have a free minute to google something or you know i mean this society is built on filling people's emptiness from the outside which can never be done and that's why it's also addictive and and because so many of us grow up with that emptiness and then we need to fill it with our activities and our acquisitions and our relationships and our our beliefs and our ideologies and rather than saying okay there's emptiness here what does that feel like and what what's what is that all about so so healing to go back to your prime question here does require the willingness to really experience oneself with the way one really is and and in the body and in the mind and in the heart and and there's many ways that you're guided to do that i mean there's different modalities there's my own called compassionate inquiry i'm not putting that ahead of anybody else that just happens to be what i do but then there's peter levine's somatic experiencing pack ogden's sensory neuro sensory neuromotor reprogram i think it's called emdr there is there is uh emotionally focused therapy of sue johnson there is uh dick schwartz and his internal family systems i mean there's x number of modalities out there but the essence of them all is to reconnect with oneself and of course and that can be done spirituality meditation prayer forgiveness genuine religious experience i think that this is why there is such a profound yearning for spiritual truth in the world today there is such a sense that one world is literally falling apart we are a traumatized society i think we're a traumatized species at this point and i think the good news is how many people see this and i think that there's this simultaneous phenomenon occurring where people are trying to reach for answers and that's why i thought that going back to the conversation i was asking about ayahuasca i think it's very interesting that the conversation around uh psychedelics is back and i'd like to hear uh more of your thoughts about that sure so i was talking to in in preparation for the the book i'm writing now which i'd be so delighted to come back and talk to you about it when it comes out next year the title is the myth of normal illness and health and an insane culture but in in in writing in writing that book i was talking to michael pollan who wrote uh how to change your mind which is about psychedelics the other researcher on psychedelics and uh we agreed that as this society is in more in crisis and then particularly as the treatment modalities more and more prove themselves to be inadequate or even harmful like a lot of psychiatric approaches are worse than useless not i'm not talking about every psychiatrist i'm talking in general and i could go into the reasons why but let me just state the fact that modern psychiatry which i'm very well familiar with is in significant ways of disaster and and so as people realize that and if the crisis is deepening people looking for alternatives and so michael said that even in the psychiatric world he expected a lot of uh opposition and resistance and resentment no people out saying tell us more oh yeah because we know what we're doing yeah which i was really glad to hear him say that so so i myself as a it's 12 years ago now virtually serendipitously it always this scent if it is found out about ayahuasca this particular amazonian plant and other plant medicines so i've been working for about 12 years and for all kinds of reasons and it depends how deeply you want me to go into it but they have a potential to open up vistas and self-awareness and i'm talking from direct personal experience such as to mind like my own would hardly have been available otherwise because i have a very strong mind and that has helped me in many ways in the world but it also is a protection against pain one of the please go on i'm sorry and so you know it's okay so i'm saying that the psychedelics i'm telling you from direct experience i kind of get that mental defense out of the way and you get to see oh there's so much pain here but there's so much love here too and the pain and the love they don't invalidate each other in fact they can both be there and and you don't have to deny the one or crave the other they're just there and you can be with them and so that's in a nutshell the helpful psychedelic experience now i'm not a psychedelic evangelist for all kinds of reasons i think it's not for everybody else i think it's not practical to even think it being available to everybody given the expense and all that but as a modality as a potential way in to the psyche uh western medicine is nuts not to embrace it and to research it and to learn about it because i've seen miracles you wouldn't believe medically and psychologically well it's fascinating for someone my age because everything new comes back around again and that wasn't an accident that in those years we talked about peace and love all the time it was also wasn't an accident that we also took a stand against the war wasn't an accident the civil rights movement etc that there was such an embrace of social justice at that time uh people look at it from a very narrow perspective of hippie dumb or whatever but something much deeper was going on there and a lot of it had to do with the prevalence of psychedelics absolutely you know in among that from the system maybe you know this but from the systems point of view from the nixonian presidential point of view attacking psychedelics was exactly in a a direct assault on people's social consciousness oh absolutely the war of drugs is police state stuff absolutely and it's part of much as you were much like you were talking about the entire educational system it's about training masses of people to not be ecstatic to not be critical thinkers to not be more expanded it's an anti-ecstasy not just as in the drug but as in the experience even when they come up with drugs for mental health they leave out the fun part it's uh it's quite extraordinary and i think more and more people are realizing that's the world was create we now have the world created by that mentality how we doing and that's why the good thing now is people are looking beyond the obvious answers there's something i need to say okay i was about i was present in those six these days as well and i don't want to romanticize it because there's a lot of irresponsible use of the psychedelics in those days there was and which did create problems so i have to say that just so that this conversation is not misunderstood by anybody that the use of psychedelics for healing or spiritual realization needs to be done in the right context under proper guidance not just randomly by people in a kind of a anarchistic fashion because that can create problems too so that just needs to be emphasized absolutely uh i interviewed rick doblin the other day and he was talking about this of course i mean that to me goes without saying but you well it doesn't go without saying so i'm glad you said it and i and i said it repeatedly um when uh when i was speaking to rick doblin as well so i wholeheartedly agree with you um one of the saddest parts of of the film uh the wisdom of trauma had to do with the incarcerated men who were coming to discover through the compassionate prison project who were coming to discover how many adverse childhood experiences they had had uh in their own lives and that they saw the the direct connection that they saw between the trauma of their childhood and the criminal journeys that they ultimately uh embarked upon yes and if you look at who's in jail who's in jail is the most dramatized people in society for some strange reason in both your country and mine they happen to be significantly my of minority origin in canada native people aboriginal people make up four percent of the canadian population they make up 30 of the jail population but doesn't that have a huge financial component in all the ways that we were talking about earlier about about the trauma of poverty the trauma of poverty and the trauma of racism and the trauma of colonialism and the ongoing oppression it has to do with all those traumas and it has to do with in canada at least but you saw the same thing in the states there's the deliberate destruction of those families and the separation of children from their parents and so then and the traumatization of children who then go on and traumatize their own children you know and so then liberal theorists bleed about the breakdown of the black family and it's the failure of the black family to stay together but they don't look at why the black family has been under such tremendous tremendous demand it's amazing how people have survived it's amazing how they've maintained the sense of family and connection same in canada they they abducted children for 100 years from their families they tortured them in residential schools they sexually abused them then they become alcoholics they abuse their own kids and then they end up in jail and we say what's wrong with those people so these people in jail as you saw in that segment by the way that's a beautiful segment because the woman who's working with them it's liberating for people i've been in san quentin and and and um you know taught with people there and it's so liberating for them to realize that there's nothing evil about them there's nothing wrong with them it's something happened to them and it's the way they adapted to what happened that's actually a liberation for people so it's poignant but it's also liberating i've talked i talked to a man in san quentin who killed somebody was involved in killing when he was 19 he's in his 50s now and i said well if you could talk to the parole board what would you say to them he said i'd say to them i didn't know myself then i didn't know who i was and where i was coming from i just had all this rage in me that i was acting up and i didn't know why but now i understand why and i'm a different person and if you let me out of here i'll spend the rest of my life working to help heal other people so they don't have to go through what i want for and this man said i didn't know myself so that segment in the present it's poignant and it's sad yes it's sad that this is the way the system treats them but it's also very beautiful because those men are stepping forward and they're saying yes that happened to me and now i understand not excusing but understanding where i was coming from so let me ask you this because of your work and the work of others like you i do believe that there is an opening to a more expanded recognition of what's going on i love what you said earlier that the pain and the love exists simultaneously i think there's a lot of pain in looking at what's really happening in our societies and also there's a lot of love that comes from it i know in my own life you know you spend so much time or at least so much effort and energy trying to keep at bay the realization of your own character defects and i remember a time in my life when i was looking at something that i simply could no longer avoid looking at it because um one person would say it and you go oh that's not true about me another person would say oh that's and i tell that's not true about me then you realize three or four people are saying and they're in different parts of the country and they don't know each other so maybe there's something you need to look at and i remember an experience i had when i i looked at myself and i i faced something i had not wanted to face and i realized i hadn't wanted to face it because i thought i would feel such self-hatred if it was true and i felt the exact opposite i felt a compassion for myself that i had not experienced before because i realized wow how hurt i must have been in life to have developed that as a defense mechanism and it really gave me a lot of compassion for myself and i think it takes a lot of compassion for western civilization it takes a lot of compassion for our societies and compassion for our unborn great-grandchildren to be willing to look at our societies up honestly enough to recognize the love not only the levels of trauma but the levels of self-inflicted trauma that is is is all around us and sometimes inside of us more than we knew because of people like yourself we're beginning to understand it more my question to you is do you have hope in this period that is clearly a race for time that we will make enough changes in ourselves and in our institutions our our educational institutions our medical institutions our economic institutions our political institutions etc to be able to turn things around fundamentally enough to keep our civilization from completely imploding well mayan i don't know what i would have said to that question a week ago but i'll tell you what i say it say to it today okay which is that i'm not interested in hope i don't know what's gonna happen what i do know is that i'm here now and you're here now and the question is what possibility is present at this very second for you and i and everybody else who's listening whoever they are she he they whoever they are what possibly exists in the present moment for them for all of us to bend the future in a humane and loving direction huddle turnout who the heck knows i don't have a crystal ball but i do know that what i'm called upon to do and that's in the present moment and it'll be what it'll be but even if i knew for sure that it's gonna go down the tube and i don't know i don't know that then something in me doesn't believe it but i would still say at the present moment this is what i'm compelled to do and this is what this is the choice that we all have all have is to decide how do we want to relate not to some imagined future but to the present so that would be my answer which kind of doesn't it slice that's the issue of hope but i don't need hope i just need the present possibility that is here right now this very second and and i'm i read your stuff and i was inspired by your presidential campaign thank you i'm inspired by i'm inspired by the people out there who are doing i mean i don't if somebody had asked you by the way let me ask you this question if you permit me when you decide to make that run do you ever hope that you become president united states my answer was exactly the way you answered me that it didn't matter matters is some things must be said and i think you gave not only a beautiful answer to my question but the right answer because we create the future in the present and i and i i feel it's it it's very parallel if we have the conversation now something good will come of it whether it's you whether it's me whether it's while we're still on the earth or not is almost irrelevant if we dig deep enough and act true enough and speak truly enough and and are honest enough and strip away the falsehood in this moment then like you said it doesn't matter what happens in the future and it's the only hope we have for the future exactly and future aside it'll help liberate present people in the present moment and there is no time and linear time itself is part of the illusion that's the prison that we're all locked in um as einstein said time and space are illusions of consciousness albeit persistent ones yes and i i had a deep experience with that recently and so i'm speaking differently on the other side of that experience than i would have spoken before the experience you know do you feel like sharing any of that well um yeah i can tell you a little bit about it um so based on that childhood infant travail that i had to move through in my first year year and a half of life uh i'd always been convinced that some light had been killed inside me that will never open up the light of unity the light of love the light of presence you know i could talk about it i could teach about it i could help others but i would never get them myself you know and turns out that's not true and and not only that i had this loyalty a friend of mine i was talking to friend of mine last night actually and he said i've always said this royalty he's talking about me you god but i've always had this royalty to your grandparents who were killed in auschwitz and all the suffering in the world and you've always made yourself believe that if for you to be happy or to experience joy is to betray all that suffering and and i was talking to somebody else from slovenia sunday morning and she said to me you can't give the germans that victory you can't give the nazis that victory but they kill the light in you you can't give that to them and so what i've learned is precisely what i articulated earlier which is that there could be that horror and it is in the world that horror and this society perpetrates horror around the world as we both know uh at home and abroad there's all that and there's the beauty and there's the love and the one doesn't negate the other as a matter of fact all that and i'm certainly not the first one to say it i just wouldn't have understood it before all that horror that is being perpetrated comes from people who are cut off from love now there's systemic reasons for it there's economic reasons for political reasons i'm not trying to put it all in the realm of spirituality or psychology but it does work on that level anyway so what i've understood is that neither i or any other human being is excluded from that unity and and and from the from that love although we may believe we are i mean we have really good reasons for believing that we are and i don't blame anybody for whatever they believe and something you said as well is that um well there's a psychotherapist her name is um edith egger you probably know about her eugene she but edith edgar is a jewish hungarian woman who was sent to auschwitz probably on the same shipment that my grandparents from a town in czechoslovakia are called koshitsa and she survived her parents did not my my grandparents did not but they must have been on the same shipment or within a couple of days of each other so she's 92 now 93 she's writing books she's written two books called one's called the choice it's called the gift and she says in the gift i think it's gonna give maybe no choice she said it and i talked to her i talked to her not long ago and um and she said we all have a hitler inside of us and you know what the thing is to love the hitler inside of us because you said earlier can you imagine the pain that gave you were talking about yourself but being compassionate with parts of yourself but can you imagine the pain that must have been incurred to create that kind of hardness and that kind of hatred and that kind of um desperation that creates the hitler inside all of us you know so compassion for everything compassion for everything which doesn't mean that you don't oppose things it doesn't mean you stand up you you don't stand up against the hitlers in the world it doesn't mean you give in it doesn't mean you succumb or you or you subject yourself but you can do whatever you do in resistance with compassion in other words love really is the answer yeah yeah is there any particular piece of advice that anyone has given you that has meant more to you than any other two um one is i used to have a patient who's a leading canadian poet his name was warren tallman and he was a friend of alan ginsberg and he was a very well-known poet and he was a professor at university of british columbia and after i opened my medical practice to become a patient of mine and i said to him once uh you know a wine i i want to write but i don't know what and he said you were right when you have learned something that you want to preach to the world he said and that's how it went well number one number two the other thing i was going to say was i'm sure the name vessel vanderpool you know who he is he's a trauma psychologist yes his book on trump is actually on the new york times bestsellers list this week it has been for a while it's called the body keeps the score right of course of course and and vessel and i were having lunch ones and he said to me you know gabor you don't have to drag i should surround with you everywhere you go and what i understand now that that meant is i don't have to hold on to the suffering i don't have to hold on to the resentment i can just be with the pain and a lot of love and i don't have to drag that into my world view that that should i don't have to allow that to define how the world is for me and that's the problem with trauma is that if we have a certain experience and when them you that defines the world for us and so i don't have to allow that to happen a woman who was a tremendous influence on my life spent three years from 21 to 24 at auschwitz she ended up being profoundly successful in every possible way um and a story she used to tell is that when she walked out of her auschwitz she looked behind her and said to herself adolf hitler got three years of my life he will not get another day wow wow and either edgar talks about how she goes to germany and forgives hitler not for his sake but her own she doesn't want to be imprisoned there's a story about two buddhist monks who were approaching the river and a woman comes up to them and says i do you know that story the the woman who comes up you do i do know the story but you can certainly tell the audience about how one of them carries the woman across and the other one yeah yeah but the other one says you know and the other one says how can you touch that woman how could you have done that where mom because you're not supposed to be touching women and and the other one says i put the woman down five miles ago you're still carrying her that's the story right so that's absolutely the story so what i'm getting from you is that we must look at our trauma we must understand it we must feel compassion for ourselves and others we must try to make the changes that we can make in our society to diminish the incidence of trauma and we can heal and let it go that's what i'm getting is that what we're supposed to get here well first of all i endorse every statement you just made with one exception there's no must it's available for us should we choose it and that to what you're supposed to get there's no supposed to people will get precisely what they will get thank you gabra mate as much as i have gained from reading your books and as much as i gained from watching the documentary i even gained more from the profound and eloquent beautiful things you said here today thank you so much i'm so grateful well my greatest pleasure and it's been a real privilege and pleasure to work with you thank you thank you so much well if that interview with gabor mate did not take you deep i don't know what will i thought that was really amazing i'm kind of shaken by some of it myself and i'm sure you are too i love how he said that the love and the pain exists simultaneously and i think that's true not only in terms of our own personal lives but in terms of our world today it takes a lot of love to look honestly at ourselves it takes a lot of love and compassion for ourselves to look honestly at the world we see a lot of pain there but on the other side of that there's so much repair there's so much redemption there's so much healing and there's so much love so how lucky are we that he's on the planet how fortunate are we that so many people are laying claim to a new conversation new ways of being new possibilities that will help us turn the corner i want to thank all of you who send me really great questions and i'm sorry we can't do all of them the one i'm going to do today is from someone named jocelyn hi marianne i was listening with wrapped attention to your conversation with bruce lipton and at one point you explained with deep power the truth of our deep spiritual malignancy of addiction to the delusion of an independent self comparing the sickness of the body's cellular cancer to the cultural slash human equivalency of the distortion delusion of a separate self and you said something like the malignancy will be killed too when it lives this way i was deeply moved and i felt here the interplay of despair with my own relationships to this malignant current in myself i fall into entrapment with the soul sickness of ego as a lone slash apart and suffer it mightily i'm deeply addicted to fear and appear and a part of me feels complicit in the demise and death of this whole human movement venture into evolution i despair when i heard you name the death this way of life as i felt that twinge of despair and darkness and that lie i should just let all this die what other way is there and i wondered if you could speak directly to mine and others hearts who feel entwined defeated resigned even to the sickness of delusion of the separate self what is the relationship of death to the divided ego my instinct tells me that source resolves this in christ how do we heal when we remain stuck in addictive patterns of aversion to intimacy with the truth i'm a mental health counselor serving right now and with some suicidal clients and i find myself struggle with seduction with despair i understand spiritual truths but resist being compelled into a revolution of the self where ego would root into source profoundly i've read the course twice but never completely and with your help i've started this year to follow along dreaming of a tomorrow where i will be more deeply healed of mind heart and spirit thank you for your work p.s i love jerry jampolski i'm a jewish mother past comedian artist and practicing lutheran always feeling ambivalent about my relationship to christ but deeply apprehended by love manifest and i felt source in you reaching out to me especially when i needed it today thank you eternally your sister in love another wave jocelyn well jocelyn i am really glad that you're doing the 365 days of workbook lessons along with me and for those of you who are interested you can find out more about that at marianne.com it's the 365 days from the work lessons from the workbook of a course in miracles you know jocelyn as gabor mate was talking about today there are many different modalities there are many different ways both religious spiritual and secular by which people are making that reconnection today that reconnection to the essential self you know so much of of the last human of human history in the last 200 years has torn us away from a deeper intimate experience with source with god with intimate self and the irreverence is then projected onto how we treat the earth how we treat each other as well as how we treat ourselves we have lost a sense of who we are as gabor says because we've lost a a sense of where we come from and from a religious and spiritual perspective as you well know we are ideas in the mind of god and when we forget who that we are one with the divine source then we forget who we are and forgetting who we are we forget who other people are and we forget our place in the universe and this is the sickness of souls the separation from self that we know is the existential angst of our times we talked about it with gabor mate today you said uh jocelyn that you have read the course several times but you've never completed that workbook and the course in miracle says that the workbook is the crux of the course because the crux train the workbook trains the mind to think along the lines that the text sets forth the course in miracle says that enlightenment begins as abstract concepts so many of us know the abstract concepts now we get the abstract concepts i always say the era of data collection is over we get it we've all read the same books now we've all listened to the same tapes but it's through meditation through prayer to actually doing that deeper work a lot of which is what gabor was talking about today really getting down into the level of the vertical that's where that's where the healing happens the course in miracles he says i cannot take from you what you will not release to me spiritual and personal healing is a kind of detox just like physical detox is all that stuff has to come up in order to be released of course in miracles there's only one way to get there it doesn't have any kind of monopoly on the truth there's one truth and it's spoken many many different ways and as he was saying there's so many modalities all the great religious systems have that spiritual mystical core there are so many ways and many of those ways are secular too it doesn't it doesn't matter what the language is and you know i'm not an enlightened master i don't think i know anyone who is although i think maybe one person i know is but the point is i what i see in my own life and what i see in the lives of many people i know i'm not you know this person who's totally aligned with my best self 24 7. but i can honestly say that i'm there more often than i'm not that i have the peace and the happiness of of knowing that it's more the role than the exception and i think that's where that that's a journey so many of us are on now and we need to be able to make this change in ourselves because we can't give what we don't have we we cannot really give to the world what we are not at least trying to embody and so many people jocelyn are realizing now that the work on the world is not separate from this work on ourselves when you say that you were constantly tempted you were constantly lured into the delusion of the separate self we all are every time we judge someone every time we we you know blame instead of bless every time we take a grievance have a grievance instead of accepting the miracle every time we show up in any situation to get rather than to give any time we're so self-referenced that we're leaving other people's experience out we all go there this is the state of of the world because the world is dominated by the thought system of the ego and this breeds fear all the traumas that gabor was talking about and that you described in your letter but then there's the healing journey and most of the people would be listening to this program are on it and we have incredible genius paths like the course like books by people like gabor mate there there is this this simultaneous these two phenomena going on right now one world the world of fear the world of ego the world of separation the world of reverence it's falling apart the center cannot hold there but then there's another world jocelyn and that's where we're all opening up to some new possibilities and that has to start within ourselves it starts with those morning meditations i don't know of any serious spiritual uh path that does not talk about the importance of meditating in the morning if you wake up and the first thing you do is you go to the television or the computer and the phone and you download all the fear and chaos of the world then there's no reason to be surprised when you're depressed by noon but when we download first something that inspires you some some path some inspirational reading whether it's the course in miracles or any other that don't make any one particular path special but when you know what your path is to actually walk it we literally download a different template for our nervous system for the rest of the day and sometimes we get it right and sometimes we fall off the spiritual wagon sometimes you're loving and forgiving and kind and sometimes you go into some other place in your personality sometimes things are smooth and sometimes you are confronted with real relationship difficulties which are the lessons that we have to go through in order to get to where we need to go and everybody right now jocelyn i think that this is a very tough time for people everything's so concentrated but there's a meaning to all this there's a purpose to all this we're becoming the people we need to be in order to do what we need to do in order to repair not only ourselves but repair this world so i'm glad that you're doing the daily lessons this time stay with it because you have all the intellectual abstract information but listen if if if all it took was abstract intellectual in information about spiritual principle to get there i would be an enlightened master already i get it i get it i've written books about the principles knowing the principles intellectually is only the beginning and then the course in miracle says then we take a journey without distance from the head to the heart and the course in miracle says that every person has a highly individualized curriculum every circumstance every situation every relationship is a is a is a is a lesson and the course in miracles says that every moment we are making a decision we are making it consciously or we're making it unconsciously whether we're going to open our hearts or close our hearts and it's all one moment at a time i remember when i was a little girl and you might have had one of these too jocelyn did you ever have an add a pearl necklace when i was a little girl we had atta pearl necklaces and you had this gold chain and then on your birthday you got a pearl another you know christmas or hanukkah you got a pearl and some other occasion you got a pearl add a pearl and one day you would have a whole necklace you know how'd you do la this hour i was okay and then the next hour maybe you weren't okay and you have to learn and try to pick it up and be better the next hour and also jocelyn i've seen in my own life the only real failure is something you fail to learn from you can learn from your failures and say i didn't get that right but i want to be better next time so you're on the path and the path is not always easy and sometimes we're down on our hands and knees and sometimes our elbows and our knees are scraped because it's rough going but we're on that journey and it's important that we're on that journey jocelyn not only for ourselves but for the world because if we don't rise up how are we going to lift back up this fallen world so stay with it that's what i hear in my heart about you you know what to do whether it's the course in miracles which it sounds like it is or any other path stay with it and that's what i feel about so many people right now we're better positioned sometimes than we give ourselves credit for we just have to step it up i think that's true i think most of us if we really look at our lives realize i'm not that bad i just need to step it up so thank you jocelyn thank you to all of you thank you so much for being with me this week i hope you were moved as i was by the conversation with gabor mate i hope that you will remember about his film uh the wisdom of trauma it's truly excellent and uh if you have a question for me remember you can write to me at marianne castmedia.com if you enjoy the um the program i hope that you will rate it i hope that you will tell your friends about it go to youtube go to all the different places that you listen to podcasts and i want to thank uh the people who make the program possible i want to thank amanda elliott and austin kendrick and lauren celski and wendy zahler and all of you i hope you feel that these are conversations that matter they matter to me and i hope they matter to you all my best i'll see you next week [Music]

Channel: The Marianne Williamson Podcast

Views: 91,759

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Id: SUXVXD4m_4o

Length: 90min 7sec (5407 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 25 2021