Webinar with Richard Schwartz, Wake Up Calls and Trail Heads

[Music] welcome everybody we're gonna wait a minute for more of you to get on we're almost at capacity I see okay yeah so I think we can start so welcome I'm really glad and kind of amazed at how many of you were signed up and we'll see it in one form or another when I originally decided to do this I expected a few hundred people and it turns out there's over 5,000 of you and for me it's just a testament to how much we're all craving some way to stay connected and stay himself and so that's a lot of what the goal is for me in this crazy time we've never been through anything like this and so there are gonna be parts that feel terribly out of control and scared and and then we'd all got parts that react to that and and so on so we'll be talking more about what's going on and it various levels this is been an interesting time for me to try and play with some ideas and I'll be sharing some of that with you but I also wanna as I say help us feel more connected as a community and this is going to be the first of a series of these free chats I guess is the word for them I think next week Tony her dying life's gonna do one and I'll do some more and maybe even get other people to do some too so that we can maintain this connection within our community and also help each other access self which it's really hard in times like this and so that's another of my goals for tonight and but also particularly if you can access himself to be able to follow the trail heads that are in your face right now the beliefs and emotions and and thoughts and impulses that this triggering situation is is bringing to you and allowing this situation to be what we often call a torment or in that by tormenting you it's it's teaching you it's mentoring you so the - between the Tor and the mentor about what needs to be healed and so we want to do some of that also at least give you the opportunity to do that if you can and then in general to try to bring more self to the world because it needs it it's my conviction that this is a wake-up call for us personally we'll talk more about that but it's also a wake-up call for the planet and for a lot of countries and corporations and so on so and that wake-up call won't be heated unless there's a lot of self present and and you may not believe this but I believe in my bones that the more we can access self the more it ripples up and leaders at all levels start to access more and there's a desperate need for that now so that's another of my goals okay so shortly I'll lead a kind of meditation to get us started and but in the meantime you know we're just really curious about which parts carry the fear and then which parts are trying to manage that fear and how they're trying to do that and then this is a great time to notice the parts of you that had been driving your life and whether or not you want them to continue and want them to continue dominating and then then finally what it's like when you don't have the distractions you used to have what it's like to have everything shut down so that you really can't be dominated by those same parts this they'll try hard to do it but it's really hard or much harder for them to and so what comes up when you're really taken out of this context for extended period time rema I didn't actually uh when I met my wife Jean which said now I think it's about 12 years ago she was she'd been living in Manhattan for 20 years and some point I convinced her to move police temporarily to say Louis when I was working at the time and she did and while st. Louis the suburbs of st. Louis it's quite a contrast to Manhattan it wasn't the best fit for her she did start to notice when she got away from all the frantic activity that she was constantly bombarded that she turns out to be one of these highly sensitive people who was in shutdown a lot of the time just to live in that hat and to make it but she didn't notice that until she really got away for a period of time and could have access some of the parts that were being exiled just Tector in manhattan and and you know made a conviction not to live in that kind of context anymore so the parallel I'm making is that we can't do what we used to be doing what we've been doing for a long time now and it's interesting time to notice what that's like and if indeed we get access to parts we didn't before or and and also if without the distractions our exiles are coming up in a way that's that's scary so my goal is to help us play with all that today both through talking about it like I am now but also through some meditations and exercises so without further ado let me invite you to take a second and focus inside and just notice if you can the parts that have been around the last couple weeks so both the scared maybe exiles we're fearful about your future about the disease itself maybe or got the consequences to your premiere or your your family your job and some of those fears are real but just maybe notice those parts and any other parts that are trying to distract you from those fears or trying to minimize deny or are sort of chiming in on the fears so we're just going to take a second to notice what's happening in the way of thoughts and emotions and impulses and sensations - I'm just taking a kind of inventory and if it's possible as you notice these parts let them know that let them know that you see them you care about them it may not be possible at this point you may be too blended with them or you may be blended with parts that are afraid of them or hate them or some other feeling toward them and that's fine for now but if it is possible we're going to just extend that comforting message that you see them and you care about them and just see how they receive that and tell them we're gonna do some more with them tonight and again there's no pressure I mean if they're not willing to separate enough to see them or or to let you help them that's understandable and it's fine but for now come on back and I'm going to talk a little bit more I actually wrote a paper which put together a lot of my thoughts about this and I like it and I don't remember it enough to not have to read it so I'm gonna read some of my thoughts now and then shortly after that we'll do another little exercise okay so most of us are therapists I suspect and we've all had clients who were dominated by striving individualistic materialistic parts that but that by certain measures had helped them achieve a lot of success in their lives and we might call them narcissistic or some other label like that most of mine were the spouses the partners of my clients who were feeling neglected by those high-powered sometimes executives or other kinds of people and those kinds of people generally won't change regardless of the obvious collateral damage to their bodies to their other parts to their relationships with the spouse it was my client they typically won't until something really bad happens and the same is true for countries because they become dominated by similar striving materialistic parts and then they as a country ignore the damage to the majority of the people in the country to the health of the client the climate and to the planet to the earth so like those driven clients the economies of most countries in the world are based on unrestrained growth just like the individuals goals are unrestrained unrestrained growth and like in both cases when you're dominated by those kinds of insatiable striving parts usually does bring on some kind of a crash just the domination of those parts will lead to that and so and that crash can be if he is right wake-up call a life changing kind of event for an individual and can also be a big change for a country so for a type-a people it might be the survival heart attack the divorce or hitting bottom with the addiction that they've needed to keep all their other parts exiled with a country its Wars economic depressions plagues or climate climate crises and all of which are the product of the obsessions they've had with unlimited growth such events can shock the system to the point that the beliefs that had been driving it are questioned and the costs of the mindless striving becomes more evident to the system at any of those levels so this pandemic is going to cause immense pain and suffering it already has but ideally it'll force us to individually reconsider who we are and what we value and also do the same for us collectively as a country and as a planet so it could be a wake-up call that heals human systems at many different levels for example now that countries have stopped polluting and forced to stop looting the earth has begun to heal fairly quickly right now pollution is way down and I read where Fisher back in the canals of Venice for example so ecosystems have a way to self heal and they'll if given half a chance they can do that so it'd be nice if it the planetary level we were he'd this market wake-up call and then we wouldn't need a much bigger one down the road and you know that it is kind of inevitable if we keep going the way we're going but to use the wake-up calls we have to access myself again at all these different levels and that's hard to do right now because many of us have blended with the scared parts and with that this event is so survival threatening that it's natural for those parts to get triggered and then it's also natural again for the protectors to take us away from those parts as best they can but all that keeps us from spending a lot of time itself let me say that in many cases it's not necessarily our burden parts that are scared that our parts do have good reason often now to be afraid that there are a lot of potential minefields looming we may lose our jobs or our businesses or our dear family members or ourselves actually and and many of us watch life savings go down the drain and the stock market crash so as Abraham Maslow talked about it's very hard to become self a work on even become becoming self actualized when your basic needs are in peril and that's some of where we are right now and we're not used to this we're not used to having our lives be out of this control you know be this much out of control most of us had a feeling like okay we're going to die at some point and can't control that but short of that you know if we make the right choices will basically be okay and right now you can't really feel that way on the other hand there's always self there's always what I call the capital I in the storm there's that underneath the royally waves there is this sort of column depth that's there regardless of our situation so if we can get our parts to separate enough we can access at least some of those eight C's and again that's some of my goal today but there are other obstacles so being with your fear for example in this loving way is a challenge when everybody is telling you to to be brave and overcome it I read a piece this week by Jean Houston and she wrote a line about this crisis quote on the other side of it will look back and realize that we were part of an epic time in history when caring triumphed over fear and goodness prevailed so the idea is that as I the hero triumphs over fear which usually means exiling fear so Winston Churchill at a time like this said the only thing we have to fear is fear itself so that I say really the only thing we have to fear is the is the contempt of our fear because if instead we can go to the young parts of us from which the fear emanates with love and comfort them and not be dominated so much by that the macho parts that would try a little were fear then actually we can heal a lot of things and we can help the fear and we can access and then when the fear is calm and helped then we can access the courage of self and self just has courage it's not something that you have to manufacture to triumph over anything so we can use this time to follow the trail ads and often they'll lead to parts that are stuck in terrible places in the past and we can go to those parts and and do some healing with them and take them out of where they're stuck and help them unburden and all that the whole nine yards or how many steps we have in ifs can be a very good healing opportunity as a wake up call right now but it may also be that the intense fear we're having doesn't come from a burden place it's realistic in some ways and so that's more of a challenge because this is a scary time and you can't necessarily reassure parts the bad things aren't going to happen because they might so what are you doing in this situation well as I was thinking about that it reminded me of a time about three years ago I was visiting my brother Michael and he has a place on the island of Kauai on this beautiful day and my wife Jean and I were down at the water and there were really big surf really big waves but I thought it'd be safe to just waiting in the shallows and so much to her chagrin I ignored her warnings and I started and just walked around up to my you know knees most of the time and then I was all of a sudden I took a step and I must have stepped off of a drop-off and I was suddenly being pulled out to sea by this Riptide and I didn't know how to handle it being not a native Hawaiian and so I just kept trying to swim back to the shore or swim to a reef that wasn't far off and was getting nowhere and I was getting further and further pulled out and more and more tired and then I would lay on my back to try and catch my breath but the waves are so big that water would weaken my mouth and I'd start to choke so that wasn't a solution that was available so at some point I was getting so tired that it looked bad like I was going to die and I heard these parts screaming in my head we're gonna die we're gonna die and I went to them and said okay but you know I tried to hold them and comfort them but I couldn't say we're not going to die because I didn't know that what I could say is if we die I'll be with you and that calmed them down and and then sort of in the nick of time my sister-in-law Patty came down to the beach and saw me struggling and frantically pointed me to swim toward the big waves which was counterintuitive to me and I just had enough energy to do that and then the waves kind of ushered me in and so I'm here talking today because of that and later I learned that a guy had died in a similar situation that that same day a couple days earlier so I feel very lucky and and it was a lesson in self leadership in a sense in the sense that even in that kind of a context it's really helpful two parts to help them and hold them and help them trust you regardless of what's going to happen and my parts are used to that they I've spent many many years getting them to trust me too to not have to take over and to let me handle things even scary things sometimes and in most contexts they're they're good at that there's a few I won't mention right now where they still tend to take over and it's a struggle for me to get him to step back but in I had built up enough of trust in that kind of a context that when I asked them to separate they would and so the point about is this is a scary time and it's still very valuable to our parts for the four of them to give us the space to actually help them and yeah yeah so even in the face of death it's possible to hold your parts it's far more difficult because it's less likely that they'll separate and again it's less likely they'll separate now than in other kinds of circumstances but it's possible and it may not lead to the Penan life-saving look I had but it's always better to face your challenges in life from a place of courage clarity and confidence than from you're scared dissociating or impulsive parts so that's my sort of pitch to your parts to just give you a chance because what you do access a bit more self you may find that same thing that's true for the earth when the pollution stops that you sort of automatically begin the heal and that the extreme parts that have dominated your life and that were elevated to that dominance by what it takes to make it in our culture we're forced to step back now and you might find that you love the emergence of other parts that know how to play and how to be creative or how to enjoy nature it's like the fish that return to medicine is canals these parts are coming back now if they're given the green light - and you might find that you want to make changes in your life so you can make room for them so as I mentioned before the more self we bring to this crisis the more likely its lessons will be learned at all levels the planetary the country and individual Rilke said quote let me not squander the hour of my pain and quote so rather than squandering this one let's use it to change many layers of the world we live in so all that is an excerpt of what I've been writing recently I put out the whole paper at some point and it sets the stage for the next exercise I'd like to try which is to have you actually work with some of these parts if they're willing so let's get comfortable again and focus inside and earlier we did a kind of survey of the parts of you that are triggered by this event and now get us of what part you want to focus on exclusively for a little while and work with and if it is one of these terrified exiles then just be sure you have permission to do that and if not then then go to the parts that are afraid to let you and see what their fear is and see if you can get permission so once you have a part in mind then go ahead and focus on it and find it your body around your body and notice how you feel toward it and at this point you may have a lot of extreme feelings about it which is understandable it's harder now excess self but just see if for the next few minutes doesn't have to be a long time that those parts that are giving those extreme feelings could relax just a little bit they can jump back when you're done but just ask them to let you have enough space to get to know some of these parts or the part you're focused on we're not going to give it more power overwhelm you we're not gonna we're just gonna get to know it and maybe even help it not be so scared or not whatever it's doing not have to do it so much and get it to trust that it's not alone to trust that you there so just take a second and see if the parts that have extreme feelings about the target part could relax a little and let you access yourself and come more into your body [Music] if that's not happening then don't keep going toward the target part instead focus on one of these others that won't separate and just see what it needs see what what it's fears are and what it needs from you to trust you more to handle the target part and if you can get to a point of being at least curious about the original target part and go ahead and just see what it wants you to know about itself and why it's either so sad or why it's trying to protect you whichever part it is just stay a little bit curious for a little while and see what it wants you know you and as you getting to know ad see if you can help to get to know you also that at least right now it's not alone and you're there with it and if it you actually feel it it's sincere that you do care about it and you want to help it and if you want you can also ask how old it thinks you are and it thinks you're different from your actual age then updated or let it know that you're not that age and that you might be more capable than the part thought and then see if the part seems to trust that you care about it if it doesn't asking more about why it doesn't and what you can do that build that trust and if that's true you just want to stay there but if it does seem to trust you and go ahead and ask what it wants you to know about where it got these feelings or beliefs in the past and again don't think just wait and see what comes to you if nothing's coming that's okay it might be that this part isn't stuck in the past that is just scared because it's a scary present and let it know you get that and that you're gonna do more to try and help it during this scary time but if you are getting something about where it might be frozen in time and just tell it to keep going until it feels like you really get what happened and how bad it was then if it does feel like you're getting that then see if you can go into that time that earlier time and be with that younger version of yourself in the way that he or she needed you at that time you know and see what that part might need you to do with her or for her back there for him and go ahead and do that you and then at some point you can see if the parts ready to leave that time in place with you and come to a safe comfortable place which again might not be the president because this is scary but it could be a fantasy place and then see if the part is interested in unloading any feelings or beliefs that's been carrying all this time and again that might be more challenging now with the scary present that you can just see and see if it could give anything up to light or water or fire or wind or if however it wants to send it out of its body if it was willing to our able to unburden anything just see how it's doing now and she wants to invite qualities into its body now and then finally you can bring it in other parts to check this out and see how things are a little bit different and to see how they react and so come on back whenever you're ready let me say a few things about that you know I kind of sped through those steps so it may be may well be that you didn't get very far in fact maybe your parts wouldn't separate at all and I really don't want you to feel like you failed if that's true this is a scary time and it's not easy to get parts to cooperate times like this and and it takes a lot more work than the 15 minutes then I just put in but I suspect some people were able to do it and that's something it's the kind of work I've been trying to do in my own or sometimes with gene the last couple weeks being inside most all the time I'm turn 70 this year so I'm high-risk not only that because also I have a history of severe childhood asthma and how to asthma incident by episode something like that earlier this year so I'm trying to be really careful and and really you know socially distance emotionally not distant but and you know also try to use the wake-up call personally because when everything had to cancel they've cancelled any travel for months in advance now there are parts of me that were quite relieved and parts that I'd just been pushing aside and and not listening to basically and so during these two weeks I've had much more time to spend with them and to actually do some of those healing with them and meditating to access myself and also to get to know Jeanne and given in different in deeper way and so for all that I'm grateful on and I do expect that it's going to lead to some lasting changes I don't plan to not travel anymore but I plan to not travel as much and do more online and that's one of the things that may wind up being a blessing also because we have successfully moved a lot of the training programs on online so far successfully and in doing so it may be true may be possible that we can meet a lot of the demand because I know a lot of you had a lot of trouble getting into level one trainings and in the in-person trainings require a lot more logistical stuff that make it harder to organize them and make it so that we can't have as many but if if we did at least some of the level one training some portion of the global M training online and would simplify things a lot and we can do a lot more of them so that's our what we're playing with and my experience just like today I think is that it can be quite effectively learned online you don't necessarily have the same level of community connection and and during this crisis we hope to find other ways to connect the community but but it still can be quite effective I think so anyway we're trying to to use this crisis as opportunity to and to experiment with different ways of being and I see you see in the the chat that many of you are happy to hear this so that's great so I want to close with one more meditation so let's all get relaxed again and comfortable in our chairs and this time as you notice your parts invite them to separate more so rather than getting to know them right now we're just going to ask them to relax and all open more space and lets you get more into your body because when they're activated they take up a lot of space in your body so if they're willing to do that you'll notice palpable shifts as they pull their energy out and you'll also notice feeling more embodied which means you can feel your sensations more you feel maybe some vibrating energy is running through your body somewhat grounded because when they let you embody it's comforting to them because it's hard for them to sense your presence when they keep you out of your body and they have the power to do that so we're inviting them to let you really be in your body even in this time of crisis and just see how that feels and if they're allowing that even to a small degree then it may be possible for you to extend compassion to them throughout your system even to parts you don't know very well or even the parts that caused you a lot of trouble in your life just extend from your heart it's compassionate energy throughout your system and the calm of yourself also it's very useful right now let them know again you're not young you can't help them and you have a lot of courage that they might not even know about and just see how they react and if they've sensed your compassion and calm it's likely they relax more which allows you to feel more compassion and calm the virtuous cyclic in away then I'm going to invite you extend that compassion through your body to the earth compassion and love to the earth for how it is nurtured us and given us beauty and see if it also feels right and sincere to extend an apology to the earth for how you personally have mistreated it at times even the greenest of us have done that at times and then a collective apology for how we as a species entreated the earth and then is the last part of this meditation see if now you can extend the same compassion calm clarity courage so the leaders of the world because they need those qualities to help their protectors relax and give them more access to saw so that our leaders can learn the lessons of this wake-up call and our leaders can feel the pain in a way they didn't before of what our policies have caused to the people in this country in other countries listen gently like an individual who was dominated by striving parts finally feels the pain of the parts that have been neglected and sad and vows to do something about that rather than continue on this suicidal path bored unrestrained growth when the time feels right you can shift your focus back out here so yeah we've all got lessons to learn this is a great opportunity and it is terrifying and but the lesson plan is in your parts and their burdens and just getting them to trust you a little more so yeah so let's keep finding ways to keep doing things like this and staying connected and as I say there'll be more of these to come but I think there are other ways we can do this maybe meeting in smaller groups than 5,000 at a time and it's important to know that 5,000 people doing this simultaneously can have actually quite a big effect I didn't get to say enough about that but I totally totally in my bones know that when you access self and when you help your clients access self it isn't just individually having an impact it ripples itself is a field and the more self we bring the more it ripples to all these other levels that actually will create healing so so what we just did I think is really really important and valuable and so let's all keep doing it okay I'll see you around you you

Channel: Internal Family Systems - IFS Institute

Views: 57,929

Keywords:

Id: aDyj0EWscqk

Length: 59min 45sec (3585 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 26 2020