Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:00:03 Welcome to the doctor's week show where I show you how bad States of mind, difficult life issues. Aren't pathological, but rather signs of personal growth trying to happen. All right, let's get into it. Hey, what's up people. Thank you so much for tuning in today. I'm going to tell you a story.
Speaker 1 00:00:31 It's about how my client's Sandy, which of course has her pseudonym discovered the solution to a standing problem. By focusing on something that was distracting her, usually we want to get away from whatever distracts us, but often times the very thing that disturbs your attention, the nine pain that won't go away, the awful person in your life, your inner critic is the beginning of a process that contains gold. The transformative element you might never have known about without the problem. It's a crazy paradox, hidden within the thing that messes with your attention is something awesome. And life-changing, but you need the right tools to uncover it. This story will illustrate what I'm talking about. Now. I don't usually use music in my practice, but I want to tell you about Sandy strange musical experience. She was a 46 year old receptionist who told me she'd been depressed ever since her divorce a year earlier.
Speaker 1 00:01:41 And despite doing her best to get on with life, she couldn't seem to break out of her sadness. I asked her to describe her feelings in detail, and she said, quote, I feel lost and sad and empty, but I try not to focus on it. It's such a struggle being the crazy contrarian. I am. I suggested that she focused directly on these bad feelings, but she shook her head. Aren't you going to help me get rid of this? I don't want to focus on it. I said, I understand it's painful, but by exploring it, we may learn something. Let's go into it further and see where it goes. In fact, feel it even more exaggerate your feelings amplify. The whole experience get even more lost, sad, and empty. She looked at me confused, like, what is the good doctor saying? Why would I want to make my crappy feelings worse?
Speaker 1 00:02:43 Isn't he supposed to help me feel better? I explained to her that going into her bad feelings will only be a temporary thing. It's a way to bring her process to the surface so we can discover the true solutions. Finally, she agreed to try. She closed her eyes and I encouraged her to feel lost, sad, and empty. And to make these feelings even more intense. I said, really feel deeply into them, go to their core. After a while she opened her eyes and said, sorry, I'm having trouble because I'm hearing a song in my head. As soon as I go all the way into my sadness and really feel it, the song comes in and ruins my focus. It's annoying. I asked her what song it was. And she said it was an old one. She hadn't heard in years knocking on heaven's door by Bob Dylan.
Speaker 1 00:03:40 I wanted to know how the song made her feel, but she said, I don't know. I'm trying to ignore it. I can sort of make it go away. But as soon as I feel sad, again, it pops back in, knock, knock knocking on heaven's door. Maybe I can't do this kind of work. My mind is all over the place. I said, no, you're doing great. Next step is to listen really closely to the song in your head and pay attention to the feelings and thoughts that arise. What does this song do to you? She closed her eyes again, and this time stayed like that. For what felt like a long time. It was probably only about five minutes or so. But when you sit with someone meditating like that, it can seem like an eternity. Suddenly she opened her eyes and broke down crying, not a gentle weeping or whimpering type of thing.
Speaker 1 00:04:40 An uncontrollable, cathartic, wailing sobbing expression. I handed her a tissue and I waited for her to compose herself. I asked her what had happened. And she said she had touched into something deep, spiritual, other worldly that she never felt before. At first she couldn't put it into words. And I said, she didn't have to, but after sitting quietly for a while, she said it was like quote, a million pound weight of worry lifted off me. I asked her to elaborate. And she said that ever since her divorce, she had felt like she can't make it on her own. She didn't mean financially, but rather emotionally every day was a struggle to feel like she could stand on her own two feet. She was always worried. She'd collapse into a heap of sadness and never get up again. She had sought help from friends, a psychologist and even a psychiatrist.
Speaker 1 00:05:46 And they all told her basically the same thing. Be strong, cheer up, leave the sad feelings and get out there to meet someone new. The psychiatrist also recommended she take antidepressants. The consensus was that a year is too long to be grieving, but the more they told her this, the worse she felt. She said that now she had a completely different feeling. One that gave her an uncanny feeling of relief and peace. She said, quote, I suddenly feel like what happened with my ex is okay. I'm okay. Everything's going to be all right. I can let go and accept things as they are. What a relief we explore this further, amplifying her experience that she's okay. And everything's okay. The more we went into the experience, the more I got sort of a contact high from her, what an awesome sense of life to have.
Speaker 1 00:06:53 Hey, it doesn't matter. What's going on. It's all going to be cool for me is a sort of ecstasy in that, a freedom from this anxious world, we're all trying to navigate. Sandy had really tapped into something spiritual. I asked her if she could apply this experience to her whole life and after pondering it for a bit, she said, quote, that would be amazing. It's a completely different way of living. Like I wouldn't have to worry and fight things all the time. Everything's going to work out. Life will take care of me. I try to find out how the song had opened this up in her, but she wasn't sure. She said, I don't know. It's just the sound of it. And of course the word heaven, I'm not religious, but it gives me an experience of life beyond my dramas. There's so much more to life than poor me, whose husband ran off with another woman. I mean, who cares when you're in heaven? And then she burst out laughing.
Speaker 1 00:08:03 I loved her new poetic take on life. She was having an enlightenment process after this session, her grief lifted and her life took on a whole new direction until we had processed her experience of knocking on heaven's door. She'd been trying to avoid her sadness. That's what we're all told to do, right? Ask someone for help. And they'll be like, how can we fix this? How can we make you feel better? You shouldn't feel sad for so long. And if you do, there's something wrong with you. And that's exactly how Sandy had approached her feelings. She didn't view them as something meaningful, but rather as something bad and wrong. In addition, as I mentioned, everyone in her environment had echoed this sentiment by encouraging her to get out of the grief and get on with life. But this wasn't what she needed. She needed to get in touch with something deeper, something beyond the personal, even beyond the rational and connect with a spiritual awareness that could embrace and support her experiences.
Speaker 1 00:09:20 Instead of rejecting them, you can't process something. If you eject it from the get go, you have to say hello. I don't want you. I don't like you. I wish you weren't here. But here you are. You're here for a reason, but I don't know what it is yet. I'm going to accept that you're here and explore and study you until you reveal your secrets to me. Now, this attitude runs antithetical to so much psychology psychiatry. And self-help you hear about these days. Everyone wants the quick fix the bypass, the power through the technique to overcome and defeat your problem. Sometimes this is what you need to do, but oftentimes it misses the Mark because your problem is trying to wake you up to something new in order to help you evolve. People, see the crap in their lives as being totally wrong, but it's not.
Speaker 1 00:10:24 It's your process trying to help you to change and grow instead of trying to zap away your symptoms, go into them, amplify, explore and unfold, your experiences. That's how you'll not only transform your issue, but your whole life as well. Of course you need the right tools to do this. And that's what the exercises I teach are for. So how can we understand Sandy's process and processing in general, let's start with processing in general and look at it through the concept that the problem is the solution. I know it sounds like some sort of crazy Zen co on or a twisted word game, but it isn't, it's actually an ancient idea that comes from shamanism. Do you know what that is? Shamans with the original medicine, men and women, they weren't only the first medical doctors, but the first psychotherapists priests, actors, political leaders, and of course musicians, they did it all.
Speaker 1 00:11:37 They were Renaissance people. Thousands of years before the Renaissance, when someone in an indigenous tribe began suffering from what we'd call mental health issues, the Sharman didn't view them as being sick, but rather as being called, they were seen as having a calling to be a shaman, a healer, a leader. In fact, the meaning of the word shaman is wounded healer. You're wounding is the beginning to your healing, transforming, changing, growing, but healing. What isn't the wound itself, the problem, and you just need to get rid of it. No, your problem, meaning whatever disturbs you in your life, isn't actually the problem. Yes, it's a problem, but it's not the problem. Your symptoms, meaning whatever's messing you up is a process with a message about something you don't know about yet. It's trying to upset your current consciousness in order to force you to connect with this new awareness.
Speaker 1 00:12:52 You're wounding is your calling to expand who you are and why do you need to do this? Why not just stay where you are and just get rid of the problem. Because the essential nature of human beings is change growth process, nothing in you or me or anything is ever actually still, the more you try to create a static condition in your life, the more your problems are going to lean into you and mess you up. They're the seeds of your process. Okay? Let's apply this to Sandy. The conventional view of her problem was that there was a malfunction in her mind, a mental disorder called depression, manifesting as being in too long of a grieving period. As if there's a normal amount of time, the solution was thought to be, to repair the malfunction, cure the disorder by finding a new relationship or by covering over her sadness with medication.
Speaker 1 00:14:08 But this wasn't what her real process, her deeper mind and heart were seeking her grief. Her wounding when amplified turned out to be a meaningful experience that led not only to the solution for her last relationship, but to a whole new way of being as well. Her divorce had pushed her into a depression, which went intentionally focused on an amplified, sparked a song that gave her a new way of relating to life. What everyone, including her said was wrong was actually her process trying to come forth to show her a new one. Now, if you're ready and Uber rationalist, you might think, come on, Zwick a song popped into her head. So what it was purely random, what's your evidence that it was purposeful or that it meant anything. Sounds like an airy fairy explanation of a coincidental event. Hmm. That's an interesting hardcore voice in my head.
Speaker 1 00:15:19 Okay. Let's unpack this sucker. I'm an empirical scientist. Empiricism means that scientific knowledge is acquired through sense experience, not through phenomenon. You can't actually observe. If you want scientific facts, you have to be able to see them or detect them or measure them. You can't just come up with ideas that seem to make sense, but have no hard evidence supporting them and call it science. You can call it philosophy or religion, but not science. When I work with someone or on myself, I don't follow ideas I have in my head for which I have no empirical evidence. In other words, if you ask me what I believe about a certain problem, me or a client has, I'd say, I don't believe anything. I either know something because I have evidence or I don't. And the only way I can know something is by observing and studying what actually happens, not my interpretation of it.
Speaker 1 00:16:36 Like for example, the psych diagnostic manual that says sadness for longer than two weeks is a mental illness. If you ask a psychiatrist how she knows this, she won't be able to tell you because it's a purely arbitrary idea. It's a made up belief, not a scientifically established fact. This is why it's so easy for new additions of the manual to suddenly, and for no reason, present new guidelines. If we empirically observe Sandy's process, we see that every time she got really into her sadness, knocking on heaven's door, popped into her ears. It happened repeatedly and it wouldn't matter how you or I interpreted it because that would just be our opinions. What matters is Sandy's sense experience? She said she heard the song and I simply fed back to her. Okay, here, the song that's in parasitism, it wouldn't have been empirical or scientific to interpret the meaning of hearing a song in her head because it wouldn't be based in census data.
Speaker 1 00:17:54 That's why I simply said listen to the song and see what happens. And what happened was that it evoked a transformative experience. Why it happened this way, can't be known and is irrelevant. What mattered was following exactly what happened without superimposing my ideas over her process. The only understanding that's relevant is a description of what happened. Sandy was depressed. She amplified the feelings, a song, distracted her. She listened to the song and she had an awakening. If we want to get poetic while sticking to the facts, we could say she discovered the hidden music within her grief, both literally and figuratively by consciously going into her painful feelings, instead of trying to get rid of them, she transformed to a song, but you don't need a song to change and grow. You just need to learn how to tap into and follow your process. Instead of thinking of your problem as a meaningless piece of junk, you just want to throw out, think of it as a meaningful process, with a beautiful song hiding within the ugliness.
Speaker 1 00:19:18 Of course, you can't just go straight to the song. You have to go through a process. I use a bunch of different ways to connect with my process. And one of them is by purposely using music as a vehicle, it pushes me through a doorway into whatever's going on in my subconscious. I pick up the guitar strum, a few chords, and I feel things I have visions. And sometimes I even know something new. Suddenly writing a song is like a therapy session where your process shows you the way to a new beginning, something opens up something changes. Something is born and sometimes something dies. Every song is a journey into the unknown. And I come out the other side, a new person in some way. Speaking of using music in this way, I wrote a song. I made a video called Valley where a million stars are strewn. It's about the experience of feeling lost and messed up in your life. And the search for dry land. This Friday, October 30th, I'm releasing the video and the single. You can watch the video on YouTube and stream the song on Spotify or wherever you listen to music. Here's a sneak preview.
Speaker 2 00:20:42 <inaudible>
Speaker 0 00:22:32 See you next time. Stay aware. You can follow me on social media at doctors wig, and you can sign up on the mailing list at doctors, wake.com, where you'll receive discounts on private coaching events and merchandise starting in 2021 weekly personal growth tips and lots more be well.
