WEBVTT

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More fantastical keep things moving. It's about time to change it almost. I've had it for a few weeks. I just searched for like fantasy library

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It's super cool. I haven't seen them in so long. I feel like they must be in high school now.

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The older one, Quinton, he's 13, so he's going to go into high school in the fall, but he's taller than us now. He's like five, nine now. Yeah.

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Yeah, things change really fast when those hormones start kicking in.

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That's They sure do. My brother's twin boys are 15, so I know that age well.

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Yeah.

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Hi, everyone. I want to welcome everyone in. We were just chatting here in the background. So welcome, welcome. And there's I think people are still coming in. So we'll sort of And maybe we can get started and people come in just as they do.

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So hello everyone and hi norm again so often when I'm doing a masterclass or some other webinar event, we do like a tech version of loving kindness or meta through the Zoom. And maybe we could do that today in an abbreviated version. So whoever would like to, if you want to pop in the chat and say where you're logging in from, where in the world you are today, and just say.

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Hello to one another. And if you have an intention for the community or even for yourself.

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That's sitting on the tip of your e tongue. You could also feel free to offer that as well. And I won't read them out loud, but I think people have let us know that they really appreciate seeing where people are in the world and kind of feeling that sense of solidarity and being together so that it's really

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So that we're kind of bringing community in right at the beginning and appreciating our globalness and being able to witness that in the chat and Alongside the video and audio for today, I will pop the chat up too so that you all can download that.

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All right, so welcome to this interactive webinar with Norman Farb. And the plan is for Norm and I to chat about his work and about his book and kind of put flush on the bones of some of his, I think, key ideas that are

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I think digestible for us all and also really important and supportive to our lives. And then we'll open it up to everyone and to any questions you might have or reflections.

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And we allowed 75 minutes for this if there are burning questions at the end, Norm, I don't know what your flex time is at the end, if things are sizzling, we could maybe allow a little more time.

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But you let us know kind of how you're feeling about that.

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So You know, we had a bunch of of kind of introductory materials leading up to this in which I introduced Norm. But to those things, to this kind of idea of this bio that we put out that kind of represents us, I wanted to

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Say that Norm is not only a renowned neuroscientist and a contemplative practitioner, but he's also a dear colleague and friend. And in addition to that, Norm was generous enough to come to Boston during one of our 500-hour teacher trainings for a full weekend. And teach to our cohort and then open it up to a wider community. And it was a really

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Incredible part of teacher training to really be looking deeply into the science of awareness and And then how to apply that to our lives, which we'll do today too. And we might even have some of that teacher training cohort with us today. And if you are with us live, feel free to pop an extra greeting to Norm in the chat as well.

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I know that some of us have signed up for this, but I just don't know who will be here live.

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And one reason why I and I've come out of a long period of book writing hibernation, I just want to say, Norm, that during The years after I signed my book contract, you envisioned a book, got a contract, wrote it, published it, and now it's been out in the world for a while. And I'm still on that first. I just handed in my first draft. So my process has been going slowly and it's amazing to see how fast yours went.

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And also just the beauty of the final product. I have to confess that I think that modern technology has impacted my attention span along with other people. So rarely do I read a book all the way through. Usually at some point I kind of stop. And not only did I read this all the way through once, but also a second time. And so I'm going to share some of my

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Kind of most exciting discoveries from within the book and ask you norm to kind of expand on them.

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And there's also kind of another reason that I really wanted to begin my coming back into the world with norm And I think, Norm, it's because you have a quality that's very rare, at least in my experience, which is that you really apply the work that you do in science and contemplative practice to daily life as a colleague, a friend, a parent.

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And one of the things I've appreciated about you, I don't know if I've actually ever told you this, but you actively work I think to help not just yourself, but the people around you to learn to be with sensations and also with the very human reactions we have to situations.

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In a genuine way, but then also not to stew in them indefinitely. And I think that's a really incredible quality because often we want our friends and the people that we have in our lives to mirror our reactions. And that is one kind of theme from the book and something I've really appreciated with you, Norm, is that you you don't stew indefinitely with somebody in that space that you're really working

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It's almost, I think, a form of activism to want to kind of get out of that easy, what we'll talk about as the default mode of how we can have these narratives about the people around us, the experiences around us, and then how we kind of move out of those and expand our direct experience and our ability to tolerate discomfort and to try to kind of move into new unstucked places so

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I think that is really relevant to our lives today. And that is one of the reasons I wanted to have you come.

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So much. And I may have mentioned this in the materials that some of you read before coming, but it's really no exaggeration to say that norms work has really changed the course of my own.

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And prior to meeting Norm, I had been tracking this thing that I thought of as embodied awareness in the students in my classes and also in my private work.

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And when people would come into class a little bit scattered and then when they would kind of what I call drop in to their bodies, which would be a different moment for most people. But there was something very distinct and very

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You know deeply therapeutic about that moment and people would actually talk about that to me and how it felt to them.

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And when I met you, Norm, I learned from you that there was a scientific term for that awareness called interoception. And it was a whole field of study that you were really involved in. And that was really super exciting to me.

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And really changed the way I taught, the way I did teacher training. So you have all these recipients of your work that exists out in the yoga world that have been teaching to other people and doing private work in this new way because of your work and who you are. So I think that is just that's something that I'll always be very grateful to you for So I'd love to kind of take as a springboard your 2010 study

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Which to me was like very revolutionary. And was so influential to my work. And then if you could sort of talk a little bit about the surprises in that study and the insight that it offered to you, particularly with regard to depression. And in some ways I feel like you

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In that study was Zindel Siegel, you redefine depression And you also kind of identify clearly that one of the elements of mindfulness training that was so important was the body. So can you share with us about that study and what you feel is important to take away?

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Sure. Yeah. Well, first of all, thank you so much for inviting me, boy. I'm really grateful. It's been lovely to know you over the years and continue to correspond. And thank you everyone for coming today. We'll try to make it

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Worth your while. Yeah, it's been quite a ride from 2010, I guess.

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The sort of background there is I was a graduate student trying to find a way to make sense of what was happening early in meditation mindfulness training specifically.

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With somewhat naive ideas, kind of looking at it from the outside in, I had some background in psychology and philosophy but And, you know, I did yoga at the gym kind of thing. I wouldn't say it was deeply steeped in the mysteries of contemplative practice

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And so like many people, I had this lay theory and my mentors also had this theory um that the problem a lot of times when we run into trouble with mood is about the stories we tell ourselves and that seemed like a tractable thing that we could study because we knew that there was already research showing that when people

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Judgments like i'm, you know, I'm good i'm bad i'm of a bull, I'm worth there's particular parts of the brain that would be involved Especially right here in the medial prefrontal cortex. And so we had this working theory that

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If that was too extremely activated, if you're too deeply steeped in self-evaluation, well, that must be the problem. And this fits very well with very general tropes about meditation of sort of embracing the no self or the illusion of the self. So if you could break down this network that's doing selfing

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That would be a well-adjusted, happy person and that people who get too far into self-reference get into trouble. So we did this study in 2010 where we tried to have a lab or in the scanner version of making people temporarily depressed. We show them these really sad film clips.

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I won't do any impressions today, but the early 1980s is a great place to go for these long burn themes of loss that aren't like violent or gory or shocking, but are still really, really sad. And we compare that to like home and garden television

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And you could show that people's self-referential networks are going wild when they watch these film clips in the scanner.

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And people sort of in general would report, yeah, like I'm a five out of seven, a six out of seven for sadness. You made me really sad. Thanks.

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In the scanner and I spent a long time trying to show that, trying to show what we thought was going to happen was that the more people activated these self-referential networks, so judging like, well, what does this have to do with me? How do I relate to this sadness I'm feeling from the film to my own life?

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To show that the magnitude of that activity was predicting who is depressed in our sample and who wasn't. Because the whole sample of participants were people who had signed up to do mindfulness-based stress reduction.

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People tend to sign up for courses like that when they're kind of stressed, right? So it's a mixture of depression, anxiety.

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Chronic pain. And I'd say it's been at least six months trying to show that medial prefrontal cortex, that self-activation was the problem and just failing to do so and getting more and more frustrated And my advisor being like, oh, run it again, you know, tweak some parameters. You know, I'm sure it's there. That's got to be the story.

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And then one day, you know, I just kind of gave up on that having to be this story, probably sort of frustration and exhaustion, not some like greater enlightenment. And I was like, well, what else?

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Is going on in the brain when people get upset by watching these film clips and they get really sad.

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And sort of it just became as soon as I was willing to see it, it kind of just showed up that there's all these other parts of the brain that were deactivating that we're turning off.

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And especially we saw that this deactivation was happening a lot in sensory parts of the brain, which are really distinct from the conceptual parts of the brain. A lot of the back of our brain is dedicated just to having these factories that break down vision and

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Hearing and touch and the internal sense of the body. In fact, only smell gets to be have a factory in the front of the brain right at the top of the nose. Everything else, even vision goes through like stereo cables to the very back.

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And so you can see especially the body surface and internal parts of the body we're turning off as people were saying they were more sad. And this response actually was much more variable. So everyone was doing it a little bit, but some people were doing it much more than others.

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And when I looked at the magnitude at which people were turning off sensation in response to this appraisal, like, oh, I'm feeling sad right now.

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That was really shockingly strongly predictive of how depressed they were.

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And so the thing that I couldn't see when we were so focused on the problem is that we tell a self story or make self-judgment was that there's a second response to stress, especially sad mood, negative mood.

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That also involves blocking out sensation, which is probably at the start of it protective. Like I feel sad, it's intense. I want to get away from the sensation.

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But when you don't even worry about why and you just think like, well, which of these two patterns like self-judgment versus sensory inhibition is correlated with how much you're suffering outside of the scanner task, it's 100% definitely the sensory inhibition. Everyone is telling self stories and that doesn't differentiate

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Who's really suffering after that moment versus another. It's almost natural or it seems almost obligatory that we try to make sense of our emotional experience. So we've been pathologizing the wrong thing and we didn't even realize the second thing was happening, right? We thought like.

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Oh, when you become sad, it's too much feeling. And it's our job as adults to control this feeling from becoming too intense. And what the data was showing is we've actually become much too good at controlling it, so good that we don't even realize we're doing it.

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And so with this initial protection from having to have that sad feeling.

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Persists over time. And what we don't realize is that in shielding ourselves from negative feelings, we're also shielding ourselves from all of the new feelings that are occurring.

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And what started to emerge in like the decades since is this idea that like Really, that's where change is coming from. We think we reason ourselves into different states of mind, but no you you discover you feel differently and then you try to rationalize and explain it and do all this self-reference. So when we block out this kind of sensation.

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We're actually shutting the doors to change. And so if the last thing you notice was you feel really sad or down or hopeless or lonely or disconnected.

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You've condemned yourself to keep feeling that way because you're not going to get new information that you feel differently.

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So there's an irony to being really successful at protecting yourself in the moment from feeling and that resigning yourself to continue feeling that way in the future because who knows the next thing that you feel could be even more threatening. And so that's not what people are intentionally doing. That's the consequence of an understandable momentary

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Need to sort of break away from the negative feeling. And as you see, that's a very different way of looking at depression because a lot of times as we focus on the things that are obvious to us, like rumination, negative self-judgment.

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All of this sort of self castigation that's apparent But that almost seems like it's natural and what actually becomes pathological is doing that while closing yourself off to the possibility that there could be new thoughts or experiences in the future.

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So not getting too judgmental about self-judgment, but rather considering, all right, am I still open to other thoughts and feelings down the road is really what's missing for a lot of us because it's more insidious as the sensation drops out. It's very obvious when we're having

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Having the judgments so yeah it was very hard for me to see that pattern of results. But once I saw it, it started to make all these things start to kind of fall into place and make sense.

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It's so profound. I mean, as many of you know, I started out as a psychologist where That's the existing paradigm is that these are problematic thought patterns and we need to address them through, you know, cognitive means or cognitive behavioral means. So it felt really courageous to me for you to be saying, well, there's this

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Other paradigm. And I love how in the book you stretch that concept and really talk about depression as the absence of embodied feelings.

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And that it's possible to reclaim those feelings. And that just feels like it's a wonderful opportunity for us as a society to kind of move beyond this idea that there's a chemical imbalance in neuromodulators like serotonin and norepinephrine and that we need to address depression that way because we know that that's actually

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Now being thought of to be not as connected and that there may be other incidental factors that explain why antidepressants work in in a people that they work for. So I'm wondering if you can And also, I think just to highlight something that you talked about, and maybe you can tie this together.

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But one of the really beautiful insights of the book for me is this quote within the pages that I kind of pulled out where you, and Zindel said, like, what if you're stuck only because you've stopped exploring? And I think those two ideas kind of bounce off each other.

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Riff on that a little bit.

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Yeah. So, I mean, looking at things at this sort of systems level analysis doesn't invalidate that, you know, there's going to be chemical and even structural changes in the brain.

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But it's sort of my sort of perspective is like, but you can't do anything about that, right? I mean, you can take drugs like people are definitely pushing phishing drugs, but there's very little agency in being like, oh, it's just a it's a physical change, right? And so that may be true and

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Let's focus our efforts on where we have some ability to affect things, which is often with our attention, our intentions and our behavior.

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And if you really take on the idea, like not even like it has to be 100% true, we just play with the idea that Sensation is where change comes from like that we come from we live in a rationalist society where we think we reason our way into change but if you think about any major inflection point in your

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Life is almost always like something from the world broke through and forced you to like it confronted you, your experience confronted your model of the world and shattered it a little bit. It wasn't like I don't know anyone who is like, oh, I was sitting on the couch and I really thought about things and then I just changed my worldview.

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And trying to argue with people with different worldviews. It's like the symbols you pop out of your mouth or write on a page.

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They don't change people's models of the world, right? Like maybe a very talented writer or something that brings people to simulating like an experience. And then again, that experience kind of changes them. So if we start from that perspective that

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It's direct experience, the things that we sense and sense from the world that come in that challenge our internal models, then this idea that this is the way to change ourselves kind of make it follows from that idea.

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And then so When we feel stuck and we wish things were different What that means is we already have a model of the world or gives us a set of expectations that is dissatisfying or distressing.

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Both. And we don't know how to change that model. So you think, you know, here's the way I wish things were So that's my desire, what I'm yearning for. And then here's how I actually believe things are. That's the model.

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And there's this disconnect. And so I'm going to suffer because I want them to be this way, but they're not.

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But neither of those things is it the world. And we're just like, I wish things were different. But if you really wish they were different, you'd be like, well, where would I find evidence that updates my model of the way things are?

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And so that doesn't mean like you just magically change things. In fact, it's the opposite of that. You would actually have to go find evidence from the world that made your model closer to the way you wanted things to be.

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And if you made those things closer together, you would suffer less, you would be more content. In a situation where exactly how you want things to be is the way you think they are, the way you model them.

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There's nothing you have to do. You're just like, exact, perfect. That's what I wanted.

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So it really starts to change the way we think about handling our distress. It's not even about what someone else did in the past or what we did in the past or something like that. It's like, where can I find information right now That's going to change the way I see the world.

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And really internalizing the belief because none of the practices we suggest make sense unless you kind of at least are trying on this belief.

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That you have to go explore things through your senses and take a new information and your attention to that sensory information the strong version of the theory is that that is enough to start changing you.

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Even though it's not going to be obvious how it happens and it involves a loss of control because you're letting the world in. You're not defending the things you control, which are the things inside your head.

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So yeah, it really starts to have a lot of powerful implications for how we think about our own agency, I think.

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And it's not always what we thought. It's not that if I could make the world fit my model that things would be better because that happens some of the time, like I'm hungry and I have bread, I can make a sandwich, right? So I can change

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Something in the world that I don't have food. Now I have food.

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But many other things are about the model is disconnected from our values or what we want. And then at the same time we either don't know or don't want to relinquish enough control to let that model be changed by the world.

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And that's very different than I'm going to go make the world change to conform with my model. It's like maybe something in me has to change. So I stop having this disconnect.

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Hopefully that's sort of making some sense.

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So much sense. It makes me think of one of my favorite terms that relates to depression is counterfactual processing, which is where we actually go into an event in the past and reimagine it the way we would like it to be, which is very counterproductive.

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And so all these mental kind of machinations to make things fit this kind of space of comfort that aren't working, but also that society tends to kind of emphasize, you know, we don't get a lot of messages growing up that tell us that our senses are safe or worthwhile engaging in or that even incorporate sensory training into curricula. I know that they're doing that in Australia in their school systems.

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But in the US, I don't see much of it. I do see mindfulness and that's starting.

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I just want to double click on something that you said.

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Which is that in depression, it's kind of adaptive to kind of shrink in and to cut off the difficult experiences in a way like it's a coping strategy, even if it's one that isn't working well and That kind of reminds me of the connections between depression and inflammation.

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And that kind of withdrawal and immobility is what's called like a sickness behavior that's adaptive, that's designed to kind of get energy back, but Even though it may not.

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One of the tools I love the most in your book is when you talk about novelty in sensation. And you probably don't remember this, but right after it was in 2014, right after a conference, the mind and life conference where we were at I think it was the very next day I was in a car accident and I broke my wrist on the dominant hand and you were really sweet. You reached out and said like, oh my gosh, what's happening? But that experience I had to do things with my non-dominant hand over and over again.

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And I remember the frustration and the discomfort and how hard it was.

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And then there was a moment on the train to New York where everything sort of clicked And I had this immediate mood boosting effect of using my non-dominant hand. And I really found that to be a kind of seminal experience in teaching me about novel movement. And you…

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You mentioned doing things with one's non-dominant hand as part of this menu of sensory experiences. And I would love if you would talk more about like, how do we expand the menu and also just have to say like, it's very cool that you're not in the book limiting us to interoception alone, but there's movement, there's visual exercises, auditory and tactile exercises. I feel like you're really

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Teaching us how to access that back part of the brain and develop this fuller menu. It's really not restrictive the way we can sometimes find in certain books. Can you say more about this menu and kind of your intentions behind it or or

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Any angle of that that you want to talk about.

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Yeah, no, thanks so much, Bo. And hopefully your wrist is a distant. You know, you're just even more ambidextrous than you would have been before.

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Yeah, again, it goes back to what you said, I think a little bit earlier is we just don't have a lot of encouragement to treat taking in new sensory experiences is something that's useful as we get older. Like, of course, you have to know like where the door frame is or like what you're doing on the road or something like that. But this idea of using sensation for exploration

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Is sort of something we're supposed to get over. And we're supposed to move into like an accurate model of the world because it's so much faster and it's controllable and it's predictable, right? And so to go back into sensation.

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Is effortful and not even just culturally like evolutionarily we're trying to like conserve energy, right? And so we can stay alive and reproduce. Those are like the two main things we're sort of able to do is don't die pass on your genes. And so it's really effortful to go from a place where things are automatic and predictable and known. And you know, like if I

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Try to do something with my arm it's going to go to the right place and it's going to grasp things. And then to move back to a place where like those things aren't really established routines. Yeah.

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We reacted in all kinds of different ways to what is essentially effort, right? That we don't know what's happening. We're not efficient. We're making mistakes.

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And that's because we are letting go of the need to, or because of necessity to use the conventional model and take a new information to update and inform new ways of knowing.

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And so you might say again, like, okay, well, I just have to like think about having an open mind. There's this tendency again to always think I'm going to rationally just like see things from a different perspective, but literally seeing from things how do you in the real world see something from a different perspective you go somewhere else. Like if I want to see my room from a different perspective, I need to walk across the room and look at it from a different perspective. I have to orient myself to

00:30:44.000 --> 00:30:59.000
A different way of taking a new sensory information. And not everything can happen at the level of metaphor. So if we want to learn how to use our body differently. We have to practice moving differently, right? And that will change our relationship with our body.

00:30:59.000 --> 00:31:10.000
If we want to have different relationships with people, we can't always act the same predictable way when someone says something we don't like or is aggressive to us or whatever it is.

00:31:10.000 --> 00:31:20.000
Because we're going to get the same result. That's like what we're our most intuitive thing to do, our most deeply ingrained habits have predictable results. That's why they're ingrained.

00:31:20.000 --> 00:31:26.000
So there's something that requires a bit of courage or abandon to say like.

00:31:26.000 --> 00:31:42.000
I'm going to abandon. I'm going to let go of knowing what's going to happen because I know that I feel like I'm stuck somewhere that's not as good as things could be. And they could get worse, right? Like I could try something different. I could try to pick something up with my non-dominant hand and lose my beautiful

00:31:42.000 --> 00:31:55.000
Lunch or whatever it is. But I will never get better at using that hint. I'll never find another way to eat. I'll never find another way to relate to another person if you want to generalize it into the relational space.

00:31:55.000 --> 00:32:06.000
If I'm not willing to give up on what's known and dissatisfying for the unknown. And that means it's not like things are always going to turn out better. Sometimes it will turn out worse.

00:32:06.000 --> 00:32:13.000
But a lot of times it's like, okay, right? And then sometimes it's worse and sometimes it's way better.

00:32:13.000 --> 00:32:28.000
And that whole menu of possibilities is only open when you start allowing things to occur differently, which means I'm going to maybe act a little different and I'm going to pay attention to different things. And so, yes, we do want to pay attention to our feelings because ultimately that's where our sense of

00:32:28.000 --> 00:32:45.000
Safety, security, well-being, and value lie. But that's not the only access point to changing how we relate. A lot of that happens out in the world. So how we move what body parts we use, what senses we attend to, what we attend to even within a really familiar place.

00:32:45.000 --> 00:32:58.000
Can shake things up. So even on a walk you've done a thousand times, you could pay attention to different things. You could decide that paying attention to the sensory experience on the walk was more important than getting to the place you're used to going to.

00:32:58.000 --> 00:33:04.000
For instance, and that alone is going to change the dynamics of the walk. And then you may find yourself responding differently.

00:33:04.000 --> 00:33:32.000
So it is this sort of radical of saying, I'm going to prioritize novelty and discovery over the safety and security of knowing temporarily, right? It's very, very rare almost ever to be able lose the ability to go back into the model that's like that's the dominant mode. So it's like, you know, if you're going to think of it from the top down, would you dedicate 1% of your time, 5% of your time

00:33:32.000 --> 00:33:47.000
To novelty and discovery and change or is it going to just be 100% of time defending what's already known? And many of us live lives where unintentionally, it's 100% of the time defending what's known and everything else is a disturbance and a source of aggravation.

00:33:47.000 --> 00:34:00.000
But it doesn't have to be that way if we if we valued it, just like, you know, sometimes you could eat vegetables if you're on an all carb diet, but only if you value that as contributing something to your nutrition. So we have that

00:34:00.000 --> 00:34:13.000
Knowledge that sometimes we do the thing that's uncomfortable in other domains like physical exercise or nutrition because it's been more culturally sort of integrated where I don't think we necessarily have that at the level of like, well, where do I find

00:34:13.000 --> 00:34:28.000
Meaning or creativity or connection in life at these higher levels we're still a bit backwards, I think, compared to how we've maybe understood that things that, you know, what I put into my body nutritionally matters or so on and so forth. Yeah.

00:34:28.000 --> 00:34:47.000
I think that's such an important concept because one thing I've noticed teaching internationally is how easily we can easily So just a couple, let me try to tease out what I'm trying to say. So one thing you're saying is that this doesn't, it's not about mastery.

00:34:47.000 --> 00:34:55.000
Of this whatever this new realm is that we're trying to get to. It may not turn out well. It may turn out great.

00:34:55.000 --> 00:35:05.000
And also, you know, having taught in so many other places, I've had people say to me countless times, well, this isn't the way I learned how to do this pose or this sequence or this is not what I'm used to.

00:35:05.000 --> 00:35:07.000
Right.

00:35:07.000 --> 00:35:26.000
And so what you're also sharing with us is that there is some discomfort in going into the realm of novelty because we do leave behind mastery and we do leave behind knowing like, I'm just going to reach my arm out in this way and it's going to work perfectly.

00:35:26.000 --> 00:35:45.000
And so I think it's just really important to acknowledge that it may not be super comfortable in a society that wants us to always be in charge of execution of things. And I think about how You know, my dad had a progressive neurological illness

00:35:45.000 --> 00:36:15.000
Which was a movement disorder, an ataxia. That kind of went along with dementia. And what was really interesting is that we would do yoga together a lot And it really taught me how no matter where you are in terms of your ability, he was like often in a wheelchair toward the end of his life, but he would get out of the wheelchair and kind of use his walker as like a tool to kind of lift off of with his arms and he could still get up and down off the floor. And

00:36:17.000 --> 00:36:47.000
Those experiences were so cool for him and so mood expanding and world expanding that, you know, whether or not you're in a wheelchair or experiencing temporary disability or more permanent disability These avenues are still really open to you for your whole life. They may just look a little different than what we've been trained. They should look like in a society that can be a little bit ableist, if you will.

00:36:50.000 --> 00:37:09.000
So I just want to highlight that discomfort and how if you are a movement or yoga person, often there's this temptation. I know I've experienced this to think, oh, I've got that covered. Like I can do the sensory thing just great.

00:37:09.000 --> 00:37:30.000
But what you're saying is like you're talking about finding the edge of that discomfort and kind of incorporating things that we're not used to doing And the way, I don't know if I'm putting words in your mouth, but the way that that experience of kind of expanding a repertoire then kind of

00:37:30.000 --> 00:37:49.000
Maybe trickles up to the brain In a way, you know, like that we're teaching ourselves these things through our bodies that then kind of have an effect on mood and thought patterns as opposed to trying to go in through the mind and brain.

00:37:49.000 --> 00:37:50.000
Ignoring the body.

00:37:50.000 --> 00:38:11.000
Yeah, definitely. We're trying to establish here is like, what is we know the art of of constructing things to be like solid and fixed what's the art of plasticity right and um And a healthy person needs both of those skills. I'm not trying to demonize having an understanding and having good habits.

00:38:11.000 --> 00:38:29.000
But I think you're pointing to really A crucial example that we're all inevitably either having gone through or going to go through which is like things are all going to keep getting better for us as we get older. Things are going to change. Roles are going to change and our physical ability is going to change.

00:38:29.000 --> 00:38:33.000
And many times it's going to change in a way that's constricting. I used to be able to do this.

00:38:33.000 --> 00:38:46.000
I can't do this anymore. And that's that classic recipe. I ought to be able to bend and touch my toe on my right side. I've developed, I did too many sports. I deal with some arthritis in my right hip.

00:38:46.000 --> 00:38:54.000
And when I do a yoga class now, it's like I have two bodies. I have my left side of my body, which does the things it's supposed to do. And then I have the right side of my body, which is like.

00:38:54.000 --> 00:39:12.000
This weird like regressive, it doesn't have the same range of motion it did before. So I can hold on to the model of like my left slide's right and my right side there's something wrong with it. And then I'm going to suffer every single time, like suffer not just like a twinge of pain or something like that, but suffer like at a deeper like existential level, like there's something wrong with me.

00:39:12.000 --> 00:39:26.000
Because I've changed for the worse. And that's a tough place to be, right? Or like my memory used to work right. Now it doesn't work so great anymore. I used to have this relationship. I don't have this relationship anymore.

00:39:26.000 --> 00:39:31.000
So as long as we hold on to like things were good then and now they're wrong.

00:39:31.000 --> 00:39:43.000
It's logical, it's rational that you will suffer. And so what is the art where you say like, well, why am I holding on to this model when I know it's not the way things are anymore?

00:39:43.000 --> 00:39:48.000
And you cannot, I really believe you cannot think yourself into acceptance.

00:39:48.000 --> 00:40:02.000
Acceptance is the process of having an experience having an experience and then not rejecting it when your pattern is rejecting it. And then maybe at one point, even like getting to the point you authentically say yes to it. But let's be realistic the first

00:40:02.000 --> 00:40:14.000
10 times, thousand times might be like just trying to turn the volume down on shouting no It's an experience that doesn't fit some model of who you were in the past or how the world was in the past.

00:40:14.000 --> 00:40:22.000
And how do you do that practice? You have to really start to value sensory information as helping you to change.

00:40:22.000 --> 00:40:32.000
When I can't move and my hip is saying, you can't do that anymore on this side, or just not even you can't do this anymore. Like right now you can't do this. And like, and I'm actually like, okay.

00:40:32.000 --> 00:40:39.000
Thank you for reminding me that I have a pattern that needs to change. That's a place of discovery rather than resentment.

00:40:39.000 --> 00:40:40.000
And a lot of times it's still going to go back into resentment. But I know I have a practice where I can be like.

00:40:40.000 --> 00:40:45.000
Yeah.

00:40:45.000 --> 00:40:52.000
Sometimes I'm up for a growing. If I can stay with this sensation and be like, what is it? What do I have to learn from this sensation?

00:40:52.000 --> 00:41:04.000
And that will slowly update my model. Now, what I would say is it's not every day, every second you're trying to find an edge, which is extremely effortful. It's not sustainable, right? And a lot of things we try to explore in the book is

00:41:04.000 --> 00:41:11.000
A lot of this practice, like anything, you want to have a place where it's safe or maybe even fun and inviting to practice.

00:41:11.000 --> 00:41:16.000
So that when you hit these places that are distressing, you have some wherewithal to do that.

00:41:16.000 --> 00:41:23.000
So that's why we'd invite people to find things, especially outside of their own heads, outside of their own bodies.

00:41:23.000 --> 00:41:35.000
That make it easier to practice this feeling of discovery, the saying yes to things. And there's lots of things in the world that are like that that are at least not harmful and maybe downright wholesome, right? So like getting outside

00:41:35.000 --> 00:41:55.000
Doing some kind of new exercise practice, appreciating art, talking to people that you already love and connect with and using those as a way to actually practice like I'm really going to be here for this sensation, the discovery because it's already like copacetic. It already feels good to do that, but I'm doing this because I am trying to develop this mastery because I know what it's like to make that move.

00:41:55.000 --> 00:42:08.000
Into sensation in a place that's safe and inviting. And that becomes, and so that for some people that's formal meditation, but part of why you wrote the book is you realize that like for less than 1% of the population, probably it's going to be formal meditation. Like most people hate

00:42:08.000 --> 00:42:19.000
Formal meditation. I get that like as a meditation researcher. And so this perverse project that a lot of mindfulness teachers kind of have. It's like, we're going to get the whole world to enjoy meditation. It's not going to work.

00:42:19.000 --> 00:42:39.000
And not everyone's going to love yoga and not everyone's going to love fine art or classical music or whatever or forest bathing or whatever it is But my belief is there is something sensory for everyone where it feels safe and it may even feel fun and enjoyable and that becomes your workshop, your gymnasium.

00:42:39.000 --> 00:42:44.000
And then when you go like for me, then when I go into my hip and it's like crappy, right? And I'm just like, oh, damn it.

00:42:44.000 --> 00:42:53.000
I can be like, okay, but I have a skill set that I can bring in sunny day on in sunny kind of situations that I can bring here too, where it's just like.

00:42:53.000 --> 00:43:00.000
Can I just let go of the resentment for a second and actually treat this as a chance to take a new information and grow.

00:43:00.000 --> 00:43:05.000
And sometimes the answer is no, and I have to do other things just to calm myself down. But sometimes the answer is yes.

00:43:05.000 --> 00:43:13.000
And you go for the victories where you can get them. And those are the moments where you change, right? And there's other times it's so overwhelming. You just need to find some relief.

00:43:13.000 --> 00:43:21.000
One really common example that comes up is people on their phones or people in their vices like a glass of wine or something like that. And I'll say is like.

00:43:21.000 --> 00:43:33.000
Sometimes you just need to like watch stupid television and have your glass of wine and do whatever it is because You're so dysregulated already, you're not able to put in any effort and really discovering change and don't beat yourself up for that.

00:43:33.000 --> 00:43:53.000
And on the other times you go on your phone and you're like, I'm actually going to just like use this as a chance to notice like when I watch a dumb video like What does it really feel like to take in this information and feel something funny as opposed to like confirmed, funny, swipe, confirmed, funny, swipe, which is what like kids are doing all the time. When I actually drink that wine, I'm not just waiting for it to numb me out.

00:43:53.000 --> 00:43:57.000
Like, can I actually do the thing I see people do on TV and like taste it?

00:43:57.000 --> 00:44:14.000
And so you find places of meeting your meeting sensory experience with the effort level you have and and project is like the goal is to at least be doing that some of the time and over time moving into that mode does become easier. Like I can say from research and from my own

00:44:14.000 --> 00:44:35.000
Personal experience, but it's not necessarily always available. It depends on how much energy you have and where you're in and how much distress you're already in. So sometimes just going into sensation or going into an activity just for relief is okay. And other times you're going to use it as that chance for insight, as that chance for discovery and growth. And if you're doing that some of the time.

00:44:35.000 --> 00:44:53.000
That's better than doing it none of the time. That at least means some of the time you're growing and some of the time you're just trying to relieve distress and protect yourself. And again, life is made of balancing those things.

00:44:53.000 --> 00:44:54.000
Right.

00:44:54.000 --> 00:45:17.000
It's so important what you're saying about this balance between safety and familiarity and then the novelty. I remember when I first fell in love with novel movement and sensory experience, I wanted that to be like 75% of class and people were not happy. And so my students have been really generous teachers to me and kind of saying like, hey, that is too much. We need more like familiar ground, which was really important.

00:45:17.000 --> 00:45:47.000
And also, you know, I remember, so I've had like many hip surgeries for different like congenital reasons and I've always taught on crutches after that. And I remember one day trying to get people to get people to In the transition from downward dog into a lunge where people just automatically fling a leg forward. So it would make it all the way there to their hands. I just decided to show people where I could go, which was like

00:45:48.000 --> 00:46:13.000
A foot and a half forward. And then how I would like navigate the rest of the way. And it was very profound because after that class, people came up like in tears saying like, I wasn't really able to not make it to my hands until you show that you can't make it there. And so what you're talking about too

00:46:13.000 --> 00:46:23.000
Excuse me, a little froggy today, is a kind of relationality with our bodies and with what we can do and when.

00:46:23.000 --> 00:46:48.000
And that we're kind of that in community reminding one another that it's not about like achievement and And again, performance, but that it's about relationship over time and how we respond when something isn't maybe flowing the way we would want it to. So I feel like that's a really

00:46:48.000 --> 00:46:55.000
Excuse me, key message. And also.

00:46:55.000 --> 00:47:20.000
I feel like this message about being able to reside in difficult spaces is really important. You know, one of the critiques of modern mindfulness is that it's kind of trying to make us really over regulate and feel better about things that are really kind of concerning or unjust.

00:47:20.000 --> 00:47:28.000
And that sometimes kind of residing in that place of friction, I guess you could call it.

00:47:28.000 --> 00:47:49.000
Is important. Yeah, so I'm i'm i'm I'm thinking about that and then also in one of one of the tools I love the most in your book and some of my teacher training peeps will recognize this is that you mentioned a tool for change that we've used perhaps in a

00:47:49.000 --> 00:48:07.000
Maybe slightly different flavor in my community to help people develop awareness between like where we are now and where we're going. And we called it toggling. And so it was amazing to see you talk about that very word toggling in your book.

00:48:07.000 --> 00:48:17.000
So can you describe the tool of toggling and how you're using the term and why it's so like fruitful and generative?

00:48:17.000 --> 00:48:19.000
And important is that like would that be helpful to people

00:48:19.000 --> 00:48:31.000
Yeah. I think so, because I think that there might be a tendency, this happens a lot in contemplative practices, to say, well, if I just went completely into the sensory non-dual awareness.

00:48:31.000 --> 00:48:53.000
You know, that would be great. It would be utopian and be like, no one's going to grow food like no one's gonna stop someone else from doing something bad and someone else like you know in this non-dual awareness like everything is everything is everything so That's where we can have this kind of like richness and discovery and growth and there's and non-judgment, which is really, really important.

00:48:53.000 --> 00:49:05.000
And so it's important for us to learn this mode, but that doesn't mean we abandon having models of the world and having values and standards. And so the idea of toggling is realizing that it's part of who we are

00:49:05.000 --> 00:49:28.000
Is this model, right? That's how we actually, we don't even see things really. We see how sensory information matches or mismatches the model. And so we were both these things. We were the chaos of the world coming in, right? That's part of who we are. And that's the sort of sensory exploration side of us. And we are also the model. And to abandon that would also be pathological. So when the models overdeveloped, we have

00:49:28.000 --> 00:49:35.000
Anxiety and depression disorders like that, where we have over determined patterns of ruminating about the past or worrying about the future.

00:49:35.000 --> 00:49:41.000
But if you take people who go completely to the place where those models disintegrate, you have like depersonalization.

00:49:41.000 --> 00:49:56.000
Derealization where nothing matters, nothing means anything. It's a nihilism escape into nihilistic escape into sensation, also not good, right? So toggling is recognizing that there's this teeter totter, right? This balance.

00:49:56.000 --> 00:50:09.000
Between these systems that in a healthy person is trying to find that balance. And most of the times when we feel unhealthy, things have either gotten too wild and uncontrollable and there's too much coming in. It's overwhelming.

00:50:09.000 --> 00:50:23.000
And then we try to find refuge in something stable or things have become so stable, this is harder to recognize sometimes that things seem disconnected and hopeless and meaningless and languish and all these kind of things. And toggling is realizing that there's a move

00:50:23.000 --> 00:50:39.000
To rebalance things, right? So when I feel stuck that means things have become over determined and it's time to toggle into sensation and discovery and let go of the reins a little bit and let ourselves be changed because we know we're not satisfied in the stability that we've found.

00:50:39.000 --> 00:50:54.000
And when things seemed so chaotic and uh and you know, we have no idea what's going on. That's time to try to actually form knowledge and update our beliefs, knowing that no one belief is going to be correct or right.

00:50:54.000 --> 00:51:04.000
Permanently all the time, right? But what that toggling allows then is for us to have a belief system of all of the world that's also flexible when we start realizing it's not working for us.

00:51:04.000 --> 00:51:12.000
So toggling is sort of that higher level commitment to now I have two skills. I have the ability to refine knowledge and rationalize and conceptualize.

00:51:12.000 --> 00:51:18.000
And I have the ability to break down my concepts and open them up for modification by moving into the sensory world.

00:51:18.000 --> 00:51:27.000
And so rather than think that I'm going to get really good at one and derogate people who do the other, which we tend to do like in group and out-group everyone.

00:51:27.000 --> 00:51:39.000
But it comes down to like really old wisdom. And actually the whole idea behind toggling, I think, links directly into the serenity prayer right which is I'm going to maybe not say it exactly right, but you say like, you know, I want to know

00:51:39.000 --> 00:51:57.000
Which battles I'm supposed to fight, like when I'm supposed to get out in the world and fight for the things I really want. Like, Lord, give me the wisdom to fight the battles Or make the change in the world that it's supposed to have. And also give me the wisdom to accept things when there's nothing for me to do other than change my expectation that they're going to be different, which is the sensory updating.

00:51:57.000 --> 00:52:15.000
And then wisdom is to know which one to do. And you're hoping you're toggled in the right direction and you don't make things worse by going deeper into a model when the model needs to change or abandoning the model when there's something really important about who you are fundamentally that you don't want to just give up.

00:52:15.000 --> 00:52:34.000
And so each of us has to make that determination all the time in what seems like it's not helpful is to assume that we just always want to double down on one system versus another. And most of the time in the West, we're doubling down on let's let's protect the model and get mad at the world for not meeting it. So the wisdom comes in realizing

00:52:34.000 --> 00:52:45.000
We should be moving in both directions and we'll feel good when there's a balance, when we know things about ourselves But we don't feel like we would be destroyed if we had to change one of those things.

00:52:45.000 --> 00:52:56.000
I also, I love that. And I want to also confess that You've been so instrumental in Excuse me.

00:52:56.000 --> 00:53:26.000
In kind of reminding me that like sensory exploration isn't excluding… kind of doesn't exclude cognitive processing, like the cognition and kind of putting a frame around that experience and understanding it is is compatible. So there are cognitive levels where we're processing interreception. And every time I get overexcited about sensory awareness you've been just so beautiful and are saying like, well, yeah, just keep in mind that

00:53:31.000 --> 00:53:40.000
You know, you can still have cognition here in these places, you know, as a kind of structure if Is that accurate?

00:53:40.000 --> 00:53:41.000
To say would you add?

00:53:41.000 --> 00:53:59.000
Yeah, I think so. Believing any one thing is the thing is probably going to get you you're going to find times that it's not like we need multiple tools for navigating through life and this is at least a cartoon kind of dichotomy, but still a really important realizing that you can take things too far

00:53:59.000 --> 00:54:18.000
Either way. And I, you know, I come from a place where I had a very rational like top-down dad and a very emotional like validate my emotional experience kind of home. And so, you know, I grew up as a kid trying to like be like, okay, I'm not choosing one of you as being the right parent, right? And both of you have suffered suffer in different ways so

00:54:18.000 --> 00:54:35.000
We can still be open to the sensory world, the feeling world, and realize that that's a source of knowledge, right? And we can be open to the rational world realizing that people can reason themselves into terrible situations also. And there's times when you need to pay attention to that visceral signal

00:54:35.000 --> 00:54:44.000
And then there's just so many life examples where that happens, right? Where you win an rational argument and you lose a relationship, right? And then at the end, you're like, oh, actually.

00:54:44.000 --> 00:54:47.000
The feeling in the relationship was what was more important to me.

00:54:47.000 --> 00:54:54.000
Why did I defend reason so strongly when by being right, I lost what actually mattered.

00:54:54.000 --> 00:55:04.000
And other times it can be like, well, I needed to tell the truth of my emotional experience so much that I just shattered a whole bunch of commitments I made because I really didn't like it at the time.

00:55:04.000 --> 00:55:14.000
And now I have to pick up the pieces. And that's also being like, yeah, sometimes it matters that you promise to do something just because you really powerfully feel something doesn't mean that the world has to shift around that.

00:55:14.000 --> 00:55:38.000
That either it's important to sort of contextualize that with like, well, how does that interrelate to all the other complexity and things you know about the world and cause and effect so it's important to give each of the spotlight on each part of ourselves and we're going to mess it up. But at least we're trying to realize that there's a tension between these things, the sensory and discovery and feeling state and knowledge and

00:55:38.000 --> 00:55:54.000
Rules and commitments and logic and moving into our senses as a way of unsticking ourselves from inheriting a whole bunch of reasons or or lines of argument that really don't fit with us.

00:55:54.000 --> 00:56:04.000
Yeah, we talk mostly about sense foraging because we think the imbalance tends to be on the rational side, but it doesn't mean we abandon the rational side either.

00:56:04.000 --> 00:56:25.000
I love that. I have to say that the exercises in the book are so um are kind of scaffolded with so much care in a way that's like really unusual and literally you could return to them over and over again as opposed to like sometimes you just get

00:56:25.000 --> 00:56:33.000
Here's one exercise and then here's another and they maybe don't relate, but you really sequence them in a beautiful way.

00:56:33.000 --> 00:56:42.000
And there's one in particular element of exercises that I wanted to talk about.

00:56:42.000 --> 00:57:06.000
That I've never seen before in a science-based self-help or any self-help book for that matter that I found really absolutely genius.

00:57:06.000 --> 00:57:07.000
Yeah.

00:57:07.000 --> 00:57:12.000
And I can't recall where in the book it starts, but it kind of hit me suddenly that you have this contrast between a tired version of sensory exploration and what you call a wired version And I interpreted the former as like a kind of rote habitual

00:57:12.000 --> 00:57:31.000
Almost like resentful way of approaching sense foraging where you're just checking a box and doing it almost on autopilot versus what I experienced as a really open door kind of perceptual way. And it was so brilliant.

00:57:31.000 --> 00:57:40.000
And, you know, it made me think about the way it's very easy for us to kind of feel like, oh, I know that terrain. There's nothing new there for me.

00:57:40.000 --> 00:57:53.000
And how that can kind of shut down the very novelty that you talk about as being transformative. Can you bring that contrast to life a little bit for us?

00:57:53.000 --> 00:57:54.000
Yeah.

00:57:54.000 --> 00:58:11.000
Great. No, thanks so much for bringing that up. That distinction tired versus wired and we're trying to be like cool But also like it was later in the book, we're talking about access points, which is like finding the types of sensory practices are going to work for you. And you can just do them by rote, right? So like I might say, look around your room

00:58:11.000 --> 00:58:24.000
Or whatever environment and try to find something you normally don't pay any attention to, right? So that would be a very simple sun foraging kind of practice to just get you into a sensory mode And, you know.

00:58:24.000 --> 00:58:32.000
The tired way to do it is like you do it and you're like now where's like you put your hand out and you're like, now where's my happiness, right? Like, and it's just like, it becomes this transactional thing where we're like.

00:58:32.000 --> 00:58:43.000
She told me I would do this and I would do exit, I'd get why. And you're just like still stuck in like modeling and expectations space, right?

00:58:43.000 --> 00:58:56.000
And the distinction between tired and wired is wired is like really taking on the intention is the thing that we actually have the most control over uh that Really what I'm hoping for here is a chance to be surprised and discover something.

00:58:56.000 --> 00:59:05.000
And that's where like the juices So I can move my eyes around the room and find something that I know, like the frequency at which my eyes fixate on it is low.

00:59:05.000 --> 00:59:22.000
Now I've completed the task like Where is my happiness, right? I've actually like not trying to discover something there um right i'm just trying to like be a good student And we do this so much of the time. It's like performative, right? As opposed to

00:59:22.000 --> 00:59:35.000
Thinking like, I wonder if I could see something like I see something in this room from a perspective I've never seen before I wonder like how i would what feeling would come after that and what thoughts would come after that and like

00:59:35.000 --> 00:59:42.000
I've never looked at this one shoe before. Whose shoe is this? Sorry, I'm a little like mud room area to the left of me here.

00:59:42.000 --> 00:59:58.000
And just like, when's the last time anyone wore that? And like, where were we and And what does it remind me of and um And then my mind just can go in places not like they're like brilliant insights. I'm going to discover some general theory of relativity. They're just going to take me places I wouldn't normally go.

00:59:58.000 --> 01:00:14.000
And what I'm really valuing is that I'm having this kind of novel break from the routine. And all of a sudden the boring. It is explicitly like objectively boring to notice a shoe. You know what I mean? It's not anymore because I'm inside the experience

01:00:14.000 --> 01:00:30.000
And one thing I think that I've learned, whether it's right or not, this is my understanding of like a lot of contemplative practices is the thing that you really have control over is just how you come to meet an experience, right? Like, so if like, if you're doing loving kindness practice, the thing you have control over is do you really intend

01:00:30.000 --> 01:00:39.000
To send out a feeling of love and compassion, whether or not you feel great afterwards like not up to you really a lot of the time.

01:00:39.000 --> 01:00:51.000
And so the wired thing is like put your effort into the thing where you can control the outcome and but the somewhat weird, like perverse things is the outcome isn't the outcome. The outcome is like the starting point. That's the part where you control.

01:00:51.000 --> 01:00:58.000
So I can control like, am I authentically approaching this exercise with curiosity and a willingness to be surprised.

01:00:58.000 --> 01:00:59.000
Yeah.

01:00:59.000 --> 01:01:04.000
I can control that part of it. Whether or not I get surprised and discover something or it turns out to just be like, yep, there's issue there and I move on.

01:01:04.000 --> 01:01:13.000
I can't control that part of it. So where I can make sure I have a win is like, did I set myself up? Like that's the practice. Did I set myself up to be receptive?

01:01:13.000 --> 01:01:25.000
To taking in something new. And sometimes it's there and sometimes it's not. And the way I think about it is If you do that authentically, you've at least raised the chance of discovery of having a new experience of changing yourself.

01:01:25.000 --> 01:01:35.000
From like zero to non-zero. And then sometimes it'll be like 100 and sometimes it'll be like 0.01 but like it's still something where there was no possibility for change before.

01:01:35.000 --> 01:01:42.000
So while you're just setting yourself up for that. That receptiveness. And what I really believe is, and I've seen in my own life.

01:01:42.000 --> 01:01:50.000
Is if you set up some sort of habit of looking for something with a non-zero possibility in the world, it will show up.

01:01:50.000 --> 01:01:57.000
Not in a mystical way. It's just there's like a bazillion things happening all the time every day and we're filtering it down to very small few.

01:01:57.000 --> 01:02:17.000
If you're really open to that thing, sometimes it will be a lot different than zero. And sometimes it will just be zero, but you'll never notice it unless you get yourself into that place of like, I'm willing to have a non-zero possibility of discovery in whatever domain it is that I care about. And you can get better and better at noticing the things you tune yourself

01:02:17.000 --> 01:02:25.000
To notice. So that gets us into the sort of more rarefied era of like now I'm developing some expertise in sense foraging.

01:02:25.000 --> 01:02:46.000
Nothing I've ever seen the distinction so eloquently or maybe even at all as opposed to like this outcome based like do this and you're going to get this. And I found it really useful and very generative in terms of like pointing us to

01:02:46.000 --> 01:03:01.000
Immersion, a kind of wholehearted engagement in the endeavor as opposed to here's an exercise I'm going to check the box and then, you know, and then maybe I'll abandon it if it didn't quote unquote work.

01:03:01.000 --> 01:03:02.000
Which was really useful.

01:03:02.000 --> 01:03:15.000
Mm-hmm. Right, right. If the game you're playing is like, I want to be into a state where I can change myself, then start with changing yourself. Start with like being like, I'm not going to like, it may show up as boring, but I'm not going to start off

01:03:15.000 --> 01:03:37.000
Anticipating boredom, like I'm going to change myself from a place of resignation or even just knowing. It doesn't mean resonation It's just a place of not knowing. And that shift is the shift into sensation, interceptivity, into plasticity, and it can become more familiar and you can get better at it. It's already available if you're doing it for the first time.

01:03:37.000 --> 01:03:48.000
Just like, do you want it bad enough? Are you resigned enough that things could be better than the way they are now that they're stuck, that you're willing just for a second to let go and move into a place where you're willing to change.

01:03:48.000 --> 01:03:54.000
And like, that's the move and then like the move if you do that over time, things will change.

01:03:54.000 --> 01:04:02.000
Your attention is sufficient. When it comes from an authentic place to change your mind.

01:04:02.000 --> 01:04:03.000
So, yeah.

01:04:03.000 --> 01:04:19.000
I really love that. It's also like the potential application of the tools I found to be like a very wide ranging. There is a favorite anecdote that I have in the book, which is the chef Renee, who kind of finds himself

01:04:19.000 --> 01:04:33.000
Maybe in danger of replicating the patterns that we know from TV shows with chefs where there's this kind of like, you know, striving and perhaps even like abuse of the people around you.

01:04:33.000 --> 01:04:50.000
And he takes a break at what one might consider a bad time to do that like just when he's kind of on the verge of something and goes into the forest and starts sense foraging literally for or foraging for

01:04:50.000 --> 01:05:11.000
You know different foods and it made me think about how for so many of us at this point in time, both through COVID and through other social factors, we are considering like, well, how can I serve in a different way? How can I be of use in the world?

01:05:11.000 --> 01:05:41.000
And so there's this idea of sense foraging as a way of kind of without being outcome focused, kind of conveying us into this next thing by way of kind of sensing and feeling and allowing something to take form in an organic way that I found to be like very mind expanding and illuminative. And I suspect there are a lot of people on this call and who will watch later who are kind of wondering like.

01:05:45.000 --> 01:05:58.000
In this world that we're living in, like maybe what I've been doing is not what I'll be doing forever. And maybe it's time to kind of shift into something different.

01:05:58.000 --> 01:06:17.000
But that is really scary for all the reasons you talked about and like utilizing sense foraging as a as a kind of vehicle or method of conveyance to get there just feels really powerful to me. And I wanted to bring that up as something that I really loved.

01:06:17.000 --> 01:06:21.000
And we'll probably reread quite a few times.

01:06:21.000 --> 01:06:35.000
Yeah, I mean, and truth be told, like the chef, he himself has oscillated from these patterns of discovery back into this kind of calcification and eventually walked away from that restaurant at the time of writing it, it was like, he was back on the upswing. So like.

01:06:35.000 --> 01:06:50.000
It's not, again, you move into sense for editing, then happily ever after, never have a problem Again, but exactly as you say, but we're living in a time where it's very easy to just say I reject the way the world is right now. I do not accept the way the world is right now.

01:06:50.000 --> 01:07:04.000
But just saying no to the way you understand the world creates a kind of powerlessness Because you have powerlessness. Yeah, because you have this understanding of the world and you just say like, I don't want it to be this way so you suffer.

01:07:04.000 --> 01:07:20.000
And many times are suffering for good reason because of things we're aware of are are not good things, right? There's atrocities and injustices uh And we have enough technology now to bring it all to us every day constant feed.

01:07:20.000 --> 01:07:37.000
So part of that is knowing when just to not continue to take in conceptual information that's upsetting because it's just dysregulating you, but that's all you're doing, you're kind of putting your head in the sand. And so if the goal is to

01:07:37.000 --> 01:07:53.000
Be an agent in the world for the things that you want. One thing we can think about is how much time are we spending actually being intentional about foraging, right? Like seeking out the way we want the world to be. So rather than just saying like, I don't want this. I wish things were different.

01:07:53.000 --> 01:08:02.000
Which maybe is the beginning of the motivation, right? It's like we're stuck. That's that feeling of stuckness, right? We're stuck in a way. And I know it could be better than this.

01:08:02.000 --> 01:08:07.000
So what's better? Well, I know it's better. So what is better?

01:08:07.000 --> 01:08:15.000
And pick something, right? There's lots of different ways things could be better i wish people were more open, more loving, more honest.

01:08:15.000 --> 01:08:23.000
Cool. So that's the thing you want to forage for. Great. And then the thing is, but I don't know what that looks like. I don't know how to get there.

01:08:23.000 --> 01:08:31.000
Perfect. So you know that like there's something you want that would make things better for you, right? Like in terms of how you see the world, how it could be better.

01:08:31.000 --> 01:08:39.000
And you don't know what it looks like. That is a great fuel for having an intention to move into this kind of foraging, right?

01:08:39.000 --> 01:08:49.000
And then where do you forage? You forage in real life in the world that's around you, right? And so some of that could come in like keyboard activism and things like that. But most of it, I think, comes from like

01:08:49.000 --> 01:09:08.000
Who am I interacting with every day? What are my opportunities out in the world And I'm going to tune myself to be receptive for where there's a chance for connection, right? There's a chance for honesty. There's a chance for love. There's a chance for generosity. And those chances are there if you're not so much as saying like, not this, not this, protect, protect.

01:09:08.000 --> 01:09:20.000
But where are those chances? You're going to find those chances. They'll be in people you know, they'll be in people you don't expect. They might be with people you don't expect them to be. They'll be in actions you never expected yourself to take.

01:09:20.000 --> 01:09:40.000
And if you're open to those opportunities, I mean, another cliche that doesn't have to just be a cliche is this idea of like success is preparation meaning opportunity, right? So the preparation you can make is preparing yourself to know what you're looking for in the world that would be better than this, as opposed to just saying not this.

01:09:40.000 --> 01:09:56.000
And then you're just waiting for the opportunity and then you're ready, right? You're ready for those successes and those successes can be very very modest, right? It can be like a little act of kindness, a little act of generosity, a little time when you show honesty where you would normally hide something because maybe it's risky.

01:09:56.000 --> 01:10:06.000
And that's where your power is, right? And one thing I often would say to people and they're like, oh, we have to, you know, are we going to fix the world as generations? Like, that's not your job.

01:10:06.000 --> 01:10:21.000
Your job is to try to express the values that you want to see for you in your life and let other people live their lives. And if you do something that's like amazing, right, other people will want that for themselves too. It's not your job to live to control other people.

01:10:21.000 --> 01:10:37.000
Do, right? So kind of be that person, right? And the way you find out how to be that person is by knowing kind of what you're foraging for, what you're up to, and then staying ready for those opportunities And at a local like moment by moment level, they're there every day.

01:10:37.000 --> 01:10:55.000
And then they can build. And that's often how these things start. Very few people mastermind becoming the leader of some movement or something like that, right? It's just like they they stumble their way choice by choice into that thing. And most of us don't have to do that to make a change. So it's moving into a place of empowerment by becoming clear

01:10:55.000 --> 01:11:03.000
About what we would like to see in the world instead of always focusing our attention on wishing someone else were different.

01:11:03.000 --> 01:11:17.000
Love that and it's… It's such a great kind of touchstone for how to move through this world that we're in, which is really rapidly shifting.

01:11:17.000 --> 01:11:18.000
Mm-hmm.

01:11:18.000 --> 01:11:30.000
I'm mindful of the time and I want to open things out, but I also wanted to share along those lines an experience that I had that the book sort of helped me put a frame around.

01:11:30.000 --> 01:11:48.000
And I haven't really talked about this much, but This may resonate with some of you and I haven't really spoken about this, but over the past 18 months of speaking out about Palestine, I have gotten a ton of sort of

01:11:48.000 --> 01:12:12.000
Initially and still actually hate mail and harassment from people that were employers and at national conferences and studios and yoga students and members of my community and In the beginning of that experience, I had a lot of really, I would say anticipatory fear and anxiety and discomfort and vigilance.

01:12:12.000 --> 01:12:28.000
And then that kind of, as I stayed with that, moved into kind of experiencing social ostracism from my in-group, which included yoga people, you know, mindfulness people, and even other Jewish people.

01:12:28.000 --> 01:12:58.000
And I was my initial kind of approach was to want to push through that to not really fully feel that. And as I became sort of more able to incorporate this wider range of sensations, particularly to kind of include and maybe even embrace this sense of ostracism or, you know, what some people call social pain.

01:12:58.000 --> 01:13:18.000
I kind of remained in this a little bit of a limbo. And then the book helped me kind of toggle the rest of the way to something new. And instead of staying in that place, I think it gave me the freedom to forage a little bit more within that.

01:13:18.000 --> 01:13:47.000
And to kind of organically allow the process to bring me to something that doesn't really have form yet, but that is a little different, which is Lots to do with this narrative of rejection or repression of speech. But like, what is it like to untether from a social in-group and all those norms, which is

01:13:47.000 --> 01:14:08.000
Kind of a little bit of a default conceptual framework And to kind of explore what it means to exist a little bit adrift from that, which is really a different feeling. I don't know where it's going to go because it's still very much in process. But in case that resonates for

01:14:08.000 --> 01:14:27.000
Anyone else or people perhaps in the US and elsewhere that are going through these early versions of what looks like repression and trying to kind of figure out, well, how could this apply to the difficulty of activism in this moment?

01:14:27.000 --> 01:14:55.000
Particularly when there is a price for speaking out. And so many of us have been trained not to do that. Anyway, I just wanted to highlight my gratitude for the model of sun's foraging because it it doesn't force a conclusion as you talked about, like where there's this neat bow around everything or even an understanding of like where where is that going to go or

01:14:55.000 --> 01:15:21.000
How much of this can I tolerate or this narrative, like this rejection narrative, which is kind of a narrative that's common in depression, just on a social scale. So I just wanted to really encourage people to know that this, even though it might not be a purpose of the book, like one of the beautiful nodes of generativity is how many places we can apply this and

01:15:21.000 --> 01:15:35.000
You don't have to comment on that norm i don't want to kind of push that framework here, but just to say how helpful I think it can be even in places where we might not expect it.

01:15:35.000 --> 01:15:36.000
Yeah.

01:15:36.000 --> 01:16:02.000
No, I mean, thank you for being courageous and sharing your experience. And yeah, without weighing in on like, you know, politics specifically i think It's natural for this to be scary, especially when we're talking about it at the level of like relationships and vocation, right? Like in your livelihood. And we all depend on each other and feeling like some of those things are cut off is like…

01:16:02.000 --> 01:16:08.000
It's not like, oh, you're overreacting to be concerned. And what am I doing?

01:16:08.000 --> 01:16:21.000
And… And so, yeah, I don't think the model is like, just go forage and like burn all the bridges behind you. But sometimes there is a sense of like things are changing.

01:16:21.000 --> 01:16:34.000
And sometimes you have to let go of the rope to find out what comes next for you and holding on to the very edge of the rope, especially when you realize like it's burning, right? Like it is not going it

01:16:34.000 --> 01:16:52.000
It's no place to live out the rest of your days so in a way that's hopefully considered and not like just a total rejection running away from the way life is, continuing to explore like what else is possible, which also I think, as you're saying like sometimes he's putting yourself out there and realizing that

01:16:52.000 --> 01:16:59.000
Now that you're sort of expressing a different thing you're forging for, there's other communities that you'll now be entering into.

01:16:59.000 --> 01:17:00.000
Yeah.

01:17:00.000 --> 01:17:17.000
Is part of that process. And there's going to be times that are just overwhelming where you might just use going into sensation just to get some relief and break out of the whole narrative completely. And other times you're going to go look specifically for like, what does this look like for me in the future and now who are my people

01:17:17.000 --> 01:17:22.000
And that's part of that. That exploration.

01:17:22.000 --> 01:17:38.000
And realizing that a lot of that pain and conflict, I think, as you just articulated it so well already is from seeing it's like a morning almost for this model that that it was like safe and you thought that that was going to be it, right? And now you're just like, maybe it's not right like

01:17:38.000 --> 01:17:45.000
None of us want to live in a time when the whole world changes, but are we ready if it does?

01:17:45.000 --> 01:17:46.000
Yeah.

01:17:46.000 --> 01:17:52.000
So yeah, we'll see. We don't have to decide that everything everything is changing today.

01:17:52.000 --> 01:17:58.000
But we also don't want to ignore when change starts to come and change always comes.

01:17:58.000 --> 01:18:12.000
In smaller big ways and maybe more recently like in big ways so trying to stay open and remind yourself like, what am I forging for in the face of this change and not letting other people write that narrative for you? I think I wrote this in the emails like

01:18:12.000 --> 01:18:16.000
Everyone wants to tell everyone else how to live their life.

01:18:16.000 --> 01:18:27.000
But ultimately, you get to decide and don't let people take that choice away from you and there will be other people, you know, there's always boundary conditions, but for the most case, if you're doing it from a place of

01:18:27.000 --> 01:18:41.000
Of love and exploration, there's going to be other people that you discover for every person who turns away so Yeah, and it's hard. So, I mean, just thanks for sharing it but We're all kind of on that journey, I think.

01:18:41.000 --> 01:19:10.000
And I just want to double click on what you just said and really like highlight that inquiry of it's kind of like a what would you call it it's like a one of our primal questions. What am I foraging for in this situation that can change and i just wanted to highlight how important that is to continue to kind of engage with and to ask. So thank you for that. And it wasn't until rereading the book that that started to

01:19:10.000 --> 01:19:14.000
Coalesce in a different way. So I'm really grateful.

01:19:14.000 --> 01:19:20.000
Right. And also not getting caught up in other people's like other people are foraging for other things like looking good or whatever looking and doing the right thing on on social media or whatever it is.

01:19:20.000 --> 01:19:25.000
Yeah.

01:19:25.000 --> 01:19:40.000
And it's almost like if you clear that that has nothing to do with what you're forging for, you don't even always have like it for me it just frees up. I don't even have to engage. Like you said this thing to me and I'm just like, I don't even have to respond because it doesn't serve what I'm wanting, and I don't work for your agenda like

01:19:40.000 --> 01:19:56.000
Your agenda of being even in some dialogues, right? Like it just uh it's it's something that right so Obviously, we have to address like direct challenges to our livelihood and to our cherished relationships but there's a lot of other places that are like bait

01:19:56.000 --> 01:20:08.000
And if we're clear what we're going for, like we don't have to take that beat and that just frees us up to do the things that we actually want to do because more than ever, we're living in a world where there's very carefully constructed

01:20:08.000 --> 01:20:23.000
I guess you use the word like baits for us to get sucked up and to use all of our attention and all of our energy And what it's doing is it's the loss of the opportunity to be the people we want to be. So like trying to hold on to that and finding communities that support you in that.

01:20:23.000 --> 01:20:25.000
Is so important. So it seems like you've already you're fostering that community

01:20:25.000 --> 01:20:44.000
I love that. Yeah, and you use this beautiful term that I want to end with and then take questions, which was like, and it was a different context that we were talking about, but you use the term a visceral call to action. And I just wanted to kind of leave us with that.

01:20:44.000 --> 01:20:56.000
That which is a kind of another way of saying, what am I foraging for? And knowing that we can forage amid that discomfort. So thank you for that.

01:20:56.000 --> 01:21:11.000
All right, we've done enough. It's been enough me. So how might we do this? I think if you want to raise your hand, we would be happy to unmute you. I think I just raised my own hand. I'm going to go.

01:21:11.000 --> 01:21:12.000
Lower my hand.

01:21:12.000 --> 01:21:17.000
You're demonstrating. Like so.

01:21:17.000 --> 01:21:43.000
Oh, okay. And I see a few already. So what I'll do is I'll just monitor the participant window, Norm, and then you can respond. So the first hand that I see I'm going to take, which is Chelsea W. I'm going to allow you to talk and ask you to unmute and you can talk. If anyone wants to just enter it in the chat, you can do that too. But it's also always lovely to hear you.

01:21:43.000 --> 01:21:47.000
Are you with us, Chelsea? Yes, you are. I can see you. You might have to unmute first.

01:21:47.000 --> 01:21:51.000
I just have to unmute. Yeah.

01:21:51.000 --> 01:21:53.000
Oh, how about now? Great. Thank you. Thank you so much for this.

01:21:53.000 --> 01:21:54.000
Perfect.

01:21:54.000 --> 01:21:57.000
Yeah, that's good.

01:21:57.000 --> 01:22:11.000
It's so important for everybody and I absolutely don't want to minimize that. I just can't stop thinking about the applications with depression and clinical Applications, basically.

01:22:11.000 --> 01:22:30.000
And I don't think you're a clinician, but I'm just really curious if there have been if there's been a line of research since that 2010 using this.

01:22:30.000 --> 01:22:31.000
Sure.

01:22:31.000 --> 01:22:41.000
Or at least exploring how it could be used as treatment for depression which it which would look a little different you know just your typical person out there exploring this stuff, which is so cool regardless of what we're trying to treat. And then if not, I'd be really curious how you would design

01:22:41.000 --> 01:22:45.000
A study like that.

01:22:45.000 --> 01:23:02.000
Thanks so much for the question. So we have been continuing down the rabbit hole of depression specifically around depression, relapse and recurrence. So people who already have developed clear habits of being able to become depressed as evidenced by them having had multiple episodes in the past.

01:23:02.000 --> 01:23:26.000
And we see this pattern not only persist, but intensifies. So for someone who has a a history of depression paying attention to their senses is not sufficient necessarily to fully rebalance the scales. What we see happening for people who have a history of one to 10, I would say episodes of depression and it gets stronger with every episode

01:23:26.000 --> 01:23:43.000
Thing that they can do with their attention first of all is just to take their foot off the inhibitory break. So you're going to start addressing much earlier challenge to sense foraging, which is just how do you even get yourself in a place where you're receptive to sensation? And that's going to be a lot of the initial

01:23:43.000 --> 01:23:57.000
Training and it's going to take more work and more time in the same way that we see in in recovery from addiction, for instance, someone who's addicted to methamphetamine, the reward centers of their brain stop responding to anything except for meth.

01:23:57.000 --> 01:24:11.000
And a month after they're abstinent, it's still not responding to anything after other than meth. But if they can stay um off the drug for over a year, you start to see recovery. The brain starts responding to other things like puppies and babies and things like that.

01:24:11.000 --> 01:24:20.000
And in the same way, being in that place where you're now at least no longer reflexively pushing away sensation creates a space where sensation can start to reemerge.

01:24:20.000 --> 01:24:32.000
And it may take a lot of support and time doing these kind of practices before something like anhedonia starts to lighten, right? The ability to actually feel pleasure again or feel like there's a sense of of meaning or purpose.

01:24:32.000 --> 01:24:50.000
And we've compared in a study that we published a couple of years ago a sort of wellness oriented form of cognitive behavioral therapy, which has savoring practices where you actually go in and try to be like, do I get any return on things that I know might have given me pleasure before. We compare that to more mindfulness-based cognitive therapy

01:24:50.000 --> 01:25:07.000
It turned out it didn't matter what type of one therapy wasn't better than another. It's just that when people responded, they responded by no longer using the front of their brains to inhibit sensation, but within a weeks, you don't start to see the full recovery of sensation like you would in a community sample.

01:25:07.000 --> 01:25:21.000
So there are already really good therapies that have sensory practices, part of even the growth of behavioral activation therapy is about getting people to do things in the world to update their models. Like I'm useless 100% of the time, but now with behavioral activation therapy.

01:25:21.000 --> 01:25:24.000
I go for walks. I'm only useless 99% of the time.

01:25:24.000 --> 01:25:34.000
That will update the model. It is better to be useless 99% of the time than 100% of the time. Maybe tomorrow you get to 98% and then it's going to take work, right? There's no quick solution.

01:25:34.000 --> 01:25:49.000
I would recommend on the face of it giving people This maybe conceptual framework But then you can still access a lot of high quality expert we've delivered therapies to start moving this way as long as they have some sort of sensory exploration practice.

01:25:49.000 --> 01:26:08.000
Wellness oriented cognitive therapy, mindfulness-based cognitive therapy have really good evidence bases already in depression. And then for what we're designing now, we're just starting to get to the point where we're like, well, how would we actually manualize like a workshop? Because it seems too daunting to come up with like a two month thing and most people won't do a two month thing.

01:26:08.000 --> 01:26:28.000
We have intentionally tried to move into the more For every person in a preventative way and what we're working on now, but we definitely have continued this work to look at depression in in specifically and not just community samples. If you email me later, I can send you some papers on that for sure.

01:26:28.000 --> 01:26:31.000
Fascinating. So cool. Thank you.

01:26:31.000 --> 01:26:32.000
Yeah, thank you.

01:26:32.000 --> 01:26:39.000
You can put your email norm if if you're not afraid of getting like 100 emails, I can put it in the bio.

01:26:39.000 --> 01:26:49.000
I'm happy to get them. I just takes me a long time to get back to them. I do my best to slowly respond. It just might be weeks later, like, oh, you're the 70th email. I'm finally getting to you. Sorry.

01:26:49.000 --> 01:26:52.000
I'll try it.

01:26:52.000 --> 01:26:59.000
Okay. Is that cool, Chelsea? Did that sort of get at what you were looking for?

01:26:59.000 --> 01:27:01.000
Yeah, yeah. Thank you.

01:27:01.000 --> 01:27:10.000
Awesome. Okay, I see one from Alexi. I'm hoping I got your name right, the pronunciation.

01:27:10.000 --> 01:27:17.000
And I can allow you to talk and ask you to unmute.

01:27:17.000 --> 01:27:18.000
Yep.

01:27:18.000 --> 01:27:19.000
Perfectly.

01:27:19.000 --> 01:27:33.000
Amazing. Hi, can you hear me? Okay, thank you. So I work with the perinatal population and I have really struggled to find people that are applying these sorts of practices to that period of life and getting specific about that.

01:27:33.000 --> 01:27:51.000
Transition the hormonal components of it and then specifically postpartum depression really piqued my interest if there is some sort of relationality in what's happening in the brain as far as what you guys are seeing if you've seen or if you know of any resources in that area, I would appreciate it.

01:27:51.000 --> 01:27:55.000
Yeah, great. So not my exact expertise. The framework we think probably applies to lots of different places. The person I would check out that I know of most directly is Sona Dimidjin.

01:27:55.000 --> 01:28:01.000
Sure.

01:28:01.000 --> 01:28:02.000
Okay.

01:28:02.000 --> 01:28:16.000
I think she has University of Colorado Boulder and she has developed uh interventions and some of them are preventative interventions for even populations they think are at higher risk for perinatal or postnatal depression, postpartum depression.

01:28:16.000 --> 01:28:20.000
So Dimidian is going to mess up spelling it, but Oh, you found it.

01:28:20.000 --> 01:28:23.000
Is that it norm? S-o-n-j-a. Okay.

01:28:23.000 --> 01:28:39.000
Yeah, so I would check her out because she's definitely like part of our We have a very similar minds. She's a close collaborator of Zendal Seagulls and she's done a lot of pioneering work in this area. So I think you'll find that and she'll be able to speak to it much better than I can and has a lot of research in that area.

01:28:39.000 --> 01:28:42.000
Incredible. I'm in the Denver metro area too. So that is amazing.

01:28:42.000 --> 01:28:45.000
There you go. Stars aligning. Yeah.

01:28:45.000 --> 01:28:51.000
Yes, definitely. I appreciate that.

01:28:51.000 --> 01:29:07.000
I do see, so if anyone wants to ask anything, you can raise your hand in the chat. And there's also a question here, Norm, that I happen to know that you addressed in the book, which is, do you recommend the use of psychedelics in depression?

01:29:07.000 --> 01:29:20.000
And if so, when, and I know you were like. Uber clip like that was a very clearly stated and careful conscientious portion of the book.

01:29:20.000 --> 01:29:45.000
Yeah, so psychedelics generally degrade your brain's ability to inhibit connections, inhibit inhibition is really important for constructing like boundary of one thing and the other thing like where a table ends and your foot begins, for instance. So, you know, they're going to be dysfunction, at least temporarily from going into psychedelic state, but also what a wonderful opportunity to have different types of experiences, right?

01:29:45.000 --> 01:30:01.000
So the psychedelic science, because of legislation against psychedelics is still going quite slowly and we don't know exactly how to do things safely, consistently. It seems very clear that if you have someone who can guide you.

01:30:01.000 --> 01:30:16.000
And create a safe environment. So the classic terms are set and setting. So your mindset going in guides you psychologically, but also guide you into a physically safe space. You're much more likely to have some positive meaningful experiences, and then it's going to wear off.

01:30:16.000 --> 01:30:34.000
And then the question is, what happens after like after the ecstasy, the laundry And that's where we really need to develop things more often, but much more to figure out how do you now you know you things could be different, but you're not different. The drug came out of your system. Are you just going to be high all the time? That doesn't seem

01:30:34.000 --> 01:30:49.000
Probably practical or like a good idea So what is the, but you have this attractor state of realizing that things can be so profoundly different in the same way that we see in yoga or meditation, someone has a relaxation response for the first time in 15 years and they're like, oh my God, like, I didn't know how stressed I was before. I didn't know how

01:30:49.000 --> 01:30:56.000
Originally was before you could have that experience from psychedelics and that becomes this place you can see is possible.

01:30:56.000 --> 01:31:09.000
But then again, it's going to take work to change your sober the way you are as a normal person, not high out of your mind. And all those patterns kick back in, all those inhibitory links and connections kick back in.

01:31:09.000 --> 01:31:13.000
To slowly shift to become the kind of person who can experience that consistently.

01:31:13.000 --> 01:31:21.000
So that's why I think there's a lot of potential with psychedelics because they can fast track you to be able to see things and sense things in a very different way.

01:31:21.000 --> 01:31:26.000
And it's not going to, I believe it's not going to take away the need to put in the work afterwards.

01:31:26.000 --> 01:31:46.000
To slowly and consistently make those kind of changes that you got this like fast forward glimpse of And that's still going. And so I would not say that it's going to replace doing these kind of sense foraging practices, it could just become a really powerful motivator because now you know experientially it's possible.

01:31:46.000 --> 01:31:56.000
But we know from another field, transmagnetic stimulation, for instance, it shakes things up in the brain. People who have treatment resistant depression feel this lightness.

01:31:56.000 --> 01:32:12.000
And then 50% of people who don't respond to antidepressants or psychotherapy respond to transom magnetic stimulation, and then 80% of them after a month of treatment within the next year, go back and become depressed because they fall back into their old patterns. I think psychedelics is going to show the exact same profile until we develop

01:32:12.000 --> 01:32:31.000
Not so sexy when quick fix kind of science of like after that initial impact how do you now start to chart a course for sustainable change? So yeah, super great potential and just the drug itself is not going to be the answer that's going to motivate you maybe to do the work to get to the place where

01:32:31.000 --> 01:32:36.000
Where you do find access to things you want in your life.

01:32:36.000 --> 01:32:59.000
Yeah, we have a person in the US administration that might be demonstrating that difficulty right now, particularly with regard to ketamine. I won't mention names, but I think we I'll know who that is in the US. I see a question. Hi, Kimberly. I'm not sure what that question is. Could you rephrase that?

01:32:59.000 --> 01:33:07.000
About the maintenance dose in the chat.

01:33:07.000 --> 01:33:08.000
Oh.

01:33:08.000 --> 01:33:25.000
Oh, like whether to keep whether they keep taking the drugs to maintain benefits It's possible, right? Ketamine specifically is a funny duck because it has become off-label, like legalized much more quickly because it was shown in animal models to actually promote brain growth like neurogenesis that had nothing to do with the subjective experience. Ketamine, as many of you might know, is actually like a horse tranquilizer.

01:33:25.000 --> 01:33:31.000
And so it's a dissociative drug. It's not necessarily creating all these kind of other sorts of experiences.

01:33:31.000 --> 01:33:48.000
So if it helps along that process. Of freeing up your mind for discovery and it's done in a supervised way i don't I don't have any like puritanical qualms about it. I just, again, stress that pushing yourself chemically into a different state is not where you're going to make change

01:33:48.000 --> 01:33:59.000
That matters in the world and might just free you up to make those kind of changes. The work still has to be done because most of your happiness and suffering is happening in your relationships, not while you're in the clinic on the drug.

01:33:59.000 --> 01:34:12.000
So if these become like little booster packs and it's done in a safe kind of way and it keeps that alive for you like who am i to say don't do it, especially if it's like in a medically supervised way. I just, again, let's not confuse

01:34:12.000 --> 01:34:26.000
The catalyst with the actual tonic, right? Like not something that actually speeds things up. Like that's not or gives you that that window or that freedom. That's not actually where the work is. It's just going to make it more easy to do the work.

01:34:26.000 --> 01:34:27.000
And I think we live in a

01:34:27.000 --> 01:34:32.000
You did a study, didn't you, Norm, on microdosing

01:34:32.000 --> 01:34:59.000
Yeah, we're just we're just finishing up. Actual trial where we're giving people psilocybin in micro doses um And we've done a lot of survey research on it. For microdosing we know that It's quite helpful for about two thirds of the people who microdose and for about a third of people, they get the opposite of what they want. They get more anxious or more distracted. So it's not clear why that happens. In the study we did, we found that there were some benefits to

01:34:59.000 --> 01:35:20.000
Taking microdoses of psilocybin over an eight week period for people with treatment resistant depression, but those benefits were not the real story. The real story because of the regulations is we had to have people in clinic for eight hours once a week where they are getting a lot of attention, care, counseling and doing a lot of assessment and participating in a meaningful role.

01:35:20.000 --> 01:35:34.000
And so with microdose, you can have people on placebo and they don't necessarily know. And it actually didn't matter whether they were on the drug or not. The biggest effect was doing that role for eight weeks, regardless of whether they were on placebo or not, was transformative for them.

01:35:34.000 --> 01:35:41.000
So putting in an eight hour day once a week where you're considering how your mind works and getting support from other people.

01:35:41.000 --> 01:36:02.000
Smart people, interested people, young people. That's therapeutic and it's not a sexy solution, right? It's like, yeah, you spend a day a week working on yourself with other people who are helping you and interested in you that's the big change in their symptoms. And there's a tiny little acceleration if they happen to be in a psilocybin dose, but not enough that would be clinically significant.

01:36:02.000 --> 01:36:21.000
It's not what that's not going to make a lot of money for people In the way that giving you a psilocybin lozenge will That's my understanding is it's about putting in the work relationally to and practicing finding yourself finding meaning and finding connection with other people that's curative

01:36:21.000 --> 01:36:26.000
And the drugs can make that happen a little bit faster.

01:36:26.000 --> 01:36:41.000
Let me think of the work of Robin Carhart Harris, and he talks about the introduction of entropy as kind of a therapeutic element where these very like familiar patterns are disrupted.

01:36:41.000 --> 01:36:54.000
And it kind of expands connections in a certain way. But it sounds like what you're saying is what you were saying about sense forging, that you really do need that work of integration and dedication and practice over time.

01:36:54.000 --> 01:36:56.000
To kind of, yeah.

01:36:56.000 --> 01:37:10.000
Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of relief that comes from destabilizing like an overdetermined negatively valenced model of the world to be a little jargoning, right? Like you have a really like depressive or anxious story that's just running you

01:37:10.000 --> 01:37:21.000
The entropy, which means chaos, right, is a relief Because chaos is better than this knowing that things are horrible or unsafe or you're unlovable or whatever it is.

01:37:21.000 --> 01:37:30.000
And that's the equivalent of saying like my garden is full of weeds. I've pulled out all the weeds now, like I've killed the weeds. I've destabilized them.

01:37:30.000 --> 01:37:36.000
So now what do you have, you have a big patch of dirt Great. Mission accomplished.

01:37:36.000 --> 01:37:56.000
No like so necessary but not sufficient, right? Great to break up those patterns What are you going to replace it with? Randomness? Like see what just happens to grow normally. You know what you're going to get a year later? More weeds, right? That's what happens if you have a patch of land. And yeah, there might be a cool little tree or flower that tries to fight with the weeds there too and manages to survive.

01:37:56.000 --> 01:38:01.000
But most of us know that that's not going to create the garden that you're hoping to have.

01:38:01.000 --> 01:38:10.000
So I'm not derogating or undermining the promise of psychedelics. I just think there's a tendency to latch on and be like, that's going to fix things for me.

01:38:10.000 --> 01:38:17.000
Whereas it's only part of the solution, right? Stripping off a leaky set of shingles on your roof. Very good first step.

01:38:17.000 --> 01:38:33.000
If your roof is leaking, not great long-term if you want to have a nice secure home, you need to do more than just strip off the shingles. And I have seen no evidence that you're putting new shingles on with psychedelics, just that you're getting really good at it's going to help accelerate the stripping off process.

01:38:33.000 --> 01:38:37.000
Such a great analogy. I love that. Do you have time for

01:38:37.000 --> 01:38:43.000
We've got garden shingles. I could do maybe one more, but I'm quite late for something else now. So maybe one more.

01:38:43.000 --> 01:38:44.000
Do you want to take off?

01:38:44.000 --> 01:38:48.000
Let's do one more and then we'll go. I've already quickly apologized by email.

01:38:48.000 --> 01:38:55.000
Oh, okay. We have one about sensory foraging, and I think you'll be able to kind of address this.

01:38:55.000 --> 01:39:08.000
Quickly and whether or not it has parallel outcomes for people with chronic pain or do you need a different approach? And I think Yeah.

01:39:08.000 --> 01:39:21.000
Yeah, I mean, no, same approach. The trick is to trick is to make sure you're not just foraging into your pain all the time.

01:39:21.000 --> 01:39:34.000
Like if you're always foraging for like, is the pain there? That's part of the pathology and chronic pain is a preoccupation with that presence or absence of the pain, which leads to a worry about what would happen if you discover that

01:39:34.000 --> 01:39:52.000
So the idea that you want to Do you like weaken that pattern by allowing yourself to also have moments where you're foraging out into other types of experiences or even in the presence of pain that there are other experiences available, even though pain is a dominant attractor signal?

01:39:52.000 --> 01:40:14.000
Is a big part of it. The problem in chronic pain for most people is not the one at a time level of pain though at high levels, you know, pain is ego obliterating It's that much of the other time it's not like an eight or a nine or a 10, but the fear about it prevents you from doing any of the other things that would give you connection or meaning in your life. And of course, you're playing a much harder game than someone who doesn't have pain.

01:40:14.000 --> 01:40:31.000
So it's going to need, again, the support. But the idea that you don't want to let your habits become completely determined around the pain and you're going to need some kind of practice to prevent that from happening because that's what normally happens because pain is designed to capture our attention and what we attend to becomes our habits.

01:40:31.000 --> 01:40:41.000
That's the same model, right? It's just that it's a visceral sensory pain as opposed to But you're not going to get away from it by getting into your thoughts.

01:40:41.000 --> 01:40:55.000
You need to compete with pain with other types of sensory events and Unless the pain is super extreme, those sensory events are also available while pain is present. And that's like a magic thing for people with chronic pain to be like.

01:40:55.000 --> 01:41:04.000
I'm someone who suffers from headaches. It's raining today. I knew it was going to rain today because I woke up at 1am with like a really bad headache this morning. And then it's just like.

01:41:04.000 --> 01:41:16.000
Okay, so is that it? Or like, what else is available right and so Yeah, you got to find ways to work with where you are and support, which can include medication and definitely can include having other people who help you

01:41:16.000 --> 01:41:30.000
Structure where you're moving your mind and your attention, having those practices, I think is still I'm part of that model. It's the what does this pain mean for me that determines function in all but the most extreme cases, I would say.

01:41:30.000 --> 01:41:41.000
Found and helpful that you can actually have other sensory experiences alongside the experience of pain. I think that's really a cool concept to kind of ground into

01:41:41.000 --> 01:41:54.000
Yeah, hard to do when you want to avoid the pain, which would be like turning down the volume on all experience. But arguably, again, it's the long-term consequence of turning it down versus finding a way to stay open even though it hurts.

01:41:54.000 --> 01:42:09.000
It's a good point to kind of to sum up on it. That's the exploration. That's the game we're all playing regardless of whether it's a pain condition or an emotional thing or social stress or whatever it is. How do we stay open even though it hurts sometimes?

01:42:09.000 --> 01:42:23.000
No, thank you so much for being with us and for kind of bringing your whole heart and being and presence to this. I think it's really helpful and generative for people. You're getting lots of hearts floating through. I hope you can see.

01:42:23.000 --> 01:42:24.000
Oh, that's nice. Thank you.

01:42:24.000 --> 01:42:54.000
See and receive those. And for those of you that are here, please let us know if this is like helpful to you. I would love to do more of these now that I'm kind of coming out of the writing cave. And now that times are like really difficult, but it's just amazing to be able to be with you in this setting norm. And thank you for the book and the effort behind it and the And just the richness of it. I feel like it's one that I will come back to again and again. And I hope it's helpful to all of

01:42:57.000 --> 01:42:59.000
You as well. Thank you.

01:42:59.000 --> 01:43:06.000
Yeah, thanks so much for having me and thank you all for your attention. We went for like 100 minutes, so that's amazing. But I really do have to run. So thank you so much for having me. And maybe we could debrief a bit later, but hopefully it was helpful for you all.

01:43:06.000 --> 01:43:09.000
Okay. Thank you, Noram.

01:43:09.000 --> 01:43:16.000
Okay, takeWe'll