111 Who am I? Letting Go, Toxic Home, Pain Can help - Q & A

Live Q & A to supplement and deepen our spiritual growth regardless of our personal path.  We discussed, "Who am I?", How to grow in a toxic home environment, How can I let go?, Pain can help, etc. 

These podcasts are here to support your personal path of awakening whatever that might be. I feel they are most powerful when listened to in sequence from podcast one forward because each is built on the last. Though they, also, all stand on their own. If anything does not resonate, please disregard it and follow your heart. All my podcasts and website are free. Enjoy!

Though I am a psychotherapist, and these podcasts are offered to be spiritually helpful, they are not psychotherapy. If psychotherapy is ever needed, please reach out to a psychotherapist.

www.williamecooper.wordpress.com for more support. You may, especially, enjoy the short contemplations and the resource page which gives you some supportive material.

Transcript

0:00

Hello everybody. I see some of my friends. Welcome. And some new people. Welcome. My name is William Cooper. This is Awakening Together, Relaxing into Happiness. And what we do on this live session is you're free to ask any questions about your practice or your spiritual path, or just perhaps a question you've had about really anything to do with your unfolding, emotional, mental, spiritual. I have a number of podcasts, over a hundred on all platforms, including Insight Timer under Awakening Together, Relaxing into Happiness. And these live sessions supplement those podcasts. You don't have to have listened to any of those podcasts. They're all about awakening and things that have been helpful to myself and many others. But in these live sessions, you know, there's, you can fine tune, you can ask me a question, you can type it in the box and we can talk about things that either have been in the podcast or haven't. And in that way, you guide our discussion. Yes, it's good to see you all also. Good morning. Good morning, all of you. While you're thinking about questions, and if you've been on this podcast before, you know that really we talk about everything. But while you're thinking about asking something, or maybe you just want to listen in, I've got some thoughts, or I'd like to start with this, this thought. Let's say you take your right hand and you tighten it like this, turn it into a fist and you just keep it that way. Now, if you read a book, after you finish your book, and you look at your hand, it's still like this. If you go for a jog and your hand is still, you're still holding it like this after the jog, it'll still be like this. If you awaken, after you awaken, your hand will still be like this. If you do a guided meditation and you relax and really feel great, your hand will still be like this. So what's the point? The point is this represents the tensions inside of us. We all have a collection of tensions that we've done to ourselves that reside inside of us. And nobody's inside of us, but us. We decide what we tense and what we don't tense. So any discomfort we feel, we are doing. Now there could be perfectly, and usually there are perfectly good reasons for us tensing or treating ourselves badly. And what I mean by treating ourselves badly is, have you ever felt something like frustration with yourself? And that doesn't feel good. We're, we're kind of like jabbing ourselves or tensing something or kicking ourselves in a way. Why don't you do this faster? Why don't you do better? Why, how could you forget this or forget that? Or perhaps sadness or perhaps guilt, maybe anger. You're angry at somebody, but don't you feel it? It feels really bad. And Yvonne said, says yes. 73 years of stuff to let go. Yes. That's the human condition. Even if you're awake, you can be holding these places inside and you can be miserable while you're happy. Oddly enough, awake, you realize your true being, which is joy, vibrant, but that doesn't mean your hand opens up, your fists opens up. You'll still be looking at a tight fist and this could represent our personalities. It could represent specific grudges, specific frustrations, maybe anxiety. Maybe we're in the habit of making ourselves anxious all the time. And if we've really dissociated, we would say, well, we're not doing it. It's just happening. But that's not true. We're doing it. We've just long forgotten that we're in charge sometimes. And as we've talked about in the last podcast and so many before on our series of podcasts, uh, part of our path is to reassociate, not dissociate, but reassociate. Why? Well, part of awakening, if you want full awakening, is for everything to be open and flowing. And as many of you who meditate and many who don't know this, that your being is made of peace, right? If awareness, when you check awareness, your awareness, you will find no tension there. You will find no upset, no problem. So all these problems and tightnesses we're holding in a structure that we've created and we often call it our personality. We're doing it. The point is this tight fist, no matter what we do, we read, we awaken, we jog, whatever we do. We do guided meditations. It's still like this until we open it. I can read a book, but I still have to open my hand. I can meditate, but I still have to open my hand. If it's going to be open, just sitting there all day, meditating, looking at my tight hand, isn't going to open it. It can get me in touch with my being and I can realize and start to see more clearly, Hey, I'm not this tension. So meditation is, I feel the most powerful thing you can do. But secondly, flowing from that clear seeing, you open. How? Well, the first thing is you have to recognize that your hands tight or your emotions are tight. That can happen in meditation because we can't flitter and run all over the place, frantically doing different chores and therefore not seeing that we are anxious or that we are resentful or whatever the thing is. Because when we're so busy, we can take our mind off of really what's happening. And that's called dissociation, right? So when we sit down and meditate, we reassociate because we can't get away. We're sitting there. What can we do? It's hard to dissociate when you're sitting still. Eventually the stuff pops up. We can't repress stuff so easily. So it pops up. So the first thing is we see it. Oh my goodness, this is horrible. I'm meditating and I feel horrible. This is no fun because all the stuff I haven't looked at, now I have to see. Now I am seeing, I am experiencing. Bad news, it feels bad because that's why we repressed it. Good news, we can see it and we can begin to heal. Second thing that happens, we see it, then we feel it, we experience it. So it exudes a lot of energy. It's pent up energy. It begins to exude. It feels bad. We don't like that. To try to get away from the energy, we think, think, think thoughts. We go up into our thoughts. Thoughts are like frozen emotions. They help us get away from the things we don't like. So we start hallucinating thoughts. We'd make up this thought and that thought and this thought, daydream and fantasize and have anxious thoughts and this thought and that thought. Anyway, those begin to melt and wind down and now we're just sitting straight looking at this tightened emotion. It feels bad. It's exuding energy. It's exuding energy. It's beginning to mix with our being because in meditation we're coming from being, we're in touch with our being, our clarity. It starts to open but there's another thing that has to happen. As you reassociate, as you own this emotion, rather than I have a tension in my stomach, this tension over here, it's more reassociate, that's dissociation. Reassociation is I am tensing my stomach. It's not that it's happening to my stomach over here, this block and I need to release, have it released. It's no, I am doing this. I am tensing my stomach. Ow, it hurts. I'm doing all sorts of things inside of myself. They all hurt. So you pick one. Oh, my stomach, it hurts. You feel it, you feel it. So the thing you have to do other than experiencing it and letting it burn off its energy, release its energy, is because you're now associated, you have to open and you have to breathe in relief. Ow, I hurt. I hurt. But there's awareness all around me. There's nature. There's all these good things. This hidden part needs to update its files and breathe in relief, breathe in some sort of relaxation. It has to experience it. And when a tight part experiences relief, what happens? It opens, it opens, it opens, and then it dissolves and melts back into you, you as oneness. Isn't that what happens to tight muscles in a massage? They hurt, they hurt, their massage, they open, they open, they receive and poof, where's the tight muscle? It's gone. That's what happens inside of us. So no amount of guided meditations usually are going to get rid of this. That's why you could meditate and every morning you wake up in your tents like this again, because you didn't open your hand. That's why your hand is tight, because it hasn't been open. No amount of reading books is going to open that hand. You have to open it. There's a final thing after the breathing in relief and relaxation because everything's opening up. Now you overcome the habit of 20 years of keeping this locked up inside. So there needs to be a conscious decision. I'm opening my hand. I'm doing all these other things. So it's not like a false decision, one that, oh, I just decide, but it has no underlying support. You know, really, I feel bad and I have no basis of even being able to open my hand, but I'm going to willpower my hand opening. No, that's just me pretending or forcing something and that doesn't work. Instead, you make a decision to stop that habit and do the other things that I have mentioned. So there's also the part of you make a decision, but that's kind of happens when it's been supported by actual fundamental release and opening and relief and all the other things I talked about. So Kate is asking, would you explain the difference between non-duality and depersonalization and dissociation? What a good question, Kate. That is a very good question. I remember 30 years ago, maybe I was with Francis Lucille, an amazing teacher. He was explaining something and he said, he's non-dual, Advaita. And he said, you know, if somebody just dog gets run over and dies, you don't go up to that person and say, well, the dog was an illusion. The dog didn't exist. What's the problem? You're okay. And he's no, the person lost their dog. You say, I'm sorry. And you are sorry. You have compassion. And I just start the answer that way. What's going on is we encompass a lot of realities. You know, another way of talking about it is I'm in India. I mean, when I'm in India, if some non-dual person is standing next to me and one of those Indian buses veer straight towards us because Indian buses can do whatever they want, people jump out of the way. If you're driving on your scooter and it comes into your lane, you drive into the ditch. You don't argue about how you're right because you'll get run over by that bus. You will. 100% of the time, you need to get out of the way. So everybody, even Advaitic people, people who believe in oneness believe in lots of different realities and somehow intuitively they know to honor the reality that they're looking through at the time. So with the bus, you're standing on the side of the road, you're looking through your human reality, your physical reality, and the bus comes and you jump out of the way. It doesn't mean that as you become deeper and deeper in your own clarity that you don't see and experience that everything is made of one thing, consciousness, which is made of joy, peace and love. Yet that's a reality that exists. It's a very fine reality that exists in this created world. These are objects, love, peace, joy. You can feel them. You can see them. And inside you can touch them. You can experience them. But on an intuitive level, you also exist on a reality that's way beyond this world and it's complete silence. And yet it's full. It's full of potential. It's almost like you can touch and taste everything that could ever exist. But yet in that reality, it doesn't exist because it's beyond existence. The only way you can know it is through your intuition. So this is very real. I've mentioned another podcast every second, maybe a million times a second or a thousand times a second. It's so fast. I see reality strobe in and out of existence. There's blackness and then fullness, blackness, emptiness, everything beyond reality, and then full reality. It's just like a strobe light. I experience all of these realities at the same time, some more strongly than others, because I put my attention, if I'm on the side of the road waiting for a bus, that's where generally my attention is. So non-duality is seeing clearly that everything is one. Everything is one consciousness, one energy, and even that is one because it all comes from beyond through this world. It's not even a world. You can't describe it because it's not created. It's everything. And the flip side of the coin of nothing is everything. So all of creation is everything, but at the same time, everything beyond creation, some people call it emptiness, but it's very full emptiness. They're all connected. They all exist. Non-duality is experiencing the oneness of it all. To me, it's all the same thing. Nothing is the same thing as everything. Not intellectually. It's because you can feel it all is the same thing, one flowing from the other and back into the other, that strobe light. The world, the creation is made a million times a second, fresh and new. That's non-duality. Depersonalization is when a person gets very philosophical and they might say, well, life is an illusion. That dog doesn't even exist that got run over. You don't exist. That's a philosophical stance. It's not reality. Sometimes people get into fights over these philosophical stances, but they're not experiencing really what's going on. They just have a view of things. Another way to look at depersonalization is when you're blocked emotionally. I remember years ago, say 20 years ago, uh, and before when I would see a child, I wouldn't want to be near that child or a baby. Oh my goodness. No. And the reason was this because I felt so bad as a child. I didn't know this. I didn't put all this together until later, but I felt so bad as a child, so much hurt and stress that I didn't even want to, if I connected to a nut, to a child, even when I was an adult, I had to open up to some degree because children are very flowing and open and, um, creative. And I would have to match them to really connect with them. And if I opened up that degree, I would feel all of my hurt. Again, I did not know this. All I knew is I just needed to stay away. Same with babies, even worse. So I could depersonalize. I could turn people into objects in a sense without knowing it, without meaning it, and even being kind and nice and the rest of my life. And in that case, I depersonalized because of emotional stances that I had experienced or, or emotional outcomes of the crux of my life up until that point. Yeah. So many reasons for depersonalization, but it happens. Dissociation is when I don't want to feel my own pain. I don't want to feel it because it hurts. That's why, or I don't know how to handle it. Not only hurts, I'm confused. I'm upset. I feel less than I feel vulnerable and I already feel bad. So I don't want to admit that I am a loser, you know, that, wow, I've got this problem too. I don't want to admit that even to myself, I'm already just holding on for dear life. Most, many of us are in this, this world, because this world is, we come in with a lot of problems to solve. I think that's the point of life. That's my opinion. It's, it's a place where we can see our troubles and heal them. Uh, so it's a good thing, but it doesn't feel like a good thing. And so because I don't want to feel my, um, feelings, my troubles, and I'm overwhelmed and I don't have solutions. I don't know how to act. I don't know how to fix it. And it seems like anything I do is going to make it worse, especially if it's includes another person, because I know I'm not clear and I know I don't have a solution. So anything I say is going to rile the whole situation up. And I don't, and I don't even know what to do with that if it even gets worse. Cause I don't even know what to do with it, the way it is now. So what do I do? I, maybe I go with, uh, what my culture says, take your mind off of it. Time heals everything. Go for a jog. Don't think about it. Watch TV. It'll go away. Push it down. Just don't think about it and have a drink. I'll meet you at the bar. Let's have it. You've had a hard day. Let's have some drinks. So I now am getting used to putting my attention on places where my problem is not. I'm hiding from my problem. As I said, we inhabit a lot of realities and within each reality is a lot of space. So if I look right in one reality, I don't see everything that's on the left. So maybe I get in the habit of always looking right. And I always stash all my troubles on the left. Um, that's dissociation. When I sit down in meditation, because I'm sitting there after a while, you know, I do see what's on the left. I can't avoid it. Cause I don't, there's no way to distract myself. I can't get in the refrigerator and start eating everything. I can't get on the TV and see what's interesting to take my mind off of all this trouble. I can't do that because I'm sitting with my meditation. And so that's why in meditation, I began to reassociate. And that's why often when somebody's doing meditation correctly, they don't like it because it feels so bad because they're reassociating and their mind is going crazy because it's the last protection. If I just desperately want to keep dissociating, at least I have my mind to distract me and it'll race and race and race. And eventually when it winds down, I have no defenses. And now I start to reassociate. Okay. Well now I start to heal. Okay. Thank you. Kate says, thank you. I hope that answers your question. If I didn't answer it completely, or I took off in a direction that wasn't helpful, just let me know and I'll, we'll, we'll have another go. Uh, what else do you, that's a very good question, by the way, that included a lot. Thank you. What else do you all have on your minds? And, you know, we talk about so many things here that it doesn't have to be complicated or deep. It could just be simple. Like how do you meditate or is there any role for exercise or, you know, just wherever you are. Uh, I feel anxious what to do, you know? So all of those could be. Oh, good. Liz asks, oh, I like this. We talked about this a little. I was wishing somebody would ask this question in my last time we were together. Uh, yes. Liz asks, who am I? And Jennifer says, great. And Liz says, yep. Okay. This is such a good question. It's very simple, but very deep and also not so easy. I spent decades and I'll tell you first, let me answer the question and then I'll talk about some of the other side tracks we can get down. We can go down and miss the answer. The answer to the question is, uh, you're the one that's here. That's hearing everything that's going on. That's seeing everything that's happening in front of you. That's feeling all of your emotions. That's noticing your thoughts and perhaps working with your thoughts. You're that awareness, your awareness, the one that is aware of all these things, the difficulty. That's very simple. So just let, let me just boil it down. We'll go back to the hand. Imagine you just, you can put your hand out and just look at your hand. You're looking at your hand and then you remove your hand and the awareness that was aware of your hand. It's still there, but there's no hand. So rather than having a hand to focus on, all there's left is awareness. That's who you are. You're the awareness. The difficulty is sometimes we get lost in the thing we're looking at. For instance, our hand. Oh, that's an interesting hand or our thoughts. Oh, that's an interesting thought or our personality. I feel this way or that way. I have this habit or this educational level or this thing or that thing. Now, if all of that disappeared, if I got amnesia, I would still be here. Just like I would no longer have the hand to look at. I would no longer have that personality to look at. If an emotion disappeared, perhaps before it disappeared, I was lost in that emotion. I'm so sad. I'm so guilty. I'm resentful. But let's say that emotion disappeared. It's gone. You're still here. You're realizing, well, the emotion's gone, but I'm still here. So the trick is to, in India, they call it neti neti, not this, not that. Look at everything in your life and just ask yourself, if that disappeared, would I still be here? If that thought disappeared, would I still be here? Would that emotion disappear? Would I still be here? If I had multiple personalities and one disappeared, let's say the one right now, I think I am. What if that disappeared and another one popped up? Would I still be here? Multiple personalities don't always know they are multiple personalities. What if I got amnesia? Would I still be here? Well, what's that common thing that would still be here? That's you in awareness. It's just, it's the part of you that sees everything that hears everything. Forget about the hearing, what you're hearing. Forget about what you're seeing. Just put your attention on that, which is seeing that, which is hearing. Yes. We construct a personality to get through this life. Yes. We have emotions because it's a way that we talk to ourselves or others. We hallucinate emotions. We hallucinate or make up thoughts because they're useful tools, but none of them are us. So, what confused me was I got lost in my thoughts and my personality. You know, I'm a psychotherapist, so make a better personality, go do this therapy and all these are good things, but none of them are me. I was just improving the vehicle that I drive in my personality, my body, my habits. It's like when you're driving your car, it's not a good idea to think you that you're your car. You're the driver of the car. You're not the car. You're not your personality. You're the driver of your personality. So, best to put your attention, get used to the part that's observing everything and start to wonder what is that like? Because that's who you are. Put your attention there. Now, the second confusing thing for me was as I put my attention there or even looking for who I was, what I didn't realize is because I transcend this world, technically anything that's not created isn't in this world. It does not quote unquote exist. It wasn't created. So, when I look for myself, I couldn't find anything because it wasn't created. Only things find anything. I couldn't find a thing. Things are created. You can touch them. You can feel them. You can taste them. You can do something with them because they're a thing, but your deepest self isn't a thing. So, you can't find it. That's the weird thing. You can only find things. You can find the perfume or the symptom of your self, joy, peace, well-being, and anything you construct from it, personality or otherwise. You can find those things, but you're none of those things. You simply exude those things. But who are you? You can only find yourself through your intuition. That's it. You can't find yourself through your five senses. You can't do it because you're beyond your five senses. Now, your intuition is stronger than any five sense, but we're generally not tuned into our intuition because we're so captured by things. We're hypnotized by things, thoughts, emotions, personality, personal dramas, TV dramas, social dramas. That's where our attention goes into. It leaps into those things. So, our attention is off of itself onto everything that it's not. Things that if they disappeared, you would still be there, yet our attention is sucked into those things. So, because we're looking in that world, we can't see from where we're looking. We're so distracted. So, it's tricky business. But as we meditate and we start letting go or any other technique that helps you to let go of our hypnotic, being captured hypnotically by all these things, thoughts, emotions, that's all a hypnotic suggestion is. It captures your attention. You're a chicken. And you think you are because your attention has been captured. We do that constantly, different things. Well, that's not hypnosis. I did it voluntarily. No, it's hypnosis. You did it voluntarily. Yes, that is true. But as we sit and we let go more and more, we become clearer. The dust settles. The silt settles out of the water and the water becomes clear. And when we become clear, guess what also becomes clear? Our intuition. And then we can feel. I don't know. Feels not a good word. Let's just say intuit who we are. And when you're disconnected from intuition, and I'm speaking just from my experience way back, when I was disconnected from my intuition, if somebody said, yeah, you could intuit it, that would seem very wispy to me. Like, yeah, I don't know. I don't know about that. I don't know. That's no, I don't. Maybe I don't. No, it's not very solid. But later to find out with my experience, no, it's solid as a rock. It's the thing, you know, the most more I now creation seems more wispy and all those things from which creation comes seems rock solid. So your center of gravity flips as you're seeing becomes clearer. I hope that was a, um, that I hope that was helpful is, um, bottom line with who are you on the deepest level? You're not going to find it by looking outside of yourself. You have to sit still and it's going to seem like nothing. And the drama of life is so loud. It's going to seem more captivating than that quiet, still voice inside, but putting your attention on that quiet, still voice, you'll find that it roars. It is, you know, nature is so powerful. Well, it all comes directly from that deep place. That's why people love walking in nature because they feel it. It's it. Yes, it's all in creation, but the energy from which it flows is that deep place. So, um, it roars, but you have to sit until you know that. And I don't mean intellectually. I mean, it's your experience. There's a related quote that I read somewhere, uh, which says, you can't see God because God is doing the seeing. You can't see God because God is doing the seeing. Now on the deepest level, everything melts into oneness. There is no you and God. Like when Jesus said the father and I are one, there wasn't like Jesus and God, there was no more Jesus. It was just, and the word God doesn't really make sense on those levels because God is like a being. And this is way beyond that. It's one. If you want to call it one being, that's an intellectual understanding and it's not really accurate, but it's, it's in the right direction. Uh, beyond being as is this, you might say, uh, but you can't see God because God is doing the seeing. Okay. Thank you, Liz. I yonder, how do I deal with toxic home environments while I'm trying to heal inner child and past trauma? Uh, wow. Okay. That everybody identifies with. I'm sure you got everybody's attention with that question. It's a very good one on some level, either a little bit or a lot. We all experienced that. We do. I'll tell you a story and then let me answer that. I was walking down the beach. Oh, this was, let's say 20 years ago. And there were, at that time there were people fishing and just because they didn't like the fish, they wouldn't throw it in. They would just kill the fish. They wouldn't throw it back. They'd go, Oh, that's a catfish. I don't like have it. And they just stab it. Or they would just cut up another fish, just chop it up for no reason. One guy had a net and he threw like 30 fish onto the beach and they're all flopping around and he's going, nah, I don't want those fish. And he's just letting them flop around and die. Not, not, he didn't just didn't want to eat those particular fish. And kids were running around with baseball bats, smashing crabs and things like that. They felt that was fun. Anyway, that was painful to me to see all that stuff yet. I didn't want to constantly go talk to every single person I saw on the beach. And it seemed like it was every single person was doing something. That's an exaggeration. Um, but it seemed that way. I was in pain. I'd like to walk on the beach and I was always appalled what was going on. And I would talk to lots of people. I couldn't stop myself. So my first trip to India, I, my first question to my guru, this guy that became my guru, very powerful being millions of followers, very powerful, changed my life. Um, I asked him, I said, uh, I explained the situation and I said, what do I do? And he said, you know, I'll tell you the truth. There is no problem here. It just appears to be a problem. There's no pain. There's no suffering. There's no bad deeds. It's just all joy. You know, first time in India, I hear this. Um, then he told me, he said, but that's not your truth. You're not there. I'm just telling you the way it is ultimately, but you're not there and it is pain for you and it is horrible. And these people are being mean. And if you feel like you need to talk to them, talk to them. And if you don't, don't, you have to live your life from where you are because you can't move forward. If you don't start with where you are, you're living a false life, really be who you are and move forward. Well, I was able to move forward to the place he was talking about. Took me a long time. I mean, 10 years, 15 years. Now, the odd thing with my guru is he was able to give you a transmission that very quickly you started seeing the reality and experiencing the reality that he was experiencing. We've talked about it in other podcasts. The problem with that was it wasn't my life. I was living his life. It was like a bypass, but it taught me a lot. I actually got to see and experience what he was talking about. So that was helpful. So back to Ayyanda's question. Um, first thing I would do, if you haven't listened to my four podcasts, they're around number 27, 28, 29, 30, maybe even five podcasts, 31, something like that. I would go back. They're all free. I would listen to that because inner child, they start off with post-traumatic stress disorder and how to work with that. These are these emotions that I think most of us have and don't realize that that's what it is. These are emotions that are very hard to release that we struggle with for years and years, maybe most of our life. It's how to release those. And then one of the podcasts shortly after that is on internal family systems as another way to access these locked up parts of us. So I would get these tools. If, if you need more tools than that, I would get a therapist or research it and get some good books. I give examples in the podcast of things you can do that are beyond the podcast. Also on my website, I have some videos that are helpful on releasing this stuff. Generally the way that you release PTSD one method, just to give you a shortcut right now is you go very slowly because I would say the inner child is made of PTSD usually, or much of it is it that strong emotion is what I mean. If you go too quickly, you become overwhelmed and you'll lock up inside and you won't be able to release and dissolve. Like we talked about in the beginning of this live session, you won't be able to release and relax because you'll be in turbulent, um, a turbulent environment that's pushing you too fast and you're just getting stimulated and locked up inside. So that doesn't help very much. My friend Bob said, first, you've got to get out of the pounding surf. And that's true. So when PTSD, the first step is to go very slowly, get yourself out of the pounding surf. Well, I live here. It's my home environment. What do I do? Learning boundaries. And I, I know maybe every home environment, even if you say what you want, they won't respect it, but try to try to do that. Because what I found is because of my upbringing where I didn't feel my boundaries were respected, I didn't learn how to have a voice. So I quit asking people to, to do what I needed for my healing and just expected them to be nice enough to do it anyway, but they might not have any clue. And so I would go around just being angry all the time or frustrated. So learning boundaries or just learning to begin to be, have a little bit of a voice. You may have a big voice. I'm just speaking in general because we don't know each other that well. Uh, but so I'm going to say a number of things, but one is have boundaries. Hey, I am going to take a half hour. I need silence. I'm going into this room or the front porch or in the front yard or wherever the bathroom, the closet, please do not come in between eight and eight 30. I'm meditating. I would go to my, uh, episode number six or something in my podcast. It's on awakening medication. I would do that kind of meditation. If you can, if you can't, I would even start with a guided meditation. There's a million of them on, on insight time, just to relax your nerves, just to give, help the pounding surf subside a little bit. Uh, that's the first step. Go slow, do whatever you can. Second step is in meditation. Watch the emotion that's balled up. Let it just run its course. Let it exude the energy that's it's pent up with anger, frustration, all the thoughts that come flying out, let them happen, but don't jump into the middle of them. Don't feel like you've got to think those thoughts. They're going to think themselves. You just watch them. You feel them when you feel and watch them, they will start to burn off their energy. They will expand their energy like a very tight rubber band unwinding, unwinding, unwinding. So once they've started exuding their energy and a one unwinding enough, not completely perhaps, but just enough, you'll feel, okay, that's enough. And this could take months, could take days. It could take hours. I don't know. Depends on how deep these things are. Um, once they've exuded their energy enough, the next thing you do is you reassociate with them and say like, I am hurting, not I have hurt or not that I'm experiencing hurt. I am hurting. Now you're reassociating. You're owning your hurt. I'm doing this to myself. I'm doing this. Nobody else is in my body, but myself. I'm doing it. Ow, ow, ow. That hurts. Now it's still exuding, but it's generalizing all through your body more and more and more. You're owning it. Then you do what they call pendulate you from your hurt. Cause you're now associated. You upped that hurting part of you believes that they're still in the place where that hurt first started. Like if it started when you were two years old, that part of you will feel young, like maybe two years old, or you might feel stuck as a teenager or stuck as a child. So that part of you feels very childlike or whatever age it took in the hurt. And from that place, you pendulate how I'm hurting and you update your files. You look around the room and realize I'm no longer being abused. I'm no longer being treated poorly right in this moment. I'm not. You walk in nature, perhaps barefooted nature is not hurting me. It feels good. I am being loved by nature. You pendulate as you swing, like a pendulum, the hurt begins to take in the goodness that's happening around you in that moment. I say in that moment, because you have a toxic home environment. And when you go back inside, maybe those people are still being toxic because that's all they know. They're doing the best they know how to do, but that's it. That's their best for now. But notice in your world, you've confined places to connect to that feel good. Perhaps it's music. Perhaps it's art. Perhaps it's nature. The highest thing is as you meditate, as we've talked about before, the highest thing you connect can connect to is yourself. You love yourself and that's awareness because Liz asked, who am I? That's your deep awareness. There are no problems in awareness. Awareness has no inner child. It's free of all that. Buddha says, take refuge there. And the reason why Buddha says that is because you're free there. You can relax into it. It's pure peace. That's who you are. Always. The reason why we don't always feel that is because we're sucked into our dramas and our hallucinations, our thoughts and our emotions. So if anything that's troubling you is a thought or an emotion, you know, it's a created thing. It's very real. It has been created. It's real. And it came from a real experience and you may have been betrayed and hurt really and had been in the right, really. So I'm not commenting on any of that. I'm just saying it's a response to all of that and it can be let go of because today in the moment where you take time for yourself and love yourself, you can pendulate, swing like a pendulum and connect to something good and notice your environment right there is good. You created it. It's good. And you're accepting that for yourself. So that's how you start. You can do things like go for a jog that burns off, uh, jagged edges. It's not completely healing. The reason why you can't say one thing as complete is because as we were talking about, you exist on many realities at the same time. So jogging helps on one level. Sometimes just taking a break and watching TV is helpful. It takes your mind off of it. Does it heal it? No, but it helps the pounding serve subside so that you can heal it. So you listen to yourself and do the things that work for you. And it, one thing isn't always the thing that stays the, the, um, the only thing you have to do, it could work for a while and then you graduate from that technique or practice or whatever you're doing. You graduate, you've matured. Now you're taking the next step. So that doesn't mean you have to stay doing what you always have been doing with that same teacher. Maybe you graduate to a more expansive place and thank the teacher you had that were perfect for that moment. And then you move on. So do you just stay open and listen to yourself? You're your own guru. So I hope that helped Ayanda. Uh, now if I, if I really wanted, if it was really bad, sometimes this is an extreme, but sometimes you just have to get out of that home environment. You just have to go. That's hard. It just is. The support of friends can be very helpful. MPTSD social contact can be very important. Somebody with their actual hand on your shoulder or giving you a hug can go miles. So there are many doors in and use the ones that work for you. Okay. Ayanda says that story definitely lit something up inside me. I'll definitely go back to your podcast and I'm super grateful for this opportunity to be able to grasp such beautiful information. Thank you so much. Thank you. Ayanda, you know, I'll tell you an absolute truth. If you're a human being, we're all in the same boat. I experienced troubles. You experienced them. The reason I know to say things in my podcast is because I started out with a lot of trouble. The more trouble that you start off with, if you take baby steps and do a little something every day, you'll get to your complete wholeness and healing and awakening. And you'll see those troubles were your greatest assets, even though they certainly didn't feel like it at the time. The reason why they're your greatest assets is because they force you to go deep for your solutions. And in that depth, your knowledge becomes very deep and your connection beyond everything becomes very deep. Everything becomes deep because the pain is deep and good news, bad news. Pain is your greatest helper, but it's hurts so much. And Jennifer says, great question and super brave too. Absolutely. You're speaking for all of us, Ayanda. Thank you for that question, Ayanda. Well, this has been a great live session. If you haven't listened to the podcast, they are very practical and we cover emotional as well as deeply spiritual and beyond non-dual as well as when we're in the world, we talk about duality. So I would urge you to go back and listen to them if you haven't because they all stand alone. But if you listen to them sequentially, starting at one, they also build on one another. And I think that's how I would recommend to do them. And if you find this podcast helpful, maybe send the link to somebody, just a bunch of people. World peace. We spread good things. So if you think this is a good thing, spread it. That's how things get spread. Okay. Yvonne says several times when I meditate, I found myself crying and a feeling of tightness in my throat. I don't recall being aware of a thought. I then have quite a good feeling. And then I shudder. I'm not sure if I had a thought and got involved and started crying. Just an experience. I had wonderful observation Yvonne, because yes, you don't have to have a thought. You can absorb experiences or emotions. Gandhi was in jail, imprisoned, and he became infuriated. And it turned out that the chef that was cooking his food had murdered people. And he had a lot of anger. The anger went to the food, which went into Gandhi. And he suddenly, he was angry. So who knows where all this is coming from, but you're on the right track. You just experience it. There's no law that you've got to figure out where everything comes from. Don't be looking for things. And I'm talking to everybody else. If you need to find them, they will pop out. You will get an image, you will see it, you will feel it, it will find you. You don't have to spend endless hours finding it. Okay. Catherine says, is there a guru, you know, still giving transmissions? Oh my goodness. Yes. And this is a very big subject. And if I answer it quickly, I'm afraid I'm going to put you down the wrong road because it's not a question that could be answered quickly. There's loads of them giving transmission loads. I only talk about that one that I received his awakening, but it wasn't mine. So it's very complicated. I could say, yes, go get a transmission, do this or that. But it would be like talking about emotions or inner child or something. It's or internal family systems. It's very complex. I can't give you a one sentence or just name off some names. That's not going to be helpful. So I'll cover it thoroughly in the next podcast. It's a conversation. It's a very good question, but it requires more than a fast answer. So thank you for it. Catherine. Great questions. Take care. Bye.