Attachment Styles & Meditation - George Haas

George Haas is the founder of Mettagroup - a Los Angeles based centre offering guided meditations, intensive classes, retreats and one-on-one mentoring to help you see more deeply and clearly into your life and relationships. His teachings combine the principles of attachment theory and insight meditation.
 
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Listen to George’s podcast - Meditation x Attachment...
https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/meditation-x-attachment-with-george-haas/id1125066071

Transcript

Attachment Styles & Meditation
Todd Zemek Speaking with George Haas 

Todd Zemek (00:00:05):

I am guessing you know, what it's like to feel lost or scared, or that you're just not really feeling that you're in the driver's seat of your own life sometimes or at all. Today we're talking about two parts of this experience, about how you're programmed to be close with others and how your state of mind can be so distressing that it blinds you. Today's guest is an expert in how you can change how you're close to others for the better, and how you can soothe your mind so that you can start making wiser decisions about love. George Hass is someone who has walked his talk after a difficult childhood. George developed a combination of addictions to cope with the pain in his life. He moved from New York to LA to pursue a, a career in film and photography in the early nineties where he discovered meditation.

(00:00:52):

His devotion of meditation grew as he found a teacher and became a meditation teacher himself. He continued to work on himself in psychotherapy, and in 2003, he founded the Meta Group as Center to help people through for passionate and insight meditation and attachment theory. On the Meta Group website, they explain that their techniques can help you become more of yourself in relationships and in your work. So I wanted to start by asking you, George Hass, how do you feel you're going in terms of being yourself and your work? It seems like you're doing a pretty good job.

George Haas (00:01:24):

I'm just releasing a book, and it's the first time that I haven't been crippled by anxiety around it. It's actually kind of fun and exciting. It took me 12 years to write the book because of the crippling anxiety that prevented me from finishing it. So it's, I would say a remarkable transformation in terms of my experience of myself, which I'm really enjoying.

Todd Zemek (00:01:46):

What were you so anxious about?

George Haas (00:01:48):

I had a challenging childhood, and I came up with a fearful avoidant attachment strategy. I can explain that more, but in a fearful avoidant attachment strategy, you think of yourself as somebody who's not particularly capable, and you think of the world as a hostile place that if you don't act in a perfect way will actually harm you. And so the anxiety was always about putting something out into the world that would trigger people to harm me and not actually thinking that I was capable of doing something that I could put out into the world that wouldn't cause that to happen. And so it would just ratchet up this free floating anxiety about what might happen if I was too exposed.

Todd Zemek (00:02:29):

It's good to know that after all the work that you do that you are, you're still working on that yourself, Uhhuh <affirmative>. But when I heard the, the title of your podcast that it was meditations times Attachment, I thought, okay, this is someone that's got my attention. Yeah, this is someone that knows what what he's about is bringing these two things together. And I'm conscious that when you do something like that, often purists aren't shy about saying, yeah, we like they do, of bringing things together until we actually bring things together. <Laugh> <laugh>.

George Haas (00:02:56):

Well, it was an interesting journey. I'm, I was very angry as a young man markedly so that people were frightened of me because my anger was so volatile. And I, I had such a little handle on controlling it when I went to do the meditation process and got a much better handle on it, and I decided to start teaching my teacher, one of my teachers is Shinzen Young, and what he asks of his senior students is that they begin to teach. And so just in following with his instruction, I began to teach and I was initially teaching Shin Zen's curriculum pretty much in a straightforward manner. But then people kept coming up to me and saying, you used to be so angry and you're not angry anymore. Actually, that's what I would like you to try and teach. And so I started teaching a class called Overcoming Anger, and then people came up to me and said, you know, anger isn't my issue.

(00:03:51):

Fear is my issue. Could you teach a class on fear? So then I started teaching a class on overcoming Fear. So I was teaching my two classes. Then people came up to me and said, you know, fear isn't actually my problem. Sadness is my problem. Can you teach a class on sadness? So I started teaching a class on sadness, and then people came up to me and said, Hey, gr, fear and sadness are not my problem. You know what? My problem is shame. And I thought, I'll teach a class on overcoming difficult emotions. So I started teaching a class at Overcoming Difficult Emotions, and then people came up to me and said, that actually isn't the problem. The problem is the relationships that caused the difficult emotions. And then I thought, they're asking me to teach about attachment. And so then I started teaching about attachment with all of that other stuff wrapped into it. And that's actually the thing that was the most interesting to the, the students who came to study with me.

Todd Zemek (00:04:44):

And so this was the period of your life where you were feeling quite angry, you were quite reactive.

George Haas (00:04:49):

I was always that way in a sense. I mean, I had a, a childhood with a, a mother who was undiagnosed, but likely mentally ill. And my father was very sadistic and punishing, pretty much no kinds of abuse that you can have. I didn't have from him. And my mother was an addict as well. And so by the time I got out of my childhood in my adolescence, I was pretty fucked up just to use a clinical term. So my younger brother committed suicide when he was, or I should say, died by suicide when he was 22. And that sort of spun me and pretty hard. And I was diagnosed with cirrhosis of the liver when I was 23, and told that if I didn't stop drinking immediately, I would probably die from it and still couldn't stop, and then was able to get sober in a 12 step program.

(00:05:47):

But the main issue around that is how hard it was to find anybody who knew what to do to help. It wasn't that I wasn't willing and that I wasn't working with people who were helping, it's just that they didn't really know what to do with that level of fucked Upness. And I think that the main reason I started Meta Group was because I did find that there were things that that worked and you could do, but that they were hard to find and not well bundled, and that it would be useful to people to be able to come to someplace where people with a lot of trauma and know what to do to help come out of that.

Todd Zemek (00:06:27):

So meditation had a a really important effect in your life. What about in terms of your own psychotherapy? What, what did you find? Did you try multiple things? You said you did the 12th step. Were there other types of therapies that you tried?

George Haas (00:06:41):

Sadly, I was having a really hard time in adolescents coming to terms with my sexual orientation. I lived in a family that I was afraid that if they found out I would be thrown out. Turns out I wasn't wrong about that. And so I asked for help and my dad arranged for me to see somebody, and it turned out to be conversion therapy, which wasn't actually that helpful for me. Actually, it kind of set me back. I mean, have sex with as many women as you can and don't have sex with any men, was basically the extent of the treatment, which is hilarious if you have some distance from it. When I came to New York, this would be in the mid seventies. I you know, young men in a big city trying to be successful, you know, the American way of life here.

(00:07:31):

And I found over and over again that I could get really close to succeeding, but the anxiety of it would be so crippling that I would intentionally fold not because I didn't like finishing, but because I couldn't bear the anxiety anymore. And so I would accept the not finishing or the not succeeding because the relief from the anxiety was so in need. And so I sought out a, a therapist who treated fear of success and got into that. And that was quite interesting to begin to get into that. And then what I discovered from that work in psychotherapy was that I had dissociative identity disorder, which was also pretty heavy to deal with. And so I began to work with that in New York. And then when I came out to LA I completed that integration work. And then after the, the work on the dissociative stuff, I went in to do work on attempting to develop a successful capacity for emotional regulation, which was also done mostly in a psychodynamic therapy process.

(00:08:41):

And then my therapist in the mid-nineties said that he really thought that I'd done miraculous work and that this is as good as it was going to get, and I would just have to adapt to the limitations that my unfortunate childhood imposed on me and get as much out of life as possible. When I examined that life that was available to that, it, it frankly wasn't good enough and I was ambivalent about it. And so that's when awareness of attachment theory arose. I was listening to Alan Sch, he's a researcher out here at UCLA. He was giving a talk at the you Neuropsychiatric Institute at u UCLA on disorganized attachment. And in 10 minutes, he described the pattern of my life as if he had intimate knowledge of me in a way that the previous 20 years of therapy had not even really touched on. And that was fairly mind blowing,

Todd Zemek (00:09:44):

The sun shun through the clouds

George Haas (00:09:47):

<Laugh>. So I immediately went headlong into exploring attachment and attachment theory and realized that this would be very useful. But I couldn't find anybody in Los Angeles at that time that knew anything about attachment theory nor offered any treatment for it. But I was a pretty hardcore meditator at that point. And I realized that one of the aspects which was developing mentalizing around these attachment mind states was an easy thing for meditation to do. And so I began to develop these ways of practicing, which I did just for myself as a way of exploring the attachment conditioning. And so that when people asked me to teach about difficult relationships, I had already developed the meditation strategies that I had been using myself. And so it was an easy slide into offering that to other people. I also understood that psychoeducation would be helpful to people. And so we developed a curriculum and began to teach it in classes at a meditation center that I worked in. And that they were quite popular with people, mainly though people who had already tried the conventional psychotherapy path and had not had any relief from that.

Todd Zemek (00:11:01):

And did you see that your own relationship started to change more fully at that point?

George Haas (00:11:06):

One of the things about attachment conditioning is that the pattern of relationships that you engage in are pretty straightforward and linked to your attachment strategy, I worked for five years in rehabs, and I would sit in front of a room full of addicts, and I would describe the way that they were likely in re relationships, and they would all be flabbergasted that A, they weren't so unique, and b, that it was so ordinary in the sense that conditioning leads to those kinds of outcomes. Once you begin to see those patterns, then you can make a decision to change your mind about attachment and begin to develop the skills that you need to be able to be in relationships. If you've meditated at all, you probably know that simply having the information and making a decision is not likely to lead to, to profound shifts in behavior because we're conditioned, we've grown it in our brains, and that's how our brain operate, and we have to get the brain to grow something else and then switch over to the new thing in order for you to have lasting change. And that's why the meditation piece is so useful for this In a shorter form, yes, my relationships are better

Todd Zemek (00:12:15):

<Laugh>. Well, well, I guess we, if we jump in and we, we look at, at what attachment is, how are these attachment styles different to a personality?

George Haas (00:12:24):

If you think of the personality arising? So you're going to get from me an explanation that's steeped in meditation. So you're going to have to adapt to that.

Todd Zemek (00:12:33):

I look forward to it. <Laugh>

George Haas (00:12:36):

Personality arises based on conditioning. So you have the object that can be sensed, the capacity to sense it when they meet, there's a contact of that sensing experience, which creates a consciousness of the sensing moment, which is then compared to the database of previously sensed things. And if you have one central organizing database, then you draw from your previous experiences and previous conditioning and the use of your imagination to match what the present moment means to you in relationship to your past. And then that manifests into conceptual reality, the thing that you think is happening. And because you're constantly going back to this same database to create the experience of the present moment in that way, that's what we think of as personality, that reflection from the, the conditioned database, we might talk about attachment more as a view then this thing that distorts that process of creation. And also attachment conditioning has a tendency to limit imagination, and so it tends to be less dynamic. People who have secure attachment tend to be more flexible and more dynamic in the creation of the experience of the present moment and also their personality. Whereas people who have insecure attachment or disorganized attachment are much less spontaneous and much less imaginative in the way that they create that the vivaciousness and the, the, the sort of interests of dynamic personality is less available to people who have limited views. Limiting beliefs is the Buddhist term.

Todd Zemek (00:14:15):

I imagine for people with secure attachment. It must be quite perplexing as to why everyone's having such difficulty.

George Haas (00:14:22):

It is, and it often produces a lack of compassion bonds

Todd Zemek (00:14:27):

To it, because it's not that hard <laugh> from their point of view.

George Haas (00:14:31):

Well, but also it isn't that hard for, it isn't that hard for them. Now imagine it not being that hard for you if you don't have secure attachment and how much better that is. Mm-Hmm. I mean, it is much better. It's a little controversial to say that because there are so many more people with insecure attachment than there are with a secure attachment in the general sense of it. And psychotherapy doesn't really help to change the underlying attachment mechanism. It just helps you to accommodate to it. And so without some fundamental system or tool or protocol that you could use to change attachment, the best that they have to offer is acclimatizing to the way it's going to be for you, even if it's not nearly as good. And I think that's one of the things that's so bitter for people who through no fault of their own come out of their childhood with insecure attachment.

Todd Zemek (00:15:26):

So I'm sure that you've described this thousands of times over the course of your career, but for, for people who are new to attachment, could you walk us through what we're talking about in terms of these, these different styles? And I guess the, the thing that's going to be of most interest to my audience is how does this actually play out in relationships? How does this play out in the context of dating?

George Haas (00:15:49):

The bad news is if you're past your mid-thirties, seven out of 10 people that are available for dating are going to be dismissing because they're the ones who have the shortest relationship. So they're more often available. The least available group is going to be secure people because they make commitments in their twenties that are long lasting and very stable and, and often go on their whole lives. Secure. People are not worried about somebody taking care of them, which is the main difference. So, and there's three dimensions to this. Secure attachment means that 30% of the time or more, somebody came to you, attuned to you, empathetically connected to you, understood what you needed, and then responded by meeting that need. And if that happened to you as a child 30% of the time or more, then you have a sense that you don't have to worry about that.

(00:16:50):

You have a sense that people will come to you, that they'll be able to see you, they'll be able to understand what you need, and they'll be willing to meet your needs. That's secure attachment 30% of the time or more. When you were in school and you took a test and you got 30% correct on it, what grade did they assign you for that? It's not a high bar. And I think that's also one of the things that, that is so infuriating about people who don't have secure attachment is that your parents or whoever your caregivers were showed up for you less than 30% of the time, right? That that's not a good mark. Anxious avoidant children go up to be dismissing adults. And typically what happens to them is each time they come to their attachment figure and request care, they're rejected and they're rejected so consistently.

(00:17:41):

Now this could happen because the parents are incapable of attuning or simply aren't empathetic themselves, and so they can't perform the task. But over and over again, the anxious avoidant child comes to the parent and their requests for connection are rejected. And so the child learns that there's no purpose in doing that. There's no point in attempting to collaborate in care with somebody because you can't get it. So that brings up another one of these points. There's three of them, attachment, exploration, and collaborative care. So dismissing people abandon collaborative care doesn't mean that they abandon trying to get their needs met, it's just they stop collaborating and they start taking. And so you tend to have dismissing adults who are very transactional in the way that they operate in relationships. I do this for you and you do this for me. Another way to put it is I promise you the stars, the son and the moon, and you give me attention for that, and that that's a complete transaction.

(00:18:44):

I don't have to actually supply to you the stars, the son and the moon preoccupied people. I always have to say this, you are not your attachment strategy. It is something that activates in you. So people who use a preoccupied attachment strategy as an adult had a childhood where the care was inconsistent. Sometimes the care was good, sometimes the care was misattuned, and sometimes there was no care. And what that ended up creating in the child is this preoccupation with the mind state of the caregiver and having to take care of the caregiver in order to make sure that the caregiver was in good enough shape to take care of the child. So you became in, in the child's mind, responsible for the mind state of the caregiver. And if you didn't do a good enough job taking care of them, they wouldn't be able to take care of you.

(00:19:38):

So it's a role reversing situation. And then disorganized people tend to have trauma, so that's where the trauma line is. So physical, sexual, emotional abuse, some kind of exploitation pushes them over into disorganized. If you can imagine, the attachment mechanism goes off whenever you have a sense of being in danger and causes propels, you really to seek a physical proximity to the person who is supposed to protect you. How do you make sense of that if you're a child and your attachment mechanism goes off, which is propelling you to connect to the person that is harming you? So it creates this schism in the mind, which is unresolvable for the child. And so they become quite disorganized in how they respond

Todd Zemek (00:20:27):

As people are thinking about their own relationships, their own attachment styles, I guess. Well, one of the things that I see is that sometimes it's not until you actually start getting closer to somebody that some of the rawness of these things start coming out.

George Haas (00:20:40):

Yeah. Why they wouldn't, because it's not how you are. It's an activation of a mechanism, right?

Todd Zemek (00:20:45):

Ah, yes. Yes.

George Haas (00:20:46):

So you have attachment and you have exploration, and there's sort of toggle switches. If your attachment mechanism goes off, your exploration mechanism goes off. If your attachment mechanism goes on, your exploration mechanism goes off mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, and you seek proximity to the person who will protect you. And then when they protect you and soothe you and reregulate you, the attachment mechanism goes off and your exploration mechanism goes on, and you're back out into the world looking for things that have meaning. And then the third, of course, is the collaborative care. If you meet somebody and you're able to collaborate with each other and providing care for each other, so each of you is fairly well stabilized, then the attachment mechanism doesn't go off much. So you don't have that experience of extreme need and intensity. Most of the time you're in the exploration mechanism, which is propelling you into seeking meaning in the world.

Todd Zemek (00:21:40):

So what would be the therapeutic task for someone who is preoccupied? They're feeling like they're not being responded to constantly feeling let down. What are the therapeutic tasks that would need to be achieved?

George Haas (00:21:52):

What you would need to recognize is that you've become preoccupied with your attachment figure and bring the attention back to yourself, bring your attention back to your own regulation, emotional regulation. That is,

Todd Zemek (00:22:03):

That would be so difficult because they're consistently being so disappointed.

George Haas (00:22:08):

<Laugh> Well, in all of this, of course, is that you've picked somebody who doesn't listen to you. I'm going to try and answer this in a, in a simple way that isn't too long in the three pillar approach that we use to repair attachment. The first is the ideal parent figure protocol, which is meant to help you remap the original understanding of how you think relationships will go, so that you can open up the database, make it much more flexible and dynamic. The second is mentalizing or metacognition, so that you can begin to see how your mind states are unfolding so that you can be informed of that. And so when you make a decision about what action to take, it's a more skillful action that will actually result in the outcome that you want. And then the last one is the, the development of the skill of collaborative relationships.

(00:23:00):

Secure people most often coupled with other secure people, dismissing people, most often coupled with preoccupied people. So you have a preoccupied person who's chosen to be with somebody who doesn't collaborate and doesn't reciprocate care. And so that your attachment mechanism is constantly activated because of that, which causes you to seek physical proximity to the person. The dismissing person is willing to trade physical proximity to them if you're willing to abandon your own life and just take care of them. But that in the end, is so unsatisfying as, as a way of being in the world that the dissatisfaction for the preoccupied person is constantly being presented to the dismissing person who will not take care of that. Hmm. So that's the dynamic. This works for the dismissing person because the preoccupied person tends to do take care of the dismissing person and not demand reciprocation.

(00:24:00):

And the preoccupied person is often willing to abandon their own exploration thinking that somehow the relationship will provide the meaning in life that they want. The fundamental problem with that is that it doesn't, and it, it is unable to, even if the dismissing person wanted their life to be meaningful to the preoccupied person, what provides that kind of meaning is your own solo exploration. And if your attachment mechanism is activated all the time because your partner is not responsive, your exploration mechanism no, never goes off, and you never go out into the world to explore, to satisfy that need. You just demand it of the person who can't deliver it. And so that's the knot of dismissing and preoccupied relationships

Todd Zemek (00:24:49):

And such a common painful, stuck experience for so many couples with one person tending to do more of the pursuit other person perpetually distancing. Right? And then no way of really talking about that pattern.

George Haas (00:25:04):

The reason that there's no way to talk about it is because the worldviews are so different. The dismissing person does not accept other worldviews other than their own. So the meaning that they assign it is what it is, and they won't really budge from that too much. They have a very rigid and restricted range of being able to be in a relationship. So what you'll notice is they bounce from being seductive to bullying and not much in between. If you meet a skilled dismissing person, they can elicit from you everything you've ever wanted somebody to say to you in 15 minutes and then slowly feed it back to you. So you feel like they've seen me finally, they know me, they love me. This is the only person who's ever done that. And actually, they've just pulled it out of you. They're, they're completely blind to any of that, and they're just feeding it to you because they know that if they can hook you on that, they can begin to withdraw it and you'll pursue them and you'll abandon your own life to take care of them, which is what they mainly want, which you'll do until you're fed up.

(00:26:09):

And then you'll stomp your foot and start walking out the door, and then in the back of your mind thinking, he'll come after me or she'll come after me. And, and then when they do, they seduce you a little bit. You come right back in, into the relationship until the cycle is repeated so many times you just don't believe the seduction anymore, and you can't get yourself to go back.

Todd Zemek (00:26:29):

It'd be very common process of breaking up, getting back together, whether the avoidant person was starting to feel like, oh, now I feel more comfortable, you know, we've got more, got more space here. This, yeah, this doesn't feel so bad. Yeah, let's give this, give this another try.

George Haas (00:26:41):

Yeah.

Todd Zemek (00:26:44):

You talk about the idealized parent figure. If I hadn't had experience within inner child work myself, either as a patient or as a therapist, I don't know if I'd believe this. I I, I think as an outsider, I would sort of be thinking, yeah, right, that couldn't be so powerful. Tell me a little bit about this idealized parent figure and how that works with an attachment.

George Haas (00:27:06):

It is based on the [inaudible] practice, which is a, a millennia old practice. You have your experiences, your relationships, you have the times that you, your needs are being met and you feel satisfied and connected, and you have times when they're not, and you feel a sense of disappointment and disconnection in childhood. What begins to happen when over and over again, you can't get your needs met, is you begin to pinch off your imagination. You pinch off your capacity to imagine getting those things so you don't hurt anymore because you can't get them even though you want them. And so depending on how severe the conditions of your childhood are, you can totally pinch back a, a capacity to imagine a collaborative relationship or a relationship that's fulfilling, and it can be this kind of drudgery that you simply accept, because that's the nature of how relationships are.

(00:27:58):

So that's really what, what that is. They've pinched off the capacity to desire the things that they want to try and get for themselves. They've pinched off what they think they can get in terms of relationships. They pinch off what needs they think are amenable and what aren't amenable. And so in the meditation, and I should also say, then they construct a sense of themselves around that limited view. One of the reasons that ideal parent figure is so powerful is it bypasses the autobiographical narrative of your life. So you don't have to deal with any of those constructions in doing the work. You deal really with what your, your imagination is capable of producing and what you actually remember. And so once you get past the beginning of doing the technique, you're actually in the views that you hold, not in the, the way that you've allowed yourself to think of those views very different.

(00:28:58):

And then you begin to allow yourself to touch back into the things that you wanted, that you weren't able to get, which opens up the capacity to begin not to get them then, but to see clearly what's available to you now and begin to choose from that. So if you think about it in a, in a quantum physics term, quantum mechanics term, in each moment, what opens up is the full range of potentialities that you could choose from everything. And yet, when we go to the perceptual database about trying to understand what's in front of us and what our choices are, if we've limited our capacity to imagine those or to see those choices, then what lights up is not the full range of possibility, but just the ones that we allow ourselves to see. And then we over and over again, choose those which reinforces the belief that that's all that's available to me.

(00:29:58):

But in imagination, once you begin to open it up, you can imagine hundreds or thousands of variations that you wouldn't have been able to before because you pinched off the imagination and restricted it. And so you begin to imagine what kind of mothering would've been perfect for you, a perfectly responsive mother. Now you have the, the mother if you had one that you had and what that mothering was like. And so we're not attempting to correct that or adjust that. We're just leaving that the way that it is, and we're creating a whole separate track of perfect parenting to run alongside of it, because you have the object that can be sense, the capacity to sense it when they meet the consciousness of that sensing experience arise. And then it, you look to the database to see what to make out of it. And if there's a perfect parenting entry there or a crappy parenting entry there, you can choose the perfect parenting thing, make the present moment that, and then the whole range of potentialities that you have to choose from are right in front of you and you can try them.

(00:31:07):

And then you have the immediate direct experience of having chosen differently and having a different outcome that you never would've been able to do before because you couldn't even see that that choice is available to make, which is bittersweet. You see in the present moment that you're free to choose things that you never thought you could get. But then when you reflect back, you see that the reason that you didn't get them before was because you were the one who didn't take them, even though they were available then. And so that there's a, a kind of settling period that happens where you have to sort of take that in, you know, the adult life, where meaning comes from, is from you exploring things that are meaningful to you, not to anyone else. You have all of the pressures from the people around you, what they want for you, and you have the pressures from society about what they want from you. And if you go after any of those, it's not satisfying enough. So you really have to be able to look deeply into yourself and discover the things that are meaningful to you. And then you need to begin to change your life in such a way that more and more of each day is spent in the pursuit of those things that have real meaning. And if you do that, then all of a sudden everything enlivens and the joyfulness of life is there within your reach, and it's been there, and it's so exciting in that way.

Todd Zemek (00:32:29):

Imagine that you, <laugh> <laugh>, you can be aware of what you need. You can be engaged in meeting those needs, and some of those needs can actually be met. Oh my God. Right? Yeah. Incredible. So what a, what a powerful, what a powerful practice. And that's so practical in that way. And like any practice, I guess you get better at that in time if you're able to grieve or accept for what you didn't receive, either historically in early childhood or just in terms of your adult life, just to leave that as it is, and then to continually come back to a practice that would support you in being creative in one, listening to what is it that I need? And then being creative in generating opportunities and then taking that out in the world to be creative and ex and exploratory. Yeah. I mean, it wouldn't be surprising that life would start to change under those <laugh>. Yeah. But I guess that's where having sustained support, both from a therapist in terms of those maps and in terms of your meditation, in terms of your state, that's where we're really likely to see sustainable change.

George Haas (00:33:38):

Right? The one, one of the things that you notice about secure people is that they tend to have full li full social lives. And the further you get from security and to insecure and then to disorganize, the less and less robust people's social network are until you get into disorganized people who have really almost no social network. And, and what they have is unreliable

Todd Zemek (00:33:59):

Outside of a drug habit.

George Haas (00:34:01):

You know? That first hit was awesome. And, and then the second hit that unfortunate body's corrective tolerance begins to happen. So you have to take more, and then at a certain point, you have to take more than the body can actually tolerate to have that same brilliant effect. And so that's why addiction is so unreliable, because the tolerance develops, and then all of a sudden you have to take so much that you're crippled for two days with a hangover afterwards, <laugh>.

Todd Zemek (00:34:36):

So the flip side of that diminishing returns is that for Yeah, as we become more secure, we've got other secure people in our lives who are actually very good at nourishing us,

George Haas (00:34:48):

Right? Yeah. Reliable and responsive.

Todd Zemek (00:34:51):

And I guess that that's one of the skills is that we're identifying people and we're, we're getting better at identifying people who are capable of responding to us.

George Haas (00:35:02):

If you look at the nature of the pattern of relationships with attachment strategies, secure, people tend to be in relationship with secure people because they're reliable and responsive in order to have a relationship with a secure person, the minimum entry is reliable without that reliable and sufficiently responsive. Without those, they don't engage you. If you're dismissing, you don't do collaborative relationships. So they don't have relationships with secure people because secure people won't be in a, in a transactional relationship that is one-sided, preoccupied people can be in relationships with secure people, but it's, it can be treacherous for a secure person to do that. But they can, because the reliability and responsiveness causes their attachment strategy not to activate. And so they don't act out in the preoccupied ways, but they're most likely to be in relationship to a dismissing person. They can't do a relationship with a disorganized person because the way a disorganized person regulates their emotion is by socially isolating themselves. So a preoccupied person needs constant physical proximity, and a disorganized person needs to socially isolate themselves. It doesn't work for, for either person. A preoccupied person can be in a relationship with a preoccupied person, but nobody's exploring in those relationships. So they get stale really fast. And both sides lose interest because nobody's exploring. And a disorganized person can be in relationship to a dismissing person because they really don't care whether you're reliable, as long as when you show up, you have the juice that they want, right? <Laugh>.

(00:36:45):

So most of the time, disorganized people are in relationship with other disorganized people, and neither one is reliable and neither one is responsive. And so th those relationships tend to be very reinforcing in terms of the view that there is no reliable relationship.

Todd Zemek (00:37:22):

Speaking of that, in terms of working with that idealized parent as a means of engaging with their own needs, how does that work therapeutically with patients that might have complex trauma or where the very notion of parents may be quite triggering?

George Haas (00:37:37):

It's very good question. People who have disorganized detachment should not engage in direct trauma reprocessing. What happens with direct trauma reprocessing is that they tend to dissociate the integration p part in the best case scenario. So it doesn't have really any lasting effect, but in the worst case scenario, it further disorganizes them. So it makes actually the whole recovery process harder. And so I really can't be too emphatic in saying that no EMDR, no somatic experiences, no direct trauma integration attempts for disorganized people, which would mean that if you were working with people who have trauma, that you're screening for attachments so that you know who to work with and in what way. And that typically is not currently happening in the therapeutic community. And so you have a lot of, that's who, mostly who we see. They've gone through the, the traditional trauma focused therapy, the stage dependent therapy, and, and it has made it worse.

(00:38:39):

One of the things about the ideal parent figure is it's indirect trauma reprocessing. So you never go into the traumatic experience. You avoid that. Not that you avoid repairing it, you just don't go and ask the person to come back into those mind states and relive those experiences. You go after it's over and have the ideal parent figures provide all of the soothing that the child would've wanted at that time, or the adolescent would've wanted at that time. And then you go before it happens, and you have the ideal parent figures prevent it from happening. This is a huge change in people's capacity to respond to the world because people have had trauma, and particularly when it was in their childhoods, they had no agency to stop it from happening. They could recognize that it was going to happen, but there was nothing that they could do about it.

(00:39:32):

And so it creates this passivity in the mind that when you, even if it's a, a misread identify that a traumatic experience is about to happen to you again, you have virtually no agency to stop it from happening. So you see in adults who are traumatized as children, that they over and over again submit to traumatic experiences that they might not have to, or at least you would think that an adult would have enough agency that they wouldn't have to do that. But for them, because when they go to the database, submitting is the only choice that's there. That's what they do. And so when you have the ideal parent figures prevent it from happening, you have this new entry in the database that it can be prevented. And so when the person makes the intention and to take an action in their present day life, they, they have the option of stopping it from happening, which they didn't have before. So that really changes things quite dramatically.

Todd Zemek (00:40:30):

And how beautiful that part of the prevention could be collaborative. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, it could be a process of strengthening through reaching out Yeah. To an appropriate person.

George Haas (00:40:40):

Somebody else is the best system for emotional regulation, right? Not the substance. If you don't trust people, you can't reach out or get emotionally regulated by them. So you're denying yourself the most effective means of emotional regulation. So if you look at, say, a disorganized person, something happens, they get dysregulated and they withdraw and it takes them four days to reregulate. They could have done that in 20 minutes if they had somebody reliable that they've gone and talked to. And so the efficiency of collaborative relationships is amazing in comparison to the externalized strategies. So we all start out as auto regulators, we just regulate ourselves. Infants are all order regulars. And then as the brain develops, say, everybody will know this, in America, we call it stranger anxiety, but it's, the baby is totally happy to be with whoever you plop them onto. And then all of a sudden they, they have a preference for some people, and they're frightened of people that they don't know.

(00:41:33):

We call that stranger anxiety. But actually what's happening there is the hierarchy of attachment figures list in the mind is being formed and the brain is developing to the point that you can look outside of yourself to somebody else to come and help you manage these things. And so you move from auto regulating to externally regulating. Then if the caregiver is sensitive enough, this is the baseline of 30% care, good enough care, then you begin to collaborate with the person in terms of your care. And then you integrate into yourself or interject into yourself the skills of the collaborative emotional regulation. And you, and you develop self-mastery, which is a thing that allows you to go explore dismissing people. Remember, nobody came and they never really get out of that autoregulation. So when you talk about addiction, you're talking about an auto regulating strategy, which is associated with avoidant.

(00:42:30):

People who are not avoidant, are not addicted at the same, right? So 30% of dismissing people who are organized have addiction, and 70% of disorganized people have addiction. It's very highly correlated in that way. If somebody comes and they come regularly enough that you become oriented into the external focus, but not so consistent that you develop collaborative skills, then you get stuck in the external regulator, which is the domain of the preoccupied person. And then the secure person has that they develop in the relationship to their caregiver, that basis of collaborative care in the first few months of life. And then as soon as they're mobile at about 18 months or so, between a year and 18 months, then they can regulate themselves enough to go explore. And that's the trajectory. And so when you're also talking about repairing it, we need to know where you are so we can teach you the skills to be able to move up into this place of collaborative relationships and solo exploration.

Todd Zemek (00:43:31):

Certainly one of the reasons that people avoid seeking treatment is the, is the fear that they're going to be overwhelmed by coming and doing something cathartic that they've seen on a television talk show or <laugh> or so something like that, that that's going to be the expectation. Yeah.

George Haas (00:43:45):

That's They're going to ambush you with your family <laugh>.

Todd Zemek (00:43:48):

Yes, exactly. Exactly. But this can be beautiful experiences if regulated correctly, right? In terms of how to be, not to be overwhelmed and soothed in, in a therapeutic environment. But Ben also to do that internally. And I, I guess that's where some of these meditative practices can potentially be a safe base of return. There could be, in a sense, a secure sense of certainty that comes from having a practice to turn to

George Haas (00:44:16):

The main difference, say between a straight therapeutic relationship and a relationship within a meditation community is that you actually have a community of people around that you can begin to try and build out your social network with. I think one of the main limits of having a therapeutic relationship is you can make the relationship with the therapist work well, but then when you go back out into the world, who are the people that you're going to try to get that to work with? And oftentimes that's the biggest stumbling block. Whereas if this program is embedded within a meditation community and it's part of that community, then you can come into the community segments of the community will have the same languaging that you have and that you can begin to attempt to construct a social network that will be supportive of you. One of the things about the 12 step world, of course, is that the community is there in a meditation community, of course, it's not all people who have a particular mind state or a particular affliction that draws them there.

(00:45:16):

So there's a much wider range of exposure in terms of people who are there. We often have this idea that we can become great meditators and then we can move to the desert island and live in a cave without any social contact. And that would be the classic avoidant view. <Laugh>. If you've ever been to Asia and gone to see the cave monasteries, there's a cave and there's a monastery around it filled with people <laugh>, and you sit in the cave and you're constantly engaging with people coming to bring the food and to all of the rest of the stuff that goes on. So you, you know, the, the idea of the bearded distressed hair yogi in tattered robes in a cave on the mountain side is, is incorrect

Todd Zemek (00:45:59):

With, with very, you know, potentially none of those collaborative capacities <laugh> at at all. I've encountered that at times, you know, people who are great meditators and then when they're social, they'll put on that, that identity that I, I I'm the meditator and there's a, a sense of distance as as, as you're sitting with them and they just stare, stare through you.

George Haas (00:46:20):

Yeah, right.

Todd Zemek (00:46:20):

Exactly. You're a lesser being because you're, you're

George Haas (00:46:22):

Experiencing, I'm, I'm very irreverent and, and pious. This is one of the things that sets me off <laugh>. Sure.

Todd Zemek (00:46:29):

I imagine that you would've seen this as well. I've met people that have been leaders in the meditation community or within yoga or mindfulness. And, and one of the ironies is despite their, their years of practice that their personality seems to have been untouched. That they can be just as narcissistic as a beginner or just as obsessive. How is it that someone could commit to a meditation practice for years and still their interactive capacities are still just as harsh, just as rigid?

George Haas (00:46:57):

One of the things about a meditation practice is insights tend to come from the kind of practice that you do. So you can assiduously avoid practices that would provide insight into the nature of your narcissism. And so you never see it cause it's not reflected. So you want to find a teacher really unwilling to go along with that. And if you don't, it's gonna be very hard for you to manage it. Otherwise, a view is completely believable. You can construct your conceptual reality to match your database and it's completely compelling and believable and you just operate as if that's true. Not having somebody direct you to the idea that the view is not substantial. So you take in the data through the capacity to sense that you can, as you can sense it. So eye consciousness, I'm looking at this form and light and then mind takes it and turns it into a computer and turns it into language and turns it into a person and all the rest of it. But conceptual reality is projected outward. It isn't. The main delusion is that you are taking in what's outside and you're creating a representation of it inside. That actually isn't what's happening. What's happening is you are taking in the un fixated, flowing, sensing data and then you're turning it into a, a reality and then you're projecting that reality out. So what you are looking at out there is something that's been created based on your database and as you, you probably know, it's can be very compelling <laugh>.

(00:48:35):

So you need to have the, the help of a different perspective that can then guide you toward a practice that that will reveal to yourself the nature of those things. And if you don't have that, then you think you're right and you think your view is the view and everybody else should adapt it.

Todd Zemek (00:48:53):

So what we're talking about here was using your meditation practice to help with healthier relationships. And I love what you're saying is that you're actually encouraging people to go explore as they're meditating, that they're exploring with people who are on the same process of exploration. What a great place to practice.

George Haas (00:49:12):

Yes.

Todd Zemek (00:49:13):

It broadens the idea of what practice means, doesn't it?

George Haas (00:49:16):

Well, you know, here's another thing. Secure people don't need to do this. It goes back to that why are you doing all of this? Why are you upsetting yourself? Just get on with it. And from their view that's correct. Because they don't have to do any of it and they can get on with it. And that's what I meant by the lack of compassion that often security people exhibit in the face of people who don't have it. And so when you get earn secure people, they tend to be very compassionate about these things cuz they, they know how hard one it is to get there.

Todd Zemek (00:49:50):

They become therapists,

George Haas (00:49:52):

<Laugh>

Todd Zemek (00:49:56):

In terms of developing a sense of compassion towards yourself. It's certainly an interesting thing. I've done a lot of personal therapy and I've been seeing a therapist over the last 12 months. But doing this in a child's sort of work, one of the things I've noticed is that where I would be contemptuous of myself and that that was really hardwired for a very, very long time. Now it's, it's a really curious thing. I'm just spontaneously seeing compassion towards myself. Mm-Hmm.

George Haas (00:50:22):

<Affirmative>,

Todd Zemek (00:50:23):

I'm wondering if you can offer some commentary, of course this is a, a, a fundamental part of Buddhism, but offered some sort of commentary about the role of, of compassion for self and others in terms of moving towards this healthy sense of collaboration and, and exploration.

George Haas (00:50:40):

If you look at the word compassion, it's co compassion. So the sharing of feeling and it isn't actually what you're doing with when you're getting in there and exploring that. I would talk about it as in terms of mentalizing your self-generated emotional regulation strategies. So if you have a contemptuous strategy where you run the contemptuous thought for yourself, what it's doing is generating a strong emotional experience, which is taking you out of the present moment and holding you outside of the experience of the distress that the present moment is causing. And as soon as that changes, the mind shuts off the story and brings you back into the present moment. We typically learn these strategies in our family systems because that's how our family system regulates the experience of the present moment by coming and going from it with these various, I call them themes or narratives.

(00:51:33):

And so what you begin to do is investigate those themes and narratives and the ones that are afflictive you stop using and the ones that are beneficial, you reinforce. But often in that process of stopping afflictive self-generated emotion, you have deficits in terms of your skillset for regulating emotion. And that's where meditation would come in, either sua say of VA practice, of really getting clear in terms of noting your own feeling states or using one of the heart practices met or car practice. Meta often translated as loving kindness or kauna is compassion. Compassion is this skill where you attune to somebody, you allow an empathetic exchange to flow from them and the person who's dysregulated allows the person who isn't dysregulated to regulate the experience of the empathy. And as its flows back and forth, you become more regulated by the experience of the other person regulating you.

(00:52:35):

That would be what I would think of as compassion. And so yes, you want to be fantastic at doing that. The greater your capacity to regulate, the more freedom your person has to go out and get completely discombobulated and come rushing back to you. And then you just catch them and reregulate them and push them back out to explore some more. And if they keep coming back to you and they're, they overwhelm your capacity to regulate them, then in a subtle or not so subtle way, you're gonna begin to try and curtail their exploration so that they don't dysregulate you or they come back and you can't regulate them. And so the, the exploration gets trimmed because it's, it's too difficult to be in a state of dysregulation for too long.

Todd Zemek (00:53:23):

It says that that compassion's a important part of that sense of secure attachment to be able to care for yourself while you are being injured perhaps, or to a certain point and still be able to make space for someone else. And to be able to receive

George Haas (00:53:37):

In collaborative relationships, of course you take care of somebody the way that they want to be taken care of and they take care of you and the way that you want to be taken care of. And most of the time it's not equal. One person needs more care than the other does. And so you give that to the other person if they're the ones who need more because they take care of you when you need it. So it's, you're not doing your sums and getting it down to the penny. It's what's needed in the moment, which makes the freedom to go find things out. Cuz you can go risk stuff. And if you don't have that, you can't. One of the things that happens, of course as we age is if we don't have that, we begin to trim our exploration and you can trim it to the point that you are in despair about the difficulty of being alive because it doesn't have enough meaning for you. And you see this particularly as you get older and your capacities get reduced by aging. If you don't have a network around you that's going to continue to push you to get out there and find stuff out life becomes this claustrophobic and confining experience that you really don't have that much interest in keeping going with.

Todd Zemek (00:54:45):

So in terms of developing a a home practice, so many people have attempted meditation or say, ah, I can't meditate. I'm sure you encountered this all the time in terms of people who've had multiple attempts and they're listening to this conversation and they're starting to hear some of the benefits. It's just like, oh, okay, this is a slightly different approach that have been meditating in order to assist the process of having health healthier relationships. So, okay, now I'm on board. What advice would you give in terms of developing our home practice?

George Haas (00:55:12):

Well, we have morning meditation, which is one of the things that we do. Five mornings a week live at seven 30 Pacific Time eye guided meditation. It's recorded and posted on Patreon, and you can find it there five mornings a week, you'll have guided meditations to support your practice if you want.

Todd Zemek (00:55:29):

And what's the url? What's the, what's the, the

George Haas (00:55:32):

Website meta group.org. Oh, the, it's Patreon, it's meta group at Patreon, so mm-hmm.

Todd Zemek (00:55:38):

<Affirmative>. So that'd be a great place for people to start.

George Haas (00:55:40):

Well, here's the thing, it isn't the householder practice that actually gets you into deep, a deep capacity of meditation. It's retreat practice. In a perfect world, you're meditating at home and you're going on retreats. And in an imperfect world, you could not meditate at home at all and go on retreats and make much more progress than somebody who stayed at home and meditated, but didn't go on retreats. That's just unfortunately or fortunately the way that it is. The good news is because of Covid, everything's virtual. Now, <laugh>, you can go on a retreat without leaving your home <laugh>.

(00:56:20):

I don't know whether that will last, but so you cons, cons should consider that. So then the question is always, do you like to dive in the deep end of the pool? Are you when somebody who puts your toe in and sort of inches into the water? Because if you're somebody who dives into the deep end, just go on a week long or a 10 day retreat and you'll make so much more progress in doing that than trying to get a home practice going for the whole year. And then what we really want you to have from meditation is meaningful meditative experiences so that you see the value of it because it takes a lot of effort. One of the things about just having a solo practice at home is you're not doing it well enough that you get the benefit out of doing it and you're still putting all that effort in.

(00:57:08):

And so that's the formula for people stopping. I'm trying to meditate. I'm not really making any progress. It's using up a lot of resources and I don't see what the upside is. So, so don't do that. Go on a retreat first. If 10 days seems completely impossible, go for six. If six seems completely impossible, go for the weekend, but do some period of extended sitting because the first thing that you need to develop in order to be able to meditate is enough concentration to be able to hold the objects of meditation and the little pieces of meditation at the beginning aren't going to be able to do that. And so you're going to be trying to do something that you don't have the entry level skill to do, and you're going to get the result of that, which is, this doesn't make any sense to me. It's not working, and you're not wrong. It isn't working.

Todd Zemek (00:58:03):

So you developed that skill, you developed that capacity, right? You have these experiences that start to reset what's possible, and then that starts to fuel your, your motivation.

George Haas (00:58:13):

Yeah. Then you see, oh, I'm getting something really good out of this that I never got out of anything else I've tried. It's totally worth those resources I'm going to throw at them. And it, it's makes complete sense. And so that's what drives the practice. But what you'll notice, and so you go on the retreat and you're really jazzed and it really produced some insights and you're, you're sitting, you're sitting, but it's life is intruding and you're sitting less and less and less, and then all of a sudden you're not sitting anymore. And then you go on another retreat and you have that same cycle. That's the typical cycle of home practice unless you engage something like the, the reason that we do morning meditation, it's not because I am a morning person. I'm, I'm never been a morning person <laugh>.

(00:58:54):

But that regular rhythm of meditating, of course, is regulating emotionally. And so you're more emotionally regulated, which means you're, you function at a higher level, so you make better choices. And life just sort of takes off in that sort of virtuous cycle that it, it doesn't, if you don't, that's what people mostly report. They'll meditate. They'll meditate and they'll notice that things are going better, but they won't notice it's because their stress level is much lower. And so they think better and then they stop meditating and their stress level goes up and they, they have that insight. Oh my God, the reason I can function better when I meditate is cause I'm less stressed and my mind thinks better.

Todd Zemek (00:59:33):

If people were, were looking to make changes in their lives and changes the way that they are engaging in relationships, then that would be part of the strategy is that you would start scheduling in retreats that would re reset and inspire that you would also start perhaps having some sort of a community, right. Some sort of a, a regular practice where you could actually start to become close with people who are, are on a similar path, which doesn't mean that you have to exclude o other people

George Haas (01:00:01):

Internally. Oh, no, no. This is all addition.

Todd Zemek (01:00:03):

Yes, of course

George Haas (01:00:04):

We're kind of anti cult

Todd Zemek (01:00:06):

<Laugh>. Yes, yes, yes, yes. So just adding things that are going to support that

George Haas (01:00:10):

Christ. Here's the thing. You're going to have these meditative experiences, which are mind blowing, and you're going to try and talk about it at your breakfast table with people who are going to stare at you like you eat to go to the hospital. <Laugh>,

Todd Zemek (01:00:24):

I've tried that. And then they'll, they'll respond by saying, yeah, yeah, you were always into that stuff, weren't you? Yeah. Yeah. Right. Or

George Haas (01:00:31):

Maybe you should stop doing that <laugh>.

Todd Zemek (01:00:33):

Yeah, that too. I was really, really curious to ask for a, a long time, you know, one of the things that I would experience in my meditation was just great pain in my body. And it wasn't necessarily like the classic things of, oh, my knees hurt, or, or things like that. But I would experience this great pain in the, in the back of my chest. Like someone was just stabbing a knife. So for, for me, my experience of sitting to meditate was, okay, so I've got 45 minutes of just being stabbed

George Haas (01:01:01):

And stabbed in the back. And

Todd Zemek (01:01:02):

So that's, thankfully that has subsided. So I don't experience that so much anymore. But there are other experiences where I'll, I'll experience physical, energetic sort of tension somewhere, and that'll be a really prominent experience. So for people who are meditating and experiencing some of those physical or energetic ongoing pains, any thoughts about how we go about addressing that? Well,

George Haas (01:01:25):

The first one that you described, the Zen people call the pool of poison and pain, the western psychologists call it somaticize emotion. So you still, and you come into the body and so that all of the strategies that you use to distract yourself from it are absent. And so you just feel the, the experience of what's there. Ordinarily, the energy stuff is also largely always in the body, but the bandwidth of consciousness is so narrow that we begin to learn to exclude them. And so we don't have ordinary awareness of them because there isn't bandwidth for them. I like to use a group of French neuroscientists who decided they would calculate what the bit rate of the human body was, and they calculated it to be about 11 million bits per second. And then they calculated the bit rate of consciousness, which turned out to be 16 1 6 bits per second.

(01:02:18):

So at any given moment, you're consciously aware of 16 bits out of 11 million, which is practically nothing. It's why the idea that conceptual reality could be this really accurate picture of anything is when you're only getting 16 bits out of the whole picture. It's not that much. And so when you tune your attention to these different things and allow them into consciousness, then they're there and, and you suddenly think that they're coming in, they're going away when actually that's not really what's happening. What's happening is that there's bandwidth and consciousness for them to come in and you to perceive them, and then there isn't bandwidth. And so they don't get in. Your heart is beating, right? Are you aware of it? Your blood is flowing, can you feel the blood in the legs going and coming back? There's a sensation of that happening, but, but it isn't of enough importance to get into consciousness. Whereas when you still, the mind and all of those things are out, then all of a sudden there may be bandwidth and then all of a sudden you'll be aware that your heart is beating.

Todd Zemek (01:03:28):

So once you become aware, what's next? Well,

George Haas (01:03:31):

This is the human condition. This is what it is like to live in a body that's aging <laugh>. I have a lot of students who are under 30, so they have no idea at all what I'm talking about when I say the body is aging. But once you get over that hill, it's like, oh my God. So we live in this body and the body has these qualities about it, and then you just, I think humor is the best approach for this. It's to take them into stride with a sense of humor because once you're over the pill, it's, it's a sort of easy slope until you hit your fifties and then it's like a precipitous drop.

Todd Zemek (01:04:10):

Oh God, <laugh>, I'm on the edge of 50 and I was feeling it was a rough ride up until this point. <Laugh> got that to look forward to. So look, tell us about your book, George.

George Haas (01:04:24):

It's called Lower Manhattan Dormitory Effect, and it's a memoir of 1979 in photographs and lyric prose poetry. The first section of the book is this long prose poem I wrote called The Lower Manhattan Dormitory Effect, which is about New York in the late seventies. The reason I focused on 1979 is it was a pivotal year in, in the sense that that was the actual beginning of the AIDS crisis, even though they didn't discover the virus for another five years. But that was the, the summer, that summer in 79 was when people started to die out of otherwise treatable illnesses that didn't respond. Manhattan had a 40% occupancy rate below 14th Street, so it was sort of a bombed out empty city, but it was also super cheap. And so this collection of young artists from all over the, the world really came to New York. I had a loft on 11th and Broadway, 1400 square feet, which was $174 a month, right?

(01:05:28):

I could work not quite two days a week and earn my rent, which meant I could work two days a week and make art and run around town five days a week. And so there was this little window of time when that happened. And so it produced an extraordinary burst of creativity. Also, there were a lot of nightclubs that were really interesting at the time because the rents were so cheap for everybody, including nightclubs. You could have these giant nightclub spaces, bar eclectic. And so it was one of the rare times when people from all walks of life would go to the same nightclubs. The time that it had happened before that was Paris and the twenties. So they, there's a lot of comparison between Paris and the twenties and New York and the late seventies and early eighties. And that was also fascinating who you could meet.

(01:06:25):

So one of the things about the nature of our current culture is that famous people are more interesting than ordinary people. And so I really wanted to tell this very prosaic, ordinary story about myself and this group of friends that I loved and how aids consumed them and most of them died. So the book is really a, an aids memoir in the sense that most of the people that are, that are depicted in the book died at at that time. So I wrote a second poem called Chicago is Not New York. Los Angeles is neither one, which is the third part of the book. So the first part of the book is the first poem, and it's inter interspersed with Polaroids that I took at the time. And the middle section of the book is the portraits of this social group that I had, most of whom did not make it past the beginning of the eighties. And then the end of the, the book is this long prose poem describing in a very Buddhist way of conceiving things, the process of karma that took me from Chicago to New York out to Los Angeles. And the, the capacity to reflect back on the experiences that happened to me that made me choose the way that I did that ended me up where I ended up at the time. And so that's the book

Todd Zemek (01:07:49):

That's really interesting to hear you talk about New York in particular. It's a city I'm fascinated with and I love, love visiting and you know, those areas a little bit, at least in, in visiting. So yeah, it must have been an extraordinary time for people who are interested in your work and curious. You offer mentoring through Meta Group as

George Haas (01:08:07):

Well? I do. We're going to open a center as soon as the Covid period is out. My collaborator on the center is a singer called c o who you may have heard of. So we have a building that is sitting waiting for Covid and you can't really have a meditation center where hundreds of people gather if we're in the middle of a pandemic. So we're going to offer all sorts of programs there that are, aren't currently available, but particularly around attachment repair. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. But the programs that are available now are these virtual day longs that we're doing, which is the psychoeducation on collaborative relationships and meditation training. And then we do an intensive, which is also available, and that includes the ideal parent figure protocol in the, in the early training for that. We do call them meditation and attachment and their levels of training. The first level is a series of four day longs, six hours a day, four times four.

(01:09:04):

And then the level two class is a six month long class, so that meets twice a month. And then has mentoring sessions included in that so that I can make sure that you're keeping up with the meditation training and understanding the, the concepts correctly. But one of the things about attachment, of course, is it's interpersonal and, and you want to be, begin to have the experiences of, of that. One of the nice things about getting involved in a small class, we limit the level two classes to 12 people said it isn't, you know, an overwhelming sea of people. And, and what's been happening is that because we're virtual on the other weeks, so we meet twice a month with me and I'm teaching, and then twice a month they meet as a group just without the teachers, so they can just socialize and begin to talk about experiences of how attachment works and to get additional support. That social component is really important, and it's wonderful to have people who have a language and a way of talking about it, but also are particularly primed for compassion and response to the experiences that you're having because it's a self-selecting group that's, that has the same kinds of experiences.

Todd Zemek (01:10:18):

Well, I would really recommend that people reach out to start with your podcast as well. I found that a really helpful place to get a sense Oh, good. Of you. And, and your voice Um-huh <affirmative> to, to reach out from there. So it's meditation times Attachment, right? Is that the Yeah, the name of the podcast. Fantastic.

George Haas (01:10:35):

Yeah. In theory it's weekly. We do have also evening classes that are virtual, so they're probably, ah, in the day for you, but okay. Or in the middle of the night maybe. I do a beginner series on Tuesday nights, and then I do an advanced series on or min intermediate in advance on Thursday nights.

Todd Zemek (01:10:54):

Thank you for your time today. Absolutely. I'll be looking for some retreats myself to try to bolster my practice. Really appreciate your time today. Really appreciate what I've got from your course, and definitely some of the, the details of your commentary over that podcast have been very practical, very helpful. Oh, good. Thank you for, for everything you do. And, and thank you again for your time today.

George Haas (01:11:15):

Thank you for having me.

Todd Zemek (01:11:17):

<Laugh>. Pleasure.