Lewis and Broad
Lewis and Broad Media is a storytelling ministry that is a part of First Presbyterian Church of LaGrange based in LaGrange, GA. We are here to share the lives and tales of people and local organizations that deserve a voice. Our goal is to tell of the amazing opportunities that people have to volunteer and explore their gifts.
Lewis and Broad
S8: EP 6: Mindful Moments with Susan Marshall
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In this episode of Lewis and Broad, hosts James Goodlet and Thomas Martin sit down with Susan Marshall, founder and owner of The Center for Mindful Exploration. Susan shares her journey of creating a space dedicated to holistic healing—one that nurtures both the mind and spirit. With a belief in the interconnectedness of all things, she has built an environment where people can find safety, stillness, and support on their path toward wholeness.
As a Certified Professional Counselor Supervisor, EMDR Certified Therapist, and EMDR Consultant-in-Training, Susan brings deep expertise and compassion to her work. Tune in as she discusses mindfulness, trauma healing, and what it means to hold space for others in a fast-paced, often disconnected world.
Welcome to the Lewis and Broad Podcast, where we share the stories, the people, and the culture of LaGrange, Georgia. Right in the heart of town at the corner of Lewis and Broad. My name is Jenna Edy, Director of Lewis and Broad, and here are your hosts, James Goodlitt and Thomas Martin.
SPEAKER_04Welcome to Lewis and Broad. As our producer, director, Extraordinaire said in the intro, my name is James Goodlett. I'm pastor here at First Presbyterian Church in Lagrange, GA.
SPEAKER_03Thomas Martin, pastor at First United Methodist Church, also here in Lagrange, GA.
SPEAKER_04It's been a minute since we've been in studio.
SPEAKER_03It has. It's good to be back. It's good to be back. There's a briskness in the air as we record this. It's a cool I walked here again, but I didn't break a sweat because it's not 92 degrees outside. You walked here.
SPEAKER_04You were abiding by the theme of the series. You said, you know, I could I could drive, but I'm going to get my steps in.
SPEAKER_03Parking downtown Lagrange is so hard. So hard. So I just walked. Two blocks. Maybe three.
SPEAKER_04Well, that's good. Because you know what our former mayor and one of your congregants, the honorable Jim Thornton, said. Thomas, stop making your sermon so long? That was part of it, yes. But he also said, and I quote, Lagrange doesn't have a parking problem, it has a walking problem.
SPEAKER_03Ooh, that's good.
SPEAKER_04That'll preach. I'll tell you what, maybe he should he's been a guest here before. Maybe we should have him here to talk about the merits of walking.
SPEAKER_03Listen, he's a certified lay speaker. Anytime, Jim Thornton, you want the pulpit? How about the Sunday after Christmas or the Sunday after Easter?
SPEAKER_04I too am looking for somebody to fill the pulpit on December the 28th. But it is uh it is lovely outside. This is my favorite time of year. Halloween, watch out.
SPEAKER_03And as a Georgia, let's let's we we don't usually go into sports, but as a Georgia Tech fan, how excited are you right now about this football season?
SPEAKER_04I feel like if I speak of it, they will lose to the mighty orange of Syracuse this week. But yes, it's been fun. Football season's been fun. I I I I just love this time of year. I get to do the you know the PA stuff for the Grangers and really have a blast with that. Get to see J Jenna Edy on Friday nights, although we do have a Thursday night tilt coming up.
SPEAKER_01I love Thursday night games.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, why why do you do you do you like more than Friday?
SPEAKER_01Yes, because then I have my Friday, and then I'm not groggy on Saturday, and it's just like my whole weekend's there.
SPEAKER_04That's that's fair. It it's just uh my favorite time of year. I love the month of October. I think I what is it? The the the months that end with burr. I'm a big fan of the months that end with burr, although December is kind of crazy for us in our line of work, but it's you appreciate when it's done.
SPEAKER_03It is a it's a it's a sweet, sentimental month, even in the craziness of December.
SPEAKER_04Y'all got y'all got some trunk or treat stuff going on here pretty soon, don't you?
SPEAKER_03We actually did it last week. Ah, how did it go? It's great. About a thousand people came out. Uh one of our members has a train that we drove around the parking lot over on uh Vernon and a cakewalk, which is always delightful. Kids wanting unprocessed, or no, really processed, lots of processed simple carbohydrates. Best costume you saw the family that dressed in blow-up chicken costumes, like the the they were walking around, and she's giggling, she's that's not static. That's Jenna giggle. Everybody, that is Jenna Edie. Apparently a little under the weather.
SPEAKER_05The chicken.
SPEAKER_03It was the chicken, and the dad was fully committed to the bit. I mean, he was walking around pecking, you know, throughout throughout the parking lot, and five kids and chickens, maybe I it was hard to say, but it was a flock. There was what is it, what is a group of chickens? A flock? Let's go with a flock.
SPEAKER_04I I I'm sure that there is some you know, one of our many farmers who listens to this is gonna post. Put it in the comments. Tell us what it is in the comments. It's called a murder of chickens. Murders are crows. I know that. Yeah, that's right. Um, but you know, maybe that maybe who knows? We don't know. It could be a murder of chickens.
SPEAKER_03A bucket of chicken? A bucket of chickens. Oh, bro.
SPEAKER_04You know, we're going off the rails here. It's going downhill fast. That's what we do. So let's let's actually pivot here. I'm not even gonna attempt a segue.
SPEAKER_03We have no segues today.
SPEAKER_04There is no segue whatsoever. But I'll tell you, I'm glad that we have this the uh our guest that we have in studio today, who is probably looking at us and saying, these guys. She did not she's analyzing us as we speak. Oh, there's no doubt. She's like, they need to come see me. This is Susan Marshall. Now, Susan Marshall is the owner and founder of the Center for Mindful Exploration. And this is a really cool spot. They do a lot of amazing stuff. It's not your cookie cutter, you know, mental health counseling kind of office. Yes, they have that. They also do the yoga. I wanted to put the definite article in front of it. I didn't want to say just yoga. It's I just wanted to call it the yoga.
SPEAKER_03The yoga.
SPEAKER_04They do the yoga over there, which I have been saying for years that I need to go and do the yoga because I got some back issues and some tightness in the old hamstrings. So they do some amazing things, but they really look at it from a holistic uh perspective and and really a huge asset for our community. Susan got her bachelor's from good old UGA.
SPEAKER_03Go dogs.
SPEAKER_04Oh my goodness gracious. Uh, and we're gonna talk to her about some of the stuff that she does over at the Center for Mindful Exploration. But Susan, welcome.
SPEAKER_02Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here today.
SPEAKER_04Glad to have you here, Lewis and Broad. Uh, and so thankful that you are willing to deal with our shenanigans. Clearly, this is the epicenter of self-seriousness here. Uh, but we are we're grateful because it's such an important piece to a holistic health for not only individuals but for a community. So I I've I've said a little bit about you, but why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself, how you got into all of this? Have at it.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. So um one of the things that we also do in addition to the yoga, other places do yoga, we do the yoga. Um, but one of the other things we do is the meditation. Um, so when I was 22, I took my first yoga class and started meditating. And um and then I didn't go back to graduate school to become a therapist till I was 40. So many years later, um, when I entered the field, mindfulness was just starting to creep in. Um, and so I was realizing that what they were saying about therapy was the same thing they were saying about meditation, basically, like let's pay attention to what's kind of happening in the mind and what's happening in the body. And they were starting to use that, but I'm from Atlanta, and so it was not being done as much here in LaGrange. Um, and so I started teaching meditation. I had I was working in a group practice at the time, and then I was doing teaching meditation on the side um over to church, um, my home church that was sponsoring us. Um and so my brother, so that was like that was like more than 15 years ago. And my brother at the time was living in Chicago, and he called me and he goes, You're gonna run out of people to teach meditation to in LaGrange, Georgia in a year. And so here we are, like over 15 years later, and I'm going to teach again in January. And so it's pretty exciting. I mean, it's kind of everywhere now, but it wasn't. And um, so yeah, so so the so we brought in the yoga piece. Um, Joanne Rogers runs the yoga studio because what happens on your yoga mat is happening like in your body in real time. Um, the things we're talking about in therapy, right? Like, oh, I'm feeling judged, or I'm feeling like I'm not really meeting, you know. When I have been out of my yoga practice for a while and I get back on the mat, I come in contact with I'm out of balance, I'm not strong, I'm not flexible. And there's always a correlation between that and what's actually happening in my life because I'm out of my self-care practice because we all fall in and out of that. Um, so that's sort of the embodiment of what we're talking about in in um therapy. And we've just moved, we moved Labor Day to our new location, and we are now on the thread. So, this whole idea about walking, one of the things that we have a really hard time getting people to do is we always say there's very little you can do for your mental health that's better than exercise. Well, we're on the thread now, so you can actually come to our office and walk on the thread with us in very private places while you do therapy now. So that's really exciting.
SPEAKER_03That's awesome. Yeah. The mindfulness and the meditation part is a is something that probably is still I wouldn't say stigmatized. That's a harsh word, but you know, people have come to understand yoga as a practice, they've come to understand counseling as a practice. Meditation still has that reservedness. Um, what's been the biggest uh changes that you've seen as you've developed this practice here in Lagrange and built your client base over the years?
SPEAKER_04And and before, and also this while you're doing that, because I don't want to take for granted some folks listening might not even know what mindfulness and meditation are. So maybe speak to that as well.
SPEAKER_02Okay, maybe that's the better place to start, actually. Um yeah, so when people say um when people find out about meditation, they say, I I can't meditate. I'm like, why can't you meditate? Like, I can't get my thoughts to stop. I'm like, yeah, that's gonna happen the day you die. When your brain stops working, you will stop thinking. But there is that misconception that meditation means that you stop your thinking. And so meditation is actually a way to become aware of your thinking. So it's like your thinking keeps happening while you're meditating, but you're kind of taking a backseat and seeing that it is happening, right? So I'm sitting back, I'm like breathing in, breathing out, breathing in, breathing out, and then a thought comes by. And and so usually a thought comes by and you just go down with it and you just think your thought, right? But in meditation, you have the opportunity to see that you are thinking, right? So it starts to activate a higher part of the brain that looks into the rest of the brain and sees what your brain is doing and how your body is responding to that, because those things happen so automatically, like we don't pay any attention at all. So it strengthens the part of the brain that can see what's happening, so we have the opportunity to jump in and interrupt it and and make some choices rather than just. I love this quote: your your thoughts are like a team of wild horses. If you train them, they are an amazing tool. But if you don't train them, they will just drag you around the planet. And that's what most of us are doing because we haven't trained the part of the brain that looks in and sees. So meditation actually changes your brain in a way that makes that more um accessible and then kind of gives you the tools um to calm you down. I'm we're gonna get a little into the weeds about this a little bit, but um the the part of your brain that's behind your your forehead that's called the prefrontal cortex. And deep in the middle of the brain is um the lim the limbic system with the amygdala, and the amygdala is like your warning, warning, warning. So there's connections between the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala that actually calm you down when you get upset, and meditation and mindfulness, and mindfulness is just like paying attention to what you're doing without running off and and thinking. Um actually strengthen the connections between the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala so that you actually have the ability to take a couple of breaths and then your heart rate goes down, right? And then you feel calmer, and then you're more in the part of the brain that can think through your problems and make choices.
SPEAKER_03That's fascinating. It it's uh the the way that you I've heard it said responding rather than reacting. And so the meditation the contempt the training yourself to be able to respond rather than react. Yeah, that's that's incredible.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, and and the meditation is like going like meditating itself, it's like going to the gym. Like I'm not trying to help people have mountaintop experiences. I mean, those are all fine and wonderful, but they last a minute and then they're over, right? That may or may not happen, and I'm not trying to get that to happen. But it trains your brain, it changes the way your brain functions. Like if you're I've been meditating when I started when I started teaching meditation, I was like, I've been meditating for like 20 years. And I was like, I've been meditating for like 2060 this year, so from 22 to that, I do the math for a long time, right? So it changes your brain. My brain can now, if I'm upset, I can take about three breaths and I can feel myself starting to calm. The anger anger is the uh emotion I have struggled with the most. So being able to calm that down in three breaths is huge, but I couldn't do that all those years ago.
SPEAKER_04So how has the field uh changed uh during your time and and doing all this work?
SPEAKER_02Um, so one of the changes is that mindfulness, uh, meditation, those kinds of things have become more the norm um than it was. People come in and they already know what mindfulness is now, you know, 17 years ago that was not the case. Um people people in general are just better educated about self-help and how psychology works uh than it than they were almost 20 years ago. I think the biggest change that has happened happened because of COVID. Um, we're now online. And so prior to COVID, I was like, I'm never ever doing online counseling. That's never gonna happen. And then COVID happened, and within a week, we were all online. We'd never been, nobody, I didn't know anybody who had ever done uh virtual therapy. And so and so in in a week, we were all online, and um that's changed everything. And I had all the reservations I had about it about like you can't really feel your client, you're not really sitting in the room. There's a slightly different feel, but really counseling, um virtual counseling is actually incredibly effective, and I I love it. About a a quarter of my population is is is online.
SPEAKER_04I would think COVID also changed. I mean that's the best way to put this. I I feel like being at home, socially distanced, isolation, those sorts of things, bro it certainly brought my issues to the forefront. I I mean I that time period was so intense in a in a different way that I would also think that it might have escalated things that were maybe lying in in the background.
SPEAKER_02Absolutely. Um if you were a therapist during COVID, we were all sort of dealing with our own trauma. We I mean, in addition to we were also going through what everybody else was going through, but you couldn't get a you couldn't get an appointment. We all had huge, huge waiting lists. Um it the fear, the unknown, the isolation, all of it. So it was a it was yeah, it was a very intense time and people and yes, things were rising to the surface. People were having to sit with themselves and and the fear that was arising over COVID was triggering other things. Um you were having to actually deal with your family. Um, so all of that happened. And then when everything opened back up, there was a whole nother surge of how do we be with how are we going to be with people now? Social anxiety went like off the charts when everything opened back up and people had to start being with people again. So yeah.
SPEAKER_03There's a lot to think about in what you do, how you respond, how you care. The fascinating part that I'm hearing you say is you know, we can train ourselves to to be better, to do better. We can train our internal responses. One of the things that you do is the E D M R therapy. And I know EMDR. See, I got I don't even know what it is. Yeah. So what is it? And put the letters in the right order for it.
SPEAKER_02So actually, if you just think about what the letters mean, that helps you understand what it is. So the EM is eye movement, the D is desensitization, and the R is reprocessing. So the eye movement, it's actually bilateral stimulation. So you might um track a ball or a light back and forth with your eyes, but you also might use buzzers in your hands where you're just little things that you hold and they buzz back and forth, left, right, left, right. Um, and so there's a lot of ways or um beeping and headphones back and forth. Um, so there's lots of ways to to do the bilateral stimulation. That's kind of what it got known for. But Francine Shapiro, who started EMDR, said um if she had it to do over again, she'd just call it reprocessing. Um, but so what happens with memory is that um I love to talk about this, but this would take us like two hours to get through all of what EMDR does in memory and how memory works. But um, when you have had a traumatic event, and trauma might be like what you think about big T trauma, like a car accident or an assault or some natural disaster, but it can also be like little T internalized messages like your third grade teacher called you stupid in front of the class, and you internalize that, and that becomes like a trigger for you, right? Um, those memories, if you don't have a loving, supportive person to talk that through with and process that at the time, you store that in your memory in a in an activated way. So when something is like happening that's like that, like you have to stand up and speak in front of a group and all of a sudden you're like, ugh, right? You may not think about your third grade teacher, but that's what's happening in your body because that memory, the theme of that memory is coming up in an activated state because it was never processed. Does that make sense? Yeah. Okay. So so what EMDR does is it calls up the memory while you're doing the bilateral stimulation, it calms the memory down so it can get up into the higher parts of the brain to be updated and processed with other positive things you've experienced in your life since you were in the third grade. Um, and helps to release it and and and allow it to go back into what normal memory does, which is uh your memories update all the time in a very unconscious way. But trauma memories get trapped, so it untraps them and unlocks them and helps them get updated and helps us to heal from them.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, this stuff's it it's it's fascinating to me. I uh I hadn't heard of this EMDR. I hadn't heard of it. A friend of mine was in a car accident, did EMDR, and they said that that whole process was in itself almost triggering and traumatic. It caused them to remember and experience things again that they didn't even they didn't even realize were still there. And and um I I we I finished my doctoral work a few months ago. One of the books we read was a guy uh named, and I I may be mispronouncing it, but Rhizma Minnicum, and he talks about it was it's a book about um racialized trauma. But within that book, he he talks about how trauma is stored throughout the whole body. Yeah. And that and that if we just not to say just, but if we think of mental well-being, mental health challenges as just simply that's something that's up here, we're missing we're missing a big part of it. Because it it is these experiences really are bodily.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yeah, and body trauma. And that this is another reason for the yoga, um, is that we come we you have an opportunity. So, so James, you mentioned like you know, your back and some flexibility. There's definitely um physical benefits for uh of yoga for sure. But the other thing is you just come in contact with what's happening in your body, right? Like in ways that you might not otherwise, you just ignore it, you just take your body for granted, right? So, but you're sitting with your Joanne said the other day in a yoga in a yoga class I was in. Don't use your body to get into the pose. Use the pose to get into your body, right? So, like be in this pose, but then sink into your body and Notice what your body feels like. And notice when you turn it a little bit and do this. What does that feel like? What's coming up for you? Right. So it gives us that opportunity to sink into the body and find out what's going on in here. We do, I do at the beginning of all of my, I start all of my um sessions with a brief meditation. And the meditation goes like this. It goes some breath to center, like come out of your busy wherever you were and be here. And then we do a brief body scan. And then we check in about like what is the energy like? Are we revving too high? Are we depleted? Are we fine? Um and then is the mind busy with lots of thinking, or is your mind um calm and receptive. When your mind is busy, you are not receptive. If you're talking to me and I'm thinking about what I'm gonna say next, I have no idea what you're saying, right? And so so that how do we tune into the body and to the mind and all of that and be receptive to the messages that are coming in?
SPEAKER_04How does all this interface because you you talked about your home church? How does all this interface in your experience with spirituality?
SPEAKER_02Um I think that it allows us to get out of our thinking and tap into um, well, a couple things. Allows us to tap into something that's a little deeper that we chatter over all the time. I think that has to do with spirit. I think that has to do with not our intellectual abilities and our reputations and all the things we, you know, put out into the world that we like for people to see. Um, and a lot of that's vulnerability. It's not always like, ah, my spiritual wonderfulness. A lot of it's my vulnerability, right? And um, but the other thing that does that I think is fascinating. So I lead a meditation called um, it's a meta meditation or loving-kindness meditation. And the research on that meditation is that it changes the part of the brain that says you're different from me, and so you're a threat. We we like that's actually a natural part of the brain, right? And so it actually calms that down and makes us feel more connected to each other instead of seeing each other as a threat, which to me is spirituality. I mean, that's at the heart of it. And so I think that's pretty cool. So the all the ways that the brain, that that meditation and mindfulness practices change the brain, make us more receptive to each other and to the fact that we are connected to something that's not just us, whatever you call that.
SPEAKER_03Uh, you know, I got no dog in that fight, but well, it's you know, we joked about December being the busiest month, but in the Christian tradition, December's where we celebrate Christ becoming flesh, becoming one of us. And one of the temptations that I think we often feel as people is to rush past the fleshiness, the bodiness, the embodiment, the being with uh that is the gift of a spiritual practice of believing in a higher power in our Christian tradition, you know, believing in not just the resurrection, but the incarnation as well. Um, so that's really helpful to think through why it's important to not just use and and hang our hat on the body as a temple, but the gift of embodiment comes in our in our faith and our faith journey. Thank you.
SPEAKER_05Yeah.
SPEAKER_04So something that might surprise or shock your average listener, or something that might make us think or challenge us uh when it comes to the state of mental health. And let's and let's narrow it to our context here. Let's talk about it in whether it's the southern US, whether it's Lagrange, or just US in general, but something that might be challenging or shocking to us.
SPEAKER_02I could definitely speak to kind of what's happening in Georgia. And I wish I had a hopeful message, but I I really don't. It's a frustration for every therapist that I know that if we have a client um who is in some level of crisis, there are very little resources for people, especially if you are uninsured. But even if you're uninsured, there's there are very few resources that are uh accessible if you are in a mental health crisis. Um that in a mental health crisis right now, what you're gonna be what's gonna happen is you're gonna go to um a psychiatric hospital and you are going to be there for 72 hours, maybe a little longer if they think you're a threat to some to yourself or someone else. You're going to get medically stable. In other words, they're gonna adjust your medication until they think that you are not going to harm yourself or someone else, and then you're gonna go back in your community and hope that you have a good mental health provider. And when I first started this, when somebody was discharged from the hospital, the hospital made a call and made sure that they had an appointment. And I have, I don't know when I've had a call from a hospital saying, Oh, we need this person and we need to be sure that they're gonna be seen. So um, so I think lack of access to care, especially for the most vulnerable and the the the most acute um patients. I I think just having help. If you have if you have acute chronic mental health problems, if you have um like schizophrenia, right? There are very few uh resources that for families or for um for patients. Um NAMI is a really good one in NAMI is the National Association for Mental Illness. When I'm queen of the world, it will be the National Association for Mental Health. Um but um we used to have a NAMI group here and we don't, and I think the closest active group is in Columbus. But NAMI is actually a great resource for um educating families and caregivers and friends and supports, for being a support for um people who have a mental health diagnosis and all and just finding out resources and all kinds of stuff. Um it would be great if we had a NAMI, an active NAMI group here, but we don't. So I think lack of access, I think, is the biggest problem.
SPEAKER_04Well and that that is a complicated issue, isn't it?
SPEAKER_02Absolutely. Uh yeah, I wish there were I wish I could say, you know, one group or one party or one blah blah blah, but it's not, it's an incredibly complicated issue. Um and and I think part of the and I think I mean I think this across the board really, but but when we try to find a simple solution and we go, oh, it's not us, it's you, it's you, or it's that is that one issue, or it's that, it really stops us from being able to sit down at the table with curiosity again, right? When our minds are busy and we already have an opinion, we're not being receptive. Um, it if we could all just come to the table and just listen for a little bit, and um, I think that would be amazingly helpful.
SPEAKER_03The the mindfulness, the the meditation is listen one of the things that I've picked up is listening not just to your body, but listening to your surroundings, listening to uh the chatter around, reducing the noise so that you can get to what is good and what is helpful.
SPEAKER_02Absolutely.
SPEAKER_04And I want I I kind of want to peel back the layers on that onion real quick because we we spoke a little bit in in our meeting beforehand about some of the complications. So let's let's let's put you as queen of the world, because that's clearly what your ambition is. So all hail. What are you doing to address some of the primary issues? And where do you even begin?
SPEAKER_02Yeah. So uh so this is this is an interesting issue, and I'll just be totally honest about what's happening in our practice. So we have three providers. Um LaShannon Epps, who sees children and adults, she takes insurance. Holly Roberts, who is working on full licensure, she's not able to take insurance. Yeah, once she's fully licensed, she'll take insurance. I practiced for over 15 years taking insurance and had insurance companies every year claw back thousands of dollars and just the runaround to get paid and those kinds of things. And so a year and a half ago I stopped taking insurance. And I did a two-year um really grappling ethically, like I am limiting access to care by doing that. But I'm thinking about retirement in the next five to ten years, and so moving my career in a little bit different direction. But that was a real problem, like thinking about like how do we how do we do care? So we also have sliding scale, we do pro bono work, so we we do a lot of that. Um, every therapist actually has an ethical mandate to do some level of that. Um, another concern that I have is um Obamacare. A lot of people don't know this, um, but the ACA, when the ACA came in, it's So just to be clear, sorry to interrupt, Affordable Care Act. Yes, yes, thank you. Um, one of the things that the Affordable Care Act did was to it it included mental health health parity, which basically means mental health is now seen the same way the rest of your body is. Okay, so like you know how you don't have just normally don't have eye care or dental care because apparently seeing and eating are not important to your body because we don't have that in our insurance. So mental health used to be like that. So the Affordable Care Act included mental health parity. Prior to that, insurance companies would tell us how many sessions somebody could have, and it was frequently only 12, which for most people is not enough therapy. And so um, so I'm concerned about some of the things that are happening that are making parts of the um the ACA go away. And I'm very concerned about the the idea that mental health parity will disappear along with that. I have real concern about that.
SPEAKER_04So these are some of the things that you would address. And I mean, we hear I I feel like we hear about it a lot, you know, mental illness, mental health.
SPEAKER_02There's a lot, there's a lot of lip service.
SPEAKER_04There is. There is. And yet what I feel like I constantly hear are issues pertaining to access. Uh uh, and and maybe you can debunk these, or maybe it's true, but waiting lists. Uh folks can't get in to see a provider, they don't take insurance, those sorts of things. Accessibility and maybe even affordability seem to be a big, big issue. Is that a is that a fair assessment?
SPEAKER_02It's absolutely a fair assessment. Absolutely. And it's running on both ends, right? Whether you're a because I'm a consumer and a provider, right? So as a consumer, it's hard to find access. And as a provider, you're caught in this loop of this horrible system dealing with insurance companies that at the end of the day, it's uh it's not a great system. And I and and I don't profess to know what the answer to that is. I have no idea what the answer to that is, but I do know that it's a problem.
SPEAKER_04So do you feel like in your time and we're gonna wrap up here in a couple minutes, but do you do you feel like in your time as a mental health professional that mental health has in any way been destigmatized?
SPEAKER_02Absolutely. Absolutely. Um there are still people who don't want people to know that they're in therapy. But most of my clients are like, yeah, I'm in therapy. You should go see Susan or LaShannon or Holly or you know, whoever. Um most of our clients really see their mental health, and and this happens frequently, especially if you develop um a really good therapeutic alliance with your therapist, is that you're you're in some sort of crisis. There's something has happened and it you're just overwhelmed. And so you go in for that reason. And then that starts to get better. But in the course of dealing with that, you realize, oh, there's some other stuff going on here that's been going on maybe my whole life, right? And so then the healing from those things is a lifelong practice, right? Those things never go away, even with things like EMDR, we're turning the volume down on them so when they come up, we can manage them rather than being, you know, you're frozen by them, right? Or taken under the waves with them. And but really dealing with these things is a lifelong thing. So therapy then becomes like a wellness practice, right? It's like I'm not going in um because there's something wrong. I'm going in because I'm trying to stay well. It's just a helpful practice. So I think just from that standpoint, it's changed dramatically.
SPEAKER_03That's it's one of the things in the United Methodist Church that we have to do as pastors is psychological evaluations. And there's one person who sees all clergy going through, and you know, you get a report and rank the the people on the evaluation team don't get to see them. Um, I've always found to kind of put a funny spin on it, um, one of the questions that I remember being asked is uh, do you feel that there are spiritual for no, not even spiritual, do you feel that there are forces out to get you? You know, because it's a psychological test, but this is a theological thing. And I remember this dilemma of do I answer with my theology and maybe get a red flag, or do I answer with, you know, knowing that this is a red flag and and lie? And so even that conversation, because it's a step towards something, uh, I think creates a barrier for a lot of people as you talk about the stigma of it, of how am I being judged rather than how am I being helped? And your your work is much more in the vein of how can you help people with the self-actualization, self-realization, the awareness and the spiritual practice. And it sounds like the work that you do at the Center for Mindful Exploration is is truly meaningful and appreciated within the community and um what you do is is appreciated. So thank you for that.
SPEAKER_02Thank you. And I know we're trying to wrap up, but but there is something I think is really important about what you just said. So I think historically, I don't think historically there has been a separation between you don't talk about religion in therapy. I don't know who said that originally, but that was a mistake. That was a mistake on every level because I don't care what your spiritual orientation or no spiritual orientation, that that doesn't matter. Those are things, those ideas about why we're here and what we're doing here. And if I do something wrong, what does that mean about me? What does that mean about my future? Those are things that are what what are we all doing here? You know, all those things, those are both spiritual questions and psychological questions. And if you can't bring your spirituality into your therapy space, uh anyway, I don't know why that was ever a conflict, but that is something that has changed, is that that is something that people are like, is it okay to talk about that in here? You can talk about anything in here. Yeah.
SPEAKER_04It's interesting. Uh, I remember your psyche vow piece. That was triggering for me. Uh, because I remember I we had to do that too. That was actually my introduction to this whole world. I didn't really do I didn't I didn't do counseling therapy, anything like that until I did my psyche vow, and I realized, okay, hmm, I might want to do some digging here. And that led me into, I mean, I I once I moved to Alabama, soon after I moved there, one of the first moves I made was to your point, uh, Susan, uh, started meeting with somebody who is an Episcopalian priest and a psychiatrist.
SPEAKER_05Mm-hmm. Yeah.
SPEAKER_04And so a lot of the work, and I've been with her, we now are virtual, but I've been with her, I think, for 17 years now. Yeah. Um, and and for me as a as a pastor, first of all, and I'm sure you can probably relate to this in some way, is when you're when you're internalizing other people's stuff, yeah, you need to process that out.
SPEAKER_02Yes.
SPEAKER_04Yes in some way.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_04And I can feel it when I'm not processing it helpfully. I can feel myself storing that.
SPEAKER_02Yes, and that is mindfulness.
SPEAKER_04Yeah.
SPEAKER_02I I it rather than like things are happening and I it's happening in my body, but I'm not paying attention to it, it's just happening, right? So then I go out in the world and somebody says something and I load on that person. Like, where did that come from? Well, it came from that thing that happened, you know, two hours ago that you ignored. Yeah, that's mindfulness.
SPEAKER_04If I had a dollar for every time I've apologized saying I'm either to my wife or to my kids, something to the effect of that wasn't about you, and I'm sorry, and I was out of line. That was about something else.
SPEAKER_02But you have to it it takes a lot of work to know that.
SPEAKER_04Right.
unknownRight.
SPEAKER_02Because people just think it is about your wife or your kids or whatever.
SPEAKER_04This idea that mind and body are separate from spirit. Yeah, that doesn't matter.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, that doesn't compute. None of that computes, absolutely.
SPEAKER_04Your average person can would say if they are in a state where they are in a real hard spot, it's gonna affect every aspect of their personhood. Yeah. Period end of story, including their relationship with God or whoever whoever it is that they're worshiping. Certainly for me, it's my belief, my questionings, my doubts. I mean, those are real. And sometimes those are very much affected by how I'm how I'm feeling mentally and emotionally.
SPEAKER_02Okay, let me I know we're never gonna wrap this up. Not your good. But that thing right there, my questions and my doubts about religion are things that people will talk about in therapy that they will not talk to you about because God is mad at me if I doubt. And I'm like, have you ever read the Bible? Because it's just about people who question God.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, but that's interesting. You know, literally, this last Sunday youth group. Because okay, so we're doing a uh um series um uh on uh uh called uh the the gospel according to chat GPT is what we're doing. Um because I'm kind of handling youth ministry for now or looking for somebody. So I I was like, hmm, I wonder what they're wrestling with, and and so I just went to Chat GPT. I was just like, well, I know they're using Chat GPT. Let's let's see what old Chat GPT has to say. And it gave me a bunch of stuff, and so out of that I created the series last Sundays was what about doubt? And we talked openly and it and it was actually one of the best Sundays since I've been there. Yeah, because the these kids, middle schoolers and high schoolers, were very real about their doubts, about their struggles. And and and so what I said to them was, well, look, scripturally speaking, let's look at a couple of of uh stories about that. Uh one known as doubting Thomas. God bless him. I mean, for all of history, that's what he's called. And yet, what does Jesus do? Jesus uses it as an occasion for teaching. He doesn't shame him necessarily. I mean, he does say, you know, blessed are those who don't see and still believe, but but he meets him where he is and actually shows him his scars because that's what Thomas needed. And and and then there's the story of Peter walking on water with Jesus, and Jesus calls him out, and then when he starts a doubt, Jesus doesn't let him drown, he he pulls him up. And again, he uses this as an occasion for teaching. And and so what we what we said and youth on Sunday night was look, doubts are inevitable, they are real, but the God we worship meets us there, A, and B uses that occasion potentially as an as a gateway toward a different kind of faith and belief. And that is real. That is real, and I think the church should be, I'm getting preachy, but that come on now. I feel like the church should be the place, not just therapy, right, but the church should be a place where people say, right? Thomas, come on, come on now. Come on now. Yes, it should be.
SPEAKER_02There's no religion that I bring in at all to my therapy, right? But if someone comes in and that's an important piece to them and they're struggling, especially if they're struggling with grief, and I do a strange amount of counseling, grief counseling with uh parents who've lost adult children. Um and so one of the things I'll ask, and it's one of my favorite questions to ask, is are you mad at God about this? And for some people, they're like, Yeah, yeah, I am. But a lot of people are and have a hard time acknowledging that they are. So they so then back to that embodied piece, they're just carrying this secret anger, and that's doing a lot to their mind and their body and relationships and everything. Yeah.
SPEAKER_04Where can we find you? How how you know, for your for the person who's listening out there who says, I've got some stuff I want to process, and I'd love to go see Susan or some of her clients, not our clients, some of her colleagues. Yeah. Uh, where can they find you?
SPEAKER_02Okay, so it's the Center for Mindful Exploration. Yes, I did choose a 10-syllable name for my business. And thank you both for getting it right. Um, and we are at mindful x, the letter x dot site, s-i-t-e. That's our website. Our phone number is 706 443 5433.
SPEAKER_03This has been wonderful. Thank you for sharing your time, your talents, your gifts, your insight. Uh, I've got a lot to think about, and I'm gonna go call my guy who I've been with for 17 years, who's a cooperative Baptist pastoral counselor.
SPEAKER_02So thanks for having me. It's been fun.
SPEAKER_04Grateful to have you. And that wraps up this episode of Lewis and Broad. If you have any questions or thoughts, feel free to post on our social media. You can find us on Facebook at Lewis and Broad. And we're also online at Lewisandbroad.org. Hope everybody has a lovely series of Burr months. I know I am. And it sounds like Thomas is as well. Go put on your chicken suit.
SPEAKER_03Yes. I'll dance all the way. Dance all the way.
SPEAKER_04My name is James Goodlett. I'm Thomas Martin. And for Jenna E. Remember who and whose you are, and we'll talk to you next time.
SPEAKER_00Thanks for tuning in to the Lewis and Broad podcast, where we tell the stories that shape LaGrange, Georgia. Be sure to subscribe, leave us a review, and follow us on social media. Until next time, take care, and we'll see you at the corner of Lewis and Broad.