S6 EP22: Jane's Story - I Thought I Had It All, So Why Was I So Miserable?

This week we have a great chat with Jane Garnett, who thought she was living her ‘perfect life’ unhappy and unfulfilled! Jane’s memoir is the realization that she'd spent years pursuing a false version of happiness and success. She didn't have any healthy role models growing up, so she based her idea of fulfillment on what she saw in movies and popular culture. She became a Hollywood producer who worked for Leonardo DiCaprio, had a powerful Hollywood husband, social status, and all the external markers of success she thought would finally make her happy— but instead, she was miserable and lonely.

The major turning point comes when Jane is unexpectedly called to the hospice bedside of her beloved mentor, Dr. Marie, the therapist who helped inspire Jane’s own career change. Jane was already in a period of deep personal reckoning: her marriage was unraveling, she was estranged from her closest friend, and she was questioning nearly every major decision she’d made. And then she sees this woman she loved and admired, who had already lost her longtime partner and become estranged from her son, facing the end of her life alone.

It forced Jane to confront something she’d spent most of her life trying to outrun: that no amount of achievement, status, or external success can protect us from loneliness, grief, or pain. That experience ultimately shaped the philosophy she practices today: helping people reconnect with themselves instead of living by inherited definitions of success or happiness. 

Thanks Jane!!

Links:

• @thebananajane 
• Jane Garnett Bio
• Jane Garnett Website

••This Time with Feeling (Book Website)

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 1:30

Welcome to another episode of Well That Fucked Me Up. I'm your host, Luke Colson, and today we are joined by a fellow Brit, Jane Garnet. Hi, Jane.

SPEAKER_00 1:41

Hello.

SPEAKER_01 1:42

Great to be here. Great to have you. And welcome to the show. Now, every week we have a guest who comes on and we talk about surviving life-changing events and experiences. And that can be anything from something you went through yesterday to a whole lifetime to a one-off experience to physical to mental to a diagnosis to relationship. And what we'd like to do is concentrate on how that knocked you off the tracks, you know, shuntered you, changed your life, the direction, and how you coped with it, and how you changed and where you are today. So, Jane, with that, where would you like to begin?

SPEAKER_00 2:25

I think the theme of unlearning is kind of the the headline of of my life, really. Um so that's where I am today. I'm I'm in the unlearning, I'm in the unknown. I've sort of I built my life and then I unbuilt it so that I could live in this space now.

SPEAKER_01 2:45

That's so that's great. We're gonna have, I mean, we we were talking offline, we already have a fair bit fair bit in common. Um same with me, because my life was in a uh drunken, drug-fueled trajectory, which brought me down. And I thought I I thought everything I had learnt was life, and it turns out that nothing I had learned was how I was meant to be doing anything. But once I started to figure out me, once I sobered up and got many, many years of that behind me now, I suddenly realized, ah, okay, let's just rip up because when we're born, there's no fucking manual, is there? Like I was terrified of uh being alive, and so I was just doing what I thought I needed to do, and it turns out it was not not what anyone needed to do. So I'm with you on I have I always call it like a rebirth or like a Luke 2.0 of starting again, right? With our own with a new agenda.

SPEAKER_00 3:44

Well, I'm I was kind of glad, uh weird thing to say, but glad to hear you say terrified of being alive, because it took me a while to work that one out. In fact, I remember being in a iboga ceremony with these, I don't know if you know anything about iboga, but I do not it's a very strong plant medicine.

SPEAKER_01 4:06

Oh, is it like ayahuasca?

SPEAKER_00 4:07

Yeah, it's kind of like the African ayahuasca. That's a very classistic way of putting it. Yes, very heavy medicine. And I was working with these mystics, and they were diagnosing each person in the group's fear. And I remember them saying, What is her fear? And the, you know, the chief mystic looked at me and said, fear of life or fear of being alive, and I was just like, ouch, you know. Um, and couldn't really even take it in at the time. It took quite a long time to digest that message, and in a way, I'm still digesting it because it's really heavy.

SPEAKER_02 4:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 4:46

Um but it's really, really true. And I think my fear of being alive caused me to be a control freak and try and set up a life that was kind of immune to pain.

SPEAKER_01 4:59

Oh, that's that's like a just like a giant version of fight or flight, isn't it? Like you that's how I felt every day. But I took me it took me so long to realize that's what was going on. But like I'm I was the same. But for me, instead of being a control freak, I just succumbed to like anxiety, like the worst possible type of anxiety, panic attacks, catastrophizing, and eventually drinking and drugging because I was like, well, I just need some peace in my mind. I couldn't turn it off, couldn't turn the fucking noise off. And it's funny how we each of us like do things in different ways because we don't know. We're not equipped when we're growing up. It's all good in hindsight. Oh wow, this is why I was doing this. I should have known, but we don't know. We don't know, otherwise, we wouldn't do that. You wouldn't have become a control freak. You wouldn't have tried to do all of those things to stave away how you were feeling. We just don't know, do we?

SPEAKER_00 5:54

No, we don't know. And the reason we don't know is because no one's lived your life ahead of you.

SPEAKER_02 6:00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 6:00

Which is a very frustrating thing for somebody who's fearful because you're looking around for the version that would protect you.

SPEAKER_04 6:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 6:08

But that version doesn't exist yet because you have to learn to self-protect along the lines of congruence, as in like who you actually are, not who you want to be, or who your parents said you are, or who your therapist says you are, you're a big sister.

SPEAKER_02 6:22

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 6:22

Like who you actually are, which is a unique situation.

SPEAKER_01 6:26

Yeah, that's wild, isn't it? And also for me, you talk about future self. Well, I was stuck in my past self. My past self was this fucking terrified little kid. Apparently, I used to say to my mum, like, I don't understand how I'm supposed to live. Like, I I when I was like six, I was asking her, like, how do I buy like I don't understand how you live in a house? Like, I don't understand how like jobs work. Like, I don't think I'm can't like I was worrying about those things when I was six. She always told me, like, I just know, but she just always told me I I looked like I was terrified to to how did she respond?

SPEAKER_00 7:08

Did she answer your questions?

SPEAKER_01 7:09

She did, and she was very um she was very soothing and calming with the answers to the questions, but she was it was also a little bit like it comes, you figure it out as you go, and that's just scared me even more. So instead of me having a future self or a now self, I literally just lived with terrified child, lonely child Luke, who was scared of everything.

SPEAKER_00 7:38

But yeah, I remember age six being really freaked out about what to draw and just begging my mum to tell me what do I draw? You know, I really wanted to be creative, and and that's been kind of you know one my my big obsession is sort of how to be creative. But I again you can't really be creative on somebody else's terms, or it's not gonna be asked. Yeah, it's not gonna it's not your vision, you know. Someone else tells you what to do. So yeah, I think that's another way of come of talking about my journey is sort of coming into vision, and I couldn't come into vision without going through the personal shadows.

SPEAKER_01 8:14

Yeah, that makes sense. God, it's tough, isn't it? So talk to me about how that started to manifest itself through your life, like the controlling thing sounds interesting to me, you know.

SPEAKER_00 8:26

Well, yeah, I mean, I was gifted with privilege and intelligence. You know, I I went to Oxford University, uh, all my family did. Uh, we had connections. I was in love with making movies, I came out to America, I hustled, you know, I knew how to like game life a little bit. Yeah, you know, I I knew how to kind of like work the system and play the game. And so I I, you know, entered the film business, moved up in the ranks, got a fancy job with Leonardo DiCaprio, got a rich, handsome husband, uh, you know, estate in Santa Monica, two great kids, you know. I was like really checking boxes at the rate of nothing.

SPEAKER_01 9:13

I'm in that, I'm I'm in that industry as well, by the way.

SPEAKER_00 9:17

Okay, another thing in common. So, you know, one step at a time, you know, I was having this experience of a bit like Alice in Wonderland, like, huh? You know, oh, I'm now I'm producing a movie in Prague with movie stars, and this should feel so great. Why do I feel like I'm not fully in it? Or here I am with this great guy, and everyone's like, you're with this great guy. And I'm like, Yes, I'm with this great guy. Why am I not feeling it? And yeah, you know, so I kept having this sort of experience of like, oh yeah, I'm getting what I want, but I'm not feeling it. So that discrepancy led me into psychology. So I actually started to segue into becoming a therapist really because I was trying to kind of understand this other layer of life. Then I started having clients coming into my beautiful home. And I was getting this feedback of, hey, what would you know about suffering? Look at your beautiful life. Look at your perfect life.

SPEAKER_01 10:22

And I was like Of course. That's not how it works, though, is it? You know, I mean, it's that's just the classic like people like, oh, you've got a uh Bentley and you live in uh the Palisades and you you have everything you need. That does not equal happiness often.

SPEAKER_00 10:42

Definitely not. And I remember I used to, as I started to evolve in this understanding, I would talk to my sister about it, who you know is is very much in a glamour world and sometimes is like I think of her as kind of a newer soul, like she's like, but but you know, why am I not all the way feeling great, right? When I've got all these things and so-and-so must be feeling great because they've got even more stuff. And I would tell it to her like a like a bedtime story, which is like nobody is immune to suffering. Yeah, nobody gets out alive, like you know, whoever you're seeing in Vanity Fair, I can promise you it's not all that. So it's a it's an other rising illusion. But so I had to move through that illusion, and it meant giving up these things that other people thought were so great. And we're kind of basically bragging, right? So, you know, I ended up like age 40 having kind of gotten rid of all of my perks on a family holiday in a family that's quite sort of competitive and glamorous and likes to throw around these glory stories. Yeah, and I remember being like 40 on this family holiday thinking, fuck, yeah, no one wants to hear about me being a therapist. Yeah, no, that's like exactly what they don't want to hear about.

SPEAKER_02 12:02

Yeah, of course.

SPEAKER_00 12:03

But I'm starting to pick, you know, I've actually got this radar, which I've always had, which is part of the sort of the fear and the you know, the the seeker kind of path. I've always had this radar of picking up on this other level, the level of things unsaid.

SPEAKER_02 12:18

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 12:19

So when you start picking up on that level, that's like, oh fuck.

SPEAKER_01 12:23

Yeah. That's like perception, isn't it? It's like I I I can read a room really well, and I can see people's reactions just like you, and I can I'm very observant. I uh you know, I'm very ADHD like that, and I'm very um in my job, my day job, I do like 20 projects at once, and I and I have teams that do them, and that's how I that's how I use my crazy brain, right? But I know people that just don't pick up on on anything, they can't, they don't, they're just they're just blinkered and they're looking straight ahead. And by the way, some of those people are very happy because that's their that's their world. Their world is it is straight ahead.

SPEAKER_00 13:08

And my world was yeah, it's oh yeah, straight ahead or or surface. I remember as my dick said, is a good way to say it. They're like, Jane, you don't understand. There are so many people who are like corks on the ocean. Yes, not everyone wants to deep dive and see what's down there at the bottom, yeah, right.

SPEAKER_01 13:27

Right, and so and the same with me, but also also I was surface because I was terrified of diving. Fucking terrified. It's a great analogy. I was a caught, I was a cork bobbing away, and I was getting pulled, you know, to under under the water, and I didn't want to go because I knew that would be filled with like pain and grief and s and suffering. But as soon as I figured out I could get through that, then I started to free free dive. I love this analogy. Let's keep going with the water.

SPEAKER_00 13:55

Yeah, well, I will would I I'll sort of uh poke you on this because I feel that in the six-year-old, in the un in the template of the you know, of you as a six-year-old, the the free diver was there. Yeah, but I suppose the free diver learned that it's not always welcome, right? And people don't know how to respond when you're like, what's the meaning of life? Not everybody likes you're right.

SPEAKER_01 14:21

I was an open book and then I shut completely shut down. I got scared of rejection, I got scared of death. I got I lost someone when I was 12. I watched them like a a friend who we had had an awful experience when when we were on our bikes and he died in front of me. And that's obviously gonna really fuck somebody up. And so I just closed down and all my emotions closed down. I was terrible at relationships when I met a girl that I fell in love with very quickly because I didn't know how to handle the feelings, and she after three months told me thanks, but no thanks. I was I didn't know how to deal with that, you know. So it took it's taken me so long to um be able to regulate myself, you know. It's it's completely crazy. Anyway, we've got slightly off topic. We're talking about uh well.

SPEAKER_00 15:04

Well, you brought me to to actually something I did want to talk to you about, which is the you know, the the power of of death and witnessing a death.

SPEAKER_01 15:13

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 15:14

Because um, first of all, I'm so sorry. Oh my god.

SPEAKER_01 15:18

Horrific. I mean, I still think about that daily, but yeah, I was fucking horrendous. And then we had to go to we would have been chased by some other kids, and he came off his bike and he hit his head on the on the curb and died. And uh then we had to go to court, had to cut take time out of school because the parents wanted to prosecute the kids that chased us for manslaughter. So I was a witness. I'd had to go to fucking court and stand in the witness box when I was 12. It was all over the news.

SPEAKER_00 15:49

Have you done an MDR? Like it makes me want to get up with the MDR.

SPEAKER_01 15:53

I've done an MDR and I and I've located like my safe spot as this giant oak tree at the end of the road. So actually, funny enough, you live quite near me. You might see me hugging a tree from time to time, but that's just me saying I'm a big tree hugger too. That's just me saying hello to my my dead friend, you know, it's fun.

SPEAKER_00 16:09

That's beautiful. The oak trees are really good medicine, that's for sure.

SPEAKER_03 16:13

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 16:14

Yeah, I mean, I don't know. I mean, I think for for me, the death experience I wanted to tell you about was such a sort of it was the it was the inverse of the light-seeking world that I'd been in. So I was in this world of like Hollywood and success and visibility and you know, all the stuff that supposedly takes you away from pain.

SPEAKER_02 16:42

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 16:43

And my friends and the people I hung out with were all these, you know, sort of they're all somebodies, so to speak. And as I became a therapist, I I got to know this uh old woman. She was pretty much the only elder in my life at the time. And um she was a real eccentric, she was a real outsider. She was working at my training site where we were helping young adults with developmental disabilities to like just function. So it was very different from my sort of psychoanalytic training, you know, it was very like 101, and she was sick in multiple ways, and she lived in like a tiny place, she didn't have any money, but she was brilliant. Um, she had multiple degrees, she used to be a lawyer, but she was just like on her own path. She'd also been like one of the psychedelic pioneers, she'd had a psychotic break. I mean, she was a real survivor, and I just cultivated this in the middle of all of my light seeking and all of my Hollywood and all what you know, this whole all these questions about my life. I found myself having this relationship with this older woman who was a real nut.

SPEAKER_02 17:54

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 17:55

And it became really important to me. Yeah. You know, she she was a guide and um she saw me. Yeah for whatever reason.

SPEAKER_01 18:03

And you needed that because you needed to be seen, because the people that you had sort of been around you when you were going through all of this kind of epiphany of your life and understanding didn't want to hear you or see you. You know?

SPEAKER_00 18:16

Yeah, and I think they couldn't because I hadn't even known how to show these other parts of myself.

SPEAKER_02 18:22

Yeah.

unknown 18:23

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 18:23

Like you had put them away in in drawers and forgot, forgot where the drawers were.

SPEAKER_01 18:28

100%. But then the drawers, but then the drawers would like open up and punch me in the face at one o'clock in the morning, you know, and like I'll worry about this, think about this. Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_00 18:40

Well, exactly. That's actually a really good point. The drawers open through shadow experiences. They only can because they've been put put away in the shadow, and so you know, so much of what I was learning as a therapist, but hadn't really experienced myself fully was there is all this like gold inside the shadow, inside of these dark spaces inside of ourselves.

SPEAKER_02 19:02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 19:03

Inside of the drawers that we tuck away, there are these lost parts of self. And it's only through reunion with these lost parts of self that we can start re-entering our wholeness.

SPEAKER_01 19:14

Yeah, 100%. Wow.

SPEAKER_00 19:18

So, with her, you know, I I didn't even know how important she was to me until I came back from this family trip in Greece that I was mentioning to you where I was having an identity crisis. I was like, no one can see me, no one can hear me, I don't even know who I am. All the things I've been trying to do have failed. All my relationships have failed.

SPEAKER_01 19:40

Yeah. You know, that is a real major I think it's amazing when people have, I mean, it's not doesn't necessarily feel good, but when people have that identity crisis, right? It's a horrible thing. I mean, for me it was, you know, it's probably like seven, eight years ago. But you're just it is a wild ride when you're like, fuck, like, I've done everything like you can't beat yourself up and say I've done everything wrong. But when you realize Well, I did, when you realize you're in the wrong life or in the wrong seat in the wrong bus going in the wrong direction, it's quite something.

SPEAKER_00 20:16

It's it's terrifying. Yeah, for me, it was embarrassing. I felt ashamed.

SPEAKER_01 20:23

Interesting. I was gonna say shame, actually.

SPEAKER_00 20:25

Yeah, shame, like humiliation, like why, like, I don't especially, you know, I was resourced, educated, yeah, privileged. It's like, you know what I mean? Like, I didn't have any fucking excuse. Yeah, that's how I thought about it. You know, now I'm like, oh, that's not very compassionate, you're a human, yeah, yeah. You know, and I could tell you all sorts of things, and we could make up stories about, you know, why I didn't have it great or whatever.

SPEAKER_02 20:51

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 20:52

But from my own perspective at the time, it was shameful and embarrassing that I was this lost at 40, yeah, 42 years old.

SPEAKER_01 21:01

Let's say I think it's I think it's I think it's time to normalise that a bit, right? I mean, I think like I mean, we we we use the term like midlife crisis, but like I everyone's different, and everyone has their reason to have like an epiphany or a reason to s to second guess their life or realise they're not happy or do something about not being happy. Like for me, I I I don't think I was, you know, I I feel bad because I know my ex-wife suddenly sometimes listens to this, and my mom listens to this podcast, and you know, I don't want to say I was unhappy, but I didn't really know what true happiness was. Like I didn't feel like I'd lived a day in my life of authenticity. Like I just felt like I was covering up the fucking every day was plastering over cracks like a mad person. And then however you do it, I think this we should be I'm not encouraging people, but when I see married, for instance, I see married couples that I know, and they I know one of them is off having an affair, or you know, they're miserable as fuck, and you can see they're miserable, and you can see they don't like each other, and they've been together for 20 years, and they think it's best to stay together for the kids, which by the way, it never ever ever is because the kids will suffer if they're around that toxic environment. And I always say to them, divorce is highly recommended, by the way. You know, it's like if you guys are miserable, you there is a chance for you guys to figure something out and be happy. You don't have to stay in the the nightmare, hell, claustrophobic thing that you guys have created and the animosity and the resentment for the rest of your lives. You got one fucking life. I feel like I've just had a rant about that. But anyway.

SPEAKER_00 22:44

Here's the thing, I feel like you know, we're circling around this this theme and it it relates to unlearning, right? And the power of unlearning. But and this is what I've really learned, particularly as an EMDR practitioner. So so we don't know what we don't know. We've only experienced what we've experienced, yeah, right, consciously in this lifetime. Yeah. Let's just stay in this lifetime. Yeah. So let's just keep it simple for now, okay? So we it's not just about the trauma that did or didn't happen, or whether your parents stayed together, or you had one parent, or no parents. It's about the atmosphere that your Pickled in as a kid. Oh my god, you are pickled, saturated in an atmosphere that you internalize and becomes the wallpaper of your inner life. So people don't who haven't known relational happiness haven't known relational happiness.

SPEAKER_02 23:55

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 23:56

So it's a very, very crazy thing to do and courageous thing to do is to say, well, fuck it. Maybe there's more than this wallpaper.

SPEAKER_02 24:07

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 24:07

You know?

SPEAKER_02 24:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 24:09

But you don't know because you don't know because you haven't known. And so that's why it's like for me, like EMD has been so so great to do as a practitioner and receive, is because it it's a way of getting into those sort of early saturated atmospheres and starting to realize, oh yeah, I wasn't happy or wasn't happy, you know?

SPEAKER_02 24:27

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 24:28

And to use your imagination to connect to, like, well, what if and this is the role of the guide, right? But what if it was happy? Or like, what if what if there was another version? If this is neuroplasticity, what if there was another version of you that could have happened, had a happy experience? What if there was another version of you that didn't witness your friend? You know, it's like yes, what happens is sacred, and I believe that we want to go with it and not deny it. But what is also sacred is our imagination, our ability to reinvent and rewire.

SPEAKER_01 24:59

Yeah. Well, we have to be able to rewire because otherwise you live in the grief for the rest of your life or you live in the pain for the rest of your life. You have to be able to be move on and make peace. I had to make peace with all of the uh drinking and drugging I did through my marriage, and you know, knowing that my kids were they were small at that time, thankfully, but they uh that affected them. You know, my eldest used to ask me why I was looking weird or being weird, or it was just awful when I think back on that. And I have guilt and shame. It hurts my chest when I think about that. But we all we live together now, and it's great, and we talk openly about my sobriety, and that's a lesson for them. Right. Realizing we're yabbering on and we're short on time. Yeah, two things. Let's go back to the mentor story. Yeah, just because I want to understand it sounds like you were talking about you went to Greece and you came back, so I'm expecting some bad news here.

SPEAKER_00 25:46

Yeah, yeah. So went to Greece, came back, and and she was the one I wanted to talk to. Couldn't find her. Got a message in my inbox from someone I didn't know saying she's in hospice. I didn't even know she was sick.

SPEAKER_02 25:58

Oh wow.

SPEAKER_00 25:59

Um I have two pages. If if you feel like a read, I can read it to you or I can just tell it to you.

SPEAKER_01 26:05

Uh read it. If you want to read it, that sounds great.

SPEAKER_00 26:07

Yeah?

SPEAKER_01 26:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 26:09

Okay, so I'll just just to preface it. So, so um, you know, I was dying to I just had selfish intentions. I wanted to download about my family trip.

SPEAKER_02 26:17

Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 26:19

And then I like she's dying. So I go to this place and I really don't understand it because she never told me she was sick. I knew she was old.

SPEAKER_01 26:25

That's why I go to the woman at the front desk. I'm like, she knows she was sick.

SPEAKER_00 26:30

Probably.

SPEAKER_01 26:31

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 26:31

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 26:32

Probably. She was such a mystery. I mean, I have no idea.

SPEAKER_02 26:36

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 26:37

So yeah, so I go to the woman at the front desk, I go, What's going on with Dr. Marie Woolbridge? She goes, she looks up from her phone briefly, she goes, She's dying. That's what people do here.

SPEAKER_03 26:47

Yeah, I'm like, okay.

SPEAKER_00 26:49

So I go to her room and I don't recognize her. You know, she's so skinny, she's so small, she's shrunken, totally shrunken. So, so here I am, like, wow. All right. So I'll just um I'll just if you're up for it, I'll do two pages. Cut me off if it starts to drag.

SPEAKER_02 27:09

No, go ahead, do it, let's do it.

SPEAKER_00 27:11

Okay. I can't hold Dr. Marie. Her frailty is so extreme that I fear my touch will be too heavy. The only instinctual place to put my hand is on her head. I gently stroke what's left of her hair, a few white strands, oddly thick against her spotted scalp. Her cries deepen as if dredging up all the alienation she tried to hide, never having had a family to relate to. She had no family. She was she was uh um found on a doorstep in a barn.

SPEAKER_04 27:41

Oh my gosh, why?

SPEAKER_00 27:43

How unfair that she should end this way. Where is life's sense of balance or caring? Dr. Marie came in abandoned and is going out alone. Dr. Marie's wailing accelerates, the sound's ghostly and hollow. Her eyes lock onto mine, pleading like she's begging for a lifeline. My friend's predicament is a gaping exaggeration of my worst fears. The fear of fear, the horror of horror, the void of aloneness I've avoided forever. I cut Marie's head in my hand, barely touching her lest I hurt her more. I sense back into the early days of mothering, of trying to meet the unwieldy pain of a newborn, with maternal reassurance. It's okay, I tell her. It's okay. This is the first time I've really touched her outside of guiding her up by the elbow as she manages steps or putting my hand on her shoulder blades lightly as I I help her into a Starbucks chair. But now I feel the thinness of her skin around her shrunken skull. Now her jaw locks open like monks scream, trying to be heard amid the beeping of monitors, the raw stench of cheap disinfectants, the crude blanket of her morphine drip, unable to scratch the surface of her pain. So then I I'm imagining Scotland, which is my homeland. I close my eyes and I imagine I have moss in my hand, the damp, bright green sphagnum moss of the bogs in Scotland. I will soothe her with it. I will sponge it on her scalp and let the raw earth smell of moss usurp the hospice Lysol stench. Travel with her into the bogs in Scotland, into the heart of darkness. I will hold her hand underneath that peaty water. We will sink down deep together through the crystalline peat filtered water into the core of the earth, where precious things are kept alive always. How long do I stand there? Minutes or hours? I'm not sure except that neither of us moves and she's not making sounds anymore, though her mouth is still locked open. I hear a commotion in the corridor outside. Other people are dying here. And only a few blocks away the St. John's hospital where new lives are coming in all the time. And no one knows the reason for any of this. Dr. Marie's eyes close slowly. Her left eyelid reaches its destination, but the right lid no longer knows how to close all the way down. Using my free hand, I gently touch my index finger to the centre of her lid to help it shut, and tears run down my face and drop onto Marie's clawed fist, touching the target doggy. The silence in the room, nothing is beeping, and I hardly dare breathe. What just happened? Suddenly I feel it. Death sentience stilling me with awe. Inside the void, instead of nothing, there's actually an ancient presence. A black rose of buried consciousness blooming at the centre of all that is discarded. Darkness has been trying to get my attention forever, and I've thrown piles of distractions at it, running away and utterly disrespecting its majesty.

SPEAKER_02 30:53

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 30:54

That's a fun thing.

SPEAKER_01 30:58

So that's from your book.

SPEAKER_00 31:00

That's from my book, which is this time with feeling, which is this journey I've been telling you about.

SPEAKER_01 31:06

And is that book about this, about your kind of rediscovery of your life and specific to the mentor, or really like the whole journey?

SPEAKER_00 31:15

No, the mentor is kind of just like it's towards the end where I'm kind of like really liberating from all the trappings. After this moment, I go to Burning Man alone and have a like crazy time with her as my kind of spirit guide. Um, but the the sort of first two-thirds of the story is more like like trying to still trying to kind of make it work and it's it's fun and sexy and try to figure out relationships.

SPEAKER_01 31:42

Um what tell us what it's called. Tell us what the name of the book is again.

SPEAKER_00 31:45

It's called This Time with Feeling. That makes sense.

SPEAKER_01 31:48

That's really good.

SPEAKER_00 31:48

Probably know as a filmmaker. Yeah, that's like a sort of get into your life.

SPEAKER_01 31:52

Yeah, the director telling you, okay, that this time with feeling. Yeah. And yeah, we'll make sure that there's a link to that on the show notes for this episode. And also, just before we we wrap up, I wanted to know about your EMDR practice. And also for listeners that don't have a fucking clue what EMDR is, they might think it's a type of music.

SPEAKER_00 32:13

Well, it it's kind of good with EDM as well. It is EDM and EMDR do definitely connect. Yeah. Um, yeah, so I'm uh I'm a licensed marriage and family therapist, and I have this kind of add-on of being an attachment-focused EMDR practitioner. EMDR is a trauma healing technique. It's great for all kinds of trauma, big T, little T. I do a lot of work with sexual abuse or disruptions. Um, it's very good at getting into the root system. It uses bilateral stimulation, so um, which essentially means um tapping or buzzing left to right. You can use sound, you can use visuals, you can use buzzers that you hold in your hands, you can do it on um on Zoom and you can do it in person. And it's really a good way to get under the hood. It's it's like I call it next level therapy. Yeah. It's therapy plus.

SPEAKER_01 33:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 33:07

Um, so I'm a big fan of that. I was gonna quit as a talk therapist.

SPEAKER_01 33:10

Uh there's something about the tapping or the um it's sort of distracting part of your brain that's and therefore allows memory, sometimes block memory or block trauma to escape. Something like that.

SPEAKER_00 33:25

Well, yes, you're you're on to it. I mean, it's it's stimulating the right, the left and the right hemispheres, so it's stimulating both the logical and the associative or creative channels of the brain. And with guidance, what we're learning to do is repair where things got stuck together in the wrong way. Because it's not just about what happened, it's about the meaning that you made of it in relational space. So a lot of people experience some kind of sexual abuse and then come away with some belief that they were bad or they were dirty or they were wrong.

SPEAKER_02 34:03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 34:04

We want to go back in there and not only discharge the energy that's still stuck in the body and the emotional challenge channels, but also repair what happened with a more healthy adaptive belief.

SPEAKER_02 34:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 34:18

Like, oh, I was, you know, I that was unfortunate.

SPEAKER_02 34:24

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 34:24

I got unlucky, or you know, I was victimized, or I was unsafe, or whatever it was. But you don't then carry that belief forwards on these subtle levels into your everyday life. So it's it's really cleaning up the projectilens that we carry at a very deep level.

SPEAKER_01 34:42

I like your change of career. That's good. Fuck the film business.

SPEAKER_00 34:46

It's very cinematic still, and I'm still working in cinema.

SPEAKER_01 34:49

There you go. Yeah, it's funny.

SPEAKER_00 34:51

You can't really quit, but you you quit the business, but you can't quit the passion.

SPEAKER_01 34:55

Correct, correct. Um, Jane, thank you so much for coming on and talking to us. It's been a wonderful episode. And uh again, if you're listening to this episode, go to the show notes and we will make sure there's a link to find Jane. Um, if you want are interested in her EMDR practice and the book, uh, everything will be there. Just remains for me to say thank you so much, Jane, for coming on. This has been amazing.

SPEAKER_00 35:17

Thank you for having me. What a trip.