Why You Keep Repeating the Same Emotional Patterns | Ben Oofana

Why do painful emotional and relationship patterns keep repeating, even after you understand where they came from?

Ben Oofana joins Travis White to share how his unconventional path into traditional healing, meditation, and martial arts led him to confront his own trauma and recurring relationship patterns. He explains why insight alone may not create change and why people often wait for a crisis before beginning deeper emotional work.

Together, they explore what it means to face difficult emotions, become more aware of how stress shows up in the body, and build resilience by continuing to engage with life instead of avoiding pain.

In this conversation, you'll hear:

• How Ben began training with traditional healers as a teenager
• Why understanding an emotional wound is different from working through it
• How unresolved pain can surface in relationships and repeated patterns
• Why crisis often becomes the catalyst for change
• A grounding practice for noticing emotions and where they appear in the body
• How consistent inner work can strengthen emotional resilience

Ben's takeaway is simple: keep facing life. Growth is an ongoing process of showing up, working with what you feel, and asking for support when you need it.

Learn more about Ben Oofana:

• Ben Oofana's website
• Teach Me to Meditate
• Heartache Hotline

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by guests are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Travis White, Overcome, or its affiliates.

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Most of us don't realize we're repeating the same emotional patterns until they've already caused damage. My guest today, Ben Oofana, knows that experience deeply. At just seventeen years old, Ben left Texas and began a very unconventional journey into traditional healing, meditation, martial arts, and eventually confronting his own trauma and the relationship patterns he kept repeating. In this conversation, we talk about why simply understanding your wounds. Isn't always enough why people often wait for a crises before doing the deeper work and what it actually takes to rebuild emotional resilience. One idea kept coming up throughout our conversation face your life. Face the emotions, face the patterns, face the things you would rather avoid. Because growth doesn't happen by pretending the pain isn't there. It happens when you finally decide to work through it. This is overcome. with Travis White. Please hit that follow button and leave us a five star review. Hi Ben. Why don't you go ahead and start us off by telling us about your journey? Thanks, Travis. I'm happy to join you here. initially from an early age I was drawn to Native Americans and fascination continued to grow through childhood. At fourteen, when I began to hear about the traditional Native doctors and the kinds of ritual practices they go through, vision quests, sundance, and the visionary experiences they'd have. I was thinking. If ever given the opportunity, this is what I'm gonna do with my life. So I start saving money. I mean at 17 I was hauled ass out of Texas and made it as far as Oklahoma, still had a year of high school ahead of me and which I did finish, but I was all my classmates were out partying. I was sitting in the teepees with the the native elders and And it was in one of these native or one of these Peyote meetings that I met my mentor, Horace Dolkai, who is one of the last surviving traditional kayuwood doctors. And after another year or so of college, my grades are starting to go down. I I approached him as I was terrified. know to say, this is only for native folks. It's not gonna work for you, but still shaking, it's like, I wanna know I wanna learn to do what you're doing. And he's like, what are you doing this weekend? Can you start fasting? And that was his way of testing me to determine how serious I was. I drove down to the Wichita Mountains, not eating, drinking the next two days and nights, and met him where he instructed me to we just finishing up a POTY meeting and and so we spoke and said, Well come on out, when you finish your semester we'll get started and that's how this part of my journey began. Nice, I love it. And what was it that were you going to this place to like heal yourself? What was it if so, what was it you were trying to heal from? At that point I didn't even recognize my woundedness. I grew up in a background that was very culty in many respects and and there was a lot of physical emotional abuse. it was pretty bad without going into all the gory details. But I was quite dissociated and to make it out of there, out of Texas on my own. and living among the native folks and then getting my ass into college, doing my first two years. And I was running wild. One of my friends said getting me high was like pouring gasoline onto fire. Yeah. And it was a blast. Yeah, it was just so much fun running everywhere, back and forth between Oklahoma and New Mexico. And you know, just a lot of fun with friends. But but then when I started apprenticing with my mentor Things got pretty serious really quickly. I a lot of the Native American doctors possessed paranormal abilities and extraordinary capac capabilities that a lot of people you could say were beyond the range of what most people even consider to be possible. And it's not just Native Americans. For me, spending time in India and China, these different cultures, I Seeing a lot of intense stuff, but but Horace would transmit portions of his healing gifts to me. The native people refer to that as medicine, these kinds of powers. And in order to earn the right to work with these gifts of healing, it's typical one goes through the vision quest, which usually entails four days and nights alone in the mountains without food and water. And so Horace would have me again transmitting these healing gifts, this medicine, going through the vision quest, and then gradually assisting him. that was one aspect of the training. There's other parts of it too. I think because I was a a white guy, and there was something where he had this thing where you gotta earn it. You really want this white boy? Let's see how bad you want it. And so Horace was the end of the line as far as his own tribe. There were a few other doctors, but they weren't anywhere near as powerful or gifted as Horace was. And to this day, and I've seen healers like from Brazil and the Philippines, other parts of the world, and I haven't seen anyone or even heard of anyone who's as powerful as Horace was in this day. But Horse being the end of the line. Like a lot of these native doctors in these tribes, when they put the native people on the reservations and they were taking the children away from their families, putting them in boarding schools, and and a lot of these children were subjected to horrendous trauma, horrific even, beaten for speaking their own native languages, their hair was cut off, couldn't wear their traditional clothes or speak in again in their own languages. They were just put in uniforms and subjected to verbal, emotional, physical, sometimes even sexual abuse. There are graves of you know like native children. Sometimes conditions were so bad they were trying to escape and they would freeze to death, or children dying of tuberculosis and other infectious diseases. and so there's this collective generational trauma among a of these native children who were forced into these residential schools. When a lot of the children did come back home, sometimes it could be years when they were away or whenever they'd get back, and these old native doctors, you know, they realized that this these gifts, this medicine, this power needed to be passed on. And they were having trouble finding anyone to accept it. And sometimes they would try to pass this power, this medicine, on to this young children, and but that power was too intense, too too much for the child to handle. And so sometimes the old doctor would have to take it back and would take it to the grave with them. So Horace was trying to pass it on to a few more than normal and what they normally do. But during the apprenticeship, Horace was gradually having me assist him in working with people, and I was very hesitant at first, not feeling like I really knew enough. And in hindsight, I understand a little more why, but at the time Is still very hesitant, but Horace is saying, I can't explain everything you need to do here. This is going to reveal itself to you. You just have to start working with people. And that's when you'll gain the understanding of how to work with this medicine, these healing gifts. Horace's own experience, his father had transmitted. the medicine to him shortly before he shipped off to Europe to fight in World War II. Horace still had flexor German shrapnel in his back. Yeah, he was he grew up back there in nineteen twenties, thirties, and fought in World War Two in Europe. And and then Horace came back, you know, afterwards and his the account that I heard from a man who was adopted basically into Horace's family was that Hor Horace's oldest son was not doing that well, was physically ill. And and someone said, Look, you have the medicine, you have that power from your father. You need to see what you can do for your own son. And Horace just at that point, you know, he started making the effort, and that's when that power began to awaken within him. For me though, in addition to the Transmitting the gifts and going through the Vision Quest and assisting Horace, he would do things like at one point he dropped me off in the middle of the Hopi Indian Reservation with thirty dollars in my backpack. He said, Hitchhik to Las Vegas, Nevada. Make it the best you can. Mm. And that was terrifying at Yeah, it's twenty, twenty one, somewhere in there. And is he expected me to survive, just use my instincts and and getting in there and first thing that came to mind growing up in the Christian eva evangelical movement is like I started calling churches, you know, just feeding them this line, like, Yeah, I was staying on the reservation. There's no work. I needed to find work here to survive. And so I got put up in a boarding house and And after finding a job and making a friend and we shared this small apartment and but after a couple of months horse shows up and it's like ready to go and we were back on the road again. And that experience where he dropped you off at the Hopi reservation, what did that teach you about trusting yourself? it wasn't so much intellectual you know realization that came to me out of it. It was more like Just and and I I still do this to this day sometimes. Yeah, things are precarious, you know, along the way. Two thousand eight, nine, the banksters crashed the economy, those can I say the word? Can I use a little creative language? You can use some creative language, yeah, go for it. And those assholes in the financial industry who should have gone to prison for their risky financial maneuvers that crashed the economy, where people are losing their homes and their businesses and their life savings and stuff. and you know, that time for instance, and the bottom fell out from under me too. So there are times when there's great uncertainty when there's a lot of fear and just not knowing how I'm gonna make it, how I'm gonna survive. And it's it's been challenging for me even since COVID, because before COVID I would do classes on a weekly basis in New York City and every other week I would venture up to the Boston area, do classes there. That's how I built my practice. There healers in different traditions Like you find among the Native Americans and Brazil and Philippines and among different indigenous cultures. And some of the Buddhist lineages and the Hindu Vedic traditions, you have individuals who carry these transmissions. And when you have the opportunity to be around someone such as myself or in these other lineages, and they carry these transmissions, one of the things that happens is, well for instance, when people would show up in my classes and I would be guiding them through this these series of meditation practices that I developed. In my case, it was because I suffered so much trauma. And so the meditation practices were originally developed to facilitate my own healing. But then I began to adapt them to the needs of whether someone was struggling with a digestive or respiratory disorder, or if they were going through a breakup or divorce or Yes. you know, whatever, you know, they lost their job and got laid off, you know, it's like but people would feel this power, this presence coming through me, working with them. And and I've spent time with say like a Satu from Nepal, for instance. This is just one of numerous individuals. And And even spending time with him, telling him about, say, Okay, I work as a healer and this is how I'm assisting people. Here are my challenges. Can you transmit, you know, like some of what you can that gift or that power that you embody that you carry? And when he did that that night I felt like I had the sun in the middle of my chest. I couldn't go to sleep for hours until maybe like four or five in the morning. And and so when you s have the opportunity to spend time, you know, with someone such as myself or people in these traditions, other lineages, then there's this power, this transmission that it facilitates healing, it facilitates this growth or evolution, it helps you to work through like a lot of the limitations that you carry. But one of the things that's so unfortunate with COVID, and we were moving in that direction beforehand anyway, COVID just pushed it on over the edge, is that people more and more instead of getting out, going to live events, showing up in person are more inclined to go to online events. go to workshops. You know, they try to do everything remotely, remote healing sessions, remote classes or workshops. And and maybe that can work for some people in some instances. I mean there's there are kinds of learning events that yeah, you can pretty much get it all online. But but for those of us who carry these kinds of gifts, this transmission, if you only show up online, you're missing a lot. Yeah, there's a lot of things too that in life that you can't fully experience, like you said, unless you're in person. Like right there. in person. Yeah. Yeah. And a big part of my work anyway is teaching people to show up more and more fully present. I feel all of us to some degree are not fully in our bodies. We're some some degree to some degree dissociated. And I see it. I feel it. it's one of the things I would do when people would show up in my classes at the end. I would have them stand in front of me. Start scanning their body, and I could see whatever emotional wounding they were struggling with, traumas they were carrying, sometimes going all the way back to childhood, if they were going through a breakup or divorce, and health-related issues they were struggling with as well. And and they may have shared some things with me in class, but there's a lot they didn't share, and people are often shock, like, how do you see all this? And that's how I got much of my work. yeah, with like, if he could see this, he must have something going. I gotta work with this person. Yeah. Yeah, yeah for sure. And how can someone tell the difference between actually processing an emotion and simply thinking or talking about it? You know, I went into psychotherapy for a few years. Psychotherapy is a very important part of many of our healing processes. yet I carried so much trauma. And part of the reason I went into psychotherapy was because when I began to work on my own, after f few years of apprenticeship with Horace, I needed to reassemble myself. And I parked my ass in college for a few years, earned a degree, and put myself back together at the same time. And so as it's getting close to graduation, it's like college financial aid is running out. I was barely surviving off of it. But still, it was something. And but when I started working with people and that That is when that power began to awaken inside of me. It was like pouring hydrogen peroxide into a deeply infected wound. And so this emotional wounding, like the I found myself reenacting a lot of the trauma of my childhood and adolescence, and the way I was forming attachments to women who were often unavailable or disinterested, and a few who were quite abusive. And The pain at times was excruciating. I was at a complete loss. So initially I went into psychotherapy not knowing what else to do, and it enabled me to gain a much needed intellectual understanding of my wounding and wanting to understand much deeper, I kept I was devouring volumes and volumes of clinical texts. Part of my I had some like a triple major in college, but part of it was psychology, just cause of my fascination and wanting to understand my own emotional wounding and that of others. And and but I discovered that intellectual understanding only went so far because the patterns were perpetuating themselves. And When I found myself reenacting those patterns and consumed by this overwhelming and at times excruciating pain, instinctively I somehow knew to dive into the depths of what I was feeling. I would go so far into it. And yet at a certain point I could feel it breaking open and coming out of my body in waves. And as that happened, I began to experience these powerful emanations of warmth beginning to glow from within. And with that, I could feel the unhealthy attachments starting to dissolve. Maybe there is a woman I was fixated on, as desperately trying to. To hold on to make the relationship work. I thought she was the one. It was all projection on my part, especially seeing some of those women in hindsight. Mm-hmm. It's not that they were bad necessarily. I mean, a few were quite abusive, but but a lot of it, yeah, I I see it as a reflection primarily of my own emotional wounding. But again, as I started to Do the deep level processing to actually digest the backlog of painful emotion, I'd feel this. these powerful desires that that need, that longing, the feeling that I had to be with that individual. And when did you first recognize that you were rein re enacting wounds from earlier in your life? Well that was when, like I was saying, the when I was forming those attachments to and it was it was this cycle of reenactment. It was like one relationship after another and and just being strung out emotionally on some of these women that I formed attachments to. And you know, I'd see other people and you know, you have individuals that have more of a secure attachment style and only natur naturally gravitate towards other individuals with a more secure attachment style and they they bond and their the relationships tend to flow and they partner up and tend to be for extended Yeah. periods of time. You also have those of us with in insecure attachment styles tend to form attachments to individuals with more anxious, avoidant More ambiguous kinds of attachment styles. And so as I was enacting those patterns and it was continuing to perpetuate itself, it's like, yeah, I got a problem. This is something I would need to address. And it wasn't enough to just learn about it intellectually. The wounding was so deep. And so a big part of it was working with this what was the beginning of the system of meditation practices I developed, which I found then and and still to this day I find very powerful. Yet it wasn't that long before I hit the wall. I, you know, taking things as far as I could on my own, but as realizing that I'm not getting it all on my own. There are limits to what I can do fully on my own. That's when I began to explore other therapeutic interventions. I didn't know. I was at a complete loss initially, just not knowing. And so any therapeutic intervention that held problems, you know, acupuncture, homeopathic medicine, deep tissue body work is mainly the sessions I did with gifted healers. And the Vision Quest again, that you know, it was around the time I turned 30 that I was feeling that pull to return to Oklahoma to the Wichita Mountains. And of all the interventions, the Vision Quest is by far the most powerful. There are times, especially on the fourth night, where I could feel this extraordinarily powerful presence descend into my body. Portions of it are much like a near-death experience, where I would have parts of my life, even going back as far as early childhood or anywhere along the way, even more recent adversity. But all these lived experiences would be flooding back into my awareness of the vivid sensory impressions. what I saw, what I heard, what I felt, everything, all the emotions attached to that, all this is coming back up. And I could feel myself digesting it, like the food that I eat. And as I'm digesting it, I could feel this new foundation taking shape. And and as I come out the other end, I mean I could in many instances I would still be having these emotions surface in the coming days and weeks. But as I continue to cycle through that. I'm coming to greater degrees of clarity and understanding and resolution. And there's this new foundation taking shape. And I test it out as I go back out in the world, as I'm interacting with people. I can see and feel how instead of being so caught up in the the old relational dynamics or patterns as in acting. I could see how I was relating, engaging from a healthier standpoint, and I could also feel a tremendous difference over time in how other people respond to me. So I'm always reality testing, checking, Mm-hmm. monitoring, because I want to I like to get a sense of like, am I making progress or in what ways? the other thing too is that You know, I shared a article that I'm completing about growth orientation. And in the beginning, I didn't really understand much about healing. That wasn't initially, yeah, I wanted to learn from a traditional native doctor, but I didn't really have much of a concept of what it actually entailed. And seeing my mentor as a role model. Horace to this day is still the gift most gifted, most powerful of any healer I've ever encountered or interacted with, or even heard of. You know, he's working with people with cancer and kemia and wide range of health-related issues. And I've seen him facilitate healing that would be considered miraculous. Horace didn't really know or understand how to deal with his own emotional wounding. He carried a lot of trauma himself. He's primarily just addressing the physical in the work that he did with people. In my case, I had all this again as I started working with people, a lot of my own traumatic wounding began to surface. I didn't know, I didn't understand it as I was beginning and But over time, well part of it was I was so incapacitated in many respects by the I wasn't all that functional. But what I found is that as I took the steps working with what became the series of meditation practices, incorporating the most powerful therapeutic interventions. As I came upon them as I began to learn about them, and especially the sessions with gifted healers and going back to do the vision quest, what I found is that there was this gradual process of habilitation that was taking place. I could feel, I had this very acute sense of my limitations. One of the things that I addressed in the article that I shared with you is that many people in our society are what you call crises motivated when it comes to healing. When when their lives are blowing up, whether it's they're blowing a gasket and their physical body is having health issues, when the relationships are blowing up. They lose their job or just whatever crises. Then they seek healing. And you see a lot of people who I've seen it, I find it really disappointing. Sometimes it makes it very hard for me to take people seriously. they'll come in, they'll do, it'd show up in my classes, they'd come in and do a few healing sessions, and and as the crises is blowing over, it's like, everything's cool. I'm fine now. And they just disappear. I'm like, what? Yeah. Because Doing the work that I've done, you know, over decades now, and what it took to heal the wounding, the trauma that I carried myself, that wounding being so deep, it took an extraordinary amount of work. And in doing so, it made me incredibly empathic and enabled me to develop these capacities to look and feel deeply into people's bodies and minds. And so Say we do a few individual sessions. They show up in classes, I teach them some of the meditation practices, and yeah, they feel better. They are maybe they work with me individually, they do a few sessions, and it's they're not in that distress. But in a few sessions, we've We've barely gone down through a few layers. One of the things that deeply impressed me, in addition to training with this traditional Native American doctor from the Kiowa tribe, at shortly before I turned forty, I'd gone through a few too many mugging attempts. And this guy was attempting to rob me. walking on Seventh Street in Manhattan. I whipped out pepper spray and chase his ass down the street. And he runs behind a car and we're doing this number. And some dumbass lags the police down, you know, not not having enough brain in their skull to think, you know, he's probably have a good reason, you know, for chasing this guy. Is this And next thing I know, the the police had me up against the wall and I'm this close to going to jail. And and I'm saying to the officer, like, okay, so what am I supposed to do? Get beaten up because some trash thinks he's gonna mug me. And the officer is like, This is New York, you have to get used to it. And I'm thinking, F you, you know, it's like, I'll go What would it find the most ruthless master I could find to train with the next time I will paralyze the son of a bitch. And so I go down to Chinatown and in Manhattan, go into this martial arts store, ask the guy behind the counter, So who do you recommend? And he points to this rack of flyers. I take this whole stack of flyers home with me. I'm reading through them one by one. You have Shaolin Monks in these like dramatic poses. But there's one in this printed on dingy looking yellow paper. The English grammar was absolutely horrible. But I'm reading it's like, I want to train with this guy. I go to his studio a few days later and get started. And but one of the things that I came to learn out of I I trained with Shifu Li Tai Liang for like 17 years. Hope to get back at some point, you know, in this transitional period right now. but Training with Shifu and traveling to China on several occasions, training with one of his relatives over there, another master who has since passed on. And you see these individuals who have attained mastery. And you know, for them it's they don't do this flaky ass dabbling, you know, like yeah, like maybe fifteen or twenty minutes of meditation here and there and then they I got busy. I've sorry it I haven't kept up with it. They don't show up for a healing session or two and like I'm everything's cool now I'll see you later. They're like on a daily basis, like doing hours of intensive daily practice. And a lot of them develop extraordinary gifts and capabilities. even to the extent what would be described as paranormal. And and then even spending time in India, Sri Lanka, and being around people in the Hindu Vedic traditions, yogis, gurus, the satu from Nepal. They're doing hours of intensive daily practice, you know, they're developing these capabilities. So there's not this kind of episodic off and on half-ass dabble in healing. It's like they pour themselves into it. It's hard for people in our culture. We don't really have of a point of reference for that when it comes to spiritual development. And and this isn't just some woo-woo out there like, you know, it's I mean, this is very hardcore. you have some of the most rugged individuals who r really put themselves through it. You know, you think of the Native Americans, the Vision Quest, the Sundance, you're fasting the four days and nights without food and water. Some of them went even longer than four days and nights, up to seven. Yeah, and you could survive a lot longer than two days without food and water. Yeah. Yeah. In the in this crisis driven society that you're explaining, you know, people do some of the work when they fall apart and then things get comfortable again. They're like, Well, I'm not gonna pass this line because I don't wanna do the uncomfortable work. Why do you think that pattern is so common? A lot of it's because of this there's this very dysfunctional orientation in our culture of and and I'm I'm not saying everyone, I I definitely don't want to generalize it to everybody because what's missing among many people is a growth orientation and This is one of the things that I was describing with the people in these traditions is that that commitment and the showing up day after day, whether it's the Buddhist monks, the those in the Taoist lineages training in these martial arts, the in the Hindu Vedic traditions among the Native Americans who would continually go through the vision quest and sundance, these other intensive ritual practices. And so instead of sh when they're in the midst of a crisis, reaching out to someone such as myself, help me, save me, help me get my ass together. and then and then disappearing. It's like they're like showing up consistently, day after day. And and there's this a a whole different understanding, a whole different mindset. another thing too is that Where I would see people show up in the midst of crises and things blow over and they disappear. There's there's very much in our culture this like get comfortable mindset. Like people want to get to a place where they're comfortable and it's like, okay, things are cool. I don't have to really deal with things, I can just cruise along. But the thing is, you cannot sit still for very long. Either you're Growing, you're evolving, you're developing, or you're sliding down into stagnation. And so in these ancient traditional cultures, there is more of an understanding of that. And I could feel within myself there there were times in my 20s that I just didn't know what to do, and maybe I wasn't in that really difficult. Crises of relationship blowing up and unrequited love or whatever mess it was. But there are times where it was just I was still alone and aching and longing and all that, but I didn't know what to do. But gradually, as I began to discover, you know, develop the system of practice, as I began to explore these different therapeutic interventions as I began to go on the vision quest again. And then over time, as I was connecting the dots, training with this Chinese master, seeing how those in the Taoist lineages developed extraordinary power, capacity, capability in these other ancient lineages. I developed more this mindset of like, well, instead of just coming to healing, you know, taking the steps to heal when my life was blowing up. Is getting to this place of like, this is something you do every day. And so even if I'm not in crises, which you know, the more you do this work and you build the foundation, yeah, you you you become much stronger and more resilient when when shit happens, when you're faced with challenges, you have more resources, you're more capable, you just get in and you deal with it. And And like the the father of a friend of mine who was in Vietnam served multiple tours of duty, and one of the things he would say to himself is just face it, deal with it. And I say that to myself, whatever challenge I'm faced with. And and the more we can embrace life, whatever presents itself to us, whatever challenge, whatever obstacle, you know, if we take that as a reflection of ourselves and our limitations, a lot of it's a reflection. There are cer certain things too. You know, if you're in Ukraine and you have this idiot next door, you know, who is sending millions of his own countrymen to to die in the meat grinder and and then the people in Ukraine are getting you know Shahad drones and and ballistic missiles and in that case I wouldn't say it's a reflection of your emotional wounding. It's just the asshole next door who unfortunately is in power and hopefully someone's gonna whack his ass and and the war will eventually end. But we'll see what happens. but in any case yeah not everything is a reflection of your wounding but what a lot of it is to the best of your ability face life as it presents itself Embrace life, whatever challenges you face, and to the best of your ability, how can I work with this? And even when you're faced with what seems like insurmountable odds or life is not working, when that happens to me, you know, I'll sit down, I'll close my eyes, and it's like, what am I feeling in response to that? You know, what emotions, what physical sensations I go into it. It fear, anxiety, frustration, disappointment, sadness, grief. there's a whole range of enjoyable, pleasant emotions too, but I start out with these unpleasant ones because that's where we tend to get stuck. And the more I can work with those emotions, it gets me to a place where I'm more resilient. I get through the As I cycle through the more difficult, unpleasant, painful, fearful, anxious, whatever, feelings, emotions, I have more clarity. There's more acceptance for what I can't change, but there's also more resolve for, like, okay, here's some things I can do differently. and it it helps me to access my internal resources so I can. face those challenges head on so I can deal with them more effectively so I have an increased coping capacity. Another thing that I I see a lot of people do is this there's there's very much it ties in with what we were saying before, but it's kind of off and on, you know, like okay, I'll deal with something right now, but then switching it off or I'll deal with it when when I feel ready. w when I'm Whatever. again, as much as possible, when something presents itself, it's not that you're constantly twenty-four-seven processing your emotions and but on a daily basis, I feel it's critically important that we face life. You know, face the challenges, face our emotional wounding, work with that. And and also instead of just A lot of people, you know, you see like in their homes or different areas of their lives, there are these messes, you know, things that they haven't dealt with. And so as much as possible, like I can feel that within myself. And and that's been this is a very important distinction. There's many people have this ability And maybe they think it served them. there were times in my life earlier on where I saw people and they seemed to be functioning much Okay. better. And as time has gone on, I've recognized they have a greater ability to deny, to distract themselves, to compartmentalize, to push things down. There's this I don't want to go there, I don't want to look at it, put it on the shelf. but it's they contain it. They stuff it down there. In my case, I could not escape from it. It was if it was there, it's coming up. And it is I'm feeling the emotions. I can't escape from the emotions. And it was being reflected back to me either in relationships or my work or some other area of life, other interactions. And so again, as much as possible, I feel it's important when we're faced with when we're confronted with these challenges and issues and we have these it's eliciting these difficult, uncomfortable, painful, whatever emotional responses, when that's coming up to the best of our ability, we need to just show up. Bring as much of our as we can to deal with what's there, to work with it. to effectively address it. And by doing so, we're embodying ourselves. We're becoming more present, more powerful, we're increasing our capability, our resilience. Yeah, for sure. And you remind me of something that happened to myself. You're saying face it, face your challenges. I for years I spent years playing the victim. Like I was always huh. the victim. And I had an interesting conversation with my therapist. He said, You know what your problem is? You play the victim in every single thing in your life. But I didn't realize I was doing that. So it's like, Well, how how am I doing this? And he went through and explained a few things. I can't remember exactly what he said, but he said, Stop doing that. And right as I stopped doing that, I unlocked this whole world of growth. And I I started recognizing things more clearly in my mind that, he's right. I I I I w am doing this and I am doing this. And that's I think the point where I learned to face life and just push through the hard So I I love the whole thing that you're saying. Face it, just face life, just deal with it. Yeah. And this is a really good example of how working with a psychotherapist, you know, a skilled therapist can recognize our patterns and reflect that back to us and help us to develop that self awareness. And the fact that many of us not knowing how to work effectively with our emotions, because of that there's more numbing, more disconnect, and so and along with that there's this lack of self awareness, we're just not perceiving a lot of things we're doing. Yeah. Yeah. And one of the things I find is that as as I've healed and have grown more, I tend to attract people into my life who are doing considerable work themselves. And so so I get that added benefit of they see something about me that maybe I'm overlooking, they can challenge me on it, call my attention to it. So You talked also a little bit about resilience. What does genuine emotional resilience look like to you? Again, it goes back to that ability to face what comes at us in life and to bounce back from us. We're all going to encounter adversity to some degree. trauma, adversity. You know, we all experience as losses, setbacks. Maybe we go through breakup or divorce. And And when we're not digesting our lived experiences, we're not doing the deep level processing of the lived experiences are the emotions, then what happens is we tend to contract. You know, our lived experiences and emotional responses need to be digested. What doesn't get digested, it accumulates in our bodies. And It doesn't go anywhere. And it with that continued accumulation, we lose resilience. And the more that we can face issues head on and we can work effectively effectively with our emotions, and we chew up and digest our lived experiences and emotional responses. And then we're showing up and we're engaging responsively. We're learning and growing from that experience, these experiences. This is what Builds resilience. It's not always fun. It's not always easy. Sometimes it's painful. We're upset. We may be hating it at times. we may feel like a victim sometimes. We're not going to do it perfectly, but you know, but to the best of our ability. The more we just pour ourselves into it and embrace life. the more that resilience grows and and again making use of the most effective therapeutic interventions because there's a limit to what we could do on our own. And when we take these repeated hits, which happens to many of us over the course of our lives, you know, I mean now we have this whole other toxic, convoluted drama playing out. We got this war with Iran and gas and diesel or you know going way up. I don't think we've even seen the end of it. I think it's gonna get considerably worse. It yeah, I I I think it's gonna get worse. It's the gas Much worse, yeah. is just beginning to rise. I I have the fear of that. Again. Yeah, and so the bottom is going to be falling out from under people. I think it's you know, w we saw what happened in two thousand eight and nine. there's still some people on the planet who remember the Great Depression, who lived through it. A lot of them are gone now, probably most of them. but there's still some who are quite old that were born. Even during. Yeah, they're they're nearing the end now. Okay, they're late Yeah. eighties, nineties, but there's still some on the planet. And we could have something comparable to that. And and there's one thing that disappoints me about Americans, and w we all have our faults. It's not that people in other nations or other cultures are perfect, but But what I noticed is that a lot of Americans they're incredibly unaware of what's happening beyond our borders. whereas, you know, when I was in Thailand on the way back and forth to Sri Lanka, I watched CNN because like, wow, there's so much more on CNN than you see in America. There's like all this other news and then there's Al Jazeera, you know, and it's it's like in-depth documentaries of what's going on in other parts of the world. And and I came back from Sri Lanka again, I've been there 16 times and just over three weeks ago. And and you have a lot of these nations. Pakistan is having to ration fuel. I think something like twelve percent of the gas stations in France do not have gasoline or diesel right now. And and so thanks to our Mandarin Mussolini I may be offending a few people with that, but you know, started this unnecessary catastrophic war and and so it's affecting people all over the world. We're not just suffering here in the United States, all around the globe. And it could have really devastating impact on our economy. And and it looks like Putin in his grandiosity looks like he's pushing to extend the war beyond Ukraine. And and unfortunately you have these dopes in Germany and France who are like Buying into a lot of the far right Russian back propaganda. Russia has unfortunately been one of the biggest purveyors of disinformation and has sown dis dissension in nations around the world. You know, as their one of their biggest goals is to subvert democracy, which I will say I am unapologetically pro-democracy. Having been in Sri Lanka in the midst of a country with nearly thirty year brutal war in which a couple hundred thousand people died horrifically and at one point it was one of the had one of the largest levels of enforced disappearances. I mean you have people who were disappeared by the rebel Tamil Tigers, the the offshoot, I I forget what the Karuna faction, I forget what their actual title was. Then the government forces and many were tortured and executed, dumped in mass graves. You know, in when you are in a nation and in a lot of this kind of thing is going on and you see people suffering and you have close friends and their own their own friends, their own close family members were murdered and disappeared and all that, it really affects you. And and you see how how things could go, you know, and and Yeah, so I have a lot of concerns w seeing what's playing out right now. You know, and just Thinking back though to all your life experience, is there an emotional pattern that comes to mind that took you a long time to recognize in yourself? emotional pattern. I I think the biggest thing was just the the resistance to pain. The at times wanting relationships to work and wanting it so bad that I would be attempting to make the relationships work and and holding on and holding on until it finally blew up on me. And so so over time teaching myself to to face life as it presents itself. And and then when I'm faced with these challenges, it's like, well, what do I actually feel? And you know, we all have outcomes, we all have goals and aspirations. We have things we want. And that that could also be in relationship as well. But there are times when our life doesn't seem to be working, when a lot of things are falling apart When there is this tremendous adversity and uncertainty. And I and again, I think a lot of us may be facing a lot more of that in the near future, you know, the way things are unfolding right now. And so when that would happen, you know, teaching myself like to acknowledge the reality as it's playing out, whether it is a reflection of me. in my own limitations, my own emotional wounding, which it was in many cases. And sometimes it's we're living in this world and we have these insane effing idiots, you know, who manage to get themselves into positions of power largely because, you know, you have a lot of dopes who don't listen to the news, who don't read, who don't follow history, and who are susceptible to lies and disinformation and vote for people who never should be in office to begin with. And and so we end up getting people in power. And and so what happens is you know there are consequences for that. Elections have consequences. And so when the when we get the karmic blowback and our lives are blowing up because you know the the price of fuel is going through the roof and and subsequently our groceries and people are losing their jobs and all that. We're faced with these realities. And and so whatever is coming at us in life, you know, whatever lived experience. And so what I do is, you know, I'll I'll stop and I'll go, like, okay, what's happening? And I just acknowledge reality for what it is, whether it's reflecting me or it's it's just, okay, this is just what's transpiring. And The world I happen to be living in. Not all of it does reflect us. and What am I feeling in response to it? And I bring as much awareness as I can to it. And whatever comes up, the sadness, grief, the frustration, anxiety, how am I going to make it? How am I going to survive in this? I work through these emotions. And it does get me to a place where I'm calmer, I'm more resilient, I'm thinking more clearly, I'm seeing more options. sometimes it takes time. When in 2008 or nine, there were months and months where I was couldn't sleep and I had found found myself consumed with anxiety. But I'd be breathing into the anxiety, and it's like I'd be saying to myself, What am I gonna do? How am I gonna make it? and I started getting this inspiration, like, you know, as I've gone. Through all these steps to heal over the years, and I've seen the gradual transformation, the healing of the wounding, and my r the quality of my relationships have improved. And and the fact that so many people have gone through breakups and divorces. And one of the things that I see in classes was that people would show up, whether it was in the midst of the breakup, six months, or Even years down the road, and the vast majority of people are not digesting that heartbreak and the ghosting, the breakup, the divorce, and they're still carrying that. And so, but in the midst of the financial crises of 2008 and nine, I got the inspiration to begin to teach these classes. And so week after week, you know, this is how I came up with creative workable solutions. The creative workable solutions that you come up with can very likely be completely different. It's going to depend on your circumstances or the challenges that you're facing. Of course. But you work with these practices and therapeutic interventions, whether deep tissue body work, you work with a gifted healer such as myself, maybe you're hardcore, even go on a vision quest or something, or multiple vision quests, and you're getting stronger, you're more resilient, you're capable and you just get to where you have more capability in terms of meeting life head on with whatever challenges. So yeah, the biggest lesson is just keep facing life. It it's hard at times. It's scary. It's painful and a lot of things don't work out the way we want them to, but we just keep showing up to it and embrace life. And it's like The question is how can I work with this effectively? How can I use this to heal, to grow, to transform myself, to become a better person, to become more capable, to live more fully? And for the person listening right now that may feel that they are keep repeating the same patterns and they're tired of living a certain way. What would you encourage them to do first? Work with the practice that I was just describing. You know, acknowledge what's happening, what do you feel in response to it, where are you feeling it in your body, drop into the depths of it, breathe all the way down to your abdomen very slowly, expanding your abdomen, then rip gauge, pause, then exhale fully very slowly, pause again. Continue the cycle. Take whatever time it takes. When I was going through the worst of it, I had all that trauma being reenacted in my relationship. Sometimes I'd be doing this for hours on end. There are times where something blows up on you, maybe a misunderstanding or upset, but you might work through it in 15 minutes. But whatever time it takes, just stay with it. You're working through those emotions day by day, whatever challenges are presenting themselves. Just get in, deal with it the best you can and reach out. Yeah. We can't do it all on our own. We need help. Sometimes with all the the stress and the difficulty we're facing and we could afford it. Sometimes we need the deep tissue body work because all that stress is accumulating in our body. sometimes maybe acupuncture, you know, because you're going through a breakup and your whole biochemical your biochemistry is thrown way off and it helps to create that stabilization, Ayurvedic medicine. working with a gifted healer such as myself, even that much more powerful for digesting the grief and loss and the sadness or you know, or whatever challenges you're facing, the traumatic wounding that you're carrying, so you're digesting those lived experiences, the emotions that are attached to that all and you're developing that stronger foundation so you're more capable of really showing up and needing life. I love it. just the last question that I have here is the knowing what you know now, what would you say to your seventeen year old self? I'm not sure, you know,'cause at at seventeen if a lot of what I could have said to from my the vantage point I am now, what I could say to my seventeen year old self, I don't know that the seventeen year old me would grasp a lot of it. Yeah, probably Makes sense. Yeah. And if that makes sense, it's fair. my mentor Horace at one point and he could be very quiet, very sparing with his words. We could ride across country for hours and hardly say a word at times. But at one point he's saying One of these days you're gonna be extraordinarily good. You're gonna be very powerful, very gifted at what you do, you're gonna help a lot of people. But in the meantime, you're gonna really scrape bottom. Because if you don't, you will never understand the suffering of the people you're working with. I was taken aback in that moment. I had no idea what he meant. I I felt a little shaken. Hearing those words, but I didn't understand, I didn't comprehend, had no idea what I was in for. And Yeah. So what I've conveyed already as far as like showing up to the best of your ability, learning to work effectively with your emotions, that's gonna give you some of the foundational tools and also making use of the most imp effective therapeutic interventions. Yeah. practice and interventions. The practices l are like the meditations, you could do qigong practice interventions. you know, like acupuncture, deep tissue body work, working with the gifted healers such as myself, me going on the vision quests, these are interventions. We need to combine both together. and that helps us to again, we're gonna face challenges along the way, diversity. I think a lot of things are shaking up in the world right now. lot of things that we a lot of the stability that we just took for granted. we could be losing a lot of that. May take a lot to for us to hold ourselves together in the coming months and years. We'll we'll see how it plays out. And where can people find you? My main website is benufana.com. I post a lot of articles. There are videos you can find on my YouTube channel as well, but you also find them in the blog section of my website, along with these in-depth detailed articles. Because I've developed this whole system of meditation practices, you can go in also to teachmetomeditate.com. where I teach describe these system of meditation practices. So I can work with people over the phone or in person, depending on where you're at, if we happen to be in the same place or if we're gonna be in the same part of the world at some point, because I do travel. I help with a lot of people and have for for a very long time who are in the midst of breakups and divorce. And I've I put together some courses. I'm still building them. I'll be building these indefinitely because there's just so much to it. So if you're in the midst of the breakup, there's how is it breakup first aid. If you're right in the midst of the crash, to get you back on your feet. And for the really deep dive, if you've Cycle through a series of really abusive relationships or just patterns of unrequited love and just really want to understand much more deeply and transform yourself. There's heal my heartache. And you really need to get on the phone and talk with someone and your relationship's blowing up. If you're in the midst of the crises, there's heartache hotline dot com. I'm on Instagram. you two Very pro-democracy. If you see my Facebook, the right wingers may get a a little offended. well, I'm not gonna hide myself, but you can find me on Instagram, you can find me on YouTube. Not so much political content there. Awesome. and we've covered a lot of ground in this conversation. Is there anything that you would like to bring up that we did not discuss? I think we covered everything that I could think of, you know, just day by day embrace life, show up, work steadily. I was talking about how a lot of people are crises motivated to heal, but having trained within lineages that go back hundreds, if not thousands of years, Healing is an ongoing process, yeah. So I'd encourage you to explore, you know, internalize, just Do what you can to familiarize yourself. You know, it could be in other traditions or practices, whether Buddhist or Hindu Vedic or the system of meditation practices I developed. Find those interventions that are most effective for you. And sometimes it takes a lot of exploration. Be open. It does cost money, you know. It's you know, because people are providing these inter interventions, they gotta survive to. they have to pay rent like anyone else, but but be willing to really dive in and and instead of just you know, dabbling, which is so commonplace in our culture here. You know, one of the things that part of my mindset, which has carried me so far, was as I took the steps to heal my own emotional wounding, and I was getting stronger, I was becoming more resilient, instead of operating with the assumption that, okay, I'm done, it's cool now. I had this whole different mindset of like, wow, I've progressed this far, I'm in a better space, I'm coping that much better, I'm more resourceful. How much further can I go? If these practices and interventions have carried me this far, how much further can they carry me? And a lot of that comes from the the inspiration I gained from. Training with a Native American doctor and from a master from China in these internal martial arts, Xing Yiquan, Bagwa Sang, Tai Chi, and Qigong, and in my interactions with those who've attained varying degrees of mastery, of whether Buddhist or those in the Hindu Vedic lineages, you see these individuals who are continually learning and growing and evolving, developing greater capacity. So take that mindset yourself that is so crucial. As I said, you cannot sit still for very long. Either you're sliding downward into stagnation or you're you're healing, you're growing, you're evolving. So be taking steps continually. Keep learning, keep growing, keep evolving. Awesome. I love it. Well, Ben, thank you so much for coming on the show. I admire your resilience that you've built up and I admire what you're doing to help people, how you're helping them heal. so so thank you for spending an hour with me. And thank you to all that are listening. if this show or if this episode resonated with you, please follow us and leave us a five-star review that'd be more helpful than you ever know. Thanks again. Until next time.