Francesca Maxime on ReRooting Safety in the Body and in Community

In this episode of the Mindfulness Exercises Podcast, Sean Fargo speaks with Francesca Maxime—Somatic Experiencing Practitioner, certified mindfulness teacher, and founder of ReRooted Healing.

Drawing from her lived experience as a Haitian-Dominican Italian-American and her years as a journalist, Francesca brings a deeply embodied and trauma-informed lens to mindfulness, healing, and racial justice. Together, she and Sean explore how mindfulness intersects with somatics, decolonization, and collective care.

This conversation touches on everything from intergenerational trauma to the nervous system's role in social change. With warmth and clarity, Francesca invites us to move beyond disembodied practice and toward a felt sense of liberation—for ourselves and our communities.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode:

✔ How somatic awareness supports healing from trauma and oppression

✔ Why decolonizing mindfulness means reconnecting with the body

✔ How racialized trauma shows up in the nervous system and how to tend to it

✔ The difference between coping and true healing

✔ Why “just observing” isn’t enough in trauma-sensitive mindfulness

✔ How to bring mindfulness into movements for justice, equity, and belonging

✔ What it means to create safety not just for individuals, but for entire communities

💡 Learn more about Francesca’s work 

🔗https://maximeclarity.com/

Become a Certified Mindfulness Meditation Teacher: Certify.MindfulnessExercises.com

Take 20% Off With Coupon Code: Podcast

Email: Sean@MindfulnessExercises.com

Mindfulness Exercises with Sean Fargo is a practical, grounded mindfulness podcast for people who want meditation to actually help in real life.

Hosted by Sean Fargo — a former Buddhist monk, mindfulness teacher, and founder of MindfulnessExercises.com — this podcast explores how mindfulness can support mental health, emotional regulation, trauma sensitivity, chronic pain, leadership, creativity, and meaningful work.

Each episode offers a mix of:

• Practical mindfulness and meditation teachings
• Conversations with respected meditation teachers, clinicians, authors, and researchers
• Real-world insights for therapists, coaches, yoga teachers, educators, and caregivers
• Gentle reflections for anyone navigating stress, anxiety, burnout, grief, or change

If you’re interested in:

• Mindfulness meditation for everyday life
• Trauma-sensitive and compassion-based practices
• Teaching mindfulness in an authentic, non-performative way
• Deepening your own practice while supporting others

…you’re in the right place.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Hi everyone, I'm Sean Fargo with Mindfulness Exercises, and today we have the honor of speaking with Francesca Maxime. Francesca graduated from Harvard University with a degree in English literature, and she's written two books called Rooted, a verse memoir, and Rerouted, Verse for the Human Animal. In getting to know Francesca a little bit, I'm a little surprised that we haven't met before. We have quite a bit of overlap in our interests and some of our teachers, and I'm really excited to get to know her better. She is the 2019 recipient of the International Society of Traumatic Stress Studies Outstanding Student Advocacy and Service Award, and she's the first prize winner of the Alan Ginsburg Poetry Awards. Her career began in working in Fortune 500 companies in sales and marketing and traveling around the country, speaking with a lot of executives. She's been a TV news personality, appearing on air as a news anchor and correspondent for a variety of networks and international TV stations, including PBS News Hour, Bloomberg, NBC, and Fox. She's interviewed a lot of celebrities and politicians like Michael Bloomberg, Chuck Schumer, Matt Damon, Zoe Zelda, etc. And she has done some groundbreaking domestic and international stories, including work on 9-11 and Occupy Wall Street. In the mindfulness world, she's been mentored in mindfulness and meditation practices by Jack Cornfield and Tara Brock. And she's been in silent retreat for at least several months total. She does therapy and coaching and consulting. And she's the host of the Rerooted podcast on the Be Here Now network, Be Here Now from Ramdas, where Francesca interviews renowned neuroscientists, trauma specialists, activists, psychotherapists, and also Buddhist and mindfulness meditation teachers around the issues of our times. She's done a lot of work in helping people with anxiety, trauma, PTSD, relationships. And before we started, we were talking about her work with the inner critic and shame and how, as mindfulness and meditation practitioners, how can we bring the insights of these practices to our relationships? So, Francesca, it's an honor to meet you and to be able to speak with you today. Welcome to our podcast.

SPEAKER_01 2:52

Thank you, Sean. Thank you for that kind introduction. It's funny to hear you say some of that stuff back. And I, you know, Zoe Saldania just won an Oscar, actually, and she's Dominican, and you know, I'm partially Dominican, so it's it's a nice, it's a nice honor for her and for our community. But yeah, I'm happy to dig in and say hello to all the folks out there listening.

SPEAKER_00 3:13

Yeah, it's funny. I was reading part of your bio. Looks like you're Asian Dominican and Italian American. That's quite the combo.

SPEAKER_01 3:24

Mostly Italian, like, you know, but yeah, I mean, it's it's it's all in there. I'm a little bit of a mutt.

SPEAKER_00 3:31

Yeah. Can you talk a little bit about your background growing up and and also like what led you to to mindfulness? Sure. Let's see.

SPEAKER_01 3:41

It all started when my mom met my dad, yeah, at a hospital in uh Chicago, actually. My mom was doing her residency, she's a doctor, and um he was working uh at the hospital. And uh they met and you know, uh, I was born there in Chicago, and uh he'd already had three kids, and so she kind of raised them for a while. And then when she left him when I was about two, she took me back to Massachusetts where she was raised. And so um I kind of grew up with my Italian American family in Massachusetts uh as a solo, you know, kid of a solo parent, with my grandparents kind of raising me, and um went back and forth to Chicago where my Haitian Dominican family was. And so there was always this sort of mix of having grown up speaking English and kind of in this what I call white adjacent space for me. Like I was sort of white adjacent, but uh, you know, my family in my town in Massachusetts was very, very white. And uh I was not exactly white, but I looked kind of like most of my family there, and my browner family was not there, so it was kind of like I don't know, it was a weird place and space, but I never uh I never had deep dives into my ethnic background. It was just sort of like happening as we go. I don't know how else to say it. And then when I went to college um at Harvard, uh that's when sort of I got kind of hit with a ton of bricks around being raced or having been asked to race myself in the check the box application thing, which my mom didn't really have any insight or thought about. I'm like, well, technically I'm white, I'm black, I'm Hispanic. I'm, you know, technically my father is, you know, black and Hispanic, and my mom is technically white, according to the way uh these Western world categorizations are. So I checked all those boxes and it was funny. I didn't really give it a ton of thought about sort of the impact, but Harvard at the time, and I don't know if they still do this, they segregate their incoming uh accepted, you know, people for pre-freshman weekends for um black prefreshman weekend and like I'm assuming white pre-freshman weekend. And I don't know if they have AAPI prefreshman weekend or if they have Hispanic pre-freshman weekend. And I don't know if they if they do that, but I was invited to the Black prefreshman weekend. And um I was uh sort of not familiar with um uh a lot of what I was experiencing um in that space because I was raised in a white environment with white family and hadn't really had people, to my knowledge, see me as a person of color. And so that was a very interesting experience. And the following weekend was the white prefreshman weekend, and so I stayed at Harvard on campus because I only lived an hour away from Harvard growing up in Massachusetts for that white pre-freshman weekend. And then I had a really different experience. And so that was really the beginning of my racial awakening, and it wasn't really even an awakening, it was just sort of like a hit with a ton of bricks kind of thing, and it created a lot of uh challenges internally and relationally and socially for me, um, in terms of identity and all that kind of stuff, even though I had never denied my identity. I did not have uh the same experience, uh, the same lived experience that a lot of the other people of color had growing up. And so that I was with at school. And so I say all of that to say that that became a lot of the work that I kind of circled back to and came up against later in life, and then uh was a big subject of, you know, sort of the podcast that I did with the Ram Das Network. And I don't currently record the podcast. I may come back to it at some point, but a lot of that was my own deepening of understanding around racial trauma, the way in which I've been subjected to it, I've subjected it onto other people, um, all the different ways in which people who are raised differently are subjugated differently in um this, you know, sort of false uh categorization of better or worse based on melanation levels, um, very arbitrary. And um yeah, a lot of self-honesty around around that. So I'll I'll pause there about that, but I don't know if that was exactly the answer to your question, but I kind of went there.

SPEAKER_00 8:21

It's helpful. Yeah, it's helpful to know your background and and that journey. Um and you know, I think um it may, yeah, I'm curious if that journey led to some of your work in helping other people now. It sounds like it did, uh, and what some some of those ingredients were. Um I'm also curious about um, you know, you have such an interesting background, you know, racially and growing up, but also you went to Harvard, you wrote um some acclaimed books on like some poetry books, um related to it sounds like um traumatic stress. And I'm wondering about that connection between poetry and traumatic stress and whether mindfulness was on your radar at that time.

SPEAKER_01 9:16

Yeah, I don't think it was. Um, but I think that the poetry was a way of trying to access uh pieces of, you know, Jack Um Cornfield uh at Spirit Rock talks about um loving awareness. You know, I don't know how loving or aware I was at the time I was doing my initial poetry writing, but I was trying to get access to Dharma. I was trying to get access to truth, to to sort of figuring out like what is the way that things are, like, you know, what what what is the difference between um, you know, the difficulty or the suffering, you know, the dukkha that I'm experiencing in life, um, you know, to finding some kind of better way. So let me see if I can take your pieces one by one. Um, I guess when I was at Harvard and studying English, I didn't explicitly write poetry at the time, but I was always a writer and an, you know, literary interests and whatnot. And and also just film and creativity and different kinds of um sort of visual arts and things like that. My mom's a scientist and and I'm and I'm sort of on the, she's more left-brain, I'm more right-brained, for example. Um and when I was having a really hard time uh with my uh romantic relationship, uh there was a poetry class that was offered by this uh Italian teacher called Maria Mazziatti Gillen in um Binghamton University in upstate New York, where I was living at the time, uh, working as a television news anchor for uh one of the local stations. And I took it uh as a way of kind of taking my mind off things or exploring, you know, re-exploring or re-entering my writing capacity or writing world or whatnot, and finding this whole sort of trove of uh ways to start to um not only explore what I had known historically growing up as a child with my Italian uh, you know, ethnicity and ancestry and my family there, and all the things that sort of had to be sacrificed and given up uh by my Italian family in order to assimilate to the US, because you know, Italians were not white until later, just like Irish and you know, I mean you're white, but you're not white, right? Like, you know, like everybody had their moment of becoming white in America. And um so I also explored some of this stuff around my father's uh side and uh, you know, his Haitian and Dominican roots. And the traumatic stress connection is um just a ton of intergenerational trauma on my father's side and on my mother's side. My father more directly impacted uh because he had to grow up kind of alone in Haiti and had to grow up without his mother, and she had to leave to go earn money in Chicago, and he grew up with a couple of siblings, and you know, the family was split in two. The other siblings were in the Dominican Republic, and half of them spoke French and Creole, half of them spoke Spanish. Um, it was a lot of uh stress on children. Um and prior to that, the Trujillo and the um Duvalier regimes in uh the Dominican Republic and in Haiti uh were at war with one another around, well, not exactly with one another, but the countries had very um precise kind of racist views about melanation. And uh the Dominicans would hate Haitians because they were black and you know, descendants of Western Africans. And uh, you know, there was a real sense of um superiority um with some Haitians, even around um self-hatred around other Haitians because uh, you know, they were more black than the ruling class or the wealthy class in Haiti. And and my family kind of got exiled and was sort of like running for safety out of um, you know, people coming with machetes to, you know, execute you, you know, uh if you were speaking out against uh different things politically. And so that history is what I knew growing up. And so I started to kind of write less about the over political stuff, but more about my own personal experiences as it related to my sense of displacement between going back and forth to Chicago and Massachusetts growing up, or trying to speak Spanish over here in Chicago, but not really knowing the language, and then coming back to my Italian family in Massachusetts and feeling safer and warmer with my, you know, grandparents over there, and and then wondering like, am I having a hard time over here because they're black, or am I having a hard time over here because there's a lot of stress and a lot of trauma? And my father can be really explosive. Um, and that's just difficult for a kid's nervous system. And uh, you know, so when I wrote my books, it was a lot about just using that as my own personal kind of therapeutic journey of self-discovery or naming certain things that I maybe hadn't named as overtly as I started to and trying to do so in an artful way. And um I continue to write from time to time. I actually just had a writing retreat, a poetry writing retreat that I went to um this winter, this early spring. Uh, but it's not as much of my daily practice as it as it once was. But I very much think it can be a mindfulness practice and a and a meditative practice. And um, for many people I know that it is.

SPEAKER_00 14:32

Absolutely. Yeah. So your poetry was it highlighting sort of your personal experience um with some of these traumas, or was it more of like a a cultural commentary?

SPEAKER_01 14:48

Curious mostly just personal, very narrative, very, you know, the sort of the pejorative way of calling it is confessional poetry, but uh it's better known as narrative poetry um as a genre and um very much from the eye perspective of what I'm experiencing uh in in life. And some of it had to do with my history with my father, some of it had to do with my romantic relationship, some of it had to do with being a woman or how I'm seen or whatnot. Some of it has to do with my own, you can kind of see it if I or I can see it looking back, my own awakening around like, is it me, or is it that like patriarchy and me fitting into patriarchy feels like they're too, they're too um, they're like I can't quite, I don't quite know how to fit in to that system. And when I say patriarchy, I mean, I mean the system of dominion over, the system of power over, as opposed to sort of equity and and and and connection and and full respect for all beings and and whatnot. The idea that there's some hierarchical notion that one person is better than another person, or one gender is better than another, or one race is better than another. Um that's kind of what I mean by that. And then the extraction and the entitlement that um that comes from that and the abuse that can come from that um as well. But that it all kind of starts with cutting you off from your own heart and and and of course, mindfulness is part of the practice that very much in the word of Sati is remembering, is is is putting the pieces back together to to reconnect you with your with your own heart and and and mind and body and soul, so that you can have a more coherent narrative and be more integrated, so you can then bring your integrated self into creating more integration with you know people around you.

SPEAKER_00 16:40

Yeah. Um, yeah, and for um those listening who may not uh be aware, sati is sort of an old uh Pali language word for uh mindfulness. So sati and mindfulness are sometimes used uh interchangeably. Um thanks for sharing all that. I'm I'm really struck by how courageous you were to share your experiences um and to, you know, to write them.

SPEAKER_01 17:09

Um and and do you want the footnote on that?

SPEAKER_00 17:13

Sure.

SPEAKER_01 17:14

Uh a family member was not happy and threatened to sue me and the publisher about what I shared. And so the book had a limited print run because it was not uh, you know, sort of well received, which just goes to show you that I think when you asked me when I was writing, how aware are you or were you, or you know, how mindful were you when you were writing? And um, for those folks who have ever heard of internal family systems, uh it's a kind of therapy or kind of way of looking at yourself. Um, where in much the same way in a mindfulness exercise, we might do mental noting where we're noticing different things like numbness, confusion, sadness, you know, whatever. You're sort of in internal family systems, naming these different parts of you that are like more or less, you know, have characteristics or strategies that are um more or less skillful, uh, if you will. And uh, I don't know that I was very much aware uh that the part of me that was writing was a very unskillful part of me around certain things, not because of what it was writing, but because of what it published, based on what the um publisher sort of okayed. So I just want to say that like I I do commend myself for being courageous to be in touch with that stuff and to write the things that I needed to write. I also wish that I had been more um schooled in uh or at least had better guidance, I guess, from um, you know, the publishers and the people that I was working with who asked me to put my stuff out into the world because I had not gone looking for it. But yeah, I don't want to discourage people from trying. I just want to sort of say, you know, do your writing and then get some good consultation about what you're gonna publish.

SPEAKER_00 18:56

Yeah, just remember who's gonna read it and how skillful it is to maybe introduce some of that by surprise through a book. Um yeah, so you um like what's your like how were you introduced to mindfulness? Was it through um like your work as a news anchor where you're interviewing? Squad car. I'm only half teasing.

SPEAKER_01 19:24

What did you say? I said a squad car.

SPEAKER_00 19:26

A squad car?

SPEAKER_01 19:27

Yeah, I got arrested.

SPEAKER_00 19:29

Oh.

SPEAKER_01 19:30

Yeah, I was handcuffed and put in the back of a police cruiser in 2015, almost 10 years ago. And uh because I didn't take a breathalyzer uh after I had been out uh with a girlfriend of mine and uh was heading home to uh Brooklyn where I was living at the time. And um that's an automatic arrest. And I spent the night in jail uh with a bunch of women who had been there uh presumably many more times than me, because I had certainly never experienced anything like that. And when I woke up the next day, I just was like, okay, so I'll never drink again, which I haven't, and that's not been hard. Um, but also like I don't know what kind of healing I need, whatever I've been doing with talk therapy, whatever I've tried with poetry, it is just continuing to not work. Um, I've had trauma upon trauma, whether it was the kinds of um stuff I had to experience with my family of origin, or whether it was, you know, the way that my relationship ended, my romantic partnership, uh, which was abrupt and traumatic, or uh even the thing that ended up happening with the poetry book, which is was extremely traumatic also when I was in my early 40s. Uh it it just I never had a sense of knowing how to regulate or or anything. And I remember one of my cousins had said to me long before I had gotten arrested, you know, why don't you just sit and, you know, just just take a vacation with just you and the cats and maybe some some books and just read and be quiet, or why don't you try meditating? Or, you know, she was, and I remember I tried it once. And I remember that when I was sitting on a cushion, this is before I was arrested. This is when I was just sort of still in the swirling chaos of my own mind. Um, I felt as though I was going to devolve into some quicksand and never emerge. Like I just felt like it was such a pit of despair uh that the thought of being with myself or exploring that, it felt so somatically awful, uh, so challenging uh that I continued to run from it because no one had ever taught me how to be with it. I didn't, I didn't have any idea. So this arrest was very arresting, and I went to look for, you know, some way out of it. And uh not drinking anymore was one way. But my mom had gone to a weekend retreat up at uh Tiknat Han's place in upstate New York in Pine Bush, and she had met a woman there who did uh, she was a mindfulness practitioner, obviously, in Tai's tradition, but also she was a uh somatic experiencing practitioner. And my mom listened to this talk that this lady had and took, had taken her card, I guess, and she gave it to me and she said, maybe this will be helpful to you. And so I went to start to see her in New York, and it changed my life because I started to learn how to regulate my nervous system and how to allow some of the activation in my nervous system that I was feeling based on the emotions that I would have and the, you know, right brain, you know, sort of fear-based and whatever stuff was going on with me. Um, I learned how to start to be with it. And so she used uh mindfulness and uh SE polyvagal theory, if anybody's familiar with that, nervous system regulation, basically cultivating emotional balance, which is, you know, um Alan Watts, not Alan Watts. Um anyway, there's we were using principles around mindfulness and somatic regulation to help me start to learn how to be with and explore and get curious about some of my own traumas and the reasons why the whole repetition compulsion thing kind of kept happening uh for me. Why do you keep doing the thing that you don't want to do, even though you know it's not good for you? And once I sort of, I don't know, like could get a handle on that, I was just like ravenous for more. I was curious, and then one thing led to another. It was neuroscience I was curious about, mindfulness and Buddhist psychology, I was curious about, regular psychology, I was curious about, um, positive psychology, I was curious about. Rick Hanson does a lot of that work. And so I just kind of backed away from journalism because it was the 2016 campaign, and I wasn't really interested in covering politics anymore because I'd been doing it for nearly 20 years, and um started to study this stuff and took a little bit of time kind of in retreat. I went all the time to retreats everywhere, um, studied with all the great teachers that would come to New York because they all did all the time. And um, I also had access to all the teachers in Massachusetts. Um, they were there all the time. So I did a lot of my own healing uh in that period, and then I decided to go back to school to become a therapist, and that's kind of my path forward.

SPEAKER_00 24:23

How fortuitous that your was your mom had gone to a retreat. And then so did you go to a retreat at Tice Center? And that's where you know.

SPEAKER_01 24:36

No, no, she I I all my retreats were at IMS or you know, okay. Like everything I did was at Garrison or, you know, these places in upstate New York where Sharon would go or Tara would go or Jack would go, or you know, IMS where Joseph was, or whoever, you know, uh all the people that are sort of in the inside Theravadan tradition. But I also would listen to whoever, like Lama Surya Das would come and he had the Mahamudra tradition. And that's just you know, all these different I would go to Tibet House all the time. Um, that's you know, the His Holiness, the Dalai Lama's sort of home in in the US and Robert Thurman. And um yeah, I just was taking it all in.

SPEAKER_00 25:16

Yeah. Um I love how you shared what you thought might happen if you kind of surrendered to those dark places that you use the the word um devolve like permanently. Like you would kind of get stuck in that. I like that's the image that came to mind. Um what about um say your mom's recommendation led you to feel like safe enough to be able to touch this, whereas before, you know, it there was a lot of fear around continual like devolving.

SPEAKER_01 25:58

So because there's a way to hold it with someone else in somatic experiencing that when I had tried to do it by myself did not feel accessible. Um I and and and no therapist I had gone to, even though I had gone to some therapists that, you know, were sort of more mindfully oriented uh in New York, um, nobody really it it but even that was more recent. No, nothing else was touching it because it wasn't it wasn't scientific enough. It was still too based on the old psychodynamic kind of relational sphere of um if I'm kind to you, then you can have a corrective experience. I'm not your abusive or neglectful parent. If you trust me and believe in me, then maybe you can see that not all people are terrible, and maybe you'll feel like it's possible to have a decent relationship with somebody at some point where you can trust them and hopefully you trust me, even though you pay me, right? Like, not to say that transactional stuff like that is not authentic. It's just that it's not the end of the story. Um, what I loved about this sort of awakening, if you will, um, after my arrest was I see all of this work as so obvious. It's like okay, you take a white cotton ball, you put it in a glass that has red food dye in it, and you take it out, what color is it going to be? Red. If you take a little baby nervous system and you program it with certain kinds of conditioning versus other kinds of conditioning, and it grows up to run as a system that's designed based on its programming. Is there anything wrong with that baby? No, it is running as designed, it is adapting for survival, it is living to see another day, and all of that's amazingly, terrifically wonderful. And now I'm going to switch analogies or metaphors or whatever, in much the same way on your laptop or your iPhone or whatever it is that you use for technology. When you get that little red button on the settings that says new software update available, download 12.0, because you've been running 10.0 or 10.5 or 7.0 or whatever, it means there's been like 12 updates, right? Do you download it? Absolutely you do. Why? Because you like it when your apps run better and you like it when your, you know, speeds are faster and you can text quicker. You don't say, oh, I don't want to do that. You do it automatically because you know that it's in your best interest. Well, guess what? We don't do that when it's time to update our own internal programming, our own software. We can change the color of the, we can go back to the white cotton ball and say, well, I want to be purple now, or I want to be green, or I want to be a rainbow cotton ball, or whatever version of it, right? Or maybe I don't want to be cotton and I want to say, okay, well, you know, I was cotton over here, but let's weave me into a coat or a blanket or a whatever. Like what kind of, you know, thing do I want to be? And it's all very doable when you understand the way neural synapses get bonded, the way the attachment system gets formed, the way that the reason why we move toward or away certain things is based on cues of safety and cues of threat. And then the way in which trauma through the aborted nature, through the abrupt interruption of what would be natural flow, or in other kinds of neglect, the lack of connection, right? There, there's there's too little, right, of something, um, that those create our ways of of being, our ways of operating that are totally understandable. And so when people say they come in therapy or coaching or whatever, they say, I don't want my partner to change me. I don't want to change, or this is who I am. I'm like, I don't know if it's who you are. Maybe, maybe it is, maybe it's your temperament, but I do know it's how you've had to be. I do know it's how you've been, but I don't know if it's who you really are. I don't know if that's the whole story. And if you're curious about that, we can check that out. And if you're not curious about that, well then, you know.

SPEAKER_00 29:59

Yeah, yeah. You know, I love that um cotton ball analogy that, you know, there's nothing wrong with the cotton ball becoming red through its difficult, you know, circumstances. And I think that's such a powerful reminder for all of us who may be feeling like a red cotton ball, that there's nothing red wrong with us. There's nothing wrong with the baby who had to learn certain ways of being to cope and to get through, you know, their red-dyed, you know, household. Um, you know, there's nothing wrong with the software version 5.0. It was doing its job for what it was intended at the time. And there's possibilities for um new upgrades and and software. So um I think it's helpful for all of us to remember that there's nothing wrong with us. And um, and so Francesca, for your journey, was that part of the the awakening for you that you kind of realized that there was nothing wrong with you? Like, were you starting to work with um maybe shame or or guilt um in a new way that felt um more embodied through somatic experiencing and mindfulness of of the body? Is was would that be a fair thing to say?

SPEAKER_01 31:30

Yeah, yeah, for sure. Um the somatic experiencing practitioner I worked with uh after I had gotten arrested that I was telling you about, um that woman gave me a book. She gave me Marshall Rosenberg's book on nonviolent communication, and she also gave me a book by a woman named Sherry Huber called There's Nothing Wrong with You, a Guide to Getting Over Self-Hate. And she's, I guess, a Buddhist practitioner in California somewhere or the West Coast somewhere, um, that has written a bunch of books that I've read that the concept of she calls it egocentric karmic conditioning. Um it's it's you know, based on what we know to be true. You know, show me the thumbprint, I'll show you the thumb, as my relationship, you know, mentor Terry Reale talks about, in terms of, you know, the system works as programmed or as as as you know, as designed, uh, until it's reprogrammed, you know, until something else changes. Um that the questions that I had when I had gone to kind of do therapy work or or somatic work were why do I feel like um I can't believe the good things about myself? People tell me, why do I feel like I'm not worthy of good things happening to me, even if I want them to be happening to me? And then there was some other question that I had. I can never remember the third one. But they were all basically about self-worth and and sort of my own questioning of this sort of disconnect between I had sort of an awareness, like, okay, you're an on-air TV news anchor and like people are drawn to you at a certain level and you went to Harvard. But on the other hand, like inside, like your life is kind of a mess, you know what I mean? Like you're not able to sustain, you know, sort of contentedness, uh, you know, in a way that might be nice. Um, you're always kind of up here on the floor or down on the ceiling and kind of bouncing around and seemingly sometimes creating more, you know, chaos than uh you intend to. And so when I started to kind of get that concept of like distancing myself, like I became non-attached to my programming. It was very scientific for me mentally. Uh, and I really want people to kind of take this in, if they can take this in. If if if we can kind of both hold our story and our uniqueness and our personal history, because that is important to know and have some awareness around for sure. But it's why talk therapy after 20 years still didn't work for me. It's because I didn't sort of have this like clinical intervention of, and when I say clinical, I mean like objective intervention around like see this more scientifically. And that's what I see Buddhist psychology as, is a science of the mind. That's what this is this 20, 2700-year-old, you know, study um and experience of, well, just look at what happens. You put the cotton ball in red, it does this. If you know what I mean, it and if you put like ray on, it might do something different, right? Like different fabrics would repel color, like they wouldn't absorb it, right? So, like, what are you? And then under, you know, but it's kind of like cause and effect, which is back to the principles of Buddhist psychology, right?

SPEAKER_00 34:41

Absolutely. Yeah, it's um, I also I agree with you that um, you know, when we talk about mindfulness, when we practice mindfulness, it's very helpful to have that sense of say distancing or practicing like awareness of awareness or getting that 30,000-foot bird's eye view of our life, um, say spatially over time since birth, maybe even before. Um, and just get that perspective of what are we doing? What are our patterns? Um, what are our um what are we reacting to? What are our judgments? What's getting in the way of like real contentedness or self-love, all these things, like just scientifically, what's happening? Um and unfortunately, you know, in in some mindfulness circles, um, it's easy to kind of almost get the opposite message in the sense that um mindfulness is just about um calming ourselves and and feeling good about ourselves and our stories. And that's not you know the the intention or the whole intention. A lot of people just kind of stop there and hang out in pleasantness, and so I'm curious what your thoughts are on say this, um, on how people can practice mindfulness, but also kind of lean into what they might be scared of or what they've been avoiding being aware of.

SPEAKER_01 36:29

Yeah, I appreciate the question leaning into mindfulness and also, you know, scaffolding that, you know, there there might be fear, right? Um, I guess, you know, Sharon Salzburg talks about the difference between faith and hope and belief, and you know, kind of like the old George Michael song, you gotta have faith, or whatever, right? Like, I mean, I I I do think there is a difference and I understand it now, um, in that faith is about, like, first of all, what's the premise? What's the intention? Is the intention to feel good, feel happy? Uh, is it a state I believe I can achieve, in which case I want to go there and hang on to it and cling to it, which then is the attachment stuff we talk about that causes suffering in Buddhism? Or is it more like, no, I have a genuine principle to be curious about the world, to understand how things work, how things are, how things are in me, how things are in general. I want to see the truth. I want to be able to have greater clarity. Um, and if I can have greater clarity, then I can develop skillfulness um in different realms to be able to navigate uh the different realities uh internally and externally. And so for me, um I was afraid when I sat on that cushion before I had any of these practices under my belt uh to continue with anything because I was alone and I felt like I would sink into the abyss of self-hatred or self-loathing or whatever it is, shame, all the things. When I started to practice mindfulness and you have a mental noting practice, and Joseph Goldstein saying, Oh, yeah, just nodding, you know, fear, fear, boredom, boredom, doubt, doubt, you know, joy, joy, tingling, tingling, you know, whatever. You know, you're just doing a mental noting practice. If you're happy, you're happy. If you're angry, you're angry. Oh, hot, hot, you know, cold, cold, you know, like whatever it is for you, spacey, spacey, you know, um, that can help create a little bit of distance because you're naming fear as just another thing that passes uh through, as opposed to something that like you somehow are. And um, you know, I always tell people, I said, if you had on clothes and you jumped in the pool uh and you got wet and your clothes got wet, uh, if fear were your clothes, uh, you'd get out of the pool and you'd want to take off those wet clothes because they would be uncomfortable. Like fear is removable. It isn't who you are. You're still a naked being there underneath whatever the clothes are that you have on. And that outfit could be fear, which of course we orient toward all the negativity stuff when we're trying to scan for survival all the time. We don't so much remember the positive. Who wants to take off a wet coat of happiness, even if it's wet, because it's, you know, sort of something that we're going to cling to? We'll just probably be like, oh, well, it'll dry out soon, right? We might give that one a little more time. But they're all just like jackets, you know, they're not actually like who we are. And that's, I mean, even in this example, using the body, like skin and bones, as an example, but that's only even part of it, right? They're not who we are in our soul and our deepest self and our loving awareness and our consciousness and our. And so I think that idea of sort of learning how to accompany the fear, learning how to be with the fear is not possible if you don't know how to ride the wave. If you know how to ride the wave and your nervous system gets activated, feeling the activation, feeling that sense of whatever it is that happens in you when you want to punch somebody's lights out, touching into it gently, letting it move through your body, letting it dissipate, feeling that charge kind of dissipate so that that response is completed of all that stuff that's been stored in you cumulatively and through incidents over time, then you will never want to be able to do that other thing. You will continue to be aversive toward it. But when you sit long enough, whether you work with a somatic experiencing practitioner, or if you're doing, God forbid I say, the real sitting as opposed to like the spiritually bypassing sitting, which I'm, you know, being kind of cheeky, but like, you know, whatever. We're talking about mindfulness and we all know there's all kinds of flavors out there and whatever. It's fine. We all are where we are in our journey. But if you're really kind of wanting to be raw about it, um, you would often encounter that on your own anyway, even if you weren't working with, you know, one-on-one work with like a somatic experiencing practitioner that I did, where I think I heard somebody say, it felt like there were a thousand pygmies stabbing me in the back or something when I was in this fiery heat of my sitting practice. And, you know, like they were having physical paint, you know, but they let that move through. And then on the other side of that was something else. It was something cooler. Because one of the big things is everything changes, right? That's one of the core principles of what our mindfulness practices are about. So I guess I would just encourage people to know that if you can get the hang of what it means to know that when you're activated, if we allow ourselves to feel the tears or feel the rage, but don't behave out of the rage, right? We're not acting it out, or we're acting it out in a safer container of maybe a therapy session or something like that, um, slowly and imaginally, not actually inflicting, you know, the harm. Um, that from a nervous system standpoint allows that to move through your body. So then you have more clarity. So then you can be the bodhisattva that you want to be, then you can show up differently. I think sometimes, especially in Western religion, so many times people say, don't have the anger, or, you know, even in mindfulness, even in Buddhist practices, don't have the anger. I'm a little bit like, no, no, no. Have the anger, know what it's about, get curious about it, allow yourself to then learn how to be with it. And that means somatically, mindfulness of the body, learning how to let it move through your system so it doesn't get, you know, you don't get emotionally constipated with it and then end up acting out and hurting people.

SPEAKER_00 42:47

And no one likes emotional constipation. Well said, beautiful. Um, thank you for sharing all that. Um yeah, I I think for for those people listening who are afraid to meet the scary places within, to, you know, to note a lot of what Francesca is saying. Like, you know, we can seek to understand what's happening. We don't need to um say, like existentially identify with it or reject it. We can just understand it and gently um lean into it, gently touch it, note it, um, notice and like verbally note what's happening. Um feel it in the body, let it pass through. Like all these things are really, really poignant, very um practical. Um and we won't get stuck in them because these things do change, and if we stay with it long enough, it will change, it'll pass, and usually there's brightness on the other side or lightness.

SPEAKER_01 43:54

More grief.

SPEAKER_00 43:55

Yeah, yeah. Sometimes it gets more intense.

SPEAKER_01 43:58

Well, rage often goes to grief before it goes to more sort of spaciousness, and and that's usually what I see a lot of people be unaware or surprised that they have been sort of unconsciously guarding against. They're so they're so trying to not be violent in some way that they're suppressing um their behavior of their rage, which is good. I'm glad people aren't homicidal uh at a certain level, but all of that rage is actually a justice-seeking part that wants to advocate on behalf of a part that's holding a lot of grief and longing and sadness that people maybe are usually not aware of that's underneath it. And then we move through that layer and then we hold that layer. And then when that kind of gets touched into self-compassion is absolutely just what's on the other side of that. And then from that self-compassion place, a lot of self-acceptance and non-judgment allows you to have what I call a courageous humility as opposed to a sort of this shameful, you know, self-shaming kind of um identity.

SPEAKER_00 45:05

Yeah. Yeah, there's so many layers to this, and it it reminds me of um the power of retreat, of mindfulness, meditation, retreats. You've talked about quite a few uh meditation centers on the East Coast, and uh you've mentioned Spirit Rock Meditation Center on the West Coast. There's more and more meditation centers where people can sit and go through layer upon layer for you know days on end. And I know you've been on retreat for for quite a while and multiple retreats. Um can you talk a little bit about your relationship with retreats and um and say what kinds of retreats you might recommend and what that process is like?

SPEAKER_01 45:53

Sure. Um I've done the Goenka, you know, two-week, you know, silent retreat that a lot of people sign up for, which is kind of free, the vipassana. It's it is it is called like vipassana meditation. And some people think that that's the only kind of vipassana meditation, but it isn't. But that's okay. It's just if you hear that, it might be a Goenka retreat, it might be something else. But anyway, um, you know, I did that as a two-week silent retreat and um a bunch of different silent retreats, like I said with Jack and Tara and Sharon and Joseph and other folks uh that centered around different topics. I think the one Sharon was doing was around um meta, loving kindness, and you know, sort of what that means to just sort of sit and focus on um, may I be safe, may I be happy, may I be healthy, may I live with joy and ease, may you be safe, may you be happy, may you be healthy, may you live with joy and with ease of heart. May this, you know, sort of difficult person, like I mean, whoever heard this as a retreat, uh, you know, sort of topic that you just sit there and meditate all day, sort of coming up with phrases to say, uh, whoever it is in your face or head or whatever heart, this person that you kind of want to strangle, uh, political figure, family member, spouse, whatever, may you be safe, may you be happy, may you be healthy, may you live with joy and ease. So you're just practicing these things. You're not talking to one another. Uh, some of the retreats, like the Gwankawine, you're not even supposed to really look at one another. Um, you know, uh, I think depending on the length of the retreat, whether it's like a weekend, whether it's a full week, whether it's two weeks, whether it's a, you know, over at IMS and Barry Center for Buddhist Buddhist studies, they have, you know, much longer retreats. You can do three months and, you know, whatnot. I think the best thing to do going into it is kind of know what your tolerance level is and start small. Um, you know, maybe start with a a weekend um to kind of see what it feels like if you haven't ever sat retreat before or been in silence before, and maybe do it in a place that feels maybe not too um, you don't have to go to India. Uh, you know, you can start in your backyard at, you know, a local retreat center. Um because I think that what we're looking for is what happens to me when I don't have my phone in front of me. What happens to me when I am not able to talk to someone? What happens to me when I have a lot of observations about whatever is around me, and I'm making up a love story of me and the person who's sitting over there five rows over meditating, or a hate story about this person over here who seems to be sneezing all the time. And I wonder if I'm gonna get COVID from this other person sitting on their cushion or something, and I'm mad about that. And to start to do the difference of getting lost in thought around the hate story or the love story, but watching how the mind works and how it changes. And then you want to have lunch, and then you get sleepy, and then it's time to take a shower, and then you do walking meditation, and you notice what it's like to just be mindful of your foot lifting and placing and your knee moving, and you're doing this kind of awareness practice where staying mindfully in the moment, moment to moment to moment, is a process of observation and awareness. And um that, you know, if you were never on one, I would start sort of maybe small and local, short, short and local first. And there's a lot of different retreat centers out there. Um, some of them are in different Buddhist traditions. Um, there's Theravadan tradition, insight meditation, uh, like Spirit Rock and you know, IMS and Barry and Western Massachusetts. And then there's like, you know, Thai tradition, you know, Tikhat Nan, and he has a lot of different centers around the country and the world. And, you know, then there's Dzogchen centers or Bajrayana and Tibetan Buddhism centers, and you know, whatever it is that feels right to you, or if you already have a bit of a practice in one of them, um, you know, move toward that. Ultimately, Zen, I haven't even mentioned Zen. There's a lot of Zen centers around. Um, you know, move toward what feels feels right to you and and start small. And if you have questions, there's a lot of IMTA, the International, I don't know if it's International Mindfulness Teachers Association.

SPEAKER_00 50:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 50:17

Is that is that IMTA? Okay. Yeah. Yeah, I'm part of that. Others, you can find a teacher there um that if you want to follow up with, um, you know, to do some more one-on-one practices, or if you have questions about, uh, you should find a mentor. You should find somebody that you can kind of ask questions to or about. And there's a million online sanghas, um, which are small group gatherings, uh, SAN, GAS, um, just a community group of mindfulness practitioners, and also a million online retreats uh that uh you could do, like a stay-at-home week retreat. And there are guidelines that they'll ask of you, um, even though you're going to be on Zoom and on your computer, uh, if you're homebound for some reason, or if you maybe want to have a sort of lower barrier for entry if it's a cost issue, perhaps, or things like that. So you can look at organizations like IMTA to do one-on-one follow-up work if you have more questions around integration. But um, yeah, that's kind of where I would think maybe to start.

SPEAKER_00 51:22

Yeah, yeah, that's a that's a great um suggestion. And you know, for people who want to um meet Francesca, you can go to maximeclarity.com. That's M-A-X-I-M-E. Clarity.com, and there you can uh get in contact with Francesca. Yeah, I think retreats are uh yeah so powerful to be able to get a sense for what our mind does when we're alone or when we don't have these vices around us or these distractions. We can learn so much about our mind, and it's in some way kind of a fork forcing mechanism for us to get in touch with these layers and you know our strong emotions and the grief on the other side, usually around day three or four, you know, we get the Kleenex boxes out, and then you know, day four and five, we see the vipassana facelift of people feeling a little bit lighter. Yeah. But um, yeah, that's all great suggestions, and you know, and I think to your point, you know, finding a mentor, you'd be very skillful, finding a coach or a therapist or someone who can walk us through this path um to experience, you know, our bodies and our experience with um equanimity and care. Um, and um I think when we vet a mentor, you know, it's helpful to ask, you know, how have you been on retreats? What has your experience been like? And so finding someone like Francesca or um someone who's been on this path for a while uh can yield a great degree of trust that they've been through this themselves, and so they can speak from experience. And you know, retreats are such a a personal, like inward experience. Um on the other side of that, you know, we have relationships, we have families, we have um interactions with colleagues and our communities, and you know, much less the world at large. Um and I know you work with people on um you know social dynamics and how we can bring mindfulness and you know nonviolent communication to um interpersonal dynamics. Um can you share a little bit about maybe some of the highlights or the the types of work that you do with people integrating mindfulness with others?

SPEAKER_01 54:09

Sure. I appreciate the question and um skillfully transitioned on your part. Bravo. Um I yeah, no, you're doing great. Um I uh I say that as a former TV news anchor where we have to do that all the time. So, you know, it's uh it is a skill. Um so I work with couples and adult families on trying to hold both their subjective experience as an individual, um, as well as uh the system of the relationship or the family. And one of the things that you just mentioned, equanimity, for those who are unfamiliar with the word, it essentially means balance, you know, harmony, right? Not too tight, not too loose, kind of the middle way, if you will, um, of things. Uh that that the system, whether it's you as an individual being, um, me, Francesca, or whoever the relational sphere is made up of, two parties, three parties, whatever, that it needs to find balance. And so if I'm not balanced here so much, then I may have a little more of something, maybe 70 or 80% of something. The other person is only gonna have 20% of it, right? But they may have 60% of something, and then I may only have 40% of it. And we see this with um in relational life therapy, which is the couples therapy model that I'm trained in. Uh there's a vertical axis on this grid that Terry Real uses uh that's based on uh contempt and it's sort of contempt for others on top with grandiosity and contempt for self on bottom with shame. And um, that that vertical axis is kind of uh am I better or worse than other people? Uh so it's very comparative uh around um valuation because it's not based on what we hopefully come to through doing more of this work and insight work, which is uh that every being has inherent value and worth, period, that there's not a um assessment uh of you're you're here, uh, you have value. And that's it. That's the end of the sentence.

SPEAKER_00 56:23

And most people gloss over that so fast. Yeah. If we just let that sink in and really honor the period as being a period, like there is no more of that sentence. Like, because most people will say, no, that period is really a comma. And you know, and there's like a caveat there that you know, as long as I'm a certain way or do a certain thing or don't keep messing up, then I'll be worthy or have value. But yeah, I just I love that you kept it short and sweet and put a period on that. And I hope that everyone listening, you know, really understands that that's uh that's it, that we all have value.

SPEAKER_01 57:07

And and we all, meaning everyone has value. Yeah, I do, right? So that combats the shame, and everyone does, yeah. Each individual does, and you know, we can extend it to all beings, right? But we're just say human mammals at this point, like thinking about the people in our lives or in our whatever in our world. Everyone does, and no one is better or worse than now. Most people can't really grok initially that we're separating inherent value from behavior. We're we're noticing what the characteristics are of how we show up with the value that we have, the inherent possibility, the namaste, I see the light in you when I bow to you, right? I'm bowing to that inherent value, that possibility, right, of of what could be, what what is and what can be. Because, you know, they say, what is it that Jack says? Or he said he's quoting somebody else, give me a seed, or you know, and there's hope for the world, or something like that that we are that seed. Each one of us is always that seed, whether we're two, twenty, ninety, whatever. Um, we all have a seed. You have to believe that you are the seed, that we're all seeds. I mean, you can believe it or not believe it, it's true either way. Um, so that takes away the comparison factor of I'm better than you or I'm worse than you, or that I don't have value unless I do something. That's what in relational life therapy we call externally driven self-esteem, not internally driven self-esteem. That's I have value because of what I do, I have value because of who does or doesn't love me, I have value because of what I have, the Ferrari, the trophy wife, the whatever, um, all of that being different from I just have value and these other people have value, right? So that's really the full stop period. So pulling apart the behavior or the accoutrements or whatever from I have value. Now, if you're a murderer or if you're a, you know, um extractive, sort of dominant, you know, strip miner or you know, whatnot, right? Do you not have value as a person? No, you have value, and some of the behavior that you may be engaging in may not be for the benefit of all beings. It may be for the benefit of some beings in the short term, based on greed, hatred, and delusion, but it may not be an awakened, you know, place of um of beneficence, right? And so that's what this whole practice is about of becoming mindfulness of that. But it starts with owning your worth and and believing that and having some hope and faith there. And this goes back to what I was speaking earlier about in terms of um understanding your programming to the white cotton ball. It's easier to own your own value and worth. And others, I think, when you just see that we're, you know, we're dyed whatever cotton ball color we are because of whatever environment we were in oftentimes, which isn't use bad behavior, by the way. I guess that's I don't want to I want to be careful about trying to note that, but yeah, when I say bad, I mean harmful.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:19

Yeah. When you work with people and kind of point to the uh external or extrinsic yeah, externally driven self-esteem. Self-esteem, thank you. Um, and point to you know how we may compare ourselves as better than or worse than. And the Buddha even talked about how it's dangerous to even think of ourselves as the same as other people too. But um, like when you work with people on getting in touch with their internal value, do you usually point people to their past, maybe when they were say more innocent, or like maybe then when they're a baby or a kid, in helping them to get in touch with that value? Or what other ways do we have you found to be helpful for reminding us of the value that we may have forgotten or have neglected over time?

SPEAKER_01 1:01:26

Yeah, reminding ourselves of the value that we have forgotten and neglected over time. There's a lot of different ways to approach this. I want to respond one to something that you just said about the Buddha saying that, you know, um that we're not really the same as. We're not. We're unique because we're all conditioned differently. I guess the potentiality within us in terms of that seed piece is what I'm sort of speaking to as being a core principle of having that principle of of awakening, I guess is more of what I'm referring to, of that being kind of what I see as is is um an inherent characteristic of and so I I don't know if that's helpful to make a distinction because we have you know we have unique characteristics, and that's why we have different gifts, right? And and our gifts and should be celebrated and we should we should not all work on Wall Street. We should not all be needlepoint artists.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:20

We should not all be, you know, we should do what we are here to do based on the yeah, and and uh to your point, that's I I love that that we also all have these seeds of you know awakening as well. That that's um a common characteristic.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:38

Yeah, I guess that's more what I meant, just to clarify, because I don't want to, I don't want we're not you can't look at your neighbor and you'll be like, I'm nothing like them. And that's that's true, you know. I mean, we have 10 fingers and toes or whatever, but um anyway. Uh so back to this uh question, and then I'll sort of maybe try to make the bridge into uh relational mindfulness in terms of how do we deal with our friends and family and lovers and and and people that um, you know, how does mindfulness show up in real life with uh with people? How do we translate some of uh this awareness or these skills uh into actually how we relate to other people and show up and how we relate to ourselves? I think it's very helpful for people to, and we do this in somatic experiencing and we do this in um other kinds of therapy models that I'm trained in sometimes. It's uh something called resourcing. When you when you kind of imagine when have you ever felt your most self, like your most at ease, or where have you ever felt your most self? And what we're asking the person when we ask that question is where do you feel most relaxed? Where do you feel most safe? When are you in what we call ventral vagal and polyvagal theory? When do you feel um like you're not hyper-vigilant, when you're not hiding, when you're not collapsed, when you can kind of just be you and feel like your place in the world is there's a certain okayness with you being you and whatever's happening, happening. And some people might say that never happened to me. It was a chaotic, drug-ridden household. I had violence, I didn't have food. Uh, and the invitation there is to sort of continue to say, well, was there anything ever, anyone? Um, you know, yes, and meaning, let's not skip over obviously a horrific experience or difficult, you know, challenging experience, a coach, um, uh a flower, uh a little rose bush that you would water, you know, um, uh that that somehow still bloomed in the spring, even though um, you know, it was from an abandoned house next door that, you know, nobody cared about anymore, but you did, and you noticed it, even though you were dealing with terrible things at night with your family members at home and nobody knew about that because you couldn't speak it. And right, like coming back into that place of your inherent wholeness, your inherent goodness, your inherent capacity to love, really, and to care, because that's really what we're talking about, and your capacity to receive it, not just to give it, but to receive it, to receive the beauty of that rose when it would flower, to receive the beauty of the sun when it would rise in the morning and you would feel it on your face and you knew spring was here. That we're we're inviting you to remember some of that and to start to actually link, absorb, and marinate in some of that for a moment, so that your nervous system can actually re-familiarize. And again, sati, remembering mindfulness, reintegrating what it already knows, teaching a thing its beauty, teaching a thing what it already knows. Right. So we're coming back to ourselves in a way that, oh, 98% of the time I'm scanning for threat and I'm literally, you know, you know, protecting myself from things that are being thrown at me or scavenging for what I need because nobody cares and isn't providing for me. Right. But that 2% or 20% of the time when I'm able to reconnect with that part of my nervous system that has an inner knowing that's through space and time, right? This is a living organic thing that I'm connecting with that has brought joy and you know, pollination and the birds and the, you know, everything is connected here, the insects, and I am part of that chain, right? This interdependence of me being able to connect with that and receive that and water it and nourish it despite its neglect. I'm shifting the narrative there when I remember that. And it could be something a lot less dire than that. It could just be, oh yeah, my grandfather was great, or you know, I had a wonderful teacher, or, you know, but I also had this, you know, traumatic relationship with my neighbor or cousin or something, you know, whatever. Remembering that is a nice way to be able to start to ground, or at this beach, we always had great experiences, you know, or at camp, you know, I knew they loved me and I felt good there because I wasn't in the city or whatever it is. Um, I'll pause there for a minute and then I'll come back to the other piece. How does that land for you, Sean?

SPEAKER_00 1:07:08

Yeah, you're remember you're reminding me of my goodness. Because I'm going through that. I'm like, oh yeah. Yeah, I'm I'm as you said, resourcing. And it's yeah, my I can feel my nervous system soften and the heart, you know, tenderizing a little bit. And so I think, yeah, those, you know, procedures, methods, invitations are uh can be very helpful for helping us remind ourselves of our own inner value and um and you know help us to be able to relate to others from a more grounded, caring place.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:46

Yeah. And some people will say, but the rose doesn't know that I'm doing this, or it's not a person, or I want a man to love me, not a flower to love me. And I'm like, well, you know, we can have that attitude, or we can say, I'm gonna receive the love that's here to be given to me, that's in my midst, you know, and I've been guilty of both, um, meaning that I've I've definitely spent a lot of time longing for trying to squeeze water out of a stone and and sort of whatever. And and you know, they say insanity is doing the same thing, repeating itself and you know, banging your head up against the wall or something and not doing anything different. And I I've been guilty of that. And um, it's really liberative. It's really liberating to sort of shift and say, where is the love? And can I just orient to pleasure, as we say in somatic experiencing? Can I allow myself to receive what's here? And nature, beauty, kindness of people at the grocery store, all the stuff that in sort of a meta-meditation retreat, you know, you start to take in with the neutral person, the person who gives you your dry cleaning, who likes smiles and doesn't scowl, you take that in as something beautiful. Um then you start to show up in the world and you start beaming more. And then more people that you're interested in liking you start to like you. I mean, it kind of is this again, uh, if every everything's interdependent, then it kind of makes sense if if you're kind of working off that foundation. And so then to the next piece of, all right, so you work with couples and relationally, like, you know, you and your partner are not getting along, you get caught in this negative cycle. There's a lot of reactivity and defensiveness. You know, you always this, you never that. I told you this. Why do I have to tell you again? You should know this already. You're not you're not there for the kids, or I don't know what you're doing, or why did you have an affair, or you know, you don't love me, or you know, whatever it is. Or, well, I'll never say anything bad against you, right? So stoic, you know, yeah, but you're also not saying anything, like you're a complete mystery. You know, you know, you're you're I I can't read you. Um, you know, I don't, I don't, I don't know what's going on. I feel like I can't reach you, you know. Uh I try to help coach people, whether it's therapy or relationship coaching, to create and cultivate more self-awareness under what I call the why behind the what. Why do I do what I do? What is it about this behavior that I either saw modeled, that I either like bounced against, um, that I emulated, you know, uh, that I did and nobody checked me, right? Like I became a bully in school and nobody told me that I shouldn't be. They just sort of like glorified it because I was the, I don't know, the quarterback of the football team, and people let me get away with bad stuff, like maybe we've seen and some of the athlete, you know, collegiate athlete, like, you know, rape cases and things like that. And and you know, we get that grandiosity, that permissiveness, and then I play that out, you know, where I don't treat people well later, right? Um we want to become aware of what our programming is. And I say that word programming, it could be conditioning what our early experiences are, whatever, in terms of how we feel like it was either necessary to do what we did uh because we needed to please people or because we felt entitled, and that's where we got our affirmation, you know, our love, our whatever, or to stay away from something that was harmful, right? Like to to try and we we created this belief and then subsequently this behavior, maybe withdrawal uh in a in a marriage, or I just sort of go in the other room. I'm not gonna fight with you. No, we don't fight, right? Like I'm just go in the other room and read my book, but we're never gonna talk about anything, you know. We're we're just gonna let things simmer and fester and get resentful or live in a sexless marriage, which, you know, if that's what you want to do, great. That's not what you want to do, but you're kind of not having any conversations around that. Why not? You know? Um, because what we're doing with relational mindfulness is both holding on to yourself when you have that sort of sense of self-worth and you're able to hold on to that a little bit, and your differentiation and your individuation around you being a unique being and then your partner being a unique being. And they're gonna have a different subjective experience of maybe what happened last week at dinner. Their experience is gonna be different. It's gonna be the thought bubbles that you can't read that, you know, have a completely different story uh in there of what went down. And you got to ask, right, what was your experience as opposed to this is what happened. And you can ask it that way. It doesn't mean this is what happened or this isn't what happened. It means what was your experience of what happened? And once we start to recognize their individuation and differentiation and individual experience, subjectively is going to be a little bit different than ours because we have different backgrounds, right? Especially in a marriage, you know, you're living your separate life for 20 or 30 years before you get married. There's the Venn diagram where you come together. And then the relationship, like I was going back to earlier, in terms of charge in the system, like the balance, you know, the equanimity. What's the equanimity within the system? Usually somebody might pursue more, the other person might withdraw more because they're trying to find balance within the system. If it's not within each individual, we try to find a way to bring more balance internally, individually, and then create more balance within the system by starting to hold on to yourself and then getting curious about the other person and not making so many assumptions based on your own subjective history or conditioning.

SPEAKER_00 1:13:31

I don't know if that's it's beautiful. I I'm really struck by um, I don't know how many things you're good at. You're like a poet, you were in sales and marketing for Fortune 500 companies, you're a news anchor, um, you know, you switch careers into therapy. Um, you know, you you have uh experience with somatic experiencing, uh mindfulness teaching, relational life therapy, uh couples and life coach, um, you know, neuroscience, uh, all these things. And just hearing you talk about um how you work with people, it feels um yeah, there's a nice balance. Like you you're obviously very intelligent, you're embodied, you have heart, and it's just it's a really nice combination of um modalities and just like ways that you've been able to cultivate uh your own being. Um and so it's just it's fascinating to hear all these different facets about your story and your skill sets.

SPEAKER_01 1:14:44

Um fortunate to have been exposed to some really um influential, powerful folks that I am indebted to.

SPEAKER_00 1:14:53

Yeah. Um, you know, and I know that we're all lovable regardless of what we do, but um, yeah, I'm finding you very lovable.

SPEAKER_01 1:15:02

Oh, this has been fun, yeah. It's you know, mutual appreciation society.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:07

Oh yeah, Francesca, thank you so much for um sharing everything that you've shared. I think uh people listening will um be able to take um a lot of um key takeaways home. We'll put your um URL in the description of our episode. Uh it's maximeclarity.com. Please check out Francesca's website. It's M-A-X-I-M-E Clarity.com. Um, you can listen to our old podcast episodes, see videos of her, be in touch with her. Um uh whether it's for personal work or couples work or coaching, yeah. I think you're in for a treat. So uh Francesca, do you have any say parting words or messages that you'd like to share for our audience before we uh say farewell?

SPEAKER_01 1:16:08

Well, first I want to say thank you to have me. I've really enjoyed our conversation. I can't say that I don't typically enjoy these kinds of conversations because I mostly do, but they're not often as rich as this one feels as though it was kind of coming from the heart. Although I know you let me talk a lot. So I don't know, me kind of being a little grandiose and enjoying my own voice, or if it's just, you know, that I felt like we were kind of simpatico. Um, but in any case, um, I think change is possible or resisting change is fruitless. I don't know, maybe those are both the same thing. Maybe, or you know, like um, like I think the my life absolutely does not look like what I thought it was gonna look like. It absolutely does not look like what I had hoped or clung to or thought that it would or should look like. And I have no idea what it's going to look like uh down the line. You know, I'm sort of squarely at a midpoint, if you will, if I'm lucky and I make it to triple digits, um, you know, I'm I'm sort of right in the middle of that. And um, I don't know. It there's there's a saying in 12-step programs we when you're sick of sick and tired of being sick and tired, you know, you kind of find whatever it is you need to find. And um we'll I guess we'll get there when we get there. Meaning I I wish that I had been able to have an arresting experience, uh, no pun intended, um, you know, sooner that caught me as viscerally as as the one that I did have uh 10 years ago catch me. But maybe that's just because when I was when I was ready for it, you know? And I just want everybody to know that not only is change is possible, change is inevitable, and resisting change is fruitless. And so there's no time like the present, as they say, um, if you want to lean into this and it and it will get better. It it it will feel like it will get worse before it gets better. But if it's done with the right care and guidance, I I really believe that it will get better for you. And I just wish that all beings be well and be safe and be happy and healthy and live with joy and with ease of heart, including you, Sean.

SPEAKER_00 1:18:16

Thank you so much, Francesca. Um, I wish the same for you and everyone listening and and um every all beings out there. Um, thank you so much, Francesca, and uh thank you, everyone, for listening.