Healing Self-Improvement Addiction - Insight Timer Live

Many of us live in relentless pursuit of whatever is next, including in our own healing process. We speak of wanting to feel "enough," but don't realize that trauma and internalized systems of oppression keep us running from what we most deeply long for. In this talk and gentle guided practice from November 2022, Catherine guides us toward a new way of being that heals the hungry ghost, both personally and in our culture. Trauma-informed & anti-oppressive. Meditation music by Jamiel Conlon.

Transcript

Welcome everybody to today's live healing self-improvement addiction.

Thank you for being here and thank you for opening to this inquiry about how we approach our self-improvement as if that's even a thing to improve ourselves.

And one of one of the openings I'm going to invite you into today is what if you don't need to improve yourself?

You know,

And almost the kind of panic that I know that sets off in my system.

You know,

What if there wasn't a next step in my healing path?

What if I stopped?

I stopped.

And there is a kind of restlessness and anxiety and a panic in me right now as I even sit with that possibility because as most of you know who know my teachings,

I don't teach from a place of being above anybody or this,

Right?

If we were all in a room we would be sitting in a circle and in fact that's how I've always taught workshops when I taught in person.

You know,

Always sitting on the same level in a circle because I'm certainly on the front lines with being addicted to self-improvement and I know about it because it's my inquiry with myself constantly,

You know,

Relentlessly trying to improve my self-improvement addiction.

No,

We'll go into how we actually get underneath that apparent irony.

So I want to start as I do many of my talks with a personal story and then we'll get big picture and contextualize the patterns that are in my personal story because I'm sure that you can relate with many of them too.

So we'll go big picture and then I want to do a practice with you all to bring it into your body.

What might be the other side?

What might be a different approach of visioning our healing without the notion of fixing?

Because I'm not against healing.

This is my work in the world,

You know.

I do healing.

I'm a healing facilitator.

I'm healing above all myself.

I'm healing my ancestral line.

I'm doing my best to heal culture.

So I'm certainly not against healing.

It's the reason I'm here.

What I am against is healing from the perspective that we're broken and that we need fixing and that there's no end in sight to this fixing and that's the harm that we're going to be addressing and we're going to be feeling in our bodies into what could be another approach because there is one.

So for me personally how this is looked is this that I am the oldest child of two.

You know my younger brother is four and a half years younger than me,

Dan and I love him and we have a great relationship.

Now I grew up very privileged in the suburbs northeast of Seattle and I grew up the daughter,

The eldest daughter,

Eldest child of two parents who were absolutely doing their best and I grew up with a daughter who was very experienced in the past and who both had undiagnosed mental illnesses and trauma histories that nobody ever talked about.

You know nobody ever talked about.

We just went through life as if all of this was normal,

The dysfunction was normal,

It wasn't named as dysfunction and me being the sensitive being that I am and that I'm sure pretty much all of you are if you're here,

You know you have to relate to being sensitive and feeling the pain that was never named in your family of origin.

You know and I felt that pain.

I could feel that my parents were struggling in their own private often secret ways but I could feel it wasn't secret to me and my brother turns out had undiagnosed autism.

Now he identifies as autistic.

We didn't know what then and so there was no room for me to have needs.

You know there was no room for me between my parents being involved in their own struggles and my brother being needy,

You know.

I don't say that in a negative way,

I just he has more needs,

You know.

I had to be very self-sufficient,

You know.

I couldn't have needs,

I couldn't have injuries,

Couldn't say no,

I couldn't get angry which I'm sure many of you relate to,

You know,

As we were kids and so I very much learned to take care of myself and I also had a really deep desperate longing to be seen because I didn't feel seen in the in this um in these struggles in my nuclear family,

You know.

There wasn't room for me to be seen for really who I am and so what I started to do as many of us do and that's very enabled by our culture is I started to achieve and I used achievement as a way to be seen.

I achieved in school,

I was perfectionist ruthlessly with myself,

I always had to be the best in order to feel like I was even okay at all,

You know,

And what that,

You know,

Long story short what that ended up with for me is I always wanted to be a philosophy professor.

I started reading philosophy when I was 15 and I went on this academic track and I didn't end up going into philosophy,

I got a degree in philosophy,

But I ended up going into German and I got a graduate degree in German.

I lived in Austria with a Fulbright scholarship for two years and I was full-time faculty at Oregon State University by the time I was 26.

So always achieving,

Always needing to go to the next even greater,

Even more impressive feet,

Right,

That there was,

I wouldn't even think about stopping.

I was a hungry ghost for accolades,

You know,

I was a hungry ghost for the next thing and the fact is is that that was seen as the epitome of success because I wouldn't settle,

I wouldn't stop,

You know,

I wouldn't settle for anything less than winning one of the most prestigious teaching awards on my campus of 30,

000 people,

You know,

Like I won many,

Many awards because I was ruthless with myself and this was nothing but incredibly applauded and encouraged as success.

So what I did,

So there's two layers that I'm going to be talking about to my my own self-improvement addiction,

Right,

So what I did is in order to fuel myself on this relentless academic achievement track,

I was addicted to meditation and yoga so I became a certified yoga teacher on the side and I still meditate and do yoga every day,

You know,

I love it.

The problem is not meditation or yoga,

It was the reason that I was doing it.

I was so addicted to it,

The reason I was addicted to it is that I would feel incredibly dysregulated if I didn't get to my morning meditation or if I didn't get to my morning yoga.

It was like being in withdrawal.

I was absolutely not okay so I wasn't doing meditation yoga because I loved it,

I was doing it because I needed it to even be okay and I was doing it,

In other words,

Out of a sense of controlling myself instead of caring for myself and I'm going to be coming back to this set of principles again and again today,

Control versus care.

I was doing it to control myself,

Not to care for myself.

I was doing it like anyone with an addiction does the behavior or uses a substance.

I was doing it to run away from the pain,

The pain of feeling totally empty inside,

Amidst all of my accolades,

The pain of being a hungry ghost.

I was doing the yoga and meditation as an addiction because it was the way that I was running from my own hungry ghost self.

Yeah.

And so what I did is I took my type A trauma response because being type A is a trauma response,

Perfectionism is a trauma response,

Right?

It was a response to me feeling utterly unseen as a kid.

It was,

I was stuck in that flight response.

I was stuck in flight response.

What type A often is,

Is it's a trauma response that keeps us stuck in running,

Always to the next thing,

Always the next goal,

Insatiable.

So that's like an encapsulation of kind of an early example of that addiction myself.

What I ended up doing is a lot of healing work.

I ended up leaving academia,

Long story short,

In 2016 to do this work full-time and because I had been doing it on the side here and there,

And so I thought that I had,

You know,

Overcome what I recognized as like having been addicted to that meditation and yoga,

Right?

So I had a,

You know,

I found my husband who's incredible.

I was in this career.

I was being successful.

I was doing yoga.

I was doing yoga.

I was doing yoga.

I was being successful.

I was being incredible.

I was in this career.

I was being successful in this healing arts career and I thought I had life figured out and then something happened and it was I became a mother.

I thought I had life figured out until I gave birth and I spiraled into the darkest time of my life which was intense acute insomnia where I would get unrelated to how my baby was sleeping.

By the way,

She slept great.

I would get about seven to fifteen hours of sleep a week.

My body basically lost the ability to fall asleep for more than one to three hours per night for the entire night.

So I had this acute insomnia that lasted for almost an entire year at the same time as I was a primary caregiver to my baby,

Feeling completely dysregulated and because my nervous system was frayed from the insomnia,

I developed chronic,

I developed postpartum anxiety,

Postpartum depression and so what happened was that I went back to my old ways trying to heal myself from this perspective of brokenness and getting addicted to the process and here's how that looked.

So like I was so frustrated with myself for not being able to sleep that and you know I had an expanse of hours every night because I wasn't sleeping and so I would in this very room that I'm in now,

I would just do shadow work on myself for hours trying to get to the root of the insomnia.

I was like I just have to go deeper.

It just has to be deeper,

You know.

I'm not getting to the root.

I've got to get to the root.

Like folks,

I did this,

I did shadow work on myself for hours and hours and hours every night.

I did somatic work,

You know,

Nervous system regulation.

I was studying,

You know,

Somatic trauma healing at the time so I would like be doing all of these exercises to try and regulate my system.

Good stuff.

It's all good stuff,

You know,

But the problem was my approach.

I was being violent to myself and it was not helping.

It was actually making it worse.

So for all of the realizations that I had in this time and by the way,

My podcast Tender Revolution was born out of this time in my life.

I started recording my podcast in the midst of this and the poetry that came out of that in those early episodes like were a gift from this time in my life and so I'm grateful for it,

Right,

In certain ways for sure and also now I recognize that what it was showing me is the absolute limitation of this hungry ghost approach to healing ourselves.

So here's what happened that showed me another way.

After many,

Many months of fighting myself and what I mean by violent on myself or violent to myself was if I get real about how my body feels at that time like when I was doing the shadow work on myself,

Here's kind of what it feels hard in my body.

I feel like why don't you just heal this effing thing in yourself?

That's like the internal voice like just what's wrong with you,

Catherine?

That's what's violent on myself is that was the attitude I was approaching my self-improvement with and for most of us it's a lot it's more subtle than that but it's still there and we're going to explore that in our practice today.

It's the attitude,

Yeah.

So we're hard on ourselves on our quest for healing,

Right?

How many of you can relate to that?

Like that's the violent part,

Hard on ourselves.

Control over care.

We're trying to control ourselves instead of doing it through an attitude of care for ourselves.

Yeah,

That's what I'm talking about.

So one day I was on a night,

One of these expansive nights,

I was on my couch,

My terribly stained couch stained with fresh milk and everything else that a baby produces,

Right?

And I just was hopeless.

I descended into this hopelessness and I had this idea.

My idea was,

Well,

I don't know what else to do.

I've exhausted my armada of healing tools that I've accumulated over my life.

I've tried everything so why don't I just go back to just listening to my teacher when I was a teenager and that was Tara Brach.

So I went on retreat with Tara Brach when I was maybe 19,

18 or 19,

And she completely changed my life.

She's the founding,

Her work is the foundation of a lot that I do today.

So I sat on that stained couch and I said,

Okay,

I'm just gonna find a talk by Tara Brach.

She has tons of talks.

I'll just listen and see what happens because I used to listen to her talks all the time.

So I got my phone and went to her podcast and I found,

You know,

One of her talks and I started listening and it was about self-compassion as so much of her work is.

And at first I was like,

Whatever,

You know,

Buddhism,

I've tried this Buddhism thing.

Then she started to talk about this practice that she was going to invite us to do and she said,

Okay,

I'm gonna invite you to place your hand on your heart and simply say to yourself,

I care about this suffering.

I care about this suffering.

And I did that.

I practiced with her and I can't even put into words the amount of water that came out of my body,

Like the tears,

The snot,

Like something very deep was released from my body when I said those words to myself.

And it's not that I hadn't heard them before,

It was that I was actually fertile ground for them for the first time because I was suffering deeply,

Rock bottom,

Really for the first time in my life.

And so for me to say at that point in my life I care about this suffering,

Like the suffering that I was going through that was preventing me from being the mother I wanted to be,

That was keeping my nervous system from being regulated,

That was,

You know,

Harming me and my child,

Like that suffering to say I care about it was so revolutionary for me.

And this is what I call my tender revolution.

It's when I committed to myself in that moment to care rather than control myself for myself,

That this is the way,

Like this is my enoughness right now.

I don't need to do anything else.

I don't need the next tool,

The next kind of shadow work.

I don't need the next realization.

What if I just say I care about this suffering?

And really the moment I let that in,

The miraculous started to unfold in my life,

Which is like,

No,

It wasn't a silver bullet.

Like,

No,

It wasn't a silver bullet.

I didn't immediately start to sleep.

No,

Right?

But what happened was this revolution,

My attitude to myself that I wasn't being violent to myself anymore.

I wasn't being hard on myself.

I wasn't thinking of myself as broken anymore that needed the next thing to fix who I was.

Right.

And that just started to open up this portal in my life.

It's like,

It's like I was able to join the flow of life again,

Instead of resisting myself,

Saying I'm broken and I need to be fixed and there's something wrong with me.

So I need the next thing,

Right?

Instead of this,

The resistance melted away and I rejoined the flow of life.

That didn't mean that I wasn't experiencing pain.

I experienced a lot of pain,

But I wasn't resisting my state anymore.

I was no longer trying to run from the pain with another addictive behavior.

Does that make sense?

The difference is I wasn't running anymore.

I decided to care,

To care for exactly what's here right now.

And I ended up opening to this modality,

Like cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia,

That I had really judged in the past.

You know,

Oh,

CBT,

You know,

Whatever,

It's so mainstream.

You know what?

That's actually what healed my insomnia.

So it's like,

There was just an opening and I mean,

It took months.

I'm not saying it was instant by any means.

It took many months for that method to heal my insomnia.

But it was like,

It opened me to something that didn't belong in my small world of being resistant to myself as I was,

Right?

It just opened me to possibility.

Yeah.

So just breathe into what that's bringing up for you,

The story that I shared.

And I'll say that this is still a daily practice for me,

You know,

And it gets more and more native to who I am.

Like,

I was having trouble sleeping last night and the night before and the night before.

And what I do now is I don't try and fix it.

I just lie there or I sit and I meditate with my hand on my heart.

I just say,

I love you so much.

And this is hard and that's okay.

And I love you.

Does that make sense,

The difference from that approach?

I literally just hold myself at night when I can't sleep anymore.

I literally just put my hands on my body and say,

I love you.

It's okay if this is hard.

As opposed to being in my head.

Oh,

What do I need to do?

I need to go to the bathroom.

I had,

Oh,

What do I need to do?

What do I need to do?

Do you see how this is also a question of a nervous system state,

Right?

Those of you who know about the nervous system a little bit,

Like me lying there and saying,

I love you is deeply regulating.

And it comes from a regulated place.

It comes from a place that's in my body in the present moment.

As opposed to I'm in my head thinking about the next thing.

This is coming from a dysregulated place.

It's coming from the flight response and also a fight response to myself,

Right?

Or to the situation.

I've got to overcome this.

I've got to beat this.

I've got to run from this.

That's fight flight,

Right?

Yeah.

And so if we look at the bigger picture,

You'll see that this approach,

This running to the next thing,

This idea that our healing has to be something that's hard,

That we work for,

That's intense and always gets to the deeper levels.

Like everyone,

I'll be totally frank.

This is how I used to practice shadow work years ago.

You know,

Like when I started,

I used to be this person,

Like I used to drill down in myself and sometimes with clients,

I'll be honest,

Like,

And never in a way that was overtly violent,

But like,

I used to come at shadow work from a little bit of this place of like,

I'm not sure what I'm doing,

But I'm in this place of like,

Let's get to the,

Like,

I want to get somewhere.

I want to get to the really deep roots of this issue in myself or in you,

You know,

That's control over care.

That's violence.

And I see that now,

You know,

But we see this in the wellness industry.

We see this in the health.

And sometimes it's quite insidious and quite subtle.

Most often it is.

But anybody who's trying to sell you an outcome,

And I mean,

We have to do this in the market economy and capitalism,

Right?

Like we have to like,

You have to have a reason to buy a program.

I sell an online program.

I know what this is like,

You know,

I know the tensions that are here,

The complexity that's here.

Like you have to know why you're gonna buy something,

Right?

So like,

I am part of this too.

I'm not saying I'm outside of this system at all.

We're all in this together,

But this is what capitalism teaches us.

And I want to be clear that when I say capitalism,

I'm really saying like capitalism that is a byproduct of white supremacist colonial patriarchy,

You know,

But instead of saying all of those things of all those interlocking systems of oppression,

I'm just going to say capitalism because you all get it,

Right?

But what capitalism,

What this market economy teaches us is that,

And here's a few things,

That scarcity equals value.

Scarcity is something scarce is something that's valuable.

So if something,

If I have to work really hard to get to something,

It must be more valuable than something that's imminent and right here and I don't have to work for.

Can you breathe into this and see what I mean about how we might be overlaying this onto our healing process?

If something is hard earned,

It must be valuable.

If something is scarce or rare,

It must be valuable because remember capitalism survives because it creates scarcity,

Right?

There's only a certain number of resources and that we're isolated units competing for these resources and we're pitted against each other in this competition and we're constantly running because capitalism requires constant growth to survive.

This is just the water that all of us are swimming in,

You know,

Constant growth is success.

Furthermore,

Constant growth is survival.

It's like I think all of us are terrified to stop moving,

Right?

All of us are terrified.

What if I stop trying to heal myself?

What if I slowed down to really feel my body?

What if I didn't rush this moment toward what's next?

Capitalism is baked into how we experience every moment of our life,

Rushing to the next thing.

I think we're terrified of really truly being intimate with another person.

Like how terrifying is eye gazing?

Have you ever done that?

Like just gazed in somebody's eyes and said nothing and no attachment to an outcome?

Just been with another person?

That's anti-capitalist.

Anything that we do that's imminent,

That is simple,

That doesn't have a goal or an outcome,

And that's embodied is anti-capitalist.

The tender revolution is anti-capitalist.

This idea that we don't have to keep moving to the next thing and that all we need is right here is the love that's right here for ourselves and that the rest will take care of itself.

Part of the spell of capitalism is that we have to figure it out because we're in survival mode,

Because resources are scarce and because we're alone and in competition with each other and because we have to keep running.

It keeps us in this trauma response.

So capitalism is a trauma response.

It's chronic fight,

Flight,

Fight,

Competition,

Flight.

I have to keep relentlessly growing and running to survive and get the scarce resources,

Right?

So capitalism keeps us in this sustained trauma response.

And we're so identified with this state of struggle that our systems register actual regulation,

Actual safety,

Actual satiation as a threat.

Do you see?

Do you see our systems register safety as a threat?

Our systems register slowing down as a threat.

This is happening on an autonomic nervous system level.

Like this is where the addiction comes in.

We don't have power over it,

Right?

This is an autonomic nervous system thing that I'm just going to keep reaching for my phone in moments of stillness because to some level,

On some level that's quite unconscious,

My system's terrified of just sitting there and doing nothing and having no stimulation.

You know,

Even if we go to a meditation retreat,

Which I've been to many myself,

Especially in my 20s,

Like even if we're going to a meditation retreat,

There is this sense that we're doing something,

Right?

So I feel like actually the most terrifying thing is sometimes those everyday moments of stillness and non-doing and being enough.

So we're so trained by capitalist,

Colonial,

Patriarchal,

Whatever white supremacist,

The soup that we're in,

We're so trained to stay in this chronic trauma response that we register being enough as a threat.

Like what does it mean to be enough?

It means to stop.

Stop the relentless movement.

Stop the relentless movement.

Yeah.

And the reality too is that this is unfortunately,

This constant doing is completely enabled and it's seen as virtuous.

You know,

We see people who've just settled as failures,

Right?

And we say this,

Just settle.

You know,

They're just settling.

And I'm not saying that sometimes that's wrong because like you deserve a great partner.

What I'm saying is it's funny that we have words like settling as a derogatory,

You know,

When in fact settling,

To settle yourself means to be regulated,

You know,

Means to be okay.

But that is derogatory in our culture or to be needy,

To have needs is derogatory.

You know,

It's seen as a kind of failure.

But to have our needs met is safety.

You know,

The felt sense of our needs being met is safety,

It's pleasure.

All of these things,

We unconsciously register as a threat and it keeps us going on this hamster wheel of colonial capitalist patriarchy and the world's most dangerous.

You know,

So just,

Just breathe into that because it's hard to see these things.

It's really hard because once,

And I know,

So my teacher of decolonial healing,

She's a teacher of decolonial healing,

And she's a teacher of decolonial healing.

And she's a teacher of decolonial healing.

It's really hard because once,

And I know,

So my teacher of decolonial healing is Dr.

Rocio Rosales-Messa.

She has a fantastic Instagram account.

I highly recommend her courses,

A couple of which I've taken.

So Rocio Rosales-Messa has taught me a lot of this about how to see clearly what we've taken to be normal and the poison of it and the trauma of it,

You know.

And so I believe that the way,

The way to reframe our approach to ourselves is also the way to change culture,

To change us,

To heal us collectively and heal ourselves personally is the same approach.

And that's going from control to care with exactly right what's here.

Yeah.

And I think that,

Thank you Kate for saying her name,

For typing her name.

I think that,

So addiction,

Remember addiction is when we avoid pain through engaging in a behavior or using a substance and that when we're powerless over stopping it,

Right,

That's when something is an addiction and we can't stop.

And so I think that contemporary,

Much of spirituality,

Much of wellness culture in particular is an addiction that keeps us running from grief,

Specifically from the deep grief that comes from being severed from the land and being severed from each other.

The deep grief of the emptiness of our way of life because we are severed from what creates the reason to live,

You know,

Connection to other people,

Connection to land,

Meaning and purpose on a spiritual level that is rooted in place and rooted in each other.

And there's a deep grief that most of us are completely unconscious of that comes from that,

You know.

And there's also the grief of being a white-bodied person living on stolen land that we don't think about.

For those of us who are white-bodied who live in the Americas or elsewhere in the colonized world,

Which is basically the whole world,

You know.

Like so this pain of colonialism,

This grief of this deep longing we have for connection that we don't have and also the guilt and shame as white-bodied people in the quote-unquote new world that some of us have,

Right,

Like actually running from that is I believe a lot of what fuels modern wellness culture in the name of spirituality,

In the name of healing,

Right.

But we're actually not,

Most of us aren't willing to look at the deepest roots.

I wasn't for a long time,

You know,

And now learning from the Black Indigenous teachers of color that I do because I'm constantly unlearning this programming and remembering another way,

Like I can't unsee it anymore.

I can't unsee that these are the deepest roots.

And what we need in order to develop capacity to acknowledge and to be able to be able to develop capacity to acknowledge that and to sit with it is this practice of being present with care rather than control and it builds the muscle of the heart.

It builds the muscle of empathy,

Of compassion,

Because here's the thing too is that when we're engaged in self-improvement addiction,

When we're always on to the next thing,

We don't actually have marginalized or struggling because we're figuring it out,

Right.

We're doing the next thing.

We're not allowing ourselves to feel our grief to a level that would open that empathy in ourselves because we're still running.

So it is a radical practice.

It's a radical practice to sit and be with exactly what's here because sometimes exactly what's here,

Especially if you're actually opening to this collective level and systemic level of grief,

Is terrifying,

You know.

But just one little moment at a time,

Never everything all the time,

Right.

We're going to titrate this.

So we're going to practice for just a few minutes here.

So what I'll just tell you what the invitation is and then you can decide if you'd like to practice with us.

So the invitation is we're going to sit and practice quote unquote basic mindfulness meditation,

Breath awareness mindfulness meditation,

Breath awareness meditation,

But with a twist.

But I'm going to invite you to really feel into the pause between the inhale and the exhale and the exhale and the inhale.

I'm going to invite you to wonder about what if that pause was love.

What if that pause,

The substance that is in that pause that is right here,

What if that was love?

And I do believe it is.

And we're not going to try and do anything intense or deep with it,

But the depth comes by itself.

When we all come to the same place,

When we open to this level of simplicity and enoughness right here.

So if you'd like to participate,

Just go ahead and have a comfortable seat or you can lie down.

It's totally up to you.

And take some deep breaths,

Settling your body into alignment with gravity,

Feeling the weight of the body right here and allowing that weight,

That gravity to be there.

Noticing now any areas of tension in the body,

But instead of trying to fix those areas of tension,

What if you opened and softened toward them instead?

Care over control.

Not trying to change them,

Just simply bringing an attitude of softening,

Maybe a physical release or softening to those places.

And as you open the breath into this softening body,

Breathing maybe a little bit more slowly and deeply than normal,

But also not trying to do anything special with the breath.

Noticing now if you're trying to do something and subtly adjusting your attitude toward the process in yourself.

This is not about trying to breathe right or to soften enough.

This is simply about being present with what is with a soft lens,

With a lens of care.

If it feels nourishing,

You might place one or both hands on your heart or anywhere on the body that feels nourishing.

And start to bring your awareness to your breath,

Your natural inhale and exhale.

Inviting now just a little more space between inhale and exhale and between the exhale and the next inhale.

Without trying to hold the breath,

Just getting curious about what is the substance in the stillness of this pause?

And what if that substance was love?

So without trying to make it love,

Controlling it,

Right,

Without trying to make it a certain way,

Can you open instead,

Open to the possibility,

What if,

What if what the substance is,

Is love?

And if it is,

Where do I feel that in my body?

Opening more to that what if,

What if this is love?

What if I don't have to contort myself to get this love?

What if there is no getting this love?

There is opening to this love.

There is being as this love.

So breathing,

Noticing if you're subtly trying to hang on to that pause now.

See if you can let go of the attachment to extending it,

To feeling it a certain way.

See if you can instead open to the knowing that it will be back.

In fact,

It never goes away.

It's there as surely as your next breath is.

So and do you feel how when you let go of that grasping,

Is actually a deepening of the experience of that pause of love.

So really bring your awareness back into your body if you're thinking about this instead of feeling it.

Without any self-judgment,

With so much humor and compassion,

Just bring yourself back to the next breath,

That next pause,

Feeling that substance in your body.

So and we're going to experiment now with very very slowly coming out of this meditative state with that,

But opening to the possibility that after you open your eyes,

You can still feel the substance of love between the inhale and the exhale in that pause.

What if you could still be present with the love that's here even when you are not meditating?

So do this now very slowly start to come out of the posture of meditation opening the eyes and noticing that that pause is still here.

Even when you're looking around your room,

Even when you're moving,

Even when you're looking or listening at what you're seeing or hearing here,

Just notice that it's still there.

That you can tune into this place at any time at any time and feel viscerally what it means to be enough right here without doing anything to earn it,

Without doing anything to change yourself.

And that this process of really practicing this enoughness is,

I believe,

The deepest healing that we can do instead of the lateral,

The horizontal,

Like how many programs have I bought,

How many modalities do I know?

Do you feel how this is actually a great way to be able to be more active?

What is actually a great teacher in this enoughness right here and in your practice with this enoughness?

And I'm not saying don't do any more healing or don't buy a program or participate in things that feel aligned for you.

What I'm saying is do this.

Always check with yourself and get really real about what your motivation is.

Is it out of care or is it out of control?

Because we can heal,

We can learn new things from a place of enoughness that's possible.

It just takes practice and you might find that you do less,

That you need less.

So I want to end with just one more.

So please feel free to enjoy as I'm talking.

Enjoy whatever love you might be feeling in the substrate of what's here.

And I invite you to take that beyond this talk.

And I'm going to end with just one more.

I want to leave you with another aspect to what's really continuing to bring me into a deeper sense of enoughness and belonging exactly as I am.

So I believe that care,

So like the answer to how to end the cycle,

The hundred and fifty-five cycle,

The hungry ghost of self-improvement is twofold.

It's care just like we've been practicing and it's also generosity.

It's also giving.

And that that giving actually invites us and enters us into the cycle of life that we've forgotten.

So this,

I don't know if any of you have read the amazing book Breading Sweet semiconductorauction in the Lunar LAg Combination ofray,

I don't wanna say blog and I don't wanna go too far in that terms have read the amazing book,

Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer.

She's an indigenous author and botanist.

Braiding Sweetgrass is one of the most beautiful books I've ever read.

And in that book,

She talks about connecting to the land,

You know,

Like relearning our connection to the land and actually having a relationship to the land.

And she talks about how her father would pour the first sip of his coffee onto the earth and he would say,

This is for the spirits of this land.

And learning from her from that book,

I've started to do that with my tea in the morning.

And it's utterly changed my life.

That this practice of care doesn't stop with just me toward myself.

This practice of care,

Of generativity,

Of love also reaches outward,

Right?

So what I do every morning is the first thing I do is I make my tea and I'm most excited about that first sip of tea,

Right?

That's what I'm really excited about.

And because I'm excited about it,

I give it to the earth.

So I go out on my front porch,

I have a little overhang and I greet the earth.

I say like,

Hi,

It's Catherine.

I come to you in reverence.

Thank you so much for helping me.

And I just say what's on my heart.

You know,

Then I say,

Please accept this offering as a symbol of my commitment to be in right relationship with you always.

And I pour that first sip down onto a patch of dirt that's there in the grass.

And I can't put into words how powerful this has been for me,

There are no words.

It's like the enoughness that I feel that I've practiced with myself got deeper roots because we don't exist as isolated units.

We exist because of the earth.

We're beings of the earth.

The earth makes our life possible.

And so,

And we often forget that.

We're trained to forget our contextual dependency on the earth and on each other.

So just,

Yeah,

Grounding,

It's like radically grounding.

To come to the earth in that reverent attitude heals capitalism.

It heals that extractive approach that we've all learned of control over care.

What am I gonna get out of this?

How can I manipulate or control this thing to get something out of it?

No,

This is in the other direction.

And that's beautiful,

Victoria.

You say your grandmother used to do that and adding in all the ancestors in her morning prayer.

Yeah,

So this practice of rooting ourselves is a radical act in a colonial world.

That practice of rooting ourselves in ancestral context and in earth context and that belonging is radical,

Even though it shouldn't be,

But it is.

So I invite you to also consider that,

Like what are some ways,

Whether it's this poor or other ways that you can come back to that cycle of belonging through giving,

Like Dr.

Rocio Rosales-Messa,

My decolonial healing teacher says,

We give first and we give the best.

We give first and we give the best.

That's how we give.

That's how we enter again into the cycle of life,

Into true belonging.

And it's like,

That's amplified this practice of my feeling of the love that's in the pause.

It's just,

It's created this felt sense of safety in my whole system,

Like belonging to place,

Belonging to land,

Belonging to myself.

That is deeply healing for our addiction to self-improvement.

Yeah,

Nicole,

It's kind of like giving menstrual blood back to the earth,

Especially,

But it's a slightly different practice to give something that's valuable to you.

Like menstrual blood is super valuable,

Right?

But it comes out anyway.

But what if you were to give,

Instead of like to take a bouquet of flowers,

I used to give like the wilty flowers,

I'll be real.

I used to give like the flowers to the earth that were like almost wilted,

But Dr.

Rocio,

My teacher kind of called me on that compassionately,

She was like,

No,

We give the most beautiful flower.

We give the flower that we love,

Right?

Because it's that feeling that's the offering.

It's the feeling that I'm giving you something.

That's what breaks the spell of capitalism.

That's what breaks the cycle of I'm not enough so I have to keep extracting.

Does that,

Do you see that?

And I will say that this was very difficult for me at first.

I did not want to give my sip of tea to the earth.

I did not want to give the prettiest rose in my garden to the earth.

No,

I was,

In fact,

I grappled with,

Oh,

That's like self deprivation.

Is that loving to myself to deprive myself like that?

But the truth is when I really got real about it and I could not have done this,

I couldn't have seen this without my black indigenous teachers of color.

I couldn't have seen it without them.

I was seeing that what I was calling my intuition about this is depriving myself was actually my programming.

And when I lovingly got over that enough,

When I,

In that discomfort,

In my kind of like frustration,

I don't want to deprive myself by giving this to the earth.

The fact is is that when I started to practice it,

Something broke open in me and I no longer felt the lack.

I no longer felt the scarcity,

The hungry ghost.

This is what heals hungry ghosts is giving.

So it's like the hungry ghost was telling me that I'm depriving myself.

That's the voice that was telling me that.

It wasn't actually my intuition.

So once I started to give,

It just felt amazing.

I look forward to giving that first sip every morning because it feels amazing.

I feel like I'm belonging to the cycle of life and there's a level of safety and regulation in my nervous system that I never felt before I started this practice.

I never felt it.

Yeah,

So I invite you to experiment with things like that,

With giving first and giving the best.

And I'll also say that it has like this giving practice with the tea has run over,

Like my cup runneth over and I've started giving more money to causes that I believe in.

Like I've just started opening up and being more generous and it just feels amazing.

So that's how we heal.

That's how we heal extraction.

That's how we heal.

I believe our culture,

That's how we're gonna survive as a species is getting off the hamster wheel and giving and caring.

So remember to practice that love,

That substrate of love,

That enoughness in the pause and giving where it feels right.

And just,

I wonder what's gonna happen for you.

I wonder if you'll have more peace and I wonder if you'll be able to be more present with yourself,

With the people in your life,

With the land.

Make sure to note that we have a group on Insight Timer called Shadow Work.

Yeah,

There's a Insight Timer group.

It has 1,

500 people in it.

It's called Shadow Work.

That is the group that I'm the admin of.

And this seeing with open eyes,

Our programming,

Our systemic programming,

Our personal programming from our trauma is Shadow Work,

Right?

Seeing it with love and unlearning,

Unlearning our programming.

So I think of Shadow Work as unlearning everything but love.

Shadow Work for me means unlearning everything but love.

So I invite you to join the group on Insight Timer Shadow Work.

And I will post there when I can go live again.

And in the meantime,

Please feel free to post in that Shadow Work group your questions.

If you have additional questions you'd like me to respond to after this or books,

Or if you wanna share anything that came up for you today,

That group is a great place to do it.

So thank you all so very much for bringing your hearts today.

And I wish you an absolutely beautiful week and month and until I see you next time.

Okay,

Love to you all.

Bye.

Reviews

I used to try to receive healing by hardening, forcing energy to go through kinks in my neck or shoulder pain, etc. Because of my conditioning of doing to be seen. Until I realized that softening was more powerful, being (resting, relaxing) was more powerful, connecting with the Land and nature was more powerful, giving and receiving was more powerful than only giving. That pause between the breathe does now feel like LOVE. Caring over control. It applies to me with me and it applies to me versus my 16 year old son. Thank you for sharing your story my dear twin human being! ❤️

Beautiful, compassionate and nourishing. Catherine’s teachings resonate with me like no other. So happy to have found her.

This meant the world to me today. Just found you. I know most of the names you mentioned. Will look for group and more. Thank you for caring.

There are always deep insights in Catherine's talks and meditations. This was no exception. This talk was especially helpful because I've been trying to force healing from trauma in a body that doesnt feel safe. To slow down feels like I'm giving up. But, it's a great act of compassion. And I love her ritual of giving thanks to the earth by offering it her first sip of tea. I've started doing this but have to be careful because I live on the 4th floor of an apartment. 😄 To feel that connection and support is incredibly grounding. Thank you.

Wonderfully rich still .. after repeated listens. 🥰

Wonderful thank you. Much of your journey is my own. Yesterday I had an inner journey and was told all my “failures” were not. Because I wasn’t building a tower (capitalism etc) I was building bonds and connections that grew sideways into a beautiful net. That my definition of success is not God’s definition at all.

Peace.

Beautiful, inspiring, CARING talk and meditation. Thank you 🙏🏼