Awaken Peace Interview With Patty Hlava

Insight teacher Patty Hlava and I have an in-depth talk about finding peace. We look at the process it takes and how she puts it into practice in her talks and sessions. This is part of the Peace Projects series.

Transcript

I am very,

Very happy to have a beautiful lady here on the Peace Projects.

I'm Cindy Palus and I connected with Patty Palava,

Who's a doctor,

PhD.

He's an Ayurvedic wellness counselor,

A certified yoga health coach,

A certified meditation teacher,

A registered yoga teacher.

And we met through Inside Timer.

I was listening to one of her very,

Very peaceful meditations.

And you actually include peace in your name of what you're doing.

So I went,

Well,

This is about peace.

So I'd love to find out how you decided to go on this whole path that is really about uplifting other people and using peace as part of your path.

And how do you integrate peace into your coaching?

I think that's a really great question,

Cindy.

I think when I work with people,

It's almost more in the capacity of a guide.

And my background is really integrated with PhD in psychology.

And I worked as a therapist for over 15 years.

And then I brought in all these other supplemental practices,

Including yoga and Ayurveda.

And the more I studied these other practices,

The more I came to understand that we have to heal ourselves through the whole.

It's not just our brain,

Not just our mind,

But it's this whole integration of this essence of who we are.

And at the core of that,

When we come to that center of our being,

There is this quality of peace,

This experience of peace.

And when people come to me for counseling or therapy or coaching services or guidance,

It's very often at the core of what they're seeking too.

Right?

There's this,

What is it that you're looking for?

What would you like to get out of our time together?

And the answer is a version of,

I want to feel at ease in my life.

I want to feel peace in my body,

In my heart,

In my mind.

I don't want this,

The suffering that I'm experiencing in this relationship and this of my life and this element.

And when we distill everything down,

We come back to that core of peace.

So this is what the coaching is.

This is what the guidance is.

It's about how do we come back to ourself?

How do we come back to the center of who we are beneath the noise,

Beneath the turmoil,

Beneath the things that distract us and pull us away?

And come back to their core essence.

How do we come back to the center of who we are beneath the noise,

Beneath the turmoil,

Beneath the things that distract us and pull us away?

And come back to their core essence.

I love this because in my talks on the peace projects,

I've been fascinating,

Fascinated on how many people find their terms and their negotiations with the peace projects.

They find their terms and their negotiations with themselves in so many different ways to find peace.

And it doesn't seem like there's one formula that could be applied to everyone.

It's a period.

What I've seen is an individual situation where each one has to approach it in a certain pattern.

Have you found it?

It's peace is different.

There are so many ways for people.

Yeah I don't know that there's a single path to it.

I think that's what makes it so beautiful,

Right?

There's different avenues that we can walk through to it.

And so there's the avenue of gratitude.

Right,

Of being able to step back and experience the gift,

All the things that we do in life and breaking through that negativity bias of the mind that likes to focus on the negativity and the threats and the dangers.

So when we can walk through life through the lens of gratitude and practice that skill,

It can filter out and bring us that level of peace.

There's the practice that's really interwoven with gratitude.

With the space of like this thing happened over here and it was painful and I can let go of my attachment to it and it can all be avenues to peace.

Spirituality,

Engaging with nature is so much an element of peace.

The avenues to get there are varied but I think there's a common theme.

And the common theme that I've seen,

It comes down to this idea of being able to have a few moments of intentionality and silence.

Like being really intentional and aware of where we're focusing our awareness,

Our attention,

And giving ourselves space to connect with what avenue we need to follow to get to peace.

Like when we can tune into that own inner guidance,

We can pause for just a moment,

We get the indication,

We get that from spirit,

From our heart,

From our body sometimes.

It says this is your way to peace today.

And sometimes that might be pausing with a really beautiful cup of tea,

Like that just soothes the heart and all the senses.

And sometimes it might be a walk,

Sometimes it might be a really brisk jumping up and down and increasing circulation.

But we can't know unless we're willing to be silent for a moment and listen.

And that silence is always the key,

That willingness to be in that silence for just a moment to hear that inner guidance of what your pathway to peace might be.

Have you found that with your beautiful combination of practices that you've studied,

Do you find that a lot of the people who come to you,

Do you suggest them to learn meditation or these days,

Does everyone seem to be already at that point where they come to you,

They're meditating?

Not everyone's meditating,

Although a lot of people want to,

Right?

Like,

And I think part of it is discovering,

Taking the fear out of meditation.

Meditation is great and realizing that it can look a little bit different for everyone,

That there's really specific traditions and really specific practices.

And yet it has to be right for each individual person.

And sometimes sitting on a cushion isn't the right practice for someone,

Especially if there's really fresh trauma that can be really triggering or activating.

So yes,

I recommend meditation and I don't always say that go sit down on a cushion.

It's not always that.

It's how do you connect with your body?

How do you connect with yourself?

How do you invite silence so that you can hear the whispers of your own heart?

So you know,

The average person,

The numbers vary and numbers are really not my thing.

But it's like between 65 and 85,

000 thoughts in a day is average in our waking hours.

And when we get quiet and sit to meditate,

Sometimes it's the first time we're aware of how many there are.

We sit down and it's like this explosion of thoughts.

And that can be overwhelming if we've never done that.

So we want to ease our way into the space of all right,

Well,

Maybe it's,

You know,

Maybe this meditation is,

You know,

When you're washing dishes,

Can you bring all your sensory attention to the feeling of the dish soap and the smell of the dish soap and the sound of the water?

And can you be in that space?

And when you're in that,

Can you bring your question?

What is peace for me right now?

Like,

Like,

That's a very Zen approach.

Actually,

It's,

It's very much,

I would experience that when I go on a Zen retreat,

When you really become aware of how you're doing everything.

And that's such an important part.

I've been meditating most of my life.

And in the beginning,

I just wanted to meditate and get that eye and that bliss that I feel.

Oh,

Wonderful.

So great.

And then I learned that it was really about putting it into practice.

And then you get into what you're doing.

You're delving deep.

And you talk a lot,

What you're saying seems also that you help people build a relationship,

A peaceful relationship with themselves to build up some trust in themselves,

Which that's a lifetime process for a lot of people,

Right?

I'm still in the process.

I've been practicing it for most of my life and I'm still practicing.

The daily practice,

The beauty of it is it's,

You never really reach the final destination.

There's always another depth.

And it,

The practices just become more rich.

And that's been my experience is what I've seen in,

You know,

My clients and the group members and my students is that the practices that they just keep getting deeper and they keep getting richer.

And what happens is,

You know,

When we're living in fear and stress,

Which is what's so dominant,

Particularly in our world today,

Our world can start to feel really small.

You know,

Especially in COVID right now,

Like our world can feel really small.

We're isolated,

We're contained.

What happens when we get into this loving relationship with ourself,

We start to soften and our world actually starts to expand.

Even if it's contained,

It still feels bigger.

And there's a peacefulness in that.

There's a centering.

There's a ease to it where it feels like I can access the resiliency I need if something difficult comes in.

I have the inner resources within me,

The inner guidance I can tune into.

And my sense is when I think of peace,

A lot of the time it's about trust.

It's about trust and faith and surrender.

It's about trusting that you can and will get through the difficult thing.

And difficult things are going to happen,

Right?

Because they do,

But when we can trust that,

You know,

This difficult thing has an end and I have the resources internally or around me to help me through,

We can meet those challenges with less aversion and with a sense of peace,

With a sense of,

I don't always want to say welcoming,

So we don't always welcome the challenges,

But with a sense of trust that we can get through it.

And that releases some of the resistance and opens us up to receiving peace to the experience.

How did you start your path?

What did you have?

You follow a lot of different wonderful things.

You decided to become a psychologist.

You obviously meditate,

You do yoga.

What was the main motivation beginning your path?

It has been such an adventurous and twisty journey.

There wasn't one specific thing,

I think.

It came from a multiple,

Again,

Multiple avenues.

When it comes back down to it,

It was about I needed to find a way to develop a trusting relationship with myself.

So as a kid,

I was training as a figure skater.

I was competitive and doing all that.

And I was also raised in a family that immigrated to the United States.

I was the first one born in my family in the United States.

So there was already a little bit of disconnection from my family and siblings.

They all had this other history.

And then it was,

Welcome to the States.

You're having a kid.

And I was like,

Oh,

Hi.

And they were all,

They were loving and wonderful.

And there was definitely something different about me and them.

And then I was skating.

So I was very different from my peers at school.

And I was bullied a lot.

And so I had these other experiences.

And in skating,

I was trained to push the body,

Not love the body.

So there was all these layers of disconnect.

So I went to grad school and I thought that I would,

I went to college and thought that I would study psychology to work with other athletes.

And I hit the abnormal psychology class and at age 18 thought I had every disorder in the book because I was 18.

And so I dropped out and went to art school.

I went to art school and I studied art and painting.

But I still kept studying all these other things in the background and psychology and meditation.

And in that process,

I realized that during my training in skating,

I was actually meditating every day.

I didn't know it.

A big part of our practice were these really intentional silent reflective practices and visualizations.

I had no idea that I'd been meditating for 11 years until I was in my 20s.

And I was like,

I've been doing this for years.

I've been doing this since I was eight years old.

So I started to study meditation and then realized that that had a huge overlap with what I'd been learning in psychology.

So I went back.

I went back to psychology and then all that started to meld and I started to work in the field and study and research.

And in that process,

Overworked and pushed myself.

And with that disconnection from my body became really unhealthy.

So I had what was allergies that developed into a severe sinus problem where I was having sinus infections three to five times a year.

I had sinus surgery.

I had back pain.

I was in my 40s and early 40s,

Late 30s and could barely get out of bed.

My back hurt so badly.

So in comes Ayurveda,

This practice that's with yoga and learning how to live in rhythm and reconnect to my body and care for it.

And suddenly all these practices started to come together and it became a healing for myself.

And here I am 20 years later and I can breathe.

I haven't had allergies in years.

My sinus issues are resolved and medication free.

And it's all through learning how to be silent and listen to my body and realize like,

Oh,

It doesn't actually like this food.

It's trying to tell me that this food doesn't work,

That being sedentary all day doesn't work.

It clogs the channels.

Nothing can flow.

And we think about how we do that in our own lives.

We sit,

We ruminate and we lose flow.

When we open and expand and listen,

Suddenly the energy can flow,

Things can flow and we're able to center in.

So my journey came through my own struggles with my health,

With my relationship to my body and just being curious about how to feel better.

And as I did that,

My personal relationship started to heal as well.

I was able to form relationships because I could trust myself a little bit more in some ways.

The trust word again.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's so much about that for me.

What you've done is integrated all of these wonderful processes into your life and life experiences.

So it's amazing how life taught you so much and you immediately decided to address it.

And each part of that story,

You took what life presented you when it was a challenge and you decided to face it,

Address it and heal it,

Which is a beautiful thing when you can see something and not run from it,

Not hide from it,

But face it and then,

Oh,

Okay,

This is this,

What am I going to do about it?

And it's lovely when you,

And it seems like you have that inner connection you have to yourself.

It's been a beautiful teacher for you in life.

Yeah.

It's one of the,

It's beautiful to hear you say it that way,

Cindy,

It's really interesting because I think that's,

That's my dad.

Like that was a gift from my dad.

That's how my dad moved his life.

And that's how he brought his,

You know,

The whole thing to the United States from the Czech Republic during a time of war.

He always did that.

Like he saw something and he went after it.

When he was six years old,

He wanted to come to the United States.

He wrote a letter to the Rockefellers saying,

Bring me to the United States.

And he's still a little upset they didn't respond to,

You know,

A six year old writing in Czech.

When a challenge came,

He addressed it.

He just walked up to him and said,

This is here for me.

My father was in Prague.

I'm half Czech as a Blocchian.

He came to the US when he was 17 years old.

He graduated from the college in Prague as an architect and he moved to Beverly Hills when he was 17 years old and I grew up there.

So I'm,

And I didn't understand a lot of that until I went to Czech Republic.

I went twice and boy,

I started to understand another part of a different way of thinking than I knew from living in America.

There was a whole different side that I had to discover that was very interesting in my roots.

Yes,

Yes.

Oh,

I didn't realize you're from there as well.

My maiden name was D-L-O-U-H-Y,

Which is my name.

So it's not a good name for easily pronounceable names on the radio.

So I used my married name or what was my married name before I got to Burszk.

It was easier to say than Tlohi.

No one could spell it right either.

I understand.

Halavas,

Your Czech name.

Yeah,

It's my father's name.

And I kept that after marriage because it's the connection I have to my family and to him and it's one that I feel grateful for.

And yeah,

He taught me that.

He very much taught me that when something's in front of you,

You walk up to it.

You don't cower.

You can be afraid of it,

But then you sit and you walk up to it and you be with it.

And it's not something I do easily by any means.

It's not like,

Yay,

This is really fun.

Sometimes it's really hard and there's a lot of tears and a lot of shutting of beliefs and perceptions and things that are sometimes really hard to release or let go.

And it's also the way through.

And there's something beautiful in that.

I think when I'm working with people,

Whether it's my clients or my students,

There's something in that process of being able to hold the space for someone to do that,

To be able to hold that container and being able to say,

Here's this thing.

It's over here and I'm right here with you.

Let's take a look at it together and let's make it not as big because right now it seems really big and incredibly overwhelming and it's terrifying,

But let's soothe the body.

Let's soothe the nervous system so that the whole mind can take it in instead of just our fear center.

And so we can take it in and maybe take a little piece of it and look at just this little piece and take it from there and see how we can walk up to an embrace and process that.

And then suddenly it's a little bit smaller and a little bit smaller.

It's these little 1% chunks and it's not so bad.

Have you been finding in this last eight months,

Nine months of COVID-19 that the intensity of fear and angst with people have been really brought to light,

So to speak,

To be,

Have to be faced and intensified?

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

COVID has been such an interesting experience,

I think for us globally and then individually.

And this came up,

I was doing a workshop this morning and this came up too,

This idea of like we're redefining what community is and we're really noticing and being really faced very hard with what our relationships are and how much they matter.

And we're noticing the value of touch,

Like,

Holy cats,

That's important.

And we miss these things,

Things that we were once really taken for granted.

We're suddenly experiencing in a new way.

And in this narrowing of our distraction,

Right,

We can't go running out to this place or that place in the same way.

We're suddenly,

For many of us,

We're faced,

We have to face these things we've somehow been avoiding.

Some of our old fears are coming up,

Feelings of loneliness that we've been distracting from are becoming,

They're right here now.

We have to look at it.

These old patterns or old ways of being,

They're coming up.

And so the fear naturally is there,

The sadness is there,

The longing is there,

The grief is there.

And those emotions,

And we're not used to dealing with them,

They want to be noticed,

They get loud.

So it's been very,

And it's been challenging for most.

Yeah,

I've been seeing it in so many ways and it's come out for some people in anger and frustration and some in rebellion,

And in some wanting to just run away.

It's been a fascinating and devastating time for a lot of people.

And at the same time,

I've seen more and more people turn to meditation.

I've seen more people actually turn for help.

I've seen more people wanting to pray.

I've been seeing people needing creativity.

I do music as well,

And I know a lot of musicians and they've had that same,

They have been able to play live.

So they've been looking for ways,

You know,

We're trying to,

You know,

Necessity is the mother of invention.

So we've trying to reinvent ways we can reach out to people.

And that's been interesting is the spirit,

That creative spirit,

That soul still wants to reach out and what it can do to heal and reach people,

Which we need so much,

Right?

Yeah,

Yeah.

We're social creatures.

We're not meant to live in isolation.

And so we don't,

We reach out and we find new ways to connect.

We're finding ways to create communities,

Whether it's on,

You know,

Private Facebook groups are suddenly popping up a little with more presence,

With more intentionality,

Insight timers,

That beautiful app where we found one another.

There's such a growing community.

There are people that are just coming together and saying,

I just want to be in a space with other people who can understand what I'm feeling.

And suddenly we realize people understand what I'm feeling,

Like,

Oh,

I'm not alone,

Which is how we are feeling sometimes,

Especially in this COVID time.

When we go out,

There's this piece of,

You know,

We recognize each other when we see our faces and we feel welcomed and greeted by a smile and by these acknowledgements and we're going out and we have masks.

We can't see that.

We can't see the full welcome,

The full greeting of the full experience of being welcomed by even a stranger who just acknowledges you or smiles when you walk past.

And so part of our nervous system starts to feel a little bit of a sense of threat.

Our nervous system goes on high alert.

We don't know if we're,

We just can't tell,

Like on a physiological level,

Our body doesn't know that it's safe.

And so we're finding new ways.

We're exploring,

Like,

How can I find that experience of connection,

Of safety,

Of being greeted,

Welcomed,

Seen,

Heard,

Valued.

I went to the grocery store,

I think it was a week or so ago,

And they're out of kale.

I think it was kale,

Some green produce I was buying.

And there was somebody restocking the shelf and,

You know,

I had my mask on and they had their mask on.

And I asked if they had kale in this giant thing they were unstacking.

And I,

For a minute,

I couldn't tell if my question was received with like frustration or if it was genuinely like,

You know,

And you could tell there was this moment that I think the person wasn't sure either.

And so he laughed.

And then I left,

I'm like,

Oh,

Thank you,

The sound lets me know that it's okay.

And then he's like,

I will look for kale.

And I'm like,

Oh,

Thank you.

And it was like that moment of how do I let this person know that this exchange,

The social exchange is okay.

And you could feel the ease and that won't just share glimmer of laughter from just a stranger who I could only see his eyes,

You know,

And then behind the produce.

But it's that connection you were talking about when we started talking,

That connection is also,

I feel it as the presence in our energy that we carry with us as well.

And yes,

We can tell still the energy that that person is carrying,

But it's so nice to have some connection for you is that laughter,

The moment where you connect with laughter,

Which is,

You know,

It's a wonderful gift where we were exploring skill.

We're exploring the parameters of how we continue at this point when we thought this was a temporary situation eight months ago.

And here we are still working with it.

I find that people do want to support each other.

And with Thanksgiving coming,

You know,

This is going to be a Thanksgiving where whether that's another person,

Another thing or an experience or our own body,

And to be able to come into that moment of gratitude and say,

Okay,

This holiday looks a lot different than maybe I would like it to,

Or than it has in the past.

And I can feel sadness for that.

And I can also expand and hold space for that sadness and hold joy and wonder for the fact that there's really unique technology right now that allows us to be here ten years ago.

It wasn't there ten,

Twenty years ago.

But,

Okay,

There are ways that we can still do this so we can feel the uncomfortable and the small.

And it might be,

What is it like to have a holiday with less busyness?

Can we lean into the simplicity of that?

Can we lean in and explore what is that like?

Can we find a gift in it?

And know that there's still some sadness for what it was or what we thought it would be.

And can we celebrate what it is today also?

So it's a yes and.

It's like the yes and what else is also true?

And that's where gratitude really is a powerful medicine.

It helps us receive.

Oh,

And receive Insight Timer,

Which is one of my favorite places to be on there live every Tuesday morning at 9 a.

M.

Good.

Well,

It's been a wonderful experience connecting and talking with you.

And I never realized we had the same roots,

Which I can walk in background,

Which isn't that amazing how that works.

But so,

So happy we get to connect here and talk about peace and your path,

Your awakened path to peace and more.

So many blessings to you and I'm so glad we were able to share these moments together.

God bless you and lots of love to your path and what you're doing and how you're serving.

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