Essential Medicine 7: What About God?

In this episode of Essential Medicine, Dr. Mossbridge and Dr. Rizvi discuss the role of God and ideas about God in healing with their guest, psychiatrist Dr. Roselyn Wilson. They discuss how their diverse backgrounds (Buddhist, Muslim, Catholic, Christian, secular humanist, and mystical Judaism) have informed their ideas about healing in their own lives and in the lives of others, and how, when, and whether the idea of a close relationship with God can help in healing.

Transcript

Hey,

Welcome to essential healing.

I think number six,

And we are your hosts.

I'm Dr.

Julia Mossbridge.

And for me,

The doctor is not an MD.

It's a honorific.

I have a PhD in psychoacoustics,

The psychology of sound perception.

And I started being interested in the human relationship with time and then how that has to relate to healing.

So that's,

That's my deal.

And I live in Northern California and your other host is Dr.

Adam Rizvi and I'll let him introduce himself.

I feel honored to be,

To be on the host level.

I feel like that's pretty special.

I'm Dr.

Adam Rizvi.

I guess I'll throw in the doctor there too.

A doctor is the,

Is the MD type.

I'm a neurointensivist board certified neurologist went into critical care and I am the director for my neuro ICU here at,

In Tucson at St.

Joe's for those of you who live here.

And we have a guest today,

Guest day.

I'm pretty excited.

So our guest is Dr.

Rosalynn Wilson,

Who I've known for,

I think 15 years now as a friend and as the babysitter of my son who is no longer needs a babysitter,

But Rosalynn I think you have other credentials.

So if you could introduce yourself,

That would be great.

We were just reminiscing about some of our good times.

My good times with Julia's son,

When we were really both growing up,

I was very young at that time.

It seems like a thousand years ago now I'm Dr.

Rosalynn Wilson.

I am calling in from Hamilton,

Ontario,

Where I now live.

And I am a psychiatrist.

So I moved up to Canada for my medical school and residency training.

And I work there now.

I have a couple of gigs.

One of my gigs is also at a hospital called St.

Joe's where I work at an outpatient youth mental health center called youth wellness center.

And then I also work with adults at a clinic in a smaller town doing,

Working with people with substance use disorders and other mental health disorders.

And I'm really excited to be here today in this,

In this company,

I'll confess to being a little intimidated,

But now that I've said that I can let that go.

Yay.

Oh my God.

If you,

If you knew me you would not feel intimidated at all.

And you know me and there's no way you can feel intimidated by me.

Well,

You know,

It's not always logical.

That's true.

So that's the two St.

Joe's doctors.

That's pretty sweet.

Speaking of that,

That's a,

That's interesting because we were having this urge and this is Adam,

You had this urge to talk about God and healing.

Can you explain what,

What,

What you're thinking?

Yeah.

On our last episode,

I think this is our seventh episode,

But on our last episode,

There was a moment where we were I probably should have gone back and listened to it,

But there was a moment where you had said or you referenced God and you said,

Said something to the effect of,

Well,

What if God wanted us to experience such and such or,

Or have,

Have things happen in a particular way.

And I'm sorry if I'm paraphrasing incorrectly,

But the,

If the context was about healing one,

Somehow in your,

In your neural network,

Your brain made a series of connections,

Right?

If the,

If the conversation was about healing,

You somehow made a connection to God and you brought it into the conversation.

So that's kind of what I want to explore,

Like those connections in,

In your,

In your brain and,

And why that those connections were made,

Because that often happens for me too.

In my line of work as an intensivist with a relatively high mortality rate,

But also even those who survive,

They go to the brink of death and the,

The big G word comes up quite often.

And for me,

There's not a day that goes by that metaphysics in the broader sense,

Isn't a part of what I do,

Whether it's implicit or,

Or explicit in the conversations I have with nurses and with family members.

So that's the,

That's the why.

So you want to talk about God and healing because it came up and then,

And it comes up for you all the time,

But it hadn't come up in our conversations.

Is that right?

Spot on.

Okay.

And before we jump in,

Sorry,

I would love to hear from you,

Adam,

When you,

When you say metaphysics,

When you're talking about that,

What,

What are you digging into there?

What are you getting?

Yeah,

That's a great,

Great way to start it.

Well,

So metaphysics,

Why don't we,

Why don't we pull up a definition?

Let's see what we're working with.

You know,

Every time I look up metaphysics,

I gotta say,

I'm like,

No,

It's always the same definition,

But it's always not how I think of metaphysics.

So let's read the definition and then let's figure out if that's what we want to talk about.

Yeah,

That's fair.

Okay.

Should we do Wikipedia or,

Or Merriam-Webster?

Wikipedia.

Wikipedia.

Okay.

The voice of the people.

The voice of the people.

So per,

What do you think of Wikipedia?

Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that examines the fundamental nature of reality,

Including the relationship between mind and matter,

Between substance and attribute,

And between potentiality and actuality.

That's,

That's pretty interesting.

Oh,

That's funny.

I was gonna say yawn.

Well,

I just think they take something that's like the most interesting questions that you could ask and turn it into something that sounds like,

Ugh,

My head hurts.

Well,

It's so big,

Right?

I mean,

That basically covers everything or what isn't.

Or at least maybe it's everything that we like to think and talk about,

But it sounds like specifically the,

The question of God or the relationship with God or the sort of,

Is it the bigger element of being connected to something bigger than ourselves or specifically something divine?

Adam,

That sort of piqued your interest in Julia's comment.

Yeah.

Maybe if we just drop the definition for a second and I'll offer how I saw that,

That word.

There's,

There's two things.

One is maybe it's the worldview that someone has about their life.

The,

Like the gestalt container of what their life is about.

Maybe that maybe you could use the word purpose,

Right?

When someone has a terminal illness,

Not even just terminal,

Like they,

They are critically ill,

Right?

Something happens where all of a sudden they take several steps back and their whole life is now framed in some,

In something bigger.

They say,

What,

What is,

What is this all about?

You know,

Is there,

Is there a purpose to what I'm going through right now?

If I die,

Then what,

What does that mean for my family?

The kind of questions that come up when people face their mortality,

When they face adversity,

Physical and in your case,

Maybe psychological adversity,

There's existential and ontological questions pop up.

And for me,

The word metaphysics kind of captures all of that.

Like the,

The capital Y,

Right?

One,

I'll just drop something here for us maybe to chew on at some point in the conversation,

But in some sense,

People might say,

Well,

Those questions come up because it's just our way of trying to deal with the stress of,

Of what's coming up.

You know,

This,

This huge challenge,

This physical disease,

This psychological turmoil.

And it's just a coping mechanism.

That's all it is.

You know,

It's just a coping mechanism and sometimes it's effective and other times it's maladaptive.

Some people might say,

Well,

Okay,

No,

There's actually reality to it.

There really is life after death.

There really is a grander design and a purpose.

And if I can somehow align my,

My life with that,

I'll,

There'll be greater peace within me and maybe I'll offer a greater contribution to the world.

And so they wouldn't see it as only a coping mechanism.

They would really see it as something greater.

I think those may are two ideas that we could play with.

Yeah.

And I like how you started describing it as a container and the sort of,

I mean,

It's the,

If our experience is somewhat fluid,

The container is what makes it,

Holds it all together and makes it possible.

And then these big experiences that you're mentioning of going through like a critical illness or believing you're going to die,

Or maybe wishing you were dead.

And for some of the folks I work with,

Those are the things that upset the container.

I mean,

You have to find a new container for your life and what,

What some people would argue is that,

You know,

It's just a matter of finding a container that,

That fits better.

Like,

Oh,

Well,

You know,

The blue container didn't work.

I better go for the red container or better go for the plastic one instead of the metal one.

But then is there,

Metaphysics maybe being the question of like,

Are there containers that are more in line with like,

That aren't just a matter of preference or getting through the day,

But are in line with a bigger reality?

Is there some kind of bigger container that's share that we're all in?

It's kind of a clumsy metaphor,

But it's interesting because the container makes so much possible and makes other things not possible.

And even it's hard to even talk about the container without,

You're,

You're still within a container.

You're in a bigger container talking about the smaller containers.

But that's why the definition of metaphysics is just so wordy and confusing because it gets confusing easily.

I wonder if we could each talk about our containers actually.

And maybe you guys have covered this on the podcast already,

But I find that of course the psychiatrist is like,

How did you grow up or what?

Because I do find that really influences how we approach this conversation.

I love that idea.

Before we talk about those containers,

I just want to go back and give an example because the metaphor is so good and yet let's just ground it in an example.

So one container that,

So let's say before you have a terminal illness or before you feel like you want to die,

Because we're talking about both mental and physical needs for healing here.

You have this one container that like everything is random in the universe.

Let's imagine this is one possibility.

Everything's random.

Things don't happen for a reason.

And then you get sick or you have this deep clinical depression where all of a sudden you're like,

I need a different solution.

This solution isn't working.

So the container has to shift to something where,

I mean,

It doesn't have to,

But it can be considered a coping mechanism on the one hand to shift to a container that says there is meaning and what I need to do is seek my own meaning and that will help me through this process.

Or it can be both a useful coping mechanism and actually true externally.

And so just to reiterate what we're talking about with blue and red and plastic and metal containers,

These are all metaphors for this kind of a shift that can happen.

And there,

But I just wanted to point out that there's something circular and kind of neat because I love circular things because I like studying time loops.

I think there's something very circular about the idea of if you choose a container that works for you as a coping mechanism,

It could be that that is also going to work for you because it's actually true.

In other words,

For you,

You just see it as a coping mechanism,

But in fact there's truth to it.

So you're interacting with the universe in a way that's more in line according to what's true in the universe.

So that actually also supports you.

So you may not be unbeknownst to you,

Your coping mechanism may be correct.

It also may be incorrect in terms of the metaphysical reality.

Anyway,

It's an added layer of a circular sort of process that could feed back on your healing process in some way.

So anyway,

Having said that,

Adam,

Do you want to give us your background of your container?

Sure,

Sure,

Sure.

So I'd say on a day-to-day practical level,

I consider myself a student of A Course in Miracles and we can go into that a lot more in depth later on.

But the background as to how I grew up,

My mother was raised Catholic and my father was raised Muslim and I was raised in a multicultural household.

And then from college through medical school onward,

I did a really,

Really deep dive into Buddhism and Vedanta in particular,

The non-dual traditions of Kashmiri Shaivism and Vajrayana Buddhism.

And there's a lot of similarity if you go down deeply enough to the non-dual core of that.

And one of the things that I found very interesting was having been raised in a Judeo-Christian household,

What life looks like,

Or how I started to perceive life when I started to go into non-Judaic Christian traditions.

And there's such a radical shift that happens in the worldview,

In my mind,

That I always think about that.

People take for granted that the way they see the world is how other people see the world.

And it's not at all the case.

And having gone deeply enough,

I think,

In multiple traditions,

I can absolutely see things,

Not all the times from other point of view,

But for the most part,

I allow myself to go there.

Let me give you one tangible example of how things shifted.

My grandmother was a devout,

She since passed away,

But she's a devout,

She was a devout devotee of Mother Mary.

She's a good Catholic,

Went to church every day.

And she ascribed to the way of the cross.

And for those good Catholics out there,

The way of the cross means you suffer and you suffer well,

And you suffer like Jesus Christ suffered on his way up to the cross.

And if you bear your sins well,

If you allow yourself to really feel that suffering,

Then you're doing a good job.

And so it's actually a very common defense coping mechanism for when challenges occur in life.

We would bear our cross and we really allow ourselves to go to that place of suffering.

And for my grandmother,

She went there because she believed she had sins that she needed to atone for,

And that every challenge in life that led to suffering on her part was because she deserved it.

Now we can argue as to whether that's helpful,

Not helpful.

I don't tend to see things moralistically as wrong or right,

But I like the way of looking at helpful versus not helpful.

But then having then stepped out of the Judeo,

Oh,

And I should say there's a very similar tendency in Islam.

It's a little bit different,

But there are similar tendencies of the role of suffering in one's spiritual path.

And in the Buddhist tradition,

However,

When I went deep into it,

Suffering was very clearly delineated as an epiphenomenon or a consequence of the attachment to the belief in separation,

Whether it means I'm separate from you or I'm separate from my source or just the sense of isolation or the sense of a separate ego.

If one is attached to that,

Then inevitably there will be suffering and all the forms of suffering are myriad,

But it comes from that.

And that was diametrically opposed to the previous way of seeing suffering.

And I remember in college,

I was at a crossroads where I was like,

Oh my God,

How do I handle this?

My defense mechanism was to take on the suffering that I went through.

And now that that's not the case,

Well,

Let me pause here for a moment and consider what would it look like?

How now do I take into consideration the challenges of life?

What framework do I put it inside of?

And my journey has continued,

But I'd say ever since then,

I've recognized the importance of a metaphysical container for life's challenges.

And how it can vary from day to day and from person to person.

That was a long,

Long one,

But I'll turn it over to either Julia or Rosalind.

Yeah,

Well,

You're speaking to the sort of like the disorientation that can happen when you've lost your container,

Your original container,

And you're trying to figure out how to understand the world.

I think for myself,

That point,

Well,

Maybe one of the first of those points happened when I was around high school.

So I was raised in also in the Judeo-Christian tradition in a sort of fundamental pocket of Christianity and with a lot of sort of Pentecostalism thrown in,

Sort of an eclectic evangelical church.

And it was really important to my family,

Particularly my mother,

That the certain way of viewing reality was true.

And I would have said that there was an element of bearing your suffering well and suffering for Jesus.

And there was also an element of suffering and evil being sort of outside of us,

Out to get us.

And we really relied on prayer and our sort of relationship with God to protect us from these evil things.

And then my,

One of like really the formative points of my spiritual life was my watching my mom get sick and die of a brain tumor and over a very short period of time.

And she experienced delusions and hallucinations as part of that,

That we didn't realize were delusions and hallucinations.

We just thought she was having more of the same kinds of spiritual experiences that she'd had her whole life,

But they had a sort of darker and more confusing turn.

And then by the time we realized that something medical was going on,

She was in a coma and she died.

And I felt like really in some ways that the rest of my life and my work since then has been trying to understand that and making different containers that helped me understand that experience.

Like,

Okay,

If evil or bad things are something that God is supposed to protect us from,

Then what does it mean that my very religious mother went into this experience where she was not able to even trust her experience of God or what seemed like she was having an experience of God that didn't fit with the experiences of God that I had been raised to believe.

And then what did it mean for,

You know,

Those of us left behind that we'd lost our mother,

We'd lost her in this way.

And what did it mean in general to be part of a world where people could have these experiences of such suffering and pain that seemed like they could be meaningless.

So it was kind of this,

My container started out as like,

Oh,

The world has a lot of meaning,

You know,

There's good and evil and your goal is to be on the good side and be protected from the evil.

And then when that fell apart,

I think the question of like,

Well,

Is there meaning at all then?

Is it all meaningless?

Or can there be a way,

Can there be a container big enough that holds room for meaning and good and evil,

All of it together in this more nuanced way.

And then in my,

Just to sort of finish my story,

I encountered a number of different streams after that,

That were helpful and different streams of Christianity originally.

And then through some of the friends I made,

Other people from other traditions and encountering people that just saw the world differently than I did and trying to make my container big enough to fit them.

Like I had been raised to believe that people that didn't believe what I believe were sadly mistaken and really like in need of the truth and wisdom I had to offer.

And that didn't seem to be the case,

The more people I met.

And Julia was one of those people actually in my self-righteous and confused twenties.

I was like,

Wait,

But how can you be,

Are you sure you don't just want to know Jesus?

And like,

Wouldn't that help?

I don't know.

Wouldn't that solve your problems?

They haven't really solved my problems,

But yeah.

And then,

And then eventually in my thirties coming into Buddhism as well and Buddhist meditation and finding that non-dualistic way of looking at things to be incredibly helpful,

But also sort of to add and broaden my own tradition.

So I'd say it's still,

And generally in the Judeo-Christian container,

But with so much within a awareness of all the other containers that's radically changed.

Like how I see my own container where the limits of the Tupperware are.

I love that.

I love that we're Tupperwaring this major discussion about everything.

I second the Tupperware.

Yeah.

And you can get the air out,

You know,

Everything's nicely sealed inside if you get it perfectly.

That's a beautiful story.

And I'd forgotten about how it relates,

How your qu how your journey related to your mother's death.

And you know,

Wow.

So I was raised in a Unitarian household.

And for those of you who aren't aware of Unitarian Universalists very cerebral generally don't talk a lot about God.

Don't really believe that in God kind of generally maybe,

I mean,

At least where I was,

It was a very hippie left-leaning intellectual journey about trying to be good to people.

And I really,

Really missed.

I mean,

Not with,

I had no other exposure,

But I missed God and I missed ritual and I didn't really get what I was missing.

So I'd make up these rituals and I would talk to God.

And that it was really important for me.

I lived alone and not alone.

I felt like I lived alone in a farmhouse in the middle of nowhere.

I lived with three people,

But they were all extremely difficult and had various degrees of mental illness.

So I felt like I lived alone in a farmhouse.

So I developed ways of talking to God.

And over time,

In my twenties,

I started hanging out with a friend from college,

My very best friend,

Mary,

Who was a religious studies major and was Christian and was also into Buddhism.

But she took Christianity very seriously.

And I never met anyone who took Christianity seriously.

So that made me start thinking like,

All right,

So maybe this Christianity stuff isn't totally nuts.

Like here's some really smart persons.

Yeah.

At the time I only valued intelligence.

So if you weren't smart,

Like forget it.

That's how I was raised.

I was raised in the church of the intellect really.

And,

But I was noticing that,

That,

That Mary allowed herself to have a relationship with God.

And so maybe I could continue to have my relationship with God.

So I would think that my,

How I was raised is very different.

Like by my roots are really a reaction to how I was raised because I was missing this thing.

And so I became a mystic at an early age.

I mean,

I think that by real roots are mysticism.

So in answer to Rosalind's question,

When I met her and she would talk with me about Jesus,

It's like,

Of course I want to know Jesus,

But I already know Jesus through knowing God,

Right?

Just like I know all the other,

All the other ones,

You know,

That was so mind blowing to me.

And that,

That was,

I mean,

Because that was like,

Well,

You're not allowed,

Like Jesus is very particular.

You're not allowed to have any other people that you're into.

I'm sorry.

I think Jesus is like,

So not particular clearly hangs out with prostitutes.

So so yeah.

So I was like,

All right.

So that was an interesting conversation.

And that conversation continued actually through our relationship and,

And we both changed as a result of it.

And I became more aware of this particular gifts that the Christianity and especially a relationship with Jesus could offer.

And I also felt that my people were Jewish.

I felt like I actually needed to convert to Judaism.

And all these mystical events happened that lined up to make it very,

Very clear,

Which is another story for another day that I needed to convert.

So I did.

And that was really important because now I felt like I had a relationship with God in a cultural context that really matched how I thought about God,

Which is this intimate,

There's no one between me and you lots of questioning,

Lots of like getting pissed off at God.

All of that stuff was part of the Jewish tradition.

Like Jews argue with God all the time.

It's fantastic.

So it's like,

There's none of this step down relationship.

It's like,

We're in this together,

You know,

And you know,

It's a shit show.

So let's try to fix it,

You know,

And how do we do that?

So so that's where I am now is an L O and the other piece of it,

There's the third piece of the triad.

There's this sort of perpetual mysticism in my life.

There's Judaism and then there's science.

So I really,

Really do science because it's a mystical tradition for me because it's about connecting with God,

Because,

Because it's about putting a question out there and listening to the answer rather than filling in the blank myself.

So to me,

That's really about dancing with God or having a mystical relationship with God.

So that's sort of the three pieces of my spiritual or religious pie.

Those are my containers,

My multiple containers.

Thanks Julia.

I find it interesting that it's interesting you came from,

I mean,

You sort of stayed in the Judeo-Christian sense all along,

But you highlighted mysticism right off the bat,

Which is interesting because I've noticed that if you go deep enough into most traditions,

I have a religion professor who would say,

Because I asked them to sin college,

I was like,

Well,

The perennial philosophy,

Like if you go deep enough into any tradition,

Won't you,

Once you get to the same core and he says,

The only way to find out is to go through every single tradition and get to the core of it and then,

And then switch over and then go down into the core of it.

And I was tempted in a certain sense to do that.

But really,

I think the mysticism is,

It is experiential and you can talk about rituals and there could be texts associated with various mystical traditions,

But as far as I'm aware,

The vast majority of mystical traditions will get you to,

Or guide you to an experience.

And oftentimes the experience has no words to describe it.

In fact,

That's sort of the,

That's the cusp or the threshold beyond which one hopes to traverse.

It's like you cross that path and all of a sudden words cease to have any meaning to them.

So I just wanted to highlight that aspect.

I would consider my path a very mystical path as well.

Yeah,

I would just echo that.

I think like,

And ultimately for me,

Like mysticism was a way of getting out of the sort of dilemmas about which container I fit in or the sort of angst about like,

Well,

If I have this different view than my mom did,

Can I still feel okay at a deep level?

And that I think the mystical,

The sort of mystical understanding of like these traditions are all one in a sense that is different.

It's different to experience that than it is to read about it in a book or to sort of memorize it as a fact.

I don't even know what,

How to fit mysticism into the container analogy because it's certainly a container of some kind,

But it's this sort of like the meta container that all the containers are in.

That's what I believe.

Yeah,

It's the container store.

Sorry,

I can't.

It just came to me.

Oh my gosh.

Yeah,

I feel like mysticism's purpose,

I'm not entirely sure about this,

But I see most mystics as iconoclasts.

You know,

Meister Eckhart,

Shankaracharya,

You know,

What's the guy's name,

Milarepa in the Buddhist tradition.

And then you have St.

Teresa of Avila in the Catholic tradition.

These people were iconoclasts.

They took a hammer to the Tupperware.

They like destroyed it.

And out of that came new containers and came new perspectives.

But there is something I think healthy in destroying a container in order to allow space for the next one.

It's kind of hard to live in a world without some form of container.

And you go to Heidegger and other philosophers with a linguistic background,

And you'll see that language itself presupposes some sort of mental construct.

I mean,

If you speak,

You are creating constructs,

Right,

In the world.

And so it's kind of hard to get away from,

But you can destroy containers and then have other ones arise.

And in my experience,

That could be said to be a part of healing,

Right,

When you have moments in your life where massive upheavals occur and you get pushed up to the edge of your previous container and you realize this doesn't work.

And so one of two things tend to happen in my experience is that container gets destroyed,

Whether we do so consciously or not,

And then a new one gets created,

Right?

We broaden our container to take in all these peoples and their different perspectives and the new experience that we have.

Or the cognitive dissonance builds up so intensely that we fragment and we split.

And there's a part of our mind that lives in a particular way and then that's over there and we compartmentalize and then there's another part of us that lives here.

And I don't think that's a particularly healthy way of doing things,

But I know many people who do that.

They split themselves in one to two or more pieces and live the world that way.

Yeah,

I mean,

Splitting yourself is a defense too,

Or like,

You know,

It's a way to keep yourself from breaking apart.

If you have these two seemingly like irreconcilable things,

Like I believe that there's a loving God and also,

You know,

My relative died of a brain tumor in this seemingly horrible way.

Or often it's like,

Oh,

You know,

My father,

My partner is a good person and I found out that they did this horrible thing.

They're an abuser or they have this dark secret or,

You know,

Maybe you yourself that I see this a ton.

People are trying to reconcile,

Like I did this thing that I'm,

That is in line with the values that I'm ashamed of.

And I,

That's not who I see myself as being.

And of course,

Like lots of people compartmentalize,

They're like,

Oh,

I'm still this good person.

And I did this thing,

Or I'm continuing to do this thing.

That's harming somebody else or that's harming other people.

And I'm just not really having those realities cross because it's too painful.

I can't have both of those things in the same container.

And I would agree with you.

I don't think it's a healthy place to be.

I think we all can do that sometimes,

But the more fragmented we are,

Um,

Like fragmenting is a way to resist breaking,

But it's not a way that's good for our wholeness.

And I think when you guys are talking about healing,

I'm sure like wholeness is so much of a part of that wholeness above sort of wholeness above.

I want to use like wellness or something like that,

But I don't mean to,

Maybe we have this idea of wellness and our culture of like,

Oh,

That means we're shiny and lovely.

And like all the services are,

All the services are looking good.

And that's wellness,

You know,

I've got my yoga practice and my teeth are nice and white and whatever,

But that's not the same thing as wholeness,

Which is like,

I'm a mess and not some of these not a mess,

But I'm here.

I'm all,

I'm all in the same container,

Even though it's a messy container.

That is incidentally,

Heal comes at a melogically from whole.

Exactly.

Yeah.

And,

And,

You know,

Adam and I,

When we're doing this,

We come back to this again and again,

Right at him,

This idea that healing doesn't mean not dying.

It doesn't mean being perfect.

It doesn't mean you're don't,

You're not in pain anymore.

It means you're whole.

And so this,

When you talk at him about the importance of,

You know,

Smashing containers,

So you could build new ones.

I agree with Rosalind that the important caveat is if the container,

If the having two different containers is holding you together,

If that's what's keeping you whole in a way by being separate,

Then you wait until you're ready to be whole before you don't go around smashing containers,

Just a smash containers.

Cause cause you're,

You know,

Your wholeness is actually glue between these two containers,

You know,

That's,

That's,

What's creating an entity of you,

But then you can work towards bringing those together and becoming integrated.

But I feel like it's so there's so much this wellness thing.

Okay.

So like a thousand thoughts,

I'm just going to like choose one.

And the wellness thing that Rosa brought up about being shiny and new and like I caught my yoga practice and I don't think negative thoughts or whatever it is that fantasy of perfection.

Um,

That I think comes from a con that I think comes from a particularly Christian container rather than Judeo Christian.

And the reason I would say,

Maybe I'll let you finish before I jump in here.

Yeah.

Maybe it's,

Maybe it's maybe I'm wrong,

But anyway,

The thought is my experience is one of the things that I felt so relieved by and going in the Jewish direction,

Even though it's still Judeo Christian is the assumption on the Jewish cultural side and even religious side is everyone's life is a mess.

Like frankly,

You know,

Like,

Like everyone's life is a mess.

And so how are you going to deal with that?

And that felt culturally very much more relaxing.

Cause it felt more honest than your life is supposed to be bright and shiny.

Now I'm well educated on the truth of Christianity or the,

Or the,

The fund of the foundation of Christianity and the mystical truth of Christianity from Roselyn and my friend Mary.

So I won't say that that's actually what's going on in Christianity,

But I think there's a cultural aspect of that.

Sorry.

And Roselyn,

How do you disagree?

Yeah.

And I,

You know,

I,

Well,

I think where I really see that coming up is it's a consumeristic view of wellness and it,

And that in our culture is often really tied with Christianity just because that's been the dominant religion in our,

In like North America for,

For a really long time.

And I think that that's,

I think that specific strain of Christianity and the,

And the consumerist aspect is the thing to keep it is to,

Cause you see it other places too,

You know?

And that's part of why,

Well,

It's big in actually Buddhism and yoga now,

Like yoga has been really co-opted and by the consumerist way of thinking.

And that's not in the mystical tradition at all,

But that's definitely how it's packaged and sold to North Americans.

Yeah.

I gotta say that's a total you're totally right.

And I totally agree.

That's,

That's what I was looking at when I didn't,

When I said,

It's not the truth of Christianity,

But it's this superficial cultural piece.

Exactly.

Sorry about that.

One thing that I want to highlight,

I think,

I think we're touching on this a little bit when we speak about the consumeristic perspective on things is this idea that I'm not okay the way I am right now,

But if I had this one thing,

Or if I,

If I bought that thing,

Or if I did this particular exercise long enough,

Then I would be okay.

And then I would be worthy of fill in the blank,

You know,

God's love worthy of,

Of my father's approval of my congregations,

You know,

Applause,

You know,

You know,

Fill in the blank,

But,

And this is Julia might be where time kind of fits in too.

You kind of need you need time to get from this place of not being okay to,

To that place in the future of being okay.

The thing is that place in the future is always on the horizon.

It's always,

What's that next thing that will make me happy.

And then I'll be,

I remember when I was really young,

My dad would,

Would he would say this is okay.

The first time he did this that I remember was when I was in high school,

He said,

You know,

I'll just be happy when you get into college and I'll be happy when you get into college.

Then I got into college and he's like,

You just work hard and you got to get to medical school.

I'll be happy once you get into medical school.

And I kind of caught onto that.

And I was like,

When are you going to be happy?

You know,

And if it's constantly tied to what I do,

It's,

It doesn't seem like it's you're ever going to get there.

And I feel like that tendency to put our happiness,

Our sense of being whole and okay,

And having made it and,

And being in a place where we can allow ourselves to love ourselves,

We put it out there in the future and,

And it's not okay now.

And how I have,

How I've been helped so much by the non-dualistic traditions of the East and of course of,

Of the Course in Miracles is that those traditions would say,

You're already there.

You're already whole.

There's nowhere you need to be.

There's nothing you need to do.

There's nothing you need to gain or get.

You don't perceive it that way,

But nevertheless,

It's true.

And so the journey for me has been in every moment when I don't feel okay is coming,

We talked about this last time,

Julia,

Is being okay with not being okay.

Right.

And,

But just finding,

Gently taking myself to the place of loving,

Of loving what is loving,

What's arising in this moment,

Loving,

Embracing who,

Who I am and who I'm being in this moment.

And,

And then I go from a place of pushing against life and resisting and the,

The not being okay with to,

You know,

Allowing and embracing and hugging,

You know,

The,

This moment,

That's kind of how mentally I imagine instead of this,

I do that in my mind or at least internally.

So I want to take that idea and move it to loving yourself is wonderful,

But sometimes you oftentimes,

Oftentimes people can't feel like they can love themselves,

But they can feel like they can feel loved by God,

Or they could feel loved by something external.

And so,

And certainly my experience has been that at times,

And there's this Jewish or I guess it's a Kabbalistic sort of a mystical phrase,

He nanny,

Which is the phrase that Moses would say when,

When,

You know,

God was looking for him and he's like,

He nanny means here I am.

And it's like a way to put a flag in the ground and say,

Here I am,

I'm talking to you,

God.

And the reason I bring that up is because it's about honoring the present moment as instead of being a time in which you're continually striving towards something else,

Which is what you were flagging with your father saying,

I am good enough right now to,

For God's love,

I'm good enough to have a conversation with God right now.

I'm like this,

In fact,

That may be the only thing I can do,

Right?

That may be the only thing I have access to is to be able to feel God's love.

And my experience is,

So I think this is a different kind of container that says like one way to get to the place where you can love yourself and you can be loved by other humans is to say,

Here I am.

And I'm at least good enough for God,

You know,

As a start to crack it open,

To crack it open a little,

A little starting,

Like maybe I'm good enough for God.

And then from that,

Like that circle enlargens,

Enlargens,

Enlarges,

Gets larger to include other humans and oneself.

I don't know.

What are your thoughts on this Rosalie?

Yeah,

I love that you brought up the,

Like both the utility of like there being somebody else that tells you I'm okay.

And maybe going back to your earlier point,

Maybe there's some,

Something that hearkens to a bigger truth there.

And I think just thinking about how like human brains develop and how we're wired.

I mean,

Attachment is this huge buzzword in like infant development,

Right?

That's what it takes for us to grow up normal or to grow up okay,

Is to have a secure attachment with at least one other person where we can like see ourselves reflected in their eyes.

And we're now like,

You know what,

This person loves me and they accept me.

And that's like the bare minimum for growing up as a human that's functional.

And so it totally makes sense to me that one,

That a theme that shows up again and again in different types of containers that humans have developed to understand their world is like,

There's this external being that loves me.

And then there's a variety of different conditions or understandings of that depending on the container and the flavor.

But there's like something outside of me that loves me.

Maybe with Buddhism being the exception,

Although I think you end up kind of getting there.

And actually some forms of Buddhism,

As I understand it,

Are more,

It's more about sort of guru devotion and there's a bit more of a personal element to it.

But you have to start there in order to get to the point where either you're like,

You know,

I love myself or maybe like there's no distinction between loving myself and loving my neighbor.

We're all one.

Like that's,

It's just part of this big cosmic soup.

But we mostly get there by experiencing love from somebody else.

Whether that's like,

Hopefully at some point,

It's the love of another human early in our development makes things a lot easier.

And I think that then the mystical experience of that,

Of being loved by God is like the sort of the culmination about the people.

I was going to say one other thing about that,

But maybe I'll pause.

We've been talking to my mind again.

Yeah,

I'm feeling,

I'm feeling like you just wrapped up a bunch of different ideas really beautifully and you sort of ended with a hint of,

And I'm just going to say it explicitly,

Then maybe,

Maybe the way our developmental time courses go,

You know,

Where another person loves us and we feel that we are lovable and then we can have the experience of God loving us sort of over time or this,

My God meaning something that's like a force of love or some,

Some kind of,

Some kind of loving for us external to ourselves.

That's not in our family.

And that's not like another human being.

This stepping into that,

Even rather than being loved by another way to think of it as stepping into the non-duality,

Right.

To me,

That's all very similar,

Becoming the recognizing that you're the wave rather than the droplet and that the,

And now then recognizing that you're the ocean rather than the wave,

That that whole developmental time course,

Maybe that is programmed into us because it is so universal across many different religious traditions and spiritual traditions,

Because it is the truth.

I mean,

Because it is,

It moves us towards something that is in fact metaphysically true.

And maybe there's a,

The healing comes from a recognition.

Like I'm going to say like in your soul or your essence or whatever the heck we want to call it that I've come home to the truth of,

Of what is maybe that it's maybe we're programmed to heal,

You know,

Maybe,

I mean,

Maybe we're designed,

I don't know what the right word program sounds like computers.

Maybe we're designed to heal.

Maybe the developmental time course in this world,

We are like,

This is exactly how it needs to be for us to heal.

I don't know.

Anyway,

I don't know if I'm saying that right.

So I'll stop saying it.

Well,

It's like,

It's becoming aware of like circles of greater and greater wholeness or spheres of greater and greater wholeness.

So like you start out,

Hopefully you start out by having like a sense of yourself as whole,

Which comes from attachment relationships and comes from like the secure relationships in your life.

And then and then if all is going well in that sort of developmental thing,

Then you get a sense of yourself as whole with something bigger,

Whether it's like a tribe or a family,

And then your whole with maybe other people that believe the same thing as you are with God.

And then eventually the idea is to get to the point where your whole,

Your wholeness is like the universe wholeness you recognize like I'm whole because I'm all that there is.

But you know,

There are people that I think that you can skip levels,

Or at least I hear stories of that.

And I want to believe that's true because it often goes awry in our journeys where we miss out on,

You know,

Some attachment relationships or the sort of sense of being connected to a bigger tribe and gets messed up,

Or maybe we're sort of gets,

It goes sideways and we're just connected to that tribe.

And it is in a way that interferes with our wholeness with other tribes.

And so I think that the experiences,

One of the cool things about mysticism is that sometimes it catches people by surprise,

You know,

Who are like deep in this other,

Well,

It's a yeah,

You're deep in this container that is,

Has become pathologically rigid.

And then it just busts that open in this huge way.

Maybe that's not,

I mean,

That's the,

It's not a bug,

It's a feature.

Something that popped up for me when you said that,

Rosalind,

And it has to do with being in tribes that prohibit a greater sense of wholeness.

I think I've shared with this,

This with you,

Julia,

But when I was in elementary school,

I would spend summers alternatingly in France and then in Pakistan.

And my,

I would go to France one summer and I would spend two months with my French grandparents and every Sunday we'd get up,

I'd put on nice clothes,

I'd go to church,

I'd hear the bells ring.

And everything was in Latin in this city in Normandy,

In Brittany.

And so I got to feel all of that.

And one of those mornings we came back and my grandmother was cooking breakfast after services.

And she said,

You know,

Your family,

Your Pakistani family,

They're all so nice.

It was kind of an out of the blue statement,

But she said,

You know,

They,

They all seem so nice.

It's too bad.

They're all going to hell.

And I was like,

Huh,

How do I respond to that?

I don't remember how I responded,

But I was just quiet because I really thought like,

Are they going to hell?

And the weird thing is the next year I went to Pakistan in Karachi and my grandmother there she's,

She's devout Muslim.

And she used to cook on this ground floor stove,

This chipotese,

Which is a type of bread and oh,

It would smell so good in the mornings.

And she had seen pictures of my time in France because I brought them with me to tell her about my time in France last summer.

And,

And she's like,

Oh,

They seem so nice.

They're all going to hell.

She was a little bit more direct.

And I was,

I was a little bit taken aback too.

And I'm not quite sure why both grandmothers decided to say that and in consecutive summers,

But that was a moment of container breaking because I was like,

It can't be that that,

That both those statements are true.

Either one is true or the other,

Or neither is true.

And so I,

I,

Thankfully I did not break.

And for me,

Thankfully I didn't land on one or the other.

And I just,

I loved my two families too much to do that.

And so what ended up happening in my mind is I created a container that was big enough to allow both and that I can see though,

How I,

How I could have gone to a place where I chose a tribe as you put it,

Rosalyn and,

And have that choice preclude seeing myself as part of a greater whole.

And just to round off that this thought was several years later,

I went to a monastery when I was diving into Buddhism,

I went to the monastery monastery in Southern France,

Where I spent several weeks in meditation.

And I had an experience of tremendous,

Tremendous love.

And it was beyond words.

And the thought that I had was this love is so big.

It can't not contain all of humanity.

It,

It can't not meaning it must and,

And have space to hold even more.

It was just this feeling of such bigness in,

In the,

This overwhelming love.

And I felt like in my heart,

I could hold all of it,

All of the cosmos.

And I share this with you because I feel like this is where mysticism for lack of a better word,

The experience of,

Of,

Of an inner reality can break through separation and bring us to a greater wholeness.

And if we're talking about healing them,

You know,

What,

What is healing,

If not some sense of a greater and greater whole.

So the mysticism,

The mystical experiences is the smashing of the container and it's not done by you.

I mean,

It happens to you,

Right?

I mean,

And that,

So to me,

That's akin to all of a sudden having this experience of,

Oh,

God loves me.

Like I am in this,

Like there's this brilliant bright light,

Or I'm just feeling like God loves me.

And I,

And there's even scientific evidence,

Right?

That,

I mean,

So this is just going to bring in science a little bit here,

But that self transcendence,

The experience that you are connected to something beyond yourself in a positive way,

That,

That this experience can actually make you skip steps like Roselyn was talking about,

Like this experience,

You could be on the step of not knowing where your next meal is coming from.

So,

And,

And not have,

Or having been by the,

By steps,

I mean,

Like in terms of like Maslow's hierarchy of needs,

You know,

You're not supposed to be able to feel self-actualized or something.

If you don't know where your next meal is coming from,

According to that theory,

Which makes sense on average,

You're going to be focused on your meal.

But in the case of self-transcendence,

That experience can bring you to this different level,

Or you could be having this experience of my parents never bonded with me.

I was raised in a Russian orphanage,

Or I was raised in a situation where I never felt loved,

Never felt a secure attachment.

And you could have a mystical experience that's non-pathological.

I'm not talking about pathological experiences that seem mystical,

But aren't,

But you could have a mystical experience that's very positive that bumps you up to where now you can experience love.

And maybe that is like smashing a container in a positive way.

Maybe it's like just removing the container gently.

Yeah,

Alfred,

Just a quick comment.

Alfred Whitehead talked about the concept of holons,

Which I just want to share this,

This idea that he,

He said that the many become one and are increased by one.

And what I like about the idea of holons is you can move at least in a,

In a,

In terms of one's consciousness or one's perspective can move to a greater container without smashing or destroying anything.

I kind of use that metaphorically,

That idea,

But you know,

When,

When the two atoms of hydrogen combined with the atom of oxygen,

You can't really predict that there's going to be a sense of wetness that comes out of that combination with several other atoms.

And yet that is the emergent property,

But it just depends on what level you're at.

And so I feel like when my container expanded,

It didn't negate the,

You know,

The,

The,

The experience as,

You know,

With my Christian family or negate the experiences with my Muslim family,

It held,

It held them.

Yeah.

It's interesting in trying to put words around this,

I'm thinking about how it's,

It's often not always,

But it's often that the sort of container destroying experiences that you mentioned at the very beginning,

You know,

Critical illness or really deep dark time,

Those can sometimes open up the space for there to be an experience of,

Of bigger wholeness.

And sometimes they can open up people for these mystical experiences.

I'm betting that you see that in the ICU,

That I'm at a greater than average population,

Whatever frequency when people are up against that.

But it's not contained to that.

Like as you're sort of getting at those sort of bigger wholeness,

Bigger skipping steps on the hierarchy,

Whatever it is,

Doesn't just happen at those times.

And there's lots of other ways that we cope with the,

The containers breaking too,

That are maybe less,

Well,

That aren't as directly related to our like flourishing or feeling like something is bigger.

I mean,

Sometimes we might kind of go nuts for a while or in popular terms,

Like break down,

Just not be able to cope with it.

Or we kind of split those parts of ourselves off,

Which we can view as less healthy,

But Julia,

I love that you brought up that that can be a way of,

Of managing for the time being.

So,

You know,

If you're a 10 year old,

You're going between these two families that each think the other one's going to hell.

One way of coping is like,

Okay,

Well,

I'm with my Catholic family,

I'm just gonna,

You know,

Roll with it.

And maybe the Muslim family is going to hell.

And then while I'm with my Muslim family,

It's gonna,

I'm gonna roll with it for now.

And that's a way to sort of build some strength and stability.

And you keep looking around and seeing like,

Is there,

Are there other ways of understanding this growing in your ability as a person to sort of hold both of those within yourself.

And then at some point,

And sometimes in this uncontrollable way that you become,

It becomes possible for you to hold all those,

Maybe you get,

You go to a monastery and you have this like deep experience of love,

Or maybe something else shifts for you.

I think so many of those experiences for myself have been in these really more subtle ways.

And I'm somebody that would just love to have big mystical experiences.

And I think it's been a little bit of a part of my,

Part of my journey has been accepting that that's not how things always shift for me.

But since I look back,

You know,

Four months earlier,

I'm like,

You know,

I was really struggling with that.

And now I'm not.

Now there's this sense of subtleness,

Like the container is bigger and it changed.

And I didn't have any sort of angel singing experience.

But,

But all of the stuff that happened before,

Whether it was like the breakdown or the smash or the whatever laid the ground for it,

That all happened.

And in some mysterious way,

I wasn't paying attention to it.

And I wasn't like messing with the controls,

The container got bigger.

This,

You know,

The key piece here,

It that,

Well,

Of course,

I'm going to think this,

So my bias is as usual showing,

But if your container does not allow development and change over time I think,

I think that is a key missing piece for,

For feeling for healing.

I think healing is a verb,

Which means it takes place over time.

And if you have,

If you're anxious about being done now or perfect now or healed now that removes all this joyful experience of observing exactly what Rosalind,

You were just talking about,

You know,

Oh,

I,

You know,

I didn't know what to do.

I was suffering.

And then I look back and I go,

Oh,

It's changed,

You know,

And,

And so allowing the developmental time course and just assuming that life is a growth process and,

And who we are is as individuals is evolving.

It's,

It's funny because that's a radical view,

Even though that's the obviously like clearly that's the case.

It's really hard to argue against that people are evolving over time and there's a developmental,

But life course that's happening.

And that healing of course has to happen over time,

But there's something so immediate potentially,

Maybe it's just our consumerist culture that says like,

Oh,

You have to have it all now.

That wants to work against that.

Yeah.

The container has to extend over time.

Yeah.

And I'd say also that it could be in the consumerist lifestyle that it's not just that you have to be perfect.

Now I've noticed some insidious ways that that shows up where it's you can get better fine,

But it needs to be a little bit faster than the way you're doing it right now.

And I've noticed that it's just,

It creates the same sort of angst of like,

I'm not there yet,

Or I'm not doing it fast enough.

Yeah.

Five steps to bliss,

Three steps to bliss.

One step to bliss.

There's a wonderful,

Well,

I'm going to look for this poem because I know we're getting towards the end and there's a poem I need to find.

That's interesting.

I,

Uh,

It's the first time I'm meeting you,

Roselyn.

And this is generally not the kind of conversations you have with someone when you're meeting them for the first time.

But I think what I enjoy about this is that if we can be so grounded that we're willing to be fully present with the perspectives of others and the containers of others,

Uh,

It creates a general sense of,

Um,

I don't know,

A sense of peace,

Really.

It's a sense of peace.

Like I'm really enjoying this conversation.

And also what I enjoy about it is that we don't need to get anywhere with it.

It's just a,

It's just a conversation.

And that's,

That's also a way that I'm exploring looking at life,

Right?

I don't need to get somewhere.

I'm very teleological as a personality.

And I think men tend to be in general,

But maybe humans do as a whole to this idea of like goal oriented behavior.

But,

Um,

The,

But what tempers that is this sense of allowing of whatever is just like this conversation unfolding exactly as it's supposed to.

And medicine,

I think also trains you in that.

I mean,

Like to have a goal,

A purpose,

Whether,

You know,

Better function or fewer days in the ICU or whatever it is.

Yeah.

And it is refreshing and lovely to have a conversation that is just there for the purpose of the conversation.

I'm also enjoying it and noticing a little,

A little anxiety that comes up like,

Well,

Are we,

You know,

Fulfilling the mission of the podcast or we,

Whatever like that,

That thought is there.

It doesn't go away for me.

And it's lovely to just let it go and to,

To jump into the conversation.

Same here.

And just so you know,

This podcast does not have a mission.

So we are fulfilling the mission of the podcast.

We have no idea.

We had no idea when we started these conversations that we were doing a podcast.

So it works out.

This is true.

And that's one of the reasons I love my friendship with you,

Julia,

Is that you invite me into these kinds of things.

These explicitly,

Um,

These,

I don't know what the word is.

I was going to say purposeless,

But I don't,

That's a,

It's an exploration.

It's an experiment.

We're just like,

I like to do a lot of experiments.

Yeah.

Here's this poem.

This is by St.

John of the cross.

So what is grace?

I asked God and he said,

All that happens.

Then he added when I looked perplexed could not lovers say that every moment in their beloved's arms was grace.

Existence is my arms,

Though.

I well understand how you can turn away from me until,

Oh,

Sorry.

Existence is my arms,

Though.

I will understand how one can turn away from me until the heart has wisdom.

It's gorgeous.

Thank you,

Julia.

Love that.

Yeah.

Thanks for talking to the other.

You two are such,

It feels really good to have these conversations and you're such wonderful people.

And thanks for being here.

My pleasure.

Thank you.

Thanks to both of you.

This has been really rich.

Reviews

Wonderful, left me with a lot to meditate on and explore. Thank you.