In this episode, Radhule Weininge discusses healing painful patterns and finding freedom. She delves into the intertwining of psychology and spirituality, emphasizing the importance of self-compassion and the role of mystery in the healing process. Dr. Weininger’s insights offer a unique perspective on addressing emotional wounds, highlighting the significance of awareness, patience, and resilience in the healing journey.
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Key Takeaways:
- Discover the path to healing psychological and spiritual wounds for inner peace and growth
- Uncover the key to understanding traumatic patterns in life for breaking free from recurring challenges
- Embrace the power of mindfulness for heightened self-awareness and emotional balance
- Cultivate self-compassion as a vital tool for healing and transforming psychological wounds
- Explore the fascinating mystery of interconnectedness and its impact on personal healing and growth.
Connect with Radhule Weininger: Website | Instagram | Facebook
Radhule is a clinical psychologist and teacher of Buddhist meditation and Buddhist psychology. She is the co-founder and guiding teacher of the non-profit, Mindful Heart Programs which offers a safe refuge for meditation and education programs in mindfulness, meditation, and nature connection in the Santa Barbara area. Prior to its closing, Radhule was the resident teacher of mindfulness practice at the La Casa de Maria Retreat Center in Santa Barbara, California. Her book is called Heart Medicine: How to Stop Painful Patterns and Find Peace and Freedom–At Last
If you enjoyed this episode with Radhule Weininger, check out these other episodes:
Healing Trauma with Dr. James Gordon
Healing Trauma with Judith Blackstone
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Episode Transcript:
00:00:20 – Chris Forbes
Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Dr. Radhule Weininger. She’s a clinical psychologist, psychotherapist, and meditation teacher. She also leads meditation groups in Santa Barbara and retreats globally. Radhule is the author of two books, including the one discussed here, Heart Medicine how to Stop Painful Patterns and Find Peace and Freedom.
00:01:38 – Eric Zimmer
Hi Rodeli. Welcome to the show.
00:01:41 – Radhule Weininger
Thank you. Thank you so much for inviting me.
00:01:43 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, I’m really excited to have you on. We’re going to be discussing your book, which is called Heart Medicine how to Stop Painful Patterns and Find Peace and Freedom at Last. But before we do that, we’ll start like we always do, with the parable. In the parable, there is a grandparent who’s talking with her grandchild and they say in life there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops and thinks about it for a second and looks up at their grandparent and says, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I’d like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do.
00:02:29 – Radhule Weininger
Thank you for bringing this parable. It’s actually one of my favorites and I use it quite a bit in teaching because it’s so apropos to always where we are, but also where we are today. And it means that we have a choice. As I say in my book, Lerbs, we all have long standing recurrent painful patterns. We all meet triggers. The world isn’t easy, and we have a bit Of a choice on how to respond. And we can respond with kindness and patience and wisdom and compassion, or we can react in an angry way or selfish way or greedy way, or impatient way, or just putting our heads in the sand. So I think that is what it means. You know, it’s like we do have actually some power to see where our life goes. I know Jack cornfield said once he paraphrased an old Chinese proverb that says intention leads to behavior. Behaviors create habits. Habits have something to do with our personality, and our personality has something to do with our destiny in a way. A similar way to talk to the two wolves.
00:03:59 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, yeah, totally. So the heart of your book talks about these, as you said, lerps, Long standing, recurrent painful patterns of hurt, which I’m pretty sure any one you feed listener hears that and goes, oh yeah, okay, all right, I’ve got those, but let’s explore them a little bit more. What are these things, these lerps?
00:04:20 – Radhule Weininger
Well, I think these are knots in our psyche. Old wounds that are basically becoming calloused. And they become these knots of behaviors, of memories, of thoughts, of feelings, of body, symptoms, sometimes of events. And they have been talked about in the west by Jung and by Freud as complexes. And in the east they are called samskaras or in pali, sankaras. And the only difference is that in the west they are usually seen as originating in our childhood, and in the east they are seen as passing through lifetimes. And you know, it doesn’t really matter. It just matters. We know that they’re old. You know, they’re old and they are reoccurring. And this thing about loops is that they are like patterns of relating. They’re dynamics that reoccur. And so we often come to a place where we say, why this again? You know, doesn’t this feel similar, Even though these are completely different people or completely different circumstances? And then at times we feel like sitting ducks to our own old painful patterns.
00:05:47 – Eric Zimmer
You say at the heart of a lerp is a term that’s used a lot more in modern day use, which is that there’s a trauma at the heart of a lot of these, Whether we’re talking about a capital t or lowercase t trauma, that that’s where these originate?
00:06:04 – Radhule Weininger
Yeah, that’s right. And when you say lowercase t or uppercase t, I imagine that you mean with uppercase something huge happening, like a war or an earthquake, or our house burns down, or somebody dies or we get abused really badly. And lowercase t are more these Micro traumas, let’s say an atmosphere in the house, maybe a way we were neglected kind of in a subtle way, you know, like I fed and closed you. But maybe we never got the right attention or we were pushed in a certain way, or there was huge competition with our siblings, or we felt really misunderstood. So these are probably more the lowercase t’s, is that right?
00:07:00 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, that’s precisely what I mean. Yep. So one of the things I loved in the book was first, how much you shared your own experience with these, and then secondly, how clear you made it that this is not a quick fix situation. Right. Like these things don’t go away quickly. You talk about how Native Americans knew for thousands of years that forests and grasslands, you know, had to be tended over a long period of time. And you say with this work, there’s no shortcuts, only diligent, careful tending. We’ve got to work with these things thoroughly, persistently, and with loving care. And I think that’s so important because I think we get very frustrated on our healing journey when it doesn’t happen quickly.
00:07:45 – Radhule Weininger
Yeah, that’s right. And I think unfortunately, our society primes us for that. We are kind of in this consumer society where we want quick fixes, quick pleasures, and I think especially pharmacology leads us in that direction. Take this pill and that pill and this intervention and you’re just fine. And so I think our frustration tolerance or our ability to suffer with ourselves has to be built up again, you know, to see ourselves with compassion and understanding and patience.
00:08:24 – Eric Zimmer
Looking at your own life, where do you think your lerps came from or some of them? I mean, I suppose we all could probably list a handful of them, but yeah, definitely.
00:08:35 – Radhule Weininger
And I think that’s how it started. My mentor is Jack Kornfield for over 20 years. He’s a psychologist and meditation teacher. So we talked a lot about it. He really encouraged me to work with this and others and write about it. And my lerbs came from my mom. I grew up in post war Germany and my mother had me out of wedlock. She was quite traumatized by the war herself, where she was a young medical student medicine on the east front. And her fiance died and came from a Catholic family. And so she had a baby with another doctor which was in Bavaria, 1957. Very shameful. You know, it was kind of unheard of. And so she hid me in an orphanage for two years and then presented me to her family as adopted, which I guess was a little bit more face saving than having A child without being married. And then she was always very busy, you know, as a doctor. I was having luckily a very nice nanny from when I was 2 to 4. But then we moved to my aunt’s house. So I think the first one was abandonment and maybe a sense of rejection. So I think that I noticed is always a really tender point for me when I feel excluded. And I think that was even more than in the family because they treated me a little strange, you know, they didn’t quite know where I was coming from. And there were all these stories and wasn’t quite clear and there was a lot of shame and embarrassment. So that sense has stayed with me, you know, when I don’t feel quite accepted or what maybe others can let roll off their backs more easily was just for me really a trigger and brought up a big inner reaction.
00:10:45 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, I can only imagine too what the collective society in post war Germany was like. Yeah, post war America was like, yay, Right? It’s a period of prosperity, everybody’s happy, and we think of it here as this grand time in America. But I’m sure your experience there is so radically different. I mean, Germany was just destroyed.
00:11:09 – Radhule Weininger
Right. And deeply ashamed and guilty and in denial. And even though my grandfather, he was a historian and he himself was prosecuted by the Nazis for speaking up, but there was still, you know, the whole. They were refugees from what is Poland now. And so they had come with supposedly three pairs of clothes and an old pot. And my grandparents were in this refugee resettlement camp for a few years. So, yeah, there was lots of shame and poverty and then having, on top of all, a kid born out of wedlock for refugees. You know, I feel very much for refugees nowadays. You know, when I hear about how many Ukrainians are resettled and south and middle Americans losing their homes, you know, it’s like I just can only imagine what that must feel like and how many lerps those poor kids will have.
00:12:14 – Eric Zimmer
It’s a little overwhelming sometimes as we get to know more about trauma and how it affects people. And then you see so much of it in the world and we know how it just carries on and it gets passed on. And it certainly, in my less hopeful moments, I feel very deeply overwhelmed by it. Feeling like we’re caught in this cycle.
00:12:36 – Radhule Weininger
And I think our lerps, our long standing, painful patterns from our childhood, get re brought up by new difficult environments. You know, war definitely brings up something for me and maybe for other families too. So I think this is a highly triggering outside environment for all of Us and depending on what we experienced when we were little or maybe in past lives, whoever knows, things are getting inflamed again. And yeah, there is a question how to respond. And I feel think the response has to be both psychological and spiritual.
00:13:20 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, you know, two of your main mentors. I’ve had the great privilege of speaking with both of them in the last few months for this show. Jack Kornfield and Joanna Macy. And you know, Joanna Macy’s work is, you know, very focused on being able to feel the heartbreak of the world and yet remain resilient in face of that. Let’s turn back to lerps a little bit and I want to talk about. I just sort of cast the dark side of lerps there. But you say that they also have the potential to help us find meaning and amazingly to discover the very purpose of our lives. Say a little bit more about how meaning and purpose are embedded in these things.
00:14:02 – Radhule Weininger
Yes. You know, the first noble truth by the Buddha is the truth of suffering. And that also can bring awareness. You know, it’s kind of a bit of a wake up call. Like I had to come to a place where I had in my early 20s, a stomach ulcer and two car accidents. Actually I was two months in the hospital and that led me to go to Sri Lanka. I went with my boyfriend 1980 to Sri Lanka and ended up in a monastery there. He and looking back in some ways I’m grateful that I in a way hit the wall or let’s say my windshield because I wouldn’t have stopped and really had to reevaluate my life, feel deeply what wasn’t right and actually look for meaning and purpose. So in some ways this has become a doorway, you know, and I think Pama Children says it so beautifully when pain is the doorway. And I think it’s too hard to see that in the moment. You know, if something terrible happens to somebody, you can’t just say, see this is a doorway. You know, it would feel misunderstood or you know, it feels like a narcissistic wounding as we call it in psychotherapy. But maybe later in hindsight we say, you know, in a way this was a wake up call. And that gave me a chance to reorient my life.
00:15:42 – Eric Zimmer
You know, I basically burnt my life to the ground at the age of 24 with heroin addiction. And I’m grateful for that because I was forced. At that age people are often like, well, how did you get into being interested in all this stuff? And I’m like, well, I kind of I was forced into it in a really strong way, and I feel grateful in many ways for me that it was that bad, that quick. It’s given me more of my adult life to work on healing.
00:16:08 – Radhule Weininger
Exactly. You know, I was 22. Yeah. So in some ways, I’m glad it happened early.
00:16:17 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. Yeah. You know, when you talk about that doorway, there’s that old saying, when one door closes, another door opens, which I think speaks to kind of what we’re talking about, like that, you know, we can walk through these things. But the thing about that little saying, which it’s a nice little saying and it’s true, but is that, you know, often nobody talks about what seems to me to be a long, dark hallway. Like, one door closes doesn’t mean the other door opens right up. Very often you’re like, well, now I’m in the dark, and you’re. And we’re there for a while, and we have to kind of just keep walking. And then another door opens and we go, oh, I see. All right. You know, this makes sense now. But that dark hallway is part of the journey. I want to hit one other piece of lurps here before we move into healing them. And I want to talk about why do we obsess and repeat? Right. There is a part of lerps that is this obsessive rumination chewing over the same. We just going through the same thing again and again. What’s happening there?
00:17:17 – Radhule Weininger
Yeah. You know, Freud called it repetition compulsion. I think there are different opinions why that is. One is it’s just becoming a habit, basically, to repeat. If you look at it more positively, and I’m also drawn to see it more positively. It’s like we want to jump over the hurdle. You know, we repeat it. Because there must be a way through. You know, there must be a way through. There must be a way through. So it’s maybe both. You know, there’s a habitual piece, and then there must be a way through or over this. But it’s quite heartbreaking at times how we do things again and again and again and get stuck in such a rut. And sometimes the pain can become. Actually, there’s another. Sometimes these Freudians have such good words, it can become a pain, mama. You know, the pain becomes the familiar thing. And, you know, if we don’t know peace, then pain is maybe the only thing we have.
00:18:27 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. So as we turn towards healing here, you say that awareness practice is fundamental to working with all forms of these lerps. Say more about why awareness is so fundamental. And what you mean by awareness in that context?
00:18:43 – Radhule Weininger
Well, what I mean by awareness is that we look back at ourselves and we say, ah, that’s what’s going on. Rather than just distracting ourselves or putting our head in the sand or turning to addiction or TV or our devices or whatever, we have to not be there. And I think that’s basically what awareness is. There’s self awareness, you know, being aware of what’s going on in ourselves. There’s metacognitive awareness, which is really noticing the processes in our heart and mind. And then there’s awareness of our environment. Then there is the moment by moment non judgmental attention that John Kabat Zinn talks about. And then I see sometimes awareness as like the Tibetans do, as a field quality, as something that is already there, that is always here. The field quality of awareness we can tap into the groundless ground of being in the last maybe five, 10 years. I find that actually more and more important because it gives us a wider perspective.
00:20:30 – Eric Zimmer
What you’re pointing at there is this idea of there being two types of healing. And I’m putting words on things that don’t quite fit, but we’ll run with it. And the one would be psychological healing.
00:20:43 – Radhule Weininger
Yeah, right.
00:20:44 – Eric Zimmer
It’s going back and looking at what happened to us, specifically understanding what that causes us to do, processing that, unwinding it. But it’s very personal, it’s very specific to me and my thing. And then there’s another type of healing, spiritual healing, that makes me think of something that Marvin Gaye talked about, which was a different type of healing, but that is not what the show is about. That may not be a reference you get, but some of the listeners will anyway. But spiritual healing and what you’re talking about there is connecting to something that is bigger than us, that is non personal in a sense. It’s not about me and my stories. And you just mentioned that over the last five years or so for you that that second part has become more and more important. And I’m curious if you have an opinion on whether the psychological healing that you did before that made that spiritual healing easier to do. Did it have to happen in a certain order? Did you pursue them? I think to some degree. In parallel, what are your thoughts on how those two work together?
00:21:54 – Radhule Weininger
I’m thinking about that a lot because I’m trained as a psychologist. And actually in my early 20s, with these car accidents, I started psychotherapy, which was unusual in Germany in 1980 or 79. And I also started meditation, which also was very Unusual there. My relatives thought I had entered a cult. You know, they thought it was basically dangerous. And I think they go hand in hand for a long time. It was probably until the 90s, I felt there were, like, two camps when I started my PhD, you know, after I got my MD in Germany, I got my PhD in America. But my more psychoanalytic supervisors thought that my spiritual path and I always went to retreats all the time, whenever I could, was basically an escape. You know, like, they called it like an oceanic merger or something strange. And I couldn’t basically talk about it. While many of my early spiritual friends thought that psychology was a waste of time, you know, it should just be spiritual. And it was really Jack, who I met in 86, but maybe it was a bit later that he said that, you know, like, that they actually fit together. And he gave me permission to bring those together for myself and in my work. But I always had the sense that they fit together. There was just no platform for that. You know, there was no conceptual framework for that. And I was trained as a therapist not to talk about spirituality. So whenever I did, I felt I had to not tell my supervisors or I had to kind of hide it. And it was actually Jack in the early 2000s, who asked me, do you meditate with your clients? And I said, no boundaries and transference, countertransference, this and that. And he said, rodali, get over it. And so he really gave me permission. And since then, I have gotten big time over it, and time has moved with me to a degree that now insurance companies pay for it. So it’s really wild how times have changed. And I do think they so fit together. You know, I think our spiritual healing, and it doesn’t have to be religious, but spiritual in a sense that there is something bigger that holds us, too, that has meaning, and that is there. And I remember at one long retreat, it was actually a solo retreat, but I had Jack over Skype every few days, and I asked Jack, you know, is the universe personal or impersonal? And he said, hmm. And then he said, I think it’s both. And I said, that’s what I thought, too. And it’s the great mystery. You know, like the Native Americans call it the great mystery. We just can’t wrap our mind around it. It’s certainly not a person or it’s not anthropomorphic. And I’m quite happy to say I just can’t wrap my mind around it. But I can feel it. What do you think?
00:25:34 – Eric Zimmer
I think the answer to many Questions is both. Yeah, you know, I’m kind of a both person with a lot of these things that seem like they are delineated, they’re closer together than we often think. I’ve been thinking recently about different topic but, well, similar topic. We talk about thought and emotion and we separate them. Right. But I’ve started more and more to go, well, we could talk about them as if they’re separate in some way. And there’s some ways we could point to them being separate, but they never seem to be without each other. They seem to co arise. So, you know, are they more one thing than we think? There’s certainly a deep interconnection and co arising between them.
00:26:16 – Radhule Weininger
There is. And then with body too. You know, body is also co rising with emotions. Maybe the difference is thoughts just in their pure form don’t have so many physical residues, but emotions do. And you know, we feel them in our bodies as a tightness in the chest or not in the stomach or hot or cold or whatever it is. The core rising is just the right word and it’s just how can we hold them? And I guess if we have this wider perspective, you know, if there is the sense of awareness also having a field quality, there’s a spaciousness that’s bigger and that holds us all in which we are all interdependent and co rising like Joanna says. You know Joanna, who actually was this morning at our meditation.
00:27:19 – Eric Zimmer
Oh, how lovely.
00:27:20 – Radhule Weininger
Yeah, she’s there many mornings and so she says that everything is co rising and interdependent and that interdependence then brings compassion.
00:27:36 – Eric Zimmer
So let’s move a little bit into your program of healing. You’ve got 12 steps of healing. And these are not to be confused with the 12 steps of say AA or a 12 step program. These are different 12 steps and we’re not going to make our way through all 12 of them. But I thought we might pick a couple out, if that’s okay.
00:27:57 – Radhule Weininger
Sure.
00:27:57 – Eric Zimmer
The first one is to recognize what your LRPP or your LIRP is. And you have 12 different things that might be a clue to us. Can you just mention what a couple of those are?
00:28:10 – Radhule Weininger
Yeah. The first one is that we feel it in our bodies. You know, something hits us or we feel winded or suddenly our head hurts or we feel a tightness in our jaw or our chest or hot or cold or something happens and it’s like, oh, wow, I don’t feel right. And then often there is an emotion that’s bigger than the situation would warranted. Or would be expected. You know, why does this bend me so out of shape? You know, somebody disinvited me from their book club. Why is that so real?
00:28:50 – Eric Zimmer
And now I’m gonna burn the city to the ground.
00:28:56 – Radhule Weininger
Right. Except exactly. Exactly. And then rumination. You talked about rumination. You know, our mind spins. We wake up at night between three and four, and the mind just goes and can’t stop. We can’t fall back asleep or early in the morning. Or maybe we feel a sense of, you know, like post traumatic stress symptoms, like a sense of unreality or maybe a bit of tunnel feeling or a bit of dissociation or something like that may happen. Or a generalization. You know, we feel, oh, wow, it was just the book club that rejected me. But now I feel the world is against me. You know, we generalize out from the book club to the world.
00:29:49 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah.
00:29:49 – Radhule Weininger
So these are a few of those.
00:29:51 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. One of them you mentioned, and you sort of hit it. There is this narrowing awareness, and that’s probably the one for me. My mode of LERP coming up is shut down. It’s just the power down. You know, my awareness just shrinks till it’s just like me sitting, you know, sort of immobilized. Luckily, that rarely happens to that degree anymore. But I can remember many experiences where, like, it would happen. And that was the thing for me was just this almost complete sort of shutdown.
00:30:22 – Radhule Weininger
Shut down. Right. And it shuts itself down. You know, we don’t even say, okay, now I’m shutting down. It just happens.
00:30:31 – Eric Zimmer
Yes. Yes.
00:30:32 – Radhule Weininger
And that is so insidious.
00:30:34 – Eric Zimmer
No to that insidious nature of it. I often think about. This is particularly poignant for me right now. I’m going to see my dad this weekend. My dad has Alzheimer’s and he’s declining quickly. And we never had a great relationship. And I would periodically throughout my adult life, I would be like, all right, I’m, you know, I’m going to play golf today with my dad and I’m gonna like, dive under the surface with him. Right. I’m gonna, like, make a deeper connection with him. And I would get in his presence and all of a sudden that desire would just vanish.
00:31:05 – Radhule Weininger
Oh, yeah.
00:31:06 – Eric Zimmer
And so it wasn’t even like I was consciously choosing like, oh, I’m afraid to do this. This feels too risky. It was like all that desire to do it just gone.
00:31:17 – Radhule Weininger
Yeah.
00:31:17 – Eric Zimmer
And it was like you said, it’s so insidious because I thought, oh, I guess I don’t really want it. And I Was like, no, I don’t. You know, with some more reflection, I was like, that’s not actually what’s happening here. Right. Just the situation is triggering a shutdown process that happens completely unconsciously.
00:31:34 – Radhule Weininger
Yeah, it is. It’s very unconscious, you know, and we have to be really patient with ourselves. And, you know, besides mindfulness as the next step, you know, noticing our feelings and thoughts and body symptoms and being aware of them, there’s self compassion. Because I think first when we see, we see. And sometimes it’s too much. Oh, I didn’t want to see all of that, you know, so how shut down I am or how bent out of shape I am or how great my craving is or whatever, you know, so how rejected and ashamed I feel. And so I think we need this. I call it a psycho spiritual container of mindfulness and compassion and patience with ourselves and really a lot of kindness.
00:32:54 – Eric Zimmer
I’m wondering if you could say a little bit more about practicing self compassion, because I think it’s something that more and more everybody is aware is probably a good idea and is really, really difficult.
00:33:07 – Radhule Weininger
It’s diffic.
00:33:08 – Eric Zimmer
You actually describe a situation in the book that happened early in the pandemic where you sort of spiraled into a LERP and, you know, you were finding it hard to give yourself self compassion. Can you talk about how you found your way through that?
00:33:20 – Radhule Weininger
Oh, with my ex husband, yeah. Yeah. So I felt really triggered because, you know, we always, even though we get along really well, there’s this thing about the kids. Where do the kids live? And which actually I hear a lot of people can understand well and identify with. And then I felt just again overlooked and not heard and not recognized and kind of frustrated with myself that I couldn’t get with it better, you know, why can’t I just let it go, you know, and so noticing my own lerp, why this was hitting me so badly. And also his lerp, he comes from a similarly wounded family to mine. And I think that’s often with our partners. I think some smart psychologist said we are meeting often people on a similar level of development or not development. So we meet others that are also having their lerps. They are then our exes, and we have to share our kids with them. And so it needs a lot of compassion to hold us, to find our way through.
00:34:44 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. So I assume for you, some of what’s happening in that moment is you’ve got all these things happening, and as you said, there’s a little bit of, you know, why can’t I let this go, right? Like, I’m a psychologist, I’m writing a book, I’m a mindfulness teacher. Like, what’s the matter with you? And I think anybody who’s been working with these things for a while is going to have some flavor of that, right? Some flavor of. I know the answer here. I interviewed the poet David White yesterday and he had a line that just really hit me and he said, heartbreak is when we’re called to let go and can’t. And I thought, oh my goodness, like that just really landed for me.
00:35:24 – Radhule Weininger
Yeah, that is good.
00:35:25 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. So you’re in this place where you feel like I should be doing better, but I’m obviously not. So how do you find self compassion for yourself there?
00:35:33 – Radhule Weininger
I think with experience, I think it becomes almost like a new pathway, a new habit. I think once we are able to have it once or twice or three times, it’s more possible again to do that. And sometimes remembering the little kid I was, you know, the isolation and not self pity, but self empathy. And that also, if I don’t see myself as a psychologist, this adult who’s tough, but if I see myself in my more wounded form and vulnerable form, then I can have more compassion.
00:36:17 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. And you have practices in the book for this. You’ve got a few that you use specifically for self compassion. And I wonder if you could share a little bit about one of the practices. There were three that sort of jumped out to me. There was Recognizing Ourselves practice, Understanding our Suffering practice, or the good enough parent practice. Pick one and tell us a little bit about what it is or how you do it.
00:36:43 – Radhule Weininger
What was the second one you mentioned?
00:36:45 – Eric Zimmer
The second one was Recognizing Ourselves practice.
00:36:49 – Radhule Weininger
Right. So I think really allowing yourself to get into a relaxed place to allow yourself to feel your body, your breath, and especially to recognize in your body where you feel raw and where you feel vulnerable. You know, it’s like maybe even put your hand on your heart and they found out this has actually a physiological effect to do that. And then in your mind’s eye bring to mind this feeling that you might have of rejection or maybe of being left out or missing out or whatever it is. And to feel, where is this? Maybe it is in my heart going right through to my back and stay with that felt sense. And then maybe having an image come up from a time when we were small where we felt that sense of heartache, maybe a rawness, a tightness in the heart, in the back, all the way through, where that was maybe a bit of nausea in the Stomach, maybe a little bit of lightheadedness, and bring in this child, you know, that exile, as they call it now, an internal family systems. You know, bring in the exile and give them your love, your attention, your kindness, and feel with them and maybe even feel what it felt like for them physically. You know, it’s kind of unexile, the exile. Make them your kin again, your internal kin, and really feel that in your body. And maybe there will be some compassion, maybe there will be some forgiveness. You know, sometimes we have to forgive ourselves for being in the wrong time, in the wrong place or whatever happens, and then really staying in connection with the breath, breathing through it all and coming back to body and breath with self acceptance.
00:39:20 – Eric Zimmer
You know, as I read your book and I look at the practices, there’s a part of me having done 400 of these interviews where I look at them and I go, okay, well, I’ve seen a lot of this before. Right. I really think though, the way that you sort of combine the spiritual and the psychologic is really well done. There really is within these practices, instead of talking about the two being complementary, there actually is a commingling of them. The good enough parent practice being, you know, sort of an example of that or the understanding our suffering practice. There’s mindfulness, there’s awareness, and there’s current moment awareness and mindfulness, and there’s bringing some of the psychological things into that. And I think that container is interesting. You use the word psycho spiritual container, which is it’s one thing to sit in, say, our therapist’s office and talk about a certain thing, and it’s a different thing to do it when we’re in a slightly different state of mind, one where we have relaxed the body, where we have dropped deeper into our awareness, which is what a lot of your practices are calling us to do. They’re sort of centering us, dropping us in, and then allowing us to try and process some of those things from that place.
00:40:46 – Radhule Weininger
Exactly. And I think that’s something I’m becoming more and more cognizant and aware of, that this wider perspective is really helpful and the wider spiritual container. And I think some people are catching on to that, like Richard Schwartz from ifs. You know, how the big self is really helpful, especially with personal woundings. I just saw that a few weeks ago and I thought, wow, he’s coming to a similar place. I didn’t even know, you know. So I think now we have permission to bring the psychological and the spiritual together. And soon insurance companies will even pay for it, no, you know, you know, it’s like time is moving on probably with the urgency of the times. We need it. We need the strengthening of the holding container. Just the psychological is not enough. And I feel maybe what helped me is that I kind of intuitively knew that all along, since 1980, but I felt I had to do it in secret because my spiritual teachers or my therapist didn’t know, you know, and they were in different camps. And now we are becoming one camp and which is so beautiful. And that is what our world needs. And to have this camp without card membership, you know, we don’t have to be Christians or Jews or Muslims or man. We can be, but maybe we can also be more than that or we can be neither of it.
00:42:34 – Eric Zimmer
Well, I certainly think we have way more options on the table for us, which is in many ways a very good thing as you’ve described. And yet I’m also struck by looking at some of the practices in the book that you’ve got. And again, these are awareness mindfulness practices. Recognizing that that word practice is really important, that you’re able to do some of these things because you have developed some mindfulness, some stability. You know, I think we have a tendency. I certainly have had one over the years. I think I’ve gotten better at it and I. I’ve learned. But it used to be like, pick up a book, read it, because I’m like, okay, oh, finally I’ve got something that’s going to fix me. And I read the book and it says, do this practice. And I half heartedly do it while I read the book. And then I go, that didn’t do anything. And I set it aside and I go, well, all right, what’s next? You know, versus really realizing that this is deep work that as you said, I quoted kind of very early on is, you know, we have to do it thoroughly and persistently and cannot be in a hurry.
00:43:39 – Radhule Weininger
Yeah. And you know, there is. Do you know this quote by Jack Kornfield? The miraculous to happen is an accident, but practice makes us accident prone.
00:43:51 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah.
00:43:52 – Radhule Weininger
You know, I think practice makes us accident prone.
00:43:55 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah.
00:43:56 – Radhule Weininger
And it kind of keeps a channel open not only to our own heart, but also to the great heart of the world.
00:44:06 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. So what would you say to someone who is feeling like they’ve been working on this stuff for a while and they still feel like, you know, I get just all wrapped up in my lurps. I’m doing this stuff for 30 years and I still just feel like stuck. What words of wisdom Would you have for people who are kind of in that place?
00:44:27 – Radhule Weininger
Well, I would say I know the feeling. Recently at a retreat, it happened to me, you know, I was at this four week retreat in Spirit walk and I did actually a little Dzogchen thing with two other teachers and during the four week retreat and then when I came, the other people I was doing that with, they were doing this together for a long time. They said, oh, we don’t know if we want you in our group. And for two days I didn’t hear anything from them. And it really lurked me, you know, because Spirit rock had been the place of working through lerps for me. And I thought, oh, here I am with my lerp. You know, it really helped to find out that my LERP was still well and alive, but that I noticed it. And then after two days they said, oh, it’s all fine, you know, we just do this together. And everything puffed away, you know, all the stress. And I actually thought, isn’t this interesting? Usually I would have been chewing on my lure for probably two to three weeks. And now it was two days where it passed, you know, and it just puffed away. So I would say it will still come up, but it will pass maybe a little quicker.
00:45:51 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. The thing I often think about is what would I be like had I not done so many of the things that I’ve done. So it’s very easy to habituate to what my current state of mind is and be like, okay, well you know, but then to look at like how far in some ways we’ve all come. And I think that’s an important part of the journey is to sometimes reflect and go, oh geez, you know, I’m not free from suffering because you know what, I’m human, so of course I’m not going to be. But you know, it’s not like this work hasn’t borne a lot of fruit. You know, it’s just not perfection because sometimes we get sold or we want, you know, we all naturally want a pain free life.
00:46:30 – Radhule Weininger
That is right. And in a way marketing and advertisement pushes us to that to not be terribly modest and you know, to kind of overstate ourselves. And you know, so I think that that’s unfortunately part of even here in our psycho spiritual community, we are definitely not free from that totally. And there’s a big challenge to our authenticity and our humility. It’s like if you’re too humble, you won’t be anybody. But then we don’t want to be anybody because there’s no self. Well, where do we go? It’s a tough one. And to just, again, maybe be compassionate with our human condition. And we are always teetering between the personal and the universal reality. You know, we have to get our driver’s license renewed. And also, at times, we are really at one with the universe.
00:47:36 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. When I think of Jack Kornfield more than anything else, I think of the phrase that he’s used so many times. It’s not his phrase, but he’s used it so many times that I so associated with him is the 10,000 joys and the 10,000 sorrows. And that for me is just one of the most grounding ideas for me. Whichever side of that I’m on, I go, oh, okay, yeah, normal, you know, and if I’m on the 10,000 sorrow side, I go, okay, that’s normal. And, you know, there’s some joys coming around the corner because, you know, and if I’m on the joy side, I’m not surprised. Let’s wrap up with sharing a little bit more about step 11, which is letting in the mystery. I know we’ve touched on it a little bit. It’s always a great place to go. So I’ll hand it over to you with no specific question there. So much as talk about the role of letting in the mystery in this healing process.
00:48:25 – Radhule Weininger
You know, it’s really coming to the experiential place that the mystery is here, that it’s more than a thought, it’s more than a concept. And I think there are practices like the Tibetan pointing out, practices that allow us to get to this place, or I think Locke Kelly does it these days in a more accessible way. And actually, that’s kind of how I teach these days because I think it’s so important to experience physically and energetically the great interconnected beingness of us all, and to feel that awareness can sink from my prefrontal cortex into my heart, into life around me, and that inside and outside is actually not that different and that they are interconnected and that I can see, even be mindful from that greater perspective. And it’s quite interesting. It’s in a way, like being in a flow state state, you know, we can actually be very alive and very aware and very attentive from this place. It’s not being spacey, it’s actually being hyper aware, yet relaxed at the same time and connected. And I find that is, for me, one aspect of the great mystery. And we can connect it however we want through our heart when we are really in our heart we feel this complete openness. Love is probably the main entry point to the great mystery. But then, you know, if there are prayers we have from our childhood, from whatever religious upbringing we have, that is fine to bring them in. You know, often in the beginning of a practice, mindfulness or effortless mindfulness practice, I start with a heart opening. And not just because I think it’s a good thing, but also because it calms our mind, it calms our whole system down. It’s like a little child that is afraid and when a mother holds it and comforts it, then it feels secure and then the ruminating busy mind calms down. Then our heart becomes like the doorway to the great mystery. And it actually was Henry Miller who at Epidaurus in Greece say when my little heart beats in unison with the great heart of the world. It’s a beautiful quote. And I think that’s like to speak with Joanna Macy that when we can be in touch with the great mystery and come to engagement for our world. Because part of the great mystery is compassion is love. And I think Ram Dass was one who was really telling us that, you know, it’s like you swim in God, you know, you swim in love. And I think with that love we can hold our lurps, you know, then with that love we can be patient with our lurk that love. We have enough space.
00:51:55 – Eric Zimmer
Well I think that is an absolutely beautiful and perfect place to wrap up. So thank you so much for coming on the show and spending time with us. I really enjoyed the book. I think there’s a lot of great practices. The practices are available. I believe if you get the book you get linked to all the practices as guided meditations.
00:52:15 – Radhule Weininger
Yeah.
00:52:16 – Eric Zimmer
And we’ll have a link in the show notes to where people, people can buy the book and also to your website and all that stuff.
00:52:21 – Radhule Weininger
Yeah. And you know you can even have the practices without the book. Maybe I’m not a good salesperson but on my website you can find them and you can find them on the Shambhala website. And I teach every morning 7:30 to 8 and you just come in through mindfulheartprograms.org and it’s free. I’m quite stubborn to not put a price on the meditations. We have a few other great teachers so anytime join us.
00:52:53 – Eric Zimmer
I assume that’s Pacific Time. 7:30 Pacific Time.
00:52:56 – Radhule Weininger
Yeah, it’s Pacific Time. And Monday night 7:15 and Monday mornings we have a wonderful meditation at 10:00 in the morning and actually a lot of Europeans are joining us to that one.
00:53:12 – Eric Zimmer
Well, again, thank you so much.
00:53:14 – Radhule Weininger
It was really a wonderful interview. And thank you so much for your wonderful presence.
00:53:21 – Eric Zimmer
Thank you.
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