Ralph De La Rosa on the Mind as Your Teacher

Ralph De La Rosa is a psychotherapist in private practice in NYC. He specializes in helping people resolve their childhood traumas, anxiety, depression and intimacy issues. You might have seen his work in places like CNN, GQ, Self, or Women’s Health. His new book is called The Monkey is the Messenger and it is an instructional and revolutionary look at what it means to attend and befriend ones self. In this interview, he shares some of the key practices that are most helpful along this journey. 

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 In This Interview, Ralph De La Rosa and I Discuss…

• His book, The Monkey is the Messenger
• The truest sentence he knows – there’s always more to the story
• The monkey – what it is and why it’s on our side
• The monkey mind as our teacher
• The monkey mind drives us towards meditation and away from meditation
• Our triggers are on the surface and they are connected to something deeper within us that’s unhealed. We can absolutely get to that root through mindfulness and meditation.
• The value of showing up for a daily practice
• Drawing the attention out of our head and into our body gets our brain activated in the right hemisphere
• The right hemisphere – nonlinguistic, free of chatter
• Emotions are held in the body
• The unconscious mind is accessed in the body because emotions show up in our body
• Radical Nonpathology
• Love, gratification and safety are at the root
• How can I be happy? How can I avoid suffering?
• What looks pathological are our misguided attempts to meet these root needs and drivers
• Holding our emotions like children
• Using circumstances to heal rather than being retraumatized through emotional warmth
• That difficult emotions are messengers to us
• Abandoning or ignoring any part of ourselves is equivalent to enacting aggression towards ourselves. 
• How Vinny Ferraro says you can’t hate your way into enlightenment
• The inner critic
• Emotions always follow a logic

Ralph De La Rosa Links

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