How to Find Your Path to Healing and Post-Traumatic Growth with Ralph De La Rosa

Many of us haven't encountered somebody who really exudes love and compassion such that our nervous system knows what that's like and has a reference point for how to get there.

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Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Ralph De La Rosa, a psychotherapist in private practice in New York City. He specializes in helping people resolve their early childhood traumas, anxiety, depression, and intimacy issues.

Ralph began practicing meditation in 1996 and has taught meditation since 2008. He's a regular teacher at venues such as Spirit Rock, Omega Institute, and Crapalu. Today, Eric and Ralph discuss his newest book, Outshining Trauma, a new vision of radical self-compassion, integrating internal family systems and Buddhist meditation.

Also, I haven't mentioned this in a while. Please go to our YouTube channel and subscribe. There you can watch the One You Feed podcast interviews live at One You Feed Pod on YouTube. Hi, Ralph. Welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me, Eric. I don't know how many times this is. It's three, maybe? I don't know. But you've been on a number of times in the past. I'm happy to have you on again. You have a new book out, and I was just telling you what a wonderful writer you are.

The book is called Outshining Trauma, a new vision of radical self-compassion, integrating internal family systems and Buddhist meditation. So we're going to talk all about that in a moment, but we will start in the traditional way, which is where I read this parable to you and see what you think.

There's a grandparent who's talking with a grandchild and they say, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always a 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. The grandchild stops. They think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent. They say, 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 and your life and in the work that you do.

Oh, you know me, Eric, I'm going to make it complex because it begs the question, what are they being fed? And if the so-called bad wolf were fed, heartful energies, compassion, emotional nourishment, wisdom, teachings, what would happen to that bad wolf? And could they unite with the so-called good wolf or at least harmonize? Right?

You know, we've had lots of people talk about honoring and treating the bad wolf well, but it's the first time anybody's, I think, brought up exactly what is the food involved? Yeah. Well, I mean, this is how healing works, right? That which is distraught within us, that which is distorted, that which is mangled up in bruised is really a product of

love deprivation of some form, right? Like that's one way we could frame trauma, right? Is love being betrayed or withheld? And for me, that tells us what the antidote is, the restoration of love and compassion in someone's life.

Let's start kind of at the beginning and talk about trauma. What trauma is what it means to you? So let's spend a few minutes there before we get into the healing of that trauma. So what's a simple working definition for you of trauma? Yeah, so I defined it in the new book as any adverse experience wherein one's defense mechanisms are mobilized, which comes with a lot of neurochemical activity.

But those defenses are rendered useless for any reason, for any reason. And so trauma then is not just the activation of all those neurochemicals that are quite intense and quite toxic, frankly, cortisol is one of the most toxic chemicals that can be in the body long term.

but then they have nowhere to go and then what goes with traumatic stress because not all trauma becomes traumatic stress and all traumatic stress becomes PTSD but then if a person is met with other circumstances such as not being heard such as maybe having to

deal with alienating doctors or police or living in poverty and all of the phenomenal amount of stressors that come with that sort of situation, then that sort of adverse experience where one's defenses are immobilized or rendered useless in the context, in a social context, that is, again, a love-deprived kind of situation. Yeah, then we're looking at not just traumatic experience, but major traumatic stress.

So any time our defense mechanisms are invoked but unable to be effective is kind of a working definition. I want to ask a question about trauma from a slightly different angle. Sure. You say at one point in the book,

that we should think of trauma as on a spectrum versus you have it or don't have it, which I think is wise with nearly anything that we're talking about in the mental realm. You know, we exist on a spectrum of things. You also say that by doing that, it allows us to honor the crucial role that subjectivity plays in the forming of traumas. And then you say, after all, our brains don't respond to actualities, but to perceptions.

So I want to ask from that lens, is there a way in which trauma is preventable?

Or is there a way in which things that are being deemed traumatic by certain people could be non-traumatic to other people? The one thing that a lot of critics say these days is the definition of trauma has just expanded, expanded, expanded to include almost like my door-dash order didn't come last night, right? And I know that's not what you're writing about, but I'm curious about that subjective angle.

Yeah, the subjectivity plays a humongous role, because again, yeah, the brain doesn't know the difference between your imagination, which perception is essentially imagination, actually. Right. If we really look at how it's generated in the brain, the brain doesn't know the difference between that and the objective reality. It only knows the subjective.

And so I think I even cite the example of like, you know, getting a nasty text message and then the person blocks you. That technically fits the definition of a trauma. Now, again, whether or not that turns into traumatic stress that one holds in their body long term and then becomes a crucial factor in their life depends on a lot of things. But I'll tell you about one thing I'm learning about recently, Eric, is there's this new term. It's not an official diagnosis, but

It's a new and very helpful term called rejection sensitive dysphoria. It's being researched now and it's considered that up to 95% of people with ADHD have this. Because part of being ADHD or neurodivergent is you come off weird to other people and you get thousand yards stairs wherever you go where people take you the wrong way and you get rejected a lot.

And over time, that accrues, that builds up in the nervous system. It's like death by, you know, not death by a thousand paper cuts, you know, death by a billion paper cuts. And that begins to really matter. And so this is far flung, but given how wild and alive, frankly, our neurological systems are, there's a situation that I could imagine in which somebody with rejection sensitive dysphoria, one of the things they're starting to understand about it is even,

something like getting a text message and the person blocks you, which is a literal rejection, or even your door dash order getting messed up, that the perception of rejection itself, even if it's not actually happening, the nervous system itself reacts as if it is.

Right. This is a real thing out there. And so in the context of somebody living with that kind of nervous system that's heightened to a great extent, yeah, little things that are totally negligible to other people might amount to a big deal to somebody at the neurological level, meaning separate from their personality, separate from their volition and their conscious awareness. And that person still has a choice about what to do with that internal eruption

But that's simple and not easy. Then we could go to the other end of the spectrum of, you know, we know that material privilege is a mitigating factor when it comes to traumatic experience, not becoming traumatic stress. We know that emotional intelligence, that a sense of spirituality, sense of community is really huge, a huge predictor of whether or not trauma becomes traumatic stress. So there's all kinds of factors that could be put around a person

That would make one thing negligible that is deeply adverse to the person standing right next to them. Later in the book, you talk about healing from an upward spiral perspective. I talk about upward and downward spirals a lot. As you were talking, I was thinking of trauma in that way. It becomes a downward spiral if you're rejected in some way.

Now you are more afraid of being rejected, and then that could cause you to be rejected, you spiral down. It made me think of the cruel conclusion of a lot of loneliness studies, which is the more you're isolated, the more you start to see neutral as threatening.

And so you end up getting lost, you know, getting trapped in your own sort of loop, right? And I think the same thing must be true in a traumatic sense, right? That over time, you might become conceivably more and more sensitive to smaller and smaller things that, again, to your point, quote-unquote, normal person would say, well, what's the big deal? But for that person based on a long history that kind of winds its way back, you see how it could be a big deal.

Oh, yeah, definitely, definitely. And it is interesting how we can enter into what I call a hall of mirrors, like in a haunted house where it's kind of an infinity loop of mirrors going back and forth, but one of them's warped. And so the image changes when it's reflected back to you, right? Like that. It's a great example. Yeah. So the mind can make, I forget who said this, that the mind is a place of its own. It can make a heaven out of hell and a hell out of heaven. Yeah.

I need to find the source of that quote. Yeah, I want to say Blake, but I'm not sure if that's true. Okay. So we've talked about trauma as this adverse experience where our defense mechanisms are mobilized. You talk about one of trauma's overarching effects is a narrowing. Talk to me about what you mean by narrowing. Well, you actually just gave us a very elegant example of it with the last question. Honestly, what you were describing that downward spiral

that has everything to do with somebody's subjective perception and not necessarily what's actually happening, but it's real to a human body. That's a form of narrowing someone's social world getting smaller and smaller, someone's perceptions of possibility and perceptions of the humanity around them getting more and more contracted.

It's quite literal too at a neurological level that in any moment of stress, we get a form of tunnel vision that we don't even necessarily notice in the moment until we snap out of it, we feel better and there's a sense of space. But any time stress arises in the body, there's a sense of contraction of our awareness, our muscular and facial system, it all contracts, but then that is also a psychological metaphor too around our self-esteem.

Our community, we're seeing this hugely in our world right now that our sense of community and the loneliness epidemic that's going on or how many people in the face of the pandemic started saying, you know what, I actually like this isolation thing. This works for me.

Yeah. Yeah. Or how many people it didn't work for, but they were so habituated to it after we were coming out of the pandemic that it was difficult to learn. You know, people have been saying, I've been learning how to human again. You know, so that's another example of a sense of contraction. But, you know, all the way up to and including our sense of connection to nature, to wonder, to spirituality, our sense of connection to our life's purpose, the really big stuff can also become

quite narrow, quite contracted, and we can feel quite limited when traumatic stress is abiding in the body and totally unmet.

There's one other description you use of trauma that I think can be helpful to understand. And you say, trauma becomes like a record skipping in the same spot, unable to complete the natural continuum of the song. So everything moves in cycles in nature. Every cycle wants to complete itself whether we're talking about the cycles of the seasons, the cycle of breath. And we certainly have emotional and mental patterns as well.

And when traumatic experience disrupts the nervous system, we can think about just how many thoughts we have that perseverate on the same point over and over again, or how if you get in an argument with somebody, you might stay up till three in the morning thinking about what you should have said, or the way you could have got them better. That's one small example of what can go on.

All of us have emotional patterns in our lives, right? Like, I mean, my go-to is depression. That's one pattern that's been in my life since I was very small. Other people have anxiety as what's on their heavy rotation, so to speak. And so what trauma does is basically amplifies that natural continuum and makes it so that a person gets stuck in a loop that isn't of their

pre-born disposition isn't necessarily of their personality or will, but is a conditioning of the nervous system. And really, I think that those repetitive cycles that we enter into is actually the body asking us for healing. I talk about this to a great deal in my first book, The Monkey is a messenger that if we think about it, those repeat experiences where maybe we're projecting

Something that happened in childhood onto a person who's in front of us right now is in a way the nervous system saying, hey, I didn't get my needs met. The first go around. I'm hoping to get them met now. And I'll just say briefly, the hopeful aspect of this is, first of all, anytime there's a cycle that repeats, you can get to know that cycle and learn the moment in the cycle that you can drop out of it. You can break the cycle if you get to know it.

And two, the love and compassion we didn't get, the first go around, we can actually offer to ourselves to respond to that question of the nervous system, hey, can I get this need met this time? And in that way, we kind of smooth out the skipping of the record.

That makes a lot of sense. I love that word perseverate. I have been thinking about it a lot lately. You know, I think any of us watch our mental world and there are things we perseverate upon. And I've just been very tuned into that in myself lately, just like, oh, there it is. You're persevering again.

on this thing that you've sort of already decided the plan of action of what you're going to do and yet you keep sort of thinking about it. There's one school of thought that that mental activity is just fluff. It's meaningless. And I actually hold that view in contention. I think that that's parts of us kind of tugging at our shirt sleeve saying, hey, hey, there's something here. Hey, there's something here. Pay attention to me. Pay attention to me.

So that idea has been on my mind a lot recently, but I've also thought about it for years.

which is to what extent do we take what's coming up in us as something that needs attention and we should focus on? And to what extent is it a habitual pattern that just sort of comes up and there's not much to do with it, right? And so my depression is one I've thought about and I go back and forth on this, right? On one side of me, I find myself in a depressed state and I think, okay, it's trying to tell me something. What message am I not getting?

But on the other hand, there are times that I've felt like it's been very useful for me to go, oh, this is just like having the emotional flu. Don't make a big fuss out of this. Take care of yourself in the way you normally take care of it, and it'll pass. And I kind of go back and forth with those things because a lot of times I've examined that and I haven't found anything.

You know, I go into examine it and all I find is just blankness. I'm like, okay, well. And so trying to know when something is worth excavating and when something is worth sort of treating as noise is a difficult thing, I think, to figure out. Yes, it can be. What enters the conversation here is the internal family systems model and the view of the human psyche that's presented in that model. And in particular,

this notion that we can be blended with the contents of our minds, or we can be unblended. In other words, we could be all wrapped up in those thoughts and feeling things and kind of like the body experiencing it as if whatever the content of those thoughts is happening right now. Or we could learn how to step back from those thoughts and be more of a witness, be more of an observer,

we can unblend and put a little space between us and that mental activity and take a look at it. And when we do that, we're in a much better position to discern, is this what we might call an IFS trailhead? An opening to something that could take me down a path that would be worth exploring? Or is it just mental noise, the natural chaos of our neurology?

you

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there does seem to be a certain amount of, like you said, natural noise and chaos that does resemble a habitual pattern. It is a habitual pattern. It's just a thought, I think, about a lot, trying to sort of determine when to delve deep and when to say, like, OK, let's keep moving here. I think if we can be curious, though, about that and not assume that it's mental fluff and kind of get inquisitive within ourselves and maybe even ask questions inside of ourselves from a place of curiosity,

This is another internal family system saying that actually I find quite magic that if you're in a curious place and you start inquiring about parts of you inside that are active in your mind, oftentimes you get answers and sometimes they're very surprising. Somebody might start with, hey, I seem to be obsessed with my inbox, for example, in like whether somebody's emailing me back or not or whether somebody's texting me back or not. And I keep perseverating on that. It creates a thought loop for me.

Well, you could get curious about that thought loop, and the content of it is what? Like, I'm maybe abandoned, or there's FOMO I'm missing out on something? You might be surprised if you start exploring, you know, are there emotions in there? Are there sensations in the body? What happens if you get curious about it for a moment? And when you start getting in touch with what lies beneath the surface,

A lot of times, I mean, I see this constantly in my therapy practice and in sitting with folks in meditation groups where we do this work, that somebody will arrive at a place of like, oh yeah, when I was a kid at school, nobody included me and I felt ostracized all the time. I felt othered, I was bullied perhaps or at home. I was the middle kid who felt like they were never special enough or something like that. There's so many examples of kind of a core wound.

that could belie what appears like something superficial. Or I'm just obsessed with whether they texted me back or not.

And I think that the amount of emotional energy that's present also can be an indicator sometimes. I have a couple of thought patterns, like phrases that come up that are very... I mean, things like, I hate myself, comes up for a second. And sometimes I will examine that and just realize, it doesn't feel like there's anything... Actually, that's not true because I've identified what, when that comes up, it usually is, right? It's usually...

a realization that I am not going to be able to make somebody happy. It's a realization that either I'm going to have to make a decision that's going to make somebody unhappy or I'm caught between two people. If I do this, then they're happy, but then they won't be happy. And so I've kind of started to realize that that's what that is. So I guess, as I'm saying this out loud, I am recognizing that I spent the time to diagnose and understand what it was.

So that when it comes up now i can kind of look at it and allow it to in a sense become noise because to a certain degree because i've recognized what it is. Yeah that's what i would call benevolent ignoring right like in the name of love i've got to let just let that be a stream of thought on the side.

You know, but one could also choose to take that as a part of themselves that maybe again has missed out on love and compassion in some way. You could explore the history of that. You know, very well might come down to a core wound, something experienced in childhood, something maybe even that you thought was negligible. That happens all the time.

one could also enter into a relationship with that voice inside. What is that voice really trying to do? You said there's a fear there around, I'm not going to be able to make someone happy. And so I would suggest maybe that's a defense mechanism.

of like trying to get you to avoid the risk of even trying by feeling low and small about yourself, right? Which is necessarily a method of trying to keep yourself emotionally safe, even if it's confused, even if it's distorted and off. It's still a part of you that's actually, if we look at it from a certain angle is acting benevolently with a voice of like, I hate myself.

which is bananas. I know it's convoluted, and yet this is what we discover all the time in when we do this deeper curiosity based searching inside and inquiring inside.

So there's a lot there. And again, just something that seemed like ephemera. Actually, it was the tip of an iceberg, basically. Right. I love that idea of benevolent ignoring at points. And it makes me think a little bit about cravings for drugs and alcohol.

Yeah, like trying to discern, you know, when is this craving telling me something important? And when is this craving a physiological response or habitual response and working with that energy also? And don't we both know it has four drug addicts, both of us, you know, and with heroin, the most intense of all.

I mean fentanyl now has come along and not that statement out of the water right everybody has craving in their lives everybody has some level of compulsive behavior some sort of self numbing self medicating kind of thing in their lives and this is something we get into in section three of the book on inner reparenting.

That you have to learn how to also hold a benevolent no and let that part of you have a tantrum and maybe throw a fit and you know there's that whole modality of urge surfing where you say no to the urge and you watch it crest and you ride the wave.

as it gets really intense, knowing that eventually it will die down and you'll go back to your homeostasis. But you raise a whole different point around, is there a different kind of need that's blind that craving in me?

Right. Versus, again, just writing it off as mental fluff, something to ignore, and that doesn't have any meaning to it. Right. So let's spend a couple minutes on IFS. You've referenced it a couple times. Some listeners are going to be familiar with internal family systems. We did an interview with Richard Schwartz, who's the founder of IFS, but that's a big part of this book, is internal family systems. So give us the couple-minute overview of what IFS is.

Sure, so IFS is rooted in the insight that we have a natural multiplicity to our psychological being. In other words, just like your body is constructed of many parts and yet it's one body, but your hand is a distinct part and yet it too is the body. It works like that with our psyches as well.

We can identify that there are defensive parts of us, there are parts of us that hold woundings, usually in the background, and there's parts of us that are trying to manage our lives and proactively hold us together, keep the ship from falling apart. And yet, beyond that, we have, you know, heart energy as well. We have what in IFS is called self with capital S,

that we know to be present any time there's the sense of openness inside that might have some calm to it, might have some love, some curiosity, some friendliness, openness. And so we identify all of these mind states as discrete parts that are in relationship with one another. And the idea here is it really is an internal family. We have all of these parts that are sometimes in conflict with one another, you know, called being at war with myself.

Everybody experiences that probably every day, you know, one part of me wants to see the other part of me knows that that's a bad idea and I'm struggling now with it, right? And so the idea here is internal family, meaning I can begin to assume these different parts of my mind are like individual family members wherein everybody wants the same thing.

to be seen, to be heard, to feel held, to feel safe, to feel loved, to feel respected, appreciated, just like in any literal external family, everybody wants those same things. And when we begin a process of offering self-love, self-compassion to these different aspects of our psyches, something really beautiful begins to happen.

Those parts of our minds begin to shift their presentation, and we tend to organically begin moving in the direction of healing, insight, awakening, transformation, whatever you want to call it. So that's the basic gist.

Okay, so we have these different parts inside of us, which all of us can recognize at least that multiplicity. And I think even if that's all that we take from IFS, like if that was where you left it, just to recognize that multiplicity inside of us and be able to identify what these different parts of us are wanting to do, I find to be incredibly helpful. Just that very idea.

Think it was young pueblo the poet who said I stayed with my anger long enough to realize its real name was grief Right we all get that we all get that there's these layers to it Yeah, so the idea there is you know that there's also a saying that anger is sad bodyguard, right? You stay with a mental affliction and

long enough to get down to the other parts that are being protected underneath. Nobody wants to have their sadness, their vulnerability, their childhood wounding out on the surface layer, running their lives. They would cease to be able to function, right? And so we need other parts of us to kind of hold that more vulnerable material at bay. And then when that vulnerable material gets triggered, we need parts of us to swoop in and

and address the situation because maybe we're being attacked. Maybe we need to get out of there. Maybe there's a threat to our survival. This is a question that is more curiosity-driven than anything else, which is from a neuroscientific perspective or neurological perspective, do we have any sense of what these parts actually are? Because we're talking in metaphor, right? We're talking in metaphor to some degree, or do you not think we're talking in metaphor?

That is up for debate and the jury is out. Okay. I do think that we're anthropomorphizing the nervous system. And I think that that's the most accessible view that I ordinarily acquiesced to. There are some folks that are like, no, these are real sub personalities that you should treat like other people that are inside of you. There is that view within IFS as well. And I can't actually answer the question, but I do know that there is a neuroscientist, a Buddhist neuroscientist named Kelly McOnigal.

I believe she lives in Japan and she wrote a number of really brilliant books, including The Willpower Instinct. And I do know that she talks about how when different regions of our brain are activated, we are literally a different personality. And so there is some neurological underpinnings of this, but this is something that the folks in the internal family systems world deeply want to study. Like, yo, can we get somebody in an FMRI machine?

doing what we call parts work and entering into self-compassion with like maybe an angry part of oneself and what is happening in a human nervous system when that goes on. I mean what we know with IFS work even though much there is research on it now it is an evidence-based model but we also know anecdotally from therapists and clients and people who experiences work a wide range of people who experiences work that

A lot of what we do find in these processes, these self-compassion processes, are incredibly consistent across the board, such as finding out the anger is protecting a sad part of you, such as finding out that when self-compassion enters the picture, everything inside begins to change its shape somehow. For me, as a therapist,

I've found that if I can really be in the heart of compassion, as I'm sitting with trauma survivors all day, hour after hour, session after session, and I don't like to take breaks in my day either. So if I'm in a space of compassion, genuinely, inside in the body, that day is not going to burn me out.

in the same way as if I'm being analytical with folks and thinking about what's the solution to this problem and just kind of in a maybe a more habitual mind state.

You say that the guiding reality for healing trauma and thus the North Star of the entire book is that we cannot go wrong with compassion. And we've talked about self-compassion. Self-compassion is, I sometimes feel like it's a little bit like for people who really struggle with it. It's a little bit like you can get a loan from a bank when you really don't need one, right? Like you go to the bank, if you really are broke, you're not gonna get a loan. If you got tons of money, they're gonna loan you money. And self-compassion,

If you're broke, feels very hard to get or generate, right? It feels very difficult. How do you encourage your clients or the people in your programs to start to access that energy? Because we do know, I think,

that it is extraordinarily healing and really important for a whole lot of different things. How do we start to get it if the message we've carried and the way we felt about ourselves for most of our lives has been one of really disliking who we are? Great question. Great question. And thankfully, there's a number of answers.

Because you're right, many of us haven't had a model for what that could look like that, that we got to internalize such as an early caregiver, early school teacher. Many of us haven't encountered somebody who really exudes love and compassion such that our nervous system knows what that's like and has a reference point for how to get there. However, there are reference points and models all around us at all times. And the easiest one that I can point to

is the earth. Actually, if we think about the earth, there's a reason why people gender the earth and call it mother earth, right? Because there is, we know that there are negative ions in the earth that put our body into a healing mode. We know that our gut biome absorbs useful bacteria when we're in nature.

We know that the earth is constantly propagating all species of life and the earth has provided even the materials that made this computer that I'm talking to you on and the couch that I'm sitting on and the raw materials of my apartment that I'm in right now. The earth is, you know, propagating species that are recycling the air so that it's the right mix of gases for me to breathe. I mean, if that ain't love,

I don't know what is. That is incredibly generous, and the Earth has a vast creative propensity as well. And so we can relate to the Earth, and I think there are other models that we can relate to, to get in touch with if our minds are open to the natural world and to the reality of the planet that we inhabit, if our minds are open to these ideas,

You know, there's a reason why for centuries, for millennia, for probably as long as humans have been around, spiritual teachings have come from folks going out in nature and just observing the way things were.

Right? So the earth is a nurturer. There's a good model for what compassion is that we can begin to take in. And this is where meditation comes in and something that I love teaching is, is can you get in touch with the earth's presence or at least imagine it? Because again, the brain doesn't know the difference between imagination and reality and begin to take that into your body to create a reference point for yourself.

of what nurturance looks like, what compassion looks like. In case that sounds way too woo-woo for somebody, I'll give you one more. That's a little less out there. Also, there are entry-level states of compassion, calm, curiosity, a little glimmer of openness inside the heart space, friendliness, kindness. These are certainly things that anybody can begin to open to with a little bit of training, a little bit of effort.

And if you follow the thread that that creates within you, you will arrive at compassion eventually. And so not all hope is lost. There's lots of options.

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I like what you said about imagination because I think that imagination can be really useful in these ways. I may not be able to directly feel this thing, but I can imagine it. I can imagine what it would be like. And oftentimes it takes that sort of consistent imagining my experiences before any real feeling comes along. The feelings often lag behind, you know, I read your book or we read somebody else's book and it's like, okay, do this and sit down and visualize that and imagine that and I do it. And I'm like, well,

I didn't really do anything, but continuing to do it a little bit by little bit oftentimes then feeling sort of comes along. It's that old saw that I use all the time of somebody, you can't think you're way into right action. You have to act your way into right thinking. And some of it, the acting in this case is imagining.

Yeah, we could actually do something right now that would take two minutes and would demonstrate what you're talking about to the listener. Are you up for that? Sure. Okay, so for anybody listening, maybe not don't do this if you're driving a car or operating heavy machinery, as they say, but even if you're just doing chores around the house or whatever, you don't even have to close your eyes. You can just take a breath, kind of come into being here with yourself and think of a time when you felt love or compassion coming from someone.

And please don't think of a time that would be very complex, but just a simple time, one moment where maybe somebody looked you in the eye with understanding, or hugged you like they meant it, or showed up for you in a time of need. Something like that. Just think of one moment where love and compassion were flowing towards you. And now, can you imagine what it would be like

If you could really feel that right now in your body, what would that be like to viscerally sense love and compassion flowing into your body? What would shift? And then notice what's happening now that the dial move in that direction, right? I was a quick and dirty version, but if you spend a little more time with that, it can become much more substantial.

I love that trick. It's when I use a lot. Like, if you can't get to gratitude, imagine what it would be like if you could feel a full-bodied thank you. And what that does is it primes our neurological systems to actually have the experience. And it's kind of a workaround in case there's a blockage or resistance. What did you experience just now? I thought of something that my partner, Ginny, does for me when I'm feeling bad. And yeah, it gives a bit of a warm feeling. Yeah.

It's interesting, the other thing I've often done, like a similar example is loving kindness meditation, where you sort of direct kindness to other people. I start by imagining how I feel about, she's passed now, but a dog of mine beansie.

Because that is uncomplicated, simple, and immediate. That's warmth. It's just there. Then I can take that feeling and see if I can move it around. There you go. This is a wise, intelligent use of imagination within the realm of knowing.

this thing about subjectivity in the brain that we've been discussing this whole time, that it's real to the body so often, even if it's not real externally. And I do want to say this is tricky. This is a tricky area in that somebody could be way off in the way that they're using their imagination. But if you are familiar with how basically the architecture of the psyche works and you're using that power for good,

than, you know, very, very useful. Yeah. It also can get tricky because, you know, Kristin Neff talking about self-compassion is said sometimes when you try and practice self-compassion, you imagine it. You are in many ways reminded of all the times you didn't get it, right? So you think about a moment of warmth from your mother and you're like, oh, that's nice. And then you think about

the rest of your relationship with your mother and all of a sudden you're in, you know, complicated territory, which is why, you know, when I talk about beansier, you talked about is like pick something simple. Yeah, that is something that actually is part of why I went down the path. I went down of focusing on trauma in my work and focusing on working with difficult emotions as a trailhead to trauma.

in my practice, both as a therapist and a meditation teacher, was I would teach these 30-day self-love challenges in Brooklyn once upon a time, 15 years ago, maybe. And we would do loving-kindness phrases, but just for oneself, for 30 days. And people would have the most intense, like shame-spy roles, trauma reminders, all kinds of things. And when I got into self-love practices, I actually,

didn't have that. And so I was like, wait, what do I do? What do I do? You know, in the Buddhist recipe is you just keep going with it and eventually it shifts. But in the context of trauma,

If somebody's having that kind of activation long enough, then we have a self-love practice that's actually re-traumatizing somebody, which is bananas. Right, right. Well, I think the longer you are in this sort of space of generalized healing, well-being, mental health is you start to realize that a lot of these simple prescriptions are anything but for certain people.

this idea of like just everybody can do this and it'll be good. You start to realize like that is a certain degree of being naive about them. It's always an if then proposition. If it's like this for you, then this might work. If it's like this for you, then you might need this other thing over here. And yeah, this is the

problem with the Instagramification of self-help and, you know, psychology and what have you, for sure. So I want to turn our attention to something. You talk about post-traumatic growth. We talked about the upward spiral. There's a phrase that you use that I really liked and it was enlightenment within reach. Talk to me about that because enlightenment is a very vigorously debated thing among people who care about such a thing.

What is enlightenment within reach? So yeah, this is a way that we can get our heads around this, what a liberated experience would look like. And in the IFS model, they would call this becoming a self-led person. In other words, you're healed enough, that compassion

Your heart energies are actually in the driver's seat of your life, and all of your defensive and wounded parts are kind of acting in service of that. And what that could look like when we heal inner children and parts holding trauma, we begin to uncover more playfulness, more vitality, more of the best of our child by qualities, right, spontaneity and inhibiting sweetness, joy, laughter,

We begin to recover that stuff. That's part of the promise of doing trauma-focused work on oneself, is getting that stuff back. But when we do the re-parenting work also, such as the compassionate know in the face of cravings like we were talking about, we begin to develop these other more mature qualities, wisdom, discernment, and what have you. And so I think that enlightenment within reach, something that we can have in this lifetime, if not relatively quickly as far as these things go,

is a life where you've reclaimed the best of your childlike qualities within the context of mature qualities. So what would it look like if you had easy access to playfulness and laughter, spontaneity, joy, sweetness and what have you, but you also had financial intelligence and emotional intelligence and ninja level communication skills and an altruistic spin on your life where you were of service of others.

I think, you know, whatever Buddhahood is, I think that's good enough. You know, I'll take that much.

probably my favorite line in the book, you're describing this best of both world scenario. And you're sort of saying like, you know, if you only get that playfulness, but you don't add a certain degree of maturity to it, right, that can be problematic. If on the other hand, if you cultivate full maturity without wonder and spontaneity, we'd be like replacing all playgrounds with DMV offices.

That's good. That's a good metaphor. Nice. Got to have two wings to fly. Yeah, I appreciated that. So in that section, you talk about two key energies we need to bring about these both worlds scenarios. And you talk about subtraction and addition. It's become very common in certain spiritual parlance for people to talk about subtraction. You know, you need to unlearn everything and just subtract.

But you're saying we need kind of both of those. Talk to me about what each of those are and how they come into harmony together. Yeah. I mean, it's right here in this enlightenment within REACH model, right? The subtraction element is healing the traumas, unburdening ourselves of the pain, shame, and fear we've carried around our entire lives, which can happen relatively efficiently depending

really, but in the space of compassion and good support, good community, that is absolutely possible to begin unburdening your traumas, right? So that's the subtraction piece that allows us again to reclaim these really wonderful qualities that were maybe lost along the way.

But again, the addition pieces is the cultivation of those mature qualities. And that much isn't going to come from focusing on your traumas. That is also work we have to go out and do. You can't go to therapy and work on your childhood traumas and then suddenly know how to work with your finances or be more skillful in your place of business.

or whatever it is. And this is also a piece of the Buddhist path as well, right? How do we cultivate skillful means? How do we walk that eightfold path of learning how to be non-violent with our speech and non-violent in our relationships and thoughtful about what we do for a living and how we're contributing or not contributing to the suffering of the world?

So it is a path that simultaneously goes in both directions of somehow becoming younger again and finishing with growing up at the same time. I think that old gardening analogy is a good one. You have to plant seeds and you have to pull weeds. Both those things are pretty critical to a garden. If you're not doing both of those,

You know, you could pull the weeds out, but you're going to have not a whole lot there. And you can plant a lot of seeds, but they'll get choked out if you have too many weeds. Oh, and I've been choked out before. Many at hands, but I love that analogy too, because it points us in the direction of something else that a gardener does at work pulling the weeds and planting the seeds.

Without knowing what the garden is actually going to look like, without an idea of what the final product is really going to be, you might know like these are dandelion seeds, so I'm going to get a dandelion, but you don't know the shape that that dandelion plant is going to take, how tall it's going to become, how long it's going to live, how many flowers will bloom on it versus just petals and stems, right?

And I think that that's an important lens for us to look through when it comes to healing and growth, because there's this thing out there right now in the self-help world of optimization, meaning I know what my life should look like. I know what my realized potential ought to look like, and therefore I'm going to engineer my inner work so that I go in that direction. That's not gardening. That's not gardening. And I think the way it really needs to work, or at least the

The easier way, the more human way is, I'm going to plant these seeds. I'm going to pull these weeds. I'm going to water this garden with love and good things. I'm going to stay consistent with that. And then I get to be in a process of discovery wherein I don't know how this is going to turn out, but I know that dandelion is going to be beautiful.

Yeah. Well, I think that is a beautiful place for us to wrap up. Ralph, thank you so much, as always, for coming on. It's a great book. We'll have links in the show notes to where people can get the book and find all your other work. So thank you. Yeah, thank you so much. Always a pleasure, Eric.

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