Unknown Speaker 0:00
Welcome everybody.
Speaker 1 0:02
I am super excited because I have finally managed to get one of those lovely standing up desks in the view to hopefully have my back feel a bit more.
Unknown Speaker 0:16
Don't do the word better.
Speaker 1 0:22
Oh. This is going well. Hello. Hi Simone, hi Jasmine. I hope you're well, nice to see you here today, we are going to be talking about letting go of resistance and gosh, this is probably the biggest one, isn't it? For most of us, I think when we know that all Please, can we not do that please? We know that it's in the wishing things were different to how they are is what causes us the biggest amount of pain and resistance. Has got so much to it that phone's about to do the same thing. It's about to jump off again. Maybe I should just leave it off. There we go. But just leave it like that
Unknown Speaker 1:18
and see how that works. Not the best.
Unknown Speaker 1:24
There we go. Maybe see
Unknown Speaker 1:26
if I can bring my sorry guys, but maybe
Unknown Speaker 1:31
I need a bit of blue tag or something
Unknown Speaker 1:35
to stay in place. In place for me,
Speaker 1 1:43
maybe, maybe not. Okay. Well, anyway, here we are. So one of the things about resistance so resistance is willpower. The opposite of resistance is acceptance, and we know that for most human beings, the biggest cause of our pain is our wishy things were different to how they are, and resistance is a huge part of stopping drinking. It's too annoying. Sorry, guys. I'm gonna have to just move this somewhere else. Let me see
Unknown Speaker 2:21
if I can do that, and if that's better,
Speaker 1 2:26
I hope it is. I'm not sure how much battery this phone has, though, so hopefully enough. But anyway, so wishing things were different, start again. But welcome to the podcast. I'm really glad you're here. It's lovely to be with you. If you have any questions, please let me know in the comments. But this is a podcast called midlife AF. I've had a little bit of a break for a few months, but basically, it's about finding your feet in midlife without having to use drinking as a coping mechanism. So it's for anybody, wherever they are on their journey. But one of the things that I've been doing recently working with my membership group called be the lighthouse, which is for people who are on the journey. So I've already decided that there is something about their alcohol use that's problematic for them, and they've made the decision that they want to take a longer break from alcohol. So that isn't everybody that I work with, but this is my membership group, and we meet every week on a Monday, and we also talk in between times. And one of the subjects that we're talking about a lot is self compassion, because we know that the greatest reason why people struggle with stopping drinking, and the most likely reason if you are somebody who hasn't been able to stop drinking and you wanted to, hasn't been able to take a break and you wanted to the biggest reason behind that is the is a lack of self compassion and believing that you are the problem. And the first thing that I work with all of my clients on is getting rid of the belief that the problem lies with them. And part of that is, is part of a self compassion practice that we do. I was trained originally. I stopped drinking in january 2020, I worked. I did this naked minds the alcohol experiment. And then after two weeks of doing that, I decided to train as this naked mind coach. During that time, I was also training to be a counselor, a psychotherapist, and then I have just continued to add different modalities to my
Unknown Speaker 4:51
my What do you call it profile, I guess.
Speaker 1 4:55
And I studied with Gabor Mate for a year last year that was. Absolutely amazing. And I also do a lot of internal family systems, so parts work, and just putting that on silent, I also am a massive follower of Tara Brach. I'm trauma informed. I'm an autistic ADHD human being. So this is for those of you who aren't familiar with my work. I have two autistic ADHD children and a very likely autistic ADHD husband.
Unknown Speaker 5:34
We need to keep one of us undiagnosed. Oh, hi, Lisa. How are you good to see
Speaker 1 5:42
you? But yeah, we're talking about resistance. So for example, one of the one of the examples that they give in the self compassion Book about which is written by Kristen Neff, who's like the founding father, a founding mother of self compassion, is she gives an example of so it's kind of like we rally against something, and what really happens is, when we're in resistance, we go into an internal war within our bodies. And we know that. We know that when we're at war in our brains and in our bodies, because we feel it somatically, then we cannot be at peace. And when we're at war, in our bodies and in our brains, what happens is we get really tired. And so this concept of resistance is what we resist persists because basically you you'll all have heard of you'll know of people who have been alcohol free for an extended period of time, probably using something like AA, and it's very much based in willpower. And that what tends to happen is people might go for a very long time, because actually, and particularly women, we're incredibly good at denying ourselves stuff, some of us more than others. But you know, any of you who've ever dieted, we know we know how to restrict ourselves from doing things. But what happens is, unless you do the work on the wanting, so the reason that you want to drink, you will continue having problems stopping because you are in resistance. So if you stop with willpower and you still want to drink, you still think it's better, you still wish you could be a drinker, which is very common. You know, I was on Facebook, which I shouldn't do, but chatting in one of the sober groups, I don't call myself sober. I prefer to use alcohol free. Doesn't matter what you use. Just doesn't bother me. But for me, sober has a lot of connotations that are to do with kind of like being boring and dull and gray, and I don't identify with that, so I've never considered myself to be sober. I
Unknown Speaker 8:03
I just I'm alcohol free, I don't drink.
Speaker 1 8:07
So again, it's a choice. It's not something I can't do, it's not something I'm not allowed to do. It's not something I wish I could do but I can't. It's something that I've done the work on. And I think this is what people find really amazing is the difference between when you stop drinking and you are purely in resistance, which will happen at the beginning of any with whatever method you use, if you stop drinking, initially, you're going to be in resistance. Initially going to be using a bit of willpower, but after a while, you want to be working on all those beliefs that are keeping you thinking that alcohol has something to offer you. Because I know for me, one of the biggest ahas was realizing that actually every single thing that I believed about alcohol, which I believed as clearly as the sky is blue, was a lie, and the opposite was actually true. And you know, I hear it rallying, and sometimes I find myself wishing other people knew that the stuff that's keeping them stuck is keeping them stuck. And often people get very defensive about Hello, integrative skin. Nice to see you. And people can get very defensive about their belief that it is really, really and I'm not saying stopping drinking isn't difficult. It can, of course, it's difficult anything worth doing, it's got a level of difficulty to it, but it's not like this awful, like it's sort of sad situation. And to be honest, I'm probably quite unusual in that I don't really celebrate my years alcohol free, because to me, to me, it's like, it's not something hard that I've done. And if I, if I celebrate it, like, Oh my God, what an amazing achievement. I mean, no, it's not. What is an amazing achievement is having done the work that means that I no longer see. It has something that has anything for me, but in terms of resistance, we know that we were it's the it's the our inability to feel pain that causes us the biggest problem. So many of us have been brought up in a society where showing our feelings wasn't acceptable. Many of us have been brought up to believe that children you know, should be seen and not heard, and that was definitely my parents generation. And I think you know the generation above, probably as well, and that you know if you you know if you whinged Or you were inconvenient to parents by creating a fuss, either being over excited or by crying or by whinging, or by saying you didn't want to do something, or by expressing a an emotion that wasn't what the adults would have preferred your emotion was, or taking up space when you know their belief was that good children didn't do that. So most of us have been kind of convinced that we're not really allowed to have emotions, and so none of us have and also with because a lot of us, and particularly in Western culture, were, you know, our parents, and the parents parents, and for me, I'm still, I always talk about how disgusting I think it is that when I had my children, it was, it was still the same, that there was this sort of this narrative that we should put our children down to sleep in rooms and let them cry on their own and let them cry to sleep, to sleep. And hi, Marcia, so good to see you. I'm finally back doing my lives. I had about three months off because I just, I was really burnt out, and we moved house. But I'm back second week of doing my podcast. So I'm very happy about that. But yeah, so as children, we we were left to cry. And so one of the things that they found now, and this has been around for a long time, right? Because we know that I forgot his name. Now, my brain's gone. Is it Bobby? Bobby? He was one of the funny enough, I was going through my counseling books, almost my student books from when I was studying to be a counselor, and part of the sort of development of psychology has been sort of understanding around attachment and how, you know, being picked up and loved and cared for and held research an important part of our development of, said, our sense of self as and so this is why when people say, you know, Oh, I haven't had any trauma. Well, you know, quite often what they're saying now is that, you know, even in the womb, and again, this can be a bit triggering for some of us. I mean, I find it triggering as well. Tend to hold it fairly loosely. I know people can get me like, oh, it's all about blaming the mothers. I think one of the really important things in so many different parts of psychology is, you know, just to kind of get away from this concept of blaming, it doesn't necessarily, you know, it's like, if we want to look at our upbringing, it doesn't necessarily help us to be I don't want to say anything. I don't want to be blaming my parents. It's not about your parents. It's about your experience and how that experience has impacted the way that you have developed as a human being. And it's a bit like this whole In fact, it actually falls into resistance quite a lot, because in my methodology, or this length of mind methodology, which is what I originally trained in. We don't call having a drink. We don't call it anything negative. We call it a data point, because it's the opportunity to learn about what you haven't learned to cope with yet, what you don't know how to manage without alcohol yet. And the reason, again, this is really important is because when we I know Annie, I just redid my training with Annie to get my recertification, and she talks about, they've always talked about, you know, if a computer was learning to play chess, it wouldn't beat itself up when it made an error. It would learn from that error, and then the next time. And a bit like when a baby a baby's learning to walk, we don't. We're not mean to a baby, but that, you know, they get up in each time and they try again because they're moving towards a goal. Whereas we as humans, for some reason, when we have a drink, when we weren't, weren't intending to, we tend to make ourselves bad. But that is, again, part of the human condition, because it's the way of keeping ourselves safe, and it's very much in line with, you know, trauma. So in order to like children, for example, if your parents leave each other or get divorced, you know, children always blame themselves, don't they, because it's much easier for us to blame ourselves, evolutionary wise, than to believe that perhaps. Perhaps the world isn't a safe place, and perhaps the people who love us aren't necessarily the caregivers that maybe we had the potential, you know, we then we might have had the opportunity to have, and so it's much, much easier the brain automatically brings ourselves. And that's the same with, you know, everything, when we're talking about resistance and we're talking about judgment and self judgment. And, you know, making things good or bad, I think that's this is a really important part of this. And again, it's so much, so much of this comes from our cultural it's a really great way of controlling people, this kind of concept of original sin. And, you know, going back to that sort of puritanical idea that. And, you know, in, definitely, I know, in, oh, in the times where there was slave trade and things like that, it was like, we, it's all about convincing everybody that the people are bad and that left to their own devices, they'll be bad. And unless they're controlled and given orders and, you know, and punished, then they will, they will behave badly, because they the innate human being is bad and wrong, which is the opposite of the mentality and the modality that I work in, which is that the the human is good, and the human has everything that they need inside of themselves in order for them to remember who they were put on this earth to be, before the world decided that, before the world told them that all the different things that were wrong about them, so they had to start building a protective armor and a mask to keep themselves safe. So we know that as young people, we we've not been taught how to how to hold ourselves in our distress. And you know those of us who are more sensitive, so my hips are hurting. So if you see me on the screen and I'm jiggling around, it's because I'm struggling a little bit with my hips, but those of us who have been, you know, brought up in a way where we weren't allowed to express our emotions, where we were left to cry, where we were told to suck it up, batter cap, you get what you get, and you don't get set upset. You know, I've had kids, you know, forced out of classrooms for being excited and exuberant because you weren't allowed to play with other kids because of that behavior, so you'd be basically being punished for feeling or showing your your experience of the world, and made to be smaller, take up less space and be more convenient. And so it makes sense that we wouldn't know how to comfort ourselves in discomfort, and we would feel very frightened of these emotions that perhaps we got told off for when we were little. And
Speaker 1 17:55
one of the things that can be really good about so resistance, basically what happens is we experience a feeling, and then we go into resistance. So we know that it takes seven seconds for our thinking brain to process an experience, whereas the emotion experience comes much sooner. So our physical experience, our emotional experience, to a situation, happens immediately. So this is where we get to that whole concept of wanting to respond rather than react. So immediately we react. We react from the unconscious. We react from our history, our memory and our body's memory, and we have the same reaction to a set a set of circumstances every single time it happens. And these are called our patterns, and this is one of the reasons why it's really good to work with a coach or a counselor, someone who's experienced in this kind of stuff, so that they can help you spot what your patterns might be, because sometimes it's really difficult to see our own patterns. But patterns. But again, this is something we can work on. I've been working on this. I've been noticing this. There's a particular part of me that it becomes a convincer. I want to convince people. I can get a bit defensive. I can be like, trying to prove myself to people. And it's definitely a pattern for me. And so for me, like learning that, understanding that I have this pattern, it causes me quite a lot of distress. Wishing. Again, it's another thing you know. We know that resistance comes from wishing things were different and how they are. And so for me, this is wishing other people saw me or my actions or behavior the same way that I perceive myself to be. And again, I remember learning a long time ago from Dr Libby Weaver, who wrote that great book, rushing women's syndrome, that we it's almost like we have these forehead words, you know, words that we when we go around. We want other people to see us as and often when they don't. That's what causes us great to. Stress. But also a lot of the reasons that we might get upset about things is to do with what we believe other people think of us based on because so much of our like most people, when you talk to them about not drinking, they get they get really upset about this idea of not being fun, missing out, not being part of the cool kids crime, not being part of their friendship group, being rejected, all of this stuff comes down to sort of a lack of worthiness and believing that we have to be what everybody else wants us to be in order for us to be safe. And it makes total sense that that would be the case. But this work that we're doing, you know, which, in my opinion, is, and this is something that Annie says as well, and this naked mind, but in my opinion, I've been saying it for a long time. I'm so glad when I redid the course with Annie, it was so many of the things that she's evolved, the training for the coaches are very much how my brain's evolved as well in the work that I've done since. But it's very much like it's not about stopping drinking. It's about remembering who you were. It's about coming back to source. It's about unlearning all the stuff that we've been you know, we've been manipulated into thinking about ourselves, sometimes intentionally and sometimes not intentionally, by society, societal conditioning, about ourselves, about alcohol, about what the way it is an acceptable way to live. Hi, Eliza, good to see you. So what's an acceptable way for us to live, and for many of us, not being what we think an acceptable way to live. You know, I was talking to somebody on Facebook the other day. She said, Look, I want to be able to do the normal things, go to trivia, see my friends, go to the pub, go out to dinner. And it's like, okay, so this is very important. We know that wrote the book The Myth of normal. So it's really important that we look at normal, because what normal isn't is not necessarily how things should be. Normal is just what everybody does, right? So it's like that collective behavior, you know, we could call it common. We could call it, you know, whatever we want to call it, because something that people do doesn't necessarily mean it's the right thing for everybody to do. It doesn't necessarily, I mean it's not no right or wrong, but it doesn't necessarily mean that just because everybody's doing something, it's the thing that we should be doing. There's a great quote by attributed to Mark Twain, which is, you know, you know you're on the side of the, oh, I don't know something to do with basically, once you, once you're in the side of the majority, that's when you need to start questioning what you're what you're doing, because there's a lot of, there's a lot of just some big issues that go on behind the scenes with a lot of this stuff, you know, to do with Controlling the masses, basically, so coming back to pain and resistance. So we know that pain, the inability to feel pain, and our resistance to feel pain is what causes us the suffering. So we know that if we can feel we can heal, and this can be very controversial again as well, particularly for us neurodivergent folks who have things like alexithymia or intercepted poor interceptive or very intense interceptive awareness skills. So interceptive awareness is the ability to be able to say, for example, the sort of link between, say, hunger and our brain, or that our legs gone to sleep when we've been sitting late, or that we need the loo. Those kind of things aren't necessarily connected in quite the same way as neurotypical brains, although there's a question around neurotypical brains, but I won't go into that one, because that would be a massive side quest. And alexithymia is the inability to name a feeling or to define it basically a bit more, much more complex than that. But just to make it simple for this, because I pretty much explain it pretty much every every podcast, so that can make things difficult as well. But I think one of the things that we often think about was with with emotions, is actually we have this misconception that I um, the issue is, comes when we're unable to name an emotion, right? So we're having a physical experience. We know it's an emotional experience. It's causing us to stress. We don't know what, how to name it. We don't know what it is. You know, say, you say to children, particularly, how you feeling, what's happening? I don't know. Don't know. Don't know, don't know, and what I tend to do, and you know, this is a area of work that I'm fascinated by and continue to learn all the time about and happy to be corrected on. But from what I've learned, the research that I've done, you know, we might not be able, those of us might not be able to know. And the emotion. But what we can usually do is name the sensations, you know. And again, skin can be considered intriguing for those of us who have like and I am that one of these people who have less, you know, sort of slightly different connection between my experience, the experience in my body, and the way that my brain interprets that experience. But you know, you can say to people, for example, if you're feeling anxiety, feeling it in your tummy, if you've if you most people can tend to describe the sensations in their body. So it might be that, you know, how's your breath? You know you're breathing fast or slow. Is your mouth dry or or moist? Are you? How's your heartbeat? If you touch your heart, does it feel like it's running fast or slow? Have you? Have you got any aches and pains in your body, that sort of thing? So gonna be really helpful in that area. So, you know, it's so it's, it's a bit more um, nuanced and complex, and people feel, think, because, you know, it's like, you know, you can only heal it by feeling it. Well, yes, and that can be really difficult for people. And if you've had trauma, that can be particularly difficult as well. But what, what is, what we know is that the resistance to the feeling, the resistance to our experience of the world, and the emotional energy that that creates in our body is and particularly given that we've been conditioned to not be allowed to feel our experience, or our experience has been made Bad. So kind of we're connected within kind of like Pavlov's dog, away with our
Speaker 1 26:49
US being punished. We also know that when a child is left to cry, to sleep, they don't learn to self soothe. They actually just just give up. So they tend to pass out, and they what they don't learn by being held through the difficulty of learning how to go to sleep, what they don't learn is from that adult. One of the really important things, and this is what Gabon Marty teaches, one of the really important things, is that what children learn in that experience where they're held through the pain, is they have this oversight of an adult who knows that the pain is going to end. And so for children, the reason why it can be so painful and scary, not only because sometimes there's trauma involved. In fact, for most of us, there are a lot of us, particularly our sensitive, neurodivergent folks, there is a level of trauma involved, big T or little T, but it's also this concept that actually the pain will end. And so one of the things that can be really terrifying for people is like, you say to somebody, oh, you know, so you're say you're feeling really bad about yourself. So say, Say somebody at work was a dick to you, or
Unknown Speaker 28:01
you made a mistake, and
Speaker 1 28:06
you're triggered, and you feeling really and a lot of times, the resistance is that not accepting things. Is this the meaning that we make about ourselves, the meaning that we make about what people think of us, the meaning that we make about what a person meant when they said something, what that would mean about us as a human being. That is what our distress tends to be, and that distress can often trigger things around, you know, if I am not the life and soul of the party, if I am, you know, not at all the events, if I am sat at home feeling sorry for myself, the meaning that I make about that it's very like, similar to being lonely. The meaning that I make about that is that I am not a good person, that I won't be loved, that I won't be like that I'll be rejected, and that are ultimately I'll be alone. And so these are the and so you can see why we resist feeling that stuff because it sounds really heavy, but actually we need to feel it because we can't heal the the childhood wounds that are keeping us engaged in unhealthy behaviors, engaged in hanging out with in relationships, in doing things that we think are fun, because we haven't yet learned that in all things to be fun, we shouldn't have to drink in order to do them, because if we have to drink in order to do them, then they're not really fun. And that we've got this sort of cultural conditioning of what fun looks like, and if we're not it, then we're going to make ourselves bad, because we make ourselves bad, because that's the only way a child can cope, is making themselves bad because again, then they don't, then it's not. They don't have to deal with the fact that the world could have consistent bad people and that people who supposed to look after them aren't necessarily doing their job as well as they could be so so much involved in cities, all interlinked. It's so important. And one of the really good things about letting go of resistance is you've got this kind of two elements to it. And one is kind of a mindfulness piece, and the other is a self passion piece. So one of the ways to let go of resistance and do it in the most safe way is to first of all, notice that you're in resistance. So again, awareness. So everything comes back to awareness and mindfulness. So we notice we're in resistance, and we say, I am feeling resistance. I am I wish things were different to how they are. I wish my kid would go to school. I wish my child would do their chores. I wish my husband,
Unknown Speaker 30:45
I don't know whatever.
Speaker 1 30:47
I wish my husband wasn't so annoying. I wish my husband didn't drink I wish. I'm feeling sad about this. Why am I feeling sad about this? I'm feeling sad I'll never be invited again. So this whole like thing, I know if I don't go, then I'm going to be left out. No one's going to invite me. They'll stop asking. Me and stop asking me, because I'm going to make them feel bad. All the story and they're true, right? These stories are true. People do behave like that. So it's not a they're not unfounded fears. The importance, though we're in this work, is that in order for it to work, you have to matter more your relationship with yourself has to matter more than the opinions of others, your relationship with others. And until it does, it's very difficult. It's very difficult to stop drinking. And I'm not gonna lie about that, there's a lot of stuff to do with drinking is about your readiness to change. If you're not ready to have the difficult conversations, if it's too scary, if your brain, your little heart, isn't ready yet, then that's fine. But you know, let's be let's be honest about what it is. So first of all, there's a mindfulness of recognizing how we're feeling, naming it. And what we do is, when we name something, we're saying, I'm feeling x, y and z, we get that bit of distance. And so we know that the dis, you know, the space in between an experience, and our response to that experience is that that's the key. That's the sort of liminal space, the space between our conscious and our unconscious, the pace where we can make different decisions, a place where brains engage. Because when we're when we're in fight or flight, when we're in freeze or form, when we're in survival mode, our thinking brain is offline and we're 100% unconscious. And there's plenty of ways for us to manage that. We talked about it. I think last week, mindfulness is a really good way. So when our brain is off, if we can, like, scrunch our hand really tight for 30 seconds, or really notice, like, the fingernails digging in to our hand, and then for 30 seconds afterwards, we scrunch it open and we look at that is a really great way to break that cycle. Other things that you can do is just go and splash some cold water on your face. You know, there's a million different things that you can do to bring yourself back and so that you can start engaging that part of your brain, the thinking part of your brain. But when that brain's offline, it's very, very difficult for you. And resistance put ourselves into when we're in resistance, when we're fighting an idea, when we're not accepting what's actually happening and we're wishing it was different. We're in battle in our brain. So that's this whole idea of internal battle. And of course, we want to escape an internal battle. That's why. Reason why most people drink is because they hate that cognitive dissonance. You've got the one side saying, I want to drink, and the other side saying, Can't Have a drink. We've got the wanting, you know? And again, they're both coming from resistance. So first of all, the first ones go, I'm resisting the fact that I'm not drinking, and that will be because your brain and your body's trying to bring you back to home. You're bringing you back to the familiar,
Unknown Speaker 33:54
right? So
Speaker 1 33:57
the second part of it is, then to hold ourselves with compassion. So first of all, name it. What is it? I'm feeling it. It's no longer me. I'm no longer caught up in it. I'm not all head up in the storm. I'm each person who's experiencing the feeling of I might not be able to identify the emotion, so I might just go. My heart's beating really fast. My tummy is hurting. I feel really like, I can't. I'm really like, I can't. I'm hyper aware, hyper aroused, and then we might go, you know, that's really hard. So self compassion, it's really hard to feel like this. Yes, it's really horrible, because there's something in our upbringing that means that we're really, really afraid of being left out and being alone, and also something tribal and something to do with our being human beings. You know that we don't want to be left out to try, because if we were left out in the because if we were left out in the tribe, we're left to die. So there's all these kind of big shit going down in our poor little bodies and brains, but the most important thing is that we recognize it, we know it's not us, and then we can comfort ourselves through the pain of it. That's really hard. I'm so. Sorry, empathy, empathy, empathy, and we can, you know, treat ourselves like you know, of course, you feel like that. You know, that's totally fine. It's totally okay. It's no big deal. You're gonna be fine, and I'm here for you, not dismissing you, not put your thoughts up, not just get over it, not but actually, I'm seeing you, I'm holding you, I'm validating your experience, and I'm getting going to be that adult that you should have had in the room, cuddling you and helping you learn how to go to sleep. I'm going to be the adult that shows you that the pain will end. Yeah, I have the hope for you, you know, so you're it's all reparenting, reparenting, reparenting, reparenting. So now, what else you want to say about resistance? I think that's kind of it. Actually. One of the things I'm going to do after this is I'm going to do a little exercise with an ice cube, and I encourage you to do the same. So we know that if we can build up this sort of self compassion, mindfulness, followed by compassion, acknowledging, because a lot of times just go into avoidance. We don't want to acknowledge what's happening. But if we can acknowledge and we realize that pain, you know, exists for a time, but the more that we can lean into pain, the more that we can accept it, the more that we can move through it, the more likely it is to pass and I know, about you guys, but when I had my first baby, I was so terrified, and the pain just seemed so incredibly horrible, because I was in resistance. I was like shitting myself. I was frightened. I was my husband's there, but it's, you know, something I was gonna have to go through on my own. I had no idea. And I was in a very sterile, very unloving environment. And then I had my second baby, it was completely different. I had a midwife. I was at home, had all my home comforts, and it was a completely different experience. But pain was so much worse because I was resisting it. And so the ice cube exercise, which we'll do in a minute, is that you get an ice cube and you hold it in your hands and your palm, and you keep holding it, right? And so, first of all, you notice the thoughts that come into your mind. You know, I can't bear this is so awful. And that's the resistance, right? And so, and then the other part of it is that you start to pay close attention to what you're feeling. You start to name it. You start to name the sensations, and you will start to realize that
Unknown Speaker 37:28
it's less painful.
Speaker 1 37:34
And you become aware of your sort of impulse to kind of throw the the ice away is, is something that will pass. And then you add some kindness. You know, this is hurting, this is uncomfortable. Oh, my goodness, you know. Thanks so much hand for showing me the pain. You know that I'm holding this ice with. And then, and then eventually, you you let go of the ice cube. So don't notice how you felt in the practice, what came up for you? And I'm going to do this practice with you. In a second, I'm going to go and get an ice cube, and we're going to do it. Did your mindfulness and so self kindness changed the experience for you in any way. Yeah, and it's just should be a very, very clear example of how resistance can make our pain so much worse, and how if
Unknown Speaker 38:28
we
Speaker 1 38:32
get mindful and observe what's happening for us and offers ourselves some kindness, how much less it hurts. So again, we know that our resistance comes from our natural desire to keep ourselves safe because we want to stay with the familiar. Because learning something new, learning to do something new is, you know, like when you learn to drive, then you learn to drive on roach. You don't need to learn how to do teeth every day. You don't learn how to stand up because you already know how to do that. And you do that because it conserves energy. Learning something new, changing requires you use energy. There's energy used in your brain, but willpower itself. Why? The body's clip a little crazy. Because willpower itself and resistance uses up a lot of energy as well, which is why we can get so bloody tired. It's like concept of trying. I have this like thing that I find very fascinating this concept of trying. And we know that, you know, Yoda says there's no try, just do. And I remember gevonmato saying when I was training unto him, you know, you can't try and stand up. You either stand up or you don't stand up. It's trying where we lose all the energy and cause ourselves unnecessary suffering. We talk about resistance today, and so this is an ice cube, and we're going to do the Ice Cube exercise, and I encourage you guys to do it as well. We're doing this because we know that when we resist pain, when we resist discomfort,
Unknown Speaker 39:58
change, moving to the unfamiliar. Yeah.
Speaker 1 40:02
So, for example, use this for drinking. We could also use this to, you know, talk about, you know, wishing things were different to how we were. We'd like them to be. So, for example, if we set off driving and we're late, we get second traffic. We can rail against it, which causes us greater stress. Or we can accept that this is the situation that we're in. There's nothing we can do about it. And you know that this better experience will be just to go with the flowers into our music or podcast, whatever. So one of the things the I said, this is the ice cube. So you get an ice cube and you put it on your hand, you're on. And the the idea is it says do it on waterproof or outside my office. But
Unknown Speaker 40:49
you shouldn't do this if you have
Unknown Speaker 40:52
Reynolds disease, if it's gonna cause you harm.
Speaker 1 40:56
But basically, we get one ice cube out of the freezer, hold it in a closed hand for as long as possible,
Unknown Speaker 41:02
and keep holding it,
Unknown Speaker 41:04
dropping water. After a few minutes, you'll
Speaker 1 41:06
notice what comes into your mind. So, Oh, this feels uncomfortable. That's quite hurts my hand. Is my hand going to freeze off? Is this going to cause me pain? You start observing so we're mindful, and this is really important. So where do I feel that I can feel it's like some sharp pain, actually. I can feel that icy pain. It feels like nice I can feel the nerve endings on my back of my arm. What
Unknown Speaker 41:36
else can I can feel saliva in my mouth, gonna be sick.
Speaker 1 41:42
What else can feel a tingling in my fingers.
Unknown Speaker 41:50
Then I felt my body just relaxed,
Speaker 1 41:52
actually, my brain just went and we know that that out breath is when the body is grounding, and we know that grounding is what the body's seeking. When we go, we've had a glass of wine, and what's happening for us is we're actually grounding, and that's what the body's actually seeking, rather than a glass of wine.
Unknown Speaker 42:12
So we've paid attention to it,
Speaker 1 42:14
and that's the resistance. We were like it, fighting it, and then the body went, Ah, stop fighting it. We've just been observing it. And then our body went, Oh, I'm grounded. Now I can go. So what are we experiencing at the moment? So we can say it's not cold, it's it's more than cold. I could feel it's interesting, actually, because I'm reading what they've written here. What are my emotions? So initially I was feeling a bit panicky, feeling my heartbeat and my breath, but now I've kind of relaxed into it. My eyes keeps getting a wee bit smaller,
Unknown Speaker 42:45
and yeah, I
Speaker 1 42:49
now I've just got to get a bit panicky again, my at the back of my hand, so stuck in the palm of my hand, I can feel it, oh, my fingertips. I can feel it sharply, like deep into needles, but cold. I do I want to drop it? Not to have this anymore? I can feel I'm like, Oh, my fingertips are freezing. Am
Unknown Speaker 43:14
I going to get purple? We're going to get frostbite? Probably not.
Speaker 1 43:20
So this is us being mindful. So when we feel discomfort, the discomfort, we go into resistance. I'm feeling discomfort. I'm feeling sad. I had a bad day. My boss was an asshole.
Unknown Speaker 43:30
I'm missing my familiar the
Speaker 1 43:34
sense of let down that I get my let down. I'm thinking like boobs when you breastfeeding, but I'm missing that familiar feeling, and I'm feeling a bit panicky. So this is what you might be feeling if you stop doing it. So what we do notice it? First of all, notice what the feelings like when we feel in our body. So maybe I'm something in my hand, a little bit in my chest, and less panicky now. So we know that's mindfulness, and then we add a little kindness. So this is what we do when we when we're trying to learn how to be with discomfort. So we're discomfort. We're uncomfortable. We learn to do a new thing. Our usual experience is this, if we've had someone's pissed us off, we're a bit triggered. Often
Unknown Speaker 44:16
I get triggered by
Speaker 1 44:19
thinking that people think differently than how I would like them to think about amazing what you think I've got a motive behind what I do that I don't have, or that I don't want to be seen as having, and so that upsets me. And then I think, well, they must think this. And then I get into this kind of like, I need to prove to them that. So this is something that happens for me personally. And so this is where we then need to get sort of mindful. We understand what that feels like. We can see we're going into fight or flight. And then what we then we need to do is add a little bit of kindness. So yeah, that was hurt, but it's not harmful to me. So this is like, so again, this is like, where we're learning to be that parent, that nurturing human being, that if we'd have been allowed. To cry and be cuddled to sleep, whereas most of us weren't, because it wasn't the culture of the time. You know, we would have had a parent who would let us know by their presence and their hope that the pain was going to end, and this is what we have to now provide to ourselves. It's this understanding that we're going through some discomfort and it hurts, and we feel it in our tummy, and we feel it in our eyes, and we feel it in our chest and our mouth drying whatever we're feeling right, so we notice it, and then we experiences it as an observer as much as possible. Don't get so caught up in it all, because we're being aware, we're being mindful, and then we're saying to ourselves, well, that hurts. You're sad when you feel that you're missing out on something, and it's horrible when you feel that you're going to be rejected from your gang because you're not being the life and soul of the party, which is what you've been conditioned to think you have to be in order to be accepted. And it's hard when you're worried that you might be rejected from the group. You might feel sad. But hey, do you know what we've got this. I'm here for you. We're gonna do this together, because you know this feeling is gonna win. I'm not dismissing the feeling. I'm letting you know that I see you, I validate you. This what good parenting does? I see you, I validate you. I understand that you are having a really hard time, and I'm giving you the hope, because I've had the experience of knowing that we can make our way through this, and we're choosing this. It's going to be hard, because our brain wants to keep us stuck doing the same thing as it's always done, because that's feels safe, like the old man with as many slippers, who doesn't want to wash them because they feel familiar. But we say to that old man. Come on, old man, we've got to Bucha, if this right, that's why me and my daughter's work together when we talking about PDA stopping her from going into the classroom. So we're bringing in that kindness, that tenderness. I can totally see why. That must be really hard for you. Must be really tough and feeling like and you're doing so good night, you're amazing. And don't you, by now, I'm completely unaware of this. This is like,
Unknown Speaker 47:03
this is just my friend, the ice cube.
Speaker 1 47:08
All right, my darling. So that is the example of the ice cube exercise, and it demonstrates how to deal with resistance. So we know that we want to be accepting things, not resisting, knowing the resistance to the pain is what causes us. The emotional distress causes us to feel exhausted means that we break down and we end up, you know, giving into something that we didn't want to give into, like drinking when we didn't want to drink, or, you know, losing our temper just because we're exhausted, yeah, because resistance causes exhaustion, because we're in battle, and no peace can come from battle. So when we're stopping drinking, or when we're trying to learn to do something new, we have to learn how to identify how it's making us feel, be kind to ourselves, notice, feel, become like a third party, and then offers ourselves the hope it will end and that we're still going to go through and do the hard thing, because we've got to grow from moving forward rather silly, stuck doing the same whole thing over and over again. That's making us unhappy.
Unknown Speaker 48:04
Do we? Here we are. We still got the ice. Eight
Unknown Speaker 48:08
minutes we've been holding the ice.
Speaker 1 48:11
Alright, my darling, I hope that was helpful to you. I'll take care for those of you from my be the lighthouse group. I'll see you tonight, and we'll talk about this. And also, thing I'd really love you guys to bring to tonight's conversation is looking at Christmas, looking at the holidays. What made it difficult for you and what changes would you make sure that you made to next Christmas, to ensure that you are looking after your precious self and making sure you have the very best possible chances of sticking to the changes that you want to make in your life, and not feeling that you're so overwhelmed by over committing to other people or doing things that you don't want to do, or not standing up for yourself, or worrying about making other feel comfortable uncomfortable by asking for what you need, what's going to change? What specifically are you going to implement for next year? I'll see you tonight. Lots of love. You.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
