00:00:01 Rita

I am deeply interested in how do we heal relational trauma? The deep, subtle nuances of understanding attachment trauma through the body, the nuance of the head movements, the facial movements, the vocal movements, the responses of the body. That leads me into working with developmental trauma, that leads me into, of course, ancestral trauma. So those are all pieces that I study, continuously study. and working with helping reconnect pathways that have been severed or hearts that have been severed. I’m warily working in that moment by moment way of not working out of sequence with clients, really finding those tiny moments of where their next connection comes from. It’s not about pushing people into uncomfortable places or letting them stay complacent, but I’m working on a razor’s edge right now. And how do I work with that? I work with that through embodiment practices, somatic meditation… I work with it through the relationship, how we are being moved by each other, how we are changing as a result of each other and I am changing in the presence of my client. This two person psychology.

00:01:13 Kevin
Can I ask you just, it’s just a little curiosity of mine, the play that you wrote and directed with our very own Gabor Maté. Tell me a little bit about that.

00:01:23 Rita
What we were exploring was multigenerational, intergenerational ancestral trauma and how it comes through relationally. So Gabber got to interact with my mother, as played with me. He got to interact with my father. He have to interact with my brother, but what was a really important part of the play is at one point we stopped the whole production and God was like cookie stop because I’m playing out all these arguments and things that are going on between my family, some playing out all these family dynamics and playing all these characters. He goes ‘Stop.” We sit down. He does an on stage therapy session with me. He goes your father hates your mother and your mother hates your father and your father hates your brother and you hate te da…. And then he says there are no villains and there are no victims. There’s just a lot of hurting people. 

Rosemary: This is the Gifts of Trauma podcast, stories of transformation and healing through Compassionate Inquiry.

00:02:34 Kevin
You’re very welcome to this edition of The Gifts of Trauma Podcast from Compassionate Inquiry. Rita Bozi, we haven’t met before.

00:02:43 Rita
We haven’t met and I’m just so honored to be here. Thank you, Kevin.

00:02:46 Kevin
You’re welcome. I’m very excited to have you here. We’ve just spoken for a few minutes before our interview and already we’ve established some common ground. You love Irish people in Ireland and so do I, so that floats my boat a little bit. We’re both Sagittarians, we’ve discovered.  We have a love for truth and I really want to get into that. I really want to discover and hear about your truth. What I’d like to do Rita… I was just reading a little line, I think it was from your website, and I knew when I read this line, I thought Rita and I are going to get on just fine. I read on your website and just in there it was just dropped in, and it says, “She remembers to laugh when the shit gets tough.”

00:03:37 Rita
Yes!

00:03:39 Kevin
I know that’s playful, but I also think that’s really important.

00:03:43 Rita
Yes. I’ve heard it said before that cultures that go through severe trauma have the best jokes. And some of the clients that I’ve worked with that have gone through, again, severe trauma, they have this kind of wry sense of humor. You get to the point where you just have to laugh. You have to. And I’m Hungarian, like Gabor, and I grew up with excellent Hungarian jokes. They still come out. They had a beautiful twist on the communist era and the authoritarian regime, and it was something I saw in my mother. You know, she went through such difficulties, the reign of terror in Hungary, very similar things to what Gabor has gone through. She’s older than Gabor. But every so often there would be this heaviness in this darkness in the family. And then all of a sudden I’d hear this little cackle somewhere, and my mother is laughing to herself. And I was like, Oh my God, I lived for those moments. I lived for those moments. And there would be this contagion. I didn’t even know what she was laughing about, but it would catch. And those were moments of deliverance and liberation. And it’s easy to lose our laughter. It’s easy to lose it. But when we can have it, when we can be in the contagion and let it rip, oh my God, the whole body starts to bubble up, and the organs start to move, and the blood vessels start to expand. And it’s such a beautiful way of bonding for people. It’s so necessary.

00:05:13 Kevin
I agree. I agree with everything that you said. Thank you for saying it. I’m wondering. I’m just thinking of sometimes when I’ve been working with some clients with Compassionate Inquiry, and that moment when people come to realize that the belief or the perception or the thing that they’ve been carrying,.. when they’re able to do that a little bit of work and see it from another angle. Quite often they laugh at the absurdity of what they’ve been carrying.

00:05:46 Rita
Yeah.

00:05:47 Kevin
And for me, that’s a very healing thing for people.

00:05:50 Rita
And I want to be so careful about this because I do work with very deep trauma in my clients and in myself, that sometimes, you know, on a psychedelic such as psilocybin, you get to the point where you’re laughing and you’re crying and you’re going back and forth, right? And all of a sudden, just this saying, there’s this funny bone that the medicine hits. And at the same time, it’s important to realize that what is absurd is also deeply serious. And I know, just meeting you, I know you know that because there are days where we can’t laugh about it. It’s just, it’s not there yet. But I know that, is it absurd? Sometimes. Sometimes it is absurd. Like what we’re seeing unfolding in the world is so absurd, but it’s so intensely serious at the same time. So I think about it very quickly sometimes.

00:06:39 Kevin
Yeah, I would agree with that. And that just acknowledging your absolutely right that that we’re not diminishing or minimizing the seriousness of what people are going through. But yet when we can look at it and think, holy shit, I’ve been believing that thing my whole life and it’s just not true. There’s a very deep and serious ridiculousness, or absurdity to that sort of thing when we can see that. So already I’m enjoying that you’re someone that likes to lean on the lighter side of life, or use those tools, those tools of humor, laughter, connection, to get us through.

00:07:16 Rita
Oh, I don’t always lean on the lighter side of life, just to be clear. I’ve had my very dark passages and they come and go. And at those times I need to remember… and what I do is I consciously, I keep those glimmers of hope. I have a practice where I consciously remember. Oh, I remember when I felt light, I remember when my body moved with ease. It’s a new practice for me, having gone through complex post traumatic stress. It’s like the Leonard Cohen song, about, after the darkest hour, the light comes. I can’t have butchered the quote, but that’s not easy. That’s not easy when people are in really deep dark, shut down. Their bodies have been under such chronic stress for so long. They are in the deep caves of the soul. And it’s not easy to find a firefly in the middle of a cave. But it’s a new practice for me, as well, because I can go pretty dark with what comes through my ancestry.

00:08:18 Kevin
Yeah, I’d like to lean into that a little bit in just a second if we can. Maybe this question will lead us to that read, if that’s OK… And when communicating with Rosemary, I noticed that this sentence finished with an lol 🙂 on your e-mail. So I was really drawn to that as well. And again, this isn’t to diminish it, but I just like how you’ve introduced a very serious topic, and then ended the sentence with lol :). And the sentence says, “Let’s talk about developmental trauma and how well my accommodations and adaptations have prevented my heart from completely imploding on this planet. lol :)” So that’s a big sentence about developmental trauma and how my accommodations and adaptations have prevented my heart from completely imploding on this planet. lol 🙂 And I would be really keen if we can. And of course, we go where you want to go and we don’t go where you don’t want to go.

00:09:20 Rita
You know, I’ll go anywhere, Kevin. I’ll go anywhere.

00:09:24 Kevin
So let’s talk about developmental trauma and how well your accommodations and adaptations have prevented your heart from completely imploding on this planet.

00:09:34 Rita
Allow me to broaden, and then bring into focus, because I’ve been thinking a lot about this and I’m a little bit of an octopus with many arms, and I bring it back to the centre of the heart, to the heart of that octopus. I want to say about developmental trauma… It’s a huge subject and I teach it and I research it and I learn about it within myself. But it’s really important that we back up a bit to know that developmental trauma has its roots in ancestral trauma, transgenerational, multi-generational, inter- generational. That then comes through the relationships that we’re born into. And then those relationships directly affect our development. And in developmental trauma, at the most critical periods of our brain development, the environment is failing to provide, obviously, the attunement, the connection, the interest, the engagement, the coregulation. And so we develop these holes and the higher cortical regions develop over the lower cortical regions of the brain. So you get these highly functioning people with big gaps in a sense of self. It’s like you’re really smart and you’re really stupid at the same time. It’s that kind of feeling. But there’s a disconnect, a real disconnect from that right hemispheric sense of self. And of course, I always want to acknowledge Gabor, and all that I’ve learned from him. But one of the things I learned from him is that the essence, we have our essence, and that in essence gets distorted and exaggerated and essentially in our accommodations and our adaptations which help us survive, they actually give us hope. It’s like, I can do something. I have such despair, but I can actually do something. So I’m going to do a lot of it. I’m going to get really good at it. Right? It’s going to give me hope, but it’s also wearing me down. So the LOL part at the end of that sentence is… I want to know how we can bring the serious conversations… How can we open them up? Because I can say some pretty compelling things that people don’t want to hear or see or feel or sense, right? And I’m one of those direct shooters. I’m not afraid to talk about things. I’m not afraid about taboo subjects. I think I put the little lol 🙂 at the end of it saying, do you want to hear how bad it can get? And I’m not afraid of how bad it can get. And we need to be able to talk about that because we’re facing how bad it’s getting. So my accommodations, how funny is it that, on the one hand, I’m working more than I’ve ever worked in my life. And it’s the thing that I’ve been trying not to do. But it’s also allowing a huge expansion of meeting extraordinary people like yourself. So on the one hand, my developmental trauma has made me very organized, very creative, very able to relate to people. It’s both the gift and the burden, right? Always having to refine and refine the ways in which I relate and the ways in which I do my work and the ways that I connect with people, My schedule, where do I rest? Because it’s a very fine line between the wounds that run it. And, I always say to my coach, did I do this all from trauma or is there any sanity from what I’m doing right now? And she goes, Rita, a little bit of both, right? So there’s laughter. There’s my vitality affect coming up saying I know my assistants look at me and go, I don’t know how you do what you do. And I said, thank God, the Gene Keys said, oh, you’re one of those people that can manage a lot because there needs to be something that explains why I do as much as I do other than just trauma and developmental trauma.

00:13:16 Kevin
Then talk to me a little bit, Rita about that. So what is it, other than trauma, that enables you to do so much? The word that’s coming to my mind is passion, conviction. What is it that’s driving you to do so much then?

00:13:29 Rita
Yeah, absolutely passion, absolutely conviction. I’ve always had that surge of energy. We’re talking about vitality affects. I’ve always had this enthusiasm, this surge of life coming through me. I can really teeter between, this… I can either feel this near death experience inside me and I’m like, I’m almost dead. But I also have this surge of life that comes up. My mother and I joke about it. My mother’s 94 years old. She’s 4 foot 9. She’s tiny. I don’t know what that is in meters or centimeters, but she’s tiny. And she says I’m small and strong like a peppercorn. She says that, and I’ve inherited this energy from her. And so I think it is passion, it is energy. There is this creativity that kind of flows through me that I’ve been very much in touch with, and I can get very depressed if I’m not letting that creative flow come through. But I also think that I really care. I really care about humanity. I really care about what’s happening. So I have, in some ways, decided I wanted to focus my life on how can I heal what’s here and support others without interfering. But what, what else is it? You know, I think that as a young child I saw the devastation in my family, as refugees, and I had to grow up so quickly. I psychologically had to grow up, but I wasn’t psychologically grown up, but I was task oriented. I knew the things to do to make a difference or to try to help this mess. And I also think, I know in those moments when I’m relating and things are moving, we have a beautiful women’s retreat or a training goes beautifully. There is that love of the craft. There is that love of seeing people shift right in the midst of something. There is a felt sense of well-being when I see my students relating differently and learning to relate differently… differently than my family did. So I think I was one of those children that I would tap my uncle on the shoulder and I’d say, this is really terrible what’s happening here between my mother and my father, or this is really terrible what’s happening in the world. He says don’t worry yourself about it. And I was like, I can’t not worry myself about it. It’s the way I’m built. I can’t look away.

00:15:51 Kevin
Yeah, you’re saying so many things Rita, that I’m just processing, that that are very poignant. Would you be happy enough to tell me a little bit more about then, you as a child? I get really fascinated personally and I know our listeners do too. I get really fascinated about people, and what you do, but I’m really interested in the person. I’m really interested in that journey from a young Hungarian girl, you already mentioned that this is really terrible what’s happening between my mother and my father. This is really terrible what’s happening out in the world. You mentioned adaptations and accommodations. Would you be happy to tell me a little bit more about how it was for 5, 7, 10 year old Rita?

00:16:37 Rita
I would love to tell you, and there’s a story I’d love to tell you before the five, seven-year old Rita. So I’m going to be 60 this year. I’m doing my most profound work of my life right now. My most profound-down to the cellular level – down to the.. I call it the filaments, down to the nerve, down to the nerve at my rib. I’m really understanding how my body organized itself and we can go to 5, 6, 7. But I’d like to tell you about something deeply intriguing to me right now. I recently sat with my assistant. We sat with 5MEO-DMT (salts), insufflate. So the salts, it’s a very different than the 5MEO-DMT vape (inhaling). And the way I work with it is like a somatic meditation. We don’t put on music. We do it quietly and it’s a one hour journey and it’s a very confronting journey. I’m very careful about the dosage. We always prepare with somatic meditation and embodiment practices. And this time, as I went into the medicine very quietly, and it’s always difficult because it’s pulling apart… It’s getting into my body and pulling apart the organization and the distortions and how my body organized itself around my family. But where it took me this time, it was very difficult because I could see the shadow elements of the ways that certain actions… the shadows coming out in various places in my life. And then I said to the medicine, can you take me directly to the wound? I can take care of these shadow pieces, but I’d actually like to go directly to the wound. And it took me there and it said, OK, here it is. 

It was so compelling to feel, like actually feel it on a body level and the tissue level, on the joint level, on the muscular level, the fascial level, was that my mother, who came to Canada in 1964, she hadn’t seen her husband in seven years, and she brought out a little boy who was eight years old. She’d been a single parent in communist Hungary. Finally sees my father after seven years. She comes to Canada, leaves her whole family behind. She can’t speak English. I could feel this terrified woman, her heart still shaking from years of the Reign of terror in Hungary, and her heart is still shaking, and I can feel her stiff little arms and her stiff little body. And in that moment, I could feel in the medicine, that I have never trusted anyone holding me. Not my own mother, not the earth, nothing. And in that moment I went, Oh my God, everyone’s traumatized. How can anyone hold me? The earth is traumatized. How can anyone hold me. So I could feel the bracing in my right hip, I could feel the bracing in my pelvis. I could feel the bracing. I’ve been working on bracing for years. I’m actually not very braced, compared to the average person. I’m actually quite mobile. But I’m going down to the fine elements. But what was so compelling about that, is I got to see all the places where my accommodations are about… I’m having to do this on my own, even though I’ve got a fabulous husband, we have a wonderful relationship. Not without his problems, of course. I have wonderful human beings surrounding me. But there was that element of I cannot be held. And in that moment, the medicine said, would you like to know it? Is there any possibility? Because you get to that point in trauma where you’re like, nothing’s available to you. Nothing. And in that moment, it was like it was a real conscious shift to go, hold on a minute. Could this be possible because the body wants to defend against that horrific thing that a newborn baby cannot be held by anything? And in that moment I had to switch circuits. I had to actually switch a circuit and open a new circuit and the medicine showed me universal energy. It was a completely neutral energy. It was like a mother energy but it was absolutely neutral. And it said would you like that? And I have never in my life experienced it to this degree for a half hour complete release in every joint, muscle, blood vessel, heart, everything was a complete surrender embodied being held. And I could see how that would shift my life. So fast forward, those are the beginnings, right? Those are the very beginnings. And my heart also catching the terror in my mother’s heart as I’m jumping, the terror jumping, as I’m coming through the birth canal. 5, 6, 7 year old Rita by that time, essentially always scared, always wondering when the next eruption comes in the family, scared of other people, not understanding social cues, developmental trauma, right? Not understanding this culture. I’m at home, I’m speaking Hungarian up until the age of four. I start speaking English on the streets, don’t know how. Always thinking that I’m deficient, always thinking that I’m behind. I know I’m smart. At that time I don’t know the word dissociation, but I can feel this fog coming on as the information comes. But really, I’m in excruciating emotional pain. And the excruciating emotional pain is driving me to discover strategies… Strategies on how to be great. Strategies on how to be a good student even though I can’t take in the information because I’m still thinking about what happened at home. Strategies to be the perfect kid for my parents, but at the same time raging inside because I’m also feeling the pressure of what they want of me. It’s so complex. It’s so complicated. I’m surprised my brain didn’t fragment into 1000 pieces. I mean I have imploded several times, so that’s a little bit of a picture if that answers your question.

00:22:25 Kevin
Yeah, it does. It just really helps me get an oversight of certainly your ancestors and yourself as a small human being. Follow that trajectory on through for me, then read it, which is so yeah. Tell me a little bit about schooling, starting work. I’m just interested in how you were as, a, maybe an older girl or a younger woman. What was going on then in your life?

00:22:52 Rita
I was really smart, so I looked for the thing that would get me out of the house. So by the time I was 13. I initially auditioned for the… Canada’s National Ballet School in Toronto, which at the time was the most prestigious ballet school in the world. This is like the late 70s and initially I don’t get in and I’m devastated. But this determination comes knowing that if I’m to stay on this planet, I need to get out of the house. So I see that… I don’t even know this school existed. I found out from someone, and I audition… I get into this ballet school and I shift all this pain and I direct it towards my passion, which is dance. I did love dancing. I did love it, but it had its own burdens because it’s a painful existence as well, physically and emotionally and the competition and the pressure. In ballet school, I think I was constantly paranoid. I was in a constant state of paranoia. The competition, I loved my friends. I’d have mostly bad days, but the only time that I felt any sort of sense of hope was when I was moving, when I was dancing, when the music was playing, right? But then coming outside of that, then there was the starvation. I was anorexic and bulimic for many years. It’s so complex that as well, it’s not just dance. There’s so much. And then, of course, then comes the reality, the difficult realities of the world of dance, because there’s very few spots left and I’m very small. That dance at that time, they want it. Taller dancers, it’s a lot more equitable now. It’s a different world. But at that time it wasn’t easy to get a job. So then the despair happens. Then your whole life ,you leave home the whole thing that you want. Then the despair, this constant despair and this feeling of utter rejection, because I didn’t look like other dancers. Being Hungarian, you just don’t. I think that many of my years, beginning off as a dancer, the foundations were desperation, and then the adaptations were born out of desperation, with moments of fun, but so much hard work, and so much isolation. It actually gets me a little bit emotional thinking about this.  I feel sad.

00:25:09 Kevin
Rita only then, can we then pause with that.

00:25:12 Rita
Yeah, and I feel OK about it. I’m not. I’m just like, oh gosh, I just needed to take a minute to go. Wow.

00:25:18 Kevin
Yeah, you’re being very honest and you’re being very authentic, and I really appreciate that. And I just want to honor that and notice I can see your eyes tearing up a little bit and I just want to honor that and say thank you. And there’s absolutely a space for whatever arises.

00:25:35 Rita
Yeah, I wanted to say, Kevin, I allow myself to tear up with clients. It’s a truly important part of the work is that humanity is to really embody and that embodied empathy of what someone has been through. There’s so much we don’t know. So thank you for that little pause there. Because I went, God, is that what I lived? Yeah.

00:26:03 Kevin
It’s often interesting as well when you’re as trauma informed as you are Rita, through your books and your work, and we’re going to talk a little bit more about your work, when we do, then, start to recount our own story, and listen to yourselves talking. We can have those. Holy shit, that was really tough. That was really big. Bulimia, anorexia, competition. You know, I know Gabor’s talked before about the difficulties in that dancing world and how competitive certainly for a woman or a young girl and, and coming from an already difficult upbringing, in finding yourself another difficult world to launch yourself into.

00:26:46 Rita
Not at all trauma informed either. The world was not trauma informed back then.

00:26:51 Kevin
For sure. Yeah, for sure. So yeah, when we look back, we can really appreciate that was big.

00:26:59 Rita
That was big, and that’s often what gets in the way of people being able to heal, is what I see often is that lack of empathy, and the lack of embodied empathy. That felt sense because it’s hard to feel that. It’s really hard. That’s a lot of the work that I do as well, both somatic relationally and with medicine, is to build fluency and literacy and actual resilience to feel heartbreak. That’s one of my big pieces right now is the energetic capacity to go straight to the source and not tell stories or analyze. It’s straight in. The beholding and felt sense of that heartbreak is so powerful, which allows me to then, from an embodied place, from a place of felt sense, get the other. And it’s nonverbal. It is absolutely nonverbal. You can see eye to eye that there’s a looking into the soul and going, ah, I get you. I get that. And I think that’s what we deeply yearn for, is someone to feel our lives and to take that into another body and go, I feel your life, that makes all the difference.

00:28:18 Kevin
Sure. Personally, Rita, I believe that’s why… and of course I’m here on The Gifts of Trauma podcast from Competitive Inquiry. I’m going to be an advocate of Compassionate Inquiry. I really believe that is one of the strongest pillars of Compassionate Inquiry in that it, it’s an inquiry, but it’s a compassionate one. So there’s somebody suffering with you or alongside you. And all of the Compassionate Inquiry colleagues that I have worked with, they’re very tender people who are prepared to say, I’m really feeling your story right now, you know, that’s making me really sad. Which of course, when we talk to other, maybe more medically trained therapists, psychologists, they’re trained to not express, to not engage in that way. And it’s such a wonderfully healing thing when someone, as you’ve just said, someone can say, wow, that sounds really big. I’m being really touched by that story. Thank you for that.

00:29:25 Rita
Yeah, my teacher Sharon Stanley really spoke of… There was a line, she said when I was in her practicum, her somatic transformation practicum, she said “We’re making a home in our consciousness for the consciousness of the other.” And when she wrote that line, I was like, that’s I’m practicing that for the rest of my life, just that making that home. And so it’s not an easy thing. And I want to say it’s not an easy thing to really grasp the consciousness of another human. It’s real work because it can come down in different degrees, in different degrees because I can sense when someone really takes something seriously in another. There’s one thing saying I’m sorry that happened to you, but then there’s this other level of…yeah, I get that.

00:30:14 Kevin
And I really know, I was going to say believe. I really know that, people sense that they know if you’re just saying it, that’s very, that’s terrible. And they can see if you feel it. And they’re two very different things.

00:30:27 Rita
Yeah. And I really do believe that if we’re to feel it in another, we certainly have to feel it in ourselves. And there’s layers of layers, as we know.

00:30:38 Kevin
Yeah, thank you, Rita. Rita, I’m keen to talk about the work you’re doing right now, the people you’re working with. I’m not going to read… We’ll have in our show notes at your website and where people can find out about you because it would take me 15 minutes reading out your accolades and your skills and your trainings, let me just read this little bit. “Multidisciplinary, somatic, relational, trauma informed facilitator, psychedelic therapist, somatic transformation educator, author and podcast co host.” And that’s just a little snippet of your accolades and your achievements. Can we then get into the details of your work? Talk to me about who you’re working with, what sort of people you’re working with, what they’re presenting with, what you’re helping them with. Would you be willing to do that? To show me the inside of the workings of your working world, let’s say.

00:31:35 Rita
Sure. I often say I work with people that I love, I work with people I can connect with. I work with people with whom I can establish a rhythm of connectivity. So, I have learned over many years that I can’t work with everyone, and I’m OK with that now. Whereas I used to feel like I had to save everyone. It’s a internal felt sense that the work is very challenging. It’s incredibly challenging. So I need to know that there’s this felt sense when I’m on a Zoom call, a discovery call with a potential new client. I’m curious about the rhythm that gets established between us in the very few seconds. I don’t work with particular populations. I work with whoever finds me, signs up for an interview, and we have a conversation. Right now it seems to be that I’m working with a lot of women at this time, and I also work with men of course, but it seems to be a lot of women of various ethnicities, ancestries, backgrounds, cultural ancestries. So diversity, is very important and of all gender identities, sexual orientation is really important and some Indigenous clients as well. But I am deeply interested in, how do we heal relational trauma? Deeply interested. I’m very influenced by the work of Alan Shore and the right hemisphere to right hemisphere right brain psychotherapy. The deep, subtle nuances of understanding attachment trauma through the body. The nuance of the head movements, the facial movements, the vocal movements, the responses of the body… that leads me into working with developmental trauma, that leads me into, of course, ancestral trauma. So those are all pieces that I study, continuously study. I’m working with helping reconnect pathways that have been severed, or hearts that have been severed. I’m warily working in that moment by moment way of not working out of sequence with clients, really finding those tiny moments of where their next connection comes from. It’s not about pushing people into uncomfortable places or letting them stay complacent, but I’m working on a razor’s edge right now in terms of those nuanced indications that there’s something that oh, they’ve just agreed to something, but that, no, let’s back up. That was too fast or that was too… So I worked very slowly. I work with complex trauma. I work with PTSD, complex post traumatic stress. And how do I work with that? I work with that through embodiment practices, somatic meditation. I work with it through the relationship, how we are being moved by each other, how we are changing as a result of each other, and I am changing in the presence of my client. This two person psychology.

00:34:48 Kevin
Rita, could I ask you to do something? Could you do something for me? Would that be OK? Yeah, I just be, always be very mindful of our listeners and who’s listening. So let’s just bookmark just that working on the razor’s edge. We were nearly going to how you help people and the outcomes of that. I’d love to know though. Complex post traumatic stress disorder or syndrome, whatever we want to call it. We all know what you’re talking about and some of our listeners will, but tell me how that presents. What’s the manifestation of that? Is it relational? Addiction? Chronic illness?

00:35:17 Rita
Totally. While we’re talking complex post traumatic stress, we are talking relational breakdowns. So if the client is having trouble relating, they have trouble functioning on day-to-day basis, there may or may not be in an addiction. They may feel like they’re constantly plugged into an electrical socket, that their nervous system is in a constant state of cycling between high arousal and low arousal, so they can have high up here. There’s a sense of chaos that follows them. Living in their body feels terrible. It’s horrible. There’s varying degrees of this where some people may be suicidal, they’re in hypervigilance, they’re having problems in their families with their relations, some of them may be isolated, some of them not. It’s quite a spectrum, but it feels like you are always in a state of terror. You can never rest and it affects everything.

00:36:11 Kevin
OK. Thank you. Yeah, I’m guessing that might be really helpful. I’ve got one eye or one ear on someone who might be listening to this, thinking that sounds like me.

00:36:23 Rita
Oh, yeah. And you don’t know it. You don’t know what’s wrong with you.

00:36:29 Kevin
Yeah.

00:36:29 Rita
Yeah.

00:36:30 Kevin
I’m guessing that type of person, they might also in their life have a lot of other people telling them what’s wrong with them, and telling them their shortcomings and their pitfalls and they’re terrible at this and can’t do that.

00:36:44 Rita
Yeah. It’s you, actually, I can honestly say when I went into my blind spot and I didn’t know what was going on with me, I felt like a piece of shit. That’s where I went to. I felt like a leper, like a leper, like there’s nobody that can understand what you’re going through. You can’t sleep. You have insomnia. Your guts, you feel like your guts are breaking down, like your internal organs are breaking down. It’s a horrible place to be. And I understand why people resort to suicide.. Yeah, and it’s such an accumulation of years of so many things and systems failing people and humans failing people.

00:37:23 Kevin
And I just wanted to, and maybe I have a little bit of an agenda there, Rita. I just wanted to drop that in and thank you for explaining it so beautifully, that for anyone listening to you and listening to the description that you’re given. And then, I would like them to hold that and to hold the fullness of this conversation, because I’m obviously speaking to a well educated, rounded individual, a human being that has her stresses and strains and eccentricities and foibles. But yet here you are, author, producer, podcaster, therapist, psychedelic therapist. You used a lovely phrase earlier, a firefly of hope in the night. And I would just love people that might be relating to the complex stress description, to also hold a little firefly of hope in that this was you, that this is you.

00:38:16 Rita
Yeah. And we have to remember when people have failed us. And for some people, maybe they feel that nature has failed them if they’ve gone through natural disasters. Gabor’s talked about this as well. It’s like, how do you listen to the spirit? How do you… if you’ve forgotten to look around and you’re not looking at the clouds or you’re not looking at the changing clouds, You’re not looking at the changing light? If you’ve buried yourself in so deep… Is it random? I don’t know, like how some people can hear that glimmer of hope or the spirit come through and say, get up and go. It’s different. I think different people have different levels of accumulation from ancestral trauma. And for some people, it’s no, they’ve got to leave, they’ve got to go. And others, well, I think I can pull myself up out of this one. And then maybe even a note of music or a certain song that comes on a certain day that gives you a little message of hope, is like, oh man, I haven’t heard that song in a while. Oh, there’s a signal here. I remember Amanda Lindhout, she’s an up and coming journalist from a small town here in Alberta, Canada, who ended up in Somalia, 468 days in captivity by insurgents in a cell, near death. And her mother was trying to get her out. Her mother was working with the Canadian government. The Canadian government wouldn’t bail her out because she was down there at the worst time that you could go to Somalia. They wanted ransom money. Amanda was at the point she was holding on. I think it might have been day 400 and she had a razor blade and she was contemplating suicide. In that moment. She was. It was just, I don’t even want to start describing what she’d been through. She hadn’t seen a sign of life in so long, except her captors. And in flew a tiny bird, in the moment that she was going to put that razor blade to her wrist, in flew a bird. It was unheard of that a bird would fly into this cell. And in that moment, she knew that her mother, who had been working to raise money in Alberta, it was only about $500,000. They wanted 2 million. But in that moment, she went, I’m going to survive. And that’s that same thing as Victor Frankel, that first step, that dissociation, that seeing that vision of what he was going to do. I think that if we can stay open, if there’s some tiny part of us that can stay open to the messages that are around us, then we can survive this, and then the healing path can begin. But it’s a long, circuitous route. But that’s… I want to say to people that there are tiny messages around us and we have to pay attention, if we can.

00:40:59 Kevin
Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. really. Yeah, I really appreciate how you’ve described that. Maybe then I’ll invite you back. I took you on a little segue there, maybe take you back. You were talking about the people that you work with and how they present and what’s going on for them. And I’d love to know a little bit then, of, what we talk about psychedelics and relational trauma informed therapy and different things. I would just really like to get a feel, an understanding of what that work looks like. What are you doing with people? How are you working with people?

00:40:59 Kevin
It’s that hard to try to describe it, but.

00:41:36 Kevin
I apologize for that. I get that.

00:41:38 Rita
Yeah. How do you paint this picture? But let me try. So for example, I’m working with a client right now and you would call her anorexic, you would call it an eating disorder. We’re calling it a nutritional rupture, which I much prefer nutritional rupture and complex trauma, of course, it’s been a number of years now that we’re working and we’re working really slowly and it’s working around these different levels, right? First of all, the relationship between us. No one’s going to allow you to coregulate them unless they trust you. Then there’s parts of them that may allow you to ooregulate, then there’s other parts that the self-care system has locked away and protected so highly that those parts are not up for coregulation. So there’s this… I call it this figure eight between us, this flow back and forth, this curiosity, this…. I don’t even call it curiosity, but this wonder about this person and I don’t dig into oh, so tell me about your father, your mother. I don’t dig into those things right away. I don’t even dig in to tell me about your trauma. I’m just wondering how we’re relating together, and to what level are they able to even go into the body just a little bit and then come out of the body? I’m looking for levels of arousal. Are they more high arousal? Are they more low arousal? Do they tend to shut down? What’s their dissociation like? I’m really getting an understanding of the shape of their nervous system. I’m really focused and interested in their facial expressions, the sound of their voice, when the throat tightens, as a defence, where the defences lie in the body. And then I’m interested in what they’re sharing, what’s coming from them. And so I also own my own curiosities. I might say, glee, humor me, this is coming up and I’m wondering about it. And then sometimes it’s soft approach and sometimes I might get a little bit more directive where I say, I’m wondering if you’d be up for something. And then I really have to check in to see whether, are they just being a good client or not? I’m also assessing, we’re doing a little bit of work here on the relational level. We’re checking out the developmental pieces, like how are they functioning in their lives? I’m looking at their social situations, What’s happening there. It’s so different with every single person. The process, it’s just not the same, and every client is different every single session. And then because I’m working with medicine, a lot of the times I’m taking a long time to get to know my clients through these somatic, relational, trauma informed practices, these rhythmic practices, these back and forths. I’m looking for moments where their body is in a pause and I can sense that something is reorganizing. So I’m waiting for that reorganizing to happen. I can see it in the eye. So I’m looking for these cues and I’m giving gentle, those gentle little encouragements. It’s kind of like the mother and the infant. It’s that serve and return. So it’s subtle, gentle, kind, rhythmic… I don’t go into belief systems I used to, just for myself because I don’t like to take people to the left hemisphere before they’re ready. I’m more working with the right hemisphere and up the body, and then take them over to the left for meaning making so they can make their own connections later. But, oh… I wish I could describe this better.

00:45:02 Kevin
You’re doing a beautiful job. You’re doing an absolutely beautiful job, Yeah.

00:45:05 Rita
OK, great. Thank you. I’m working with gesture, right? I’m working with gesture and you know how the body is communicating because the body right from infancy is communicating all ways. We are always letting everyone know around us what’s happening to us, and we need people to get our cues. I’m helping amplify gestures. I’m helping regulate gestures, slow them down. The voluntary teaches the involuntary. So we might have a hand gesture that’s… they said, I don’t know how I feel. Then they’re making this gesture and I said, well, your hand is showing me something about how you feel right now. And I’m working more at the feeling level rather than the emotional level. So I’m not going into… we’re regulating affect, we’re amplifying vitality affect. I’m looking for the surges of dysregulation as they’re coming up. So the feelings beneath the words, the feelings beneath the stories, so that we can create new connections and change the brain in the moment. So this is the pre-work I do to medicine. I’m not waiting for the person to do this. We’re doing this for months and months before the medicine so that by the time we get to the medicine work, we’re working in optimal arousal. So we’re not treating trauma in high arousal or low arousal. We’re getting the body into a more optimal arousal zone so that the medicine sessions can be more in the optimal arousal zone of the body. So in an embodied state, ventral – vagal, rather than being blindsided by things that come up, things float up more gently. That’s what I’m working with, is to let things float up more gently so that people don’t go into psychosis or fragmentation that’s not needed. We’re working more in a resourced way so that the journeys are gentler and more integrative as they’re happening. So we’re not waiting to integrate an integration, we’re letting it integrate as we’re going along. I’m really thinking on that homeostatic level, the homeostasis of the soul, the homeostasis of the spirit, and the homeostasis of the body, all together. Then we go over to the left hemisphere to make connections, after the right has been tended, the right hemisphere has been tended, and then we make the connections on the left. But I also just, I’m really interested in fluency of feeling, that possibility. Because it’s those feelings that allow us to really get to know why we’re here, what our purpose is. Without that, we’re just swimming around trying to figure ourselves out. And it’s that fluency of feeling that helps me…. how I want to feel towards this person or I want to be in this collaboration, or I don’t want to be in this collaboration. Gabor so beautifully talks about the gut, the heart, and the prefrontal connection. And so we’re working on that alignment as well. And I’m not going to dig for trauma. It’s there, it’s right here in the present, it’s in the whole body organization, it’s in all the gestures. I don’t go back digging for something. It just emerges quite naturally. That’s my way of working. And Earth based medicine, of course, the elements, the connection to gravity, the connection to the light, to our natural world. Also recognizing the natural world can also have its dangers as well. So, I’m not whitewashing. I’m not saying that all our answers are there. Everything has its dark side and I hope that helps describe a painting.

00:48:35 Kevin
It describes it beautifully Rita. My only regret is that people listening to this can’t see you speaking because you spoke earlier about the body is communicating so much. As I watch you speak, I’m watching someone dance. There’s a lot of movement in your body, in your hands, in your eyes and your shoulders. It’s not almost. I was going to say it’s almost ballet. It’s ballet… there’s a beautiful opening and movement and just watching you dance your description to your work has really told me a lot about what you do. I can really see that it is in relationship, in connection, in presence, in movement with people. And that might be sitting down movement  in yeah, in that movement with people. I can imagine myself being in a session with you and, and doing that dance with you or being invited to do that dance with you. And I had the privilege of watching you speak there. And I think how you described it verbally, you described it beautifully. So thank you. How does that land for you that I say that I can watch you doing that?

00:49:44 Rita
I love that. I’ve been described that way before. That when people watch me work with a client it is like a dance. I’ve heard that before and certainly we step on each other’s toes in the dance. Of course, of course, of course, on the spot, relational ruptures, on the spot repair, right? The other thing is one of the things I’m a stickler about, I absolutely understand the need for defences. We need them. We can’t walk around vulnerable all the time, but there is, for me, I do notice that it can get very slippery where people have a lot of focus on their defences and not enough focus on healing, the actual healing, the wound underneath it. So I’m very careful about that slippery place where there’s this fascination with the defences that almost looks like they’re doing really good work, but in fact there’s a lot of focus on the defences. So I also understand that we can’t go back here to this very vulnerable piece until many things have fallen into place. Most recently working with a client with the nutritional disruption. It took us such a long time, many medicine sessions, a lot of just regular sessions. Her joining a cohort where yesterday – we got to this completely different place together in the medicine work and a completely different place together and it required also… And this is where people, we talked about Sinead O’Connor being a truth teller and people caught up to her by the time she died. I can get some flack from people that say I put too much of myself into my work and I go, how else would I do this? I talked to Rachel Harris about this as well, as I have to be myself in this work. I cannot be a bord. And it’s in reason, of course. Appropriateness, of course. However, I’m not going to be shy about telling an anorexic client that says to me, her anorexia isn’t affecting anyone. I’m going to tell her, yeah, it affects me. I am going to say it affects me, because I care about you and it affects me. And I’m going to be honest with you that we’re working here, but I want to be clear that we’re working on your healing. We’re going to get clear about what you actually want to do here. I’m not going to tell you to gain weight. However I am going to say, I do not want to be in collusion with you to shorten your life. And I want to be super clear here that what you’re doing is going to shorten your life. So can we just put that on the table, just so that I said it, and now I can shelf it over here and not make it an agenda. But I need to be really clear with that. So there are also times where I’m quite open. I might sound like a drop a bomb, or I might say, hey, look at, you spent the last three sessions really interested and fixated on your defences. Is there a possibility? And I made a little fence and it was with my water bottle and with my tea mug and a carpet. And I said, you’re on that side, over there behind the defences. Here’s the fence. And I’m over here on this side. And I’m really curious about your healing. What healing the wound or what wound here, is being protected? Because we’ve been looking at these defences a long time. They’re very good, very good at that. You’re really good at that. And I’m sitting with my assistant. It’s a prep session from a medicine session. And I said, hey, no pressure. What do you want to do? Do you want to stay on the side of the defences? Or are you interested in what is hurting over here and do you want to join us? We’re over here. And so she does get up and very hard to walk over to that other side and sit with us, and actually sit on that side of that fence. So it’s that actual physical movement. So it’s very creative. I just made that up on the spot. I use a lot of creativity, a lot of what’s coming through here right now. I’m daring to be creative. It’s kind of being in a band together. I always think of my assistant, the client, that we’re making music together. We’re playing in a band, We’re playing different instruments. At one point. I don’t know what you were doing there. So I know what I was doing there. What was really beautiful at one point as we worked through the three days after the medicine session is that she was able to recognize that her tightening her throat was a really early defensive accommodation from saying the wrong thing and getting in trouble. And we were able to transform it after the medicine into slowing down long enough to let her words emerge, even if all she could get out was 3 words. But to keep this open, how do I start trusting my inner knowing, my direct knowledge and dare to get the words wrong… wrong. But it’s so interesting that these defences are so unconscious and so quick to just choke up my throat. And I won’t share the wrong thing and I won’t be cast out and I won’t be rejected. But it’s wow, the body’s been doing it for 38 years. How do we slip in there? How do we gently… How do we use ourselves as therapists to just say that, that gentle invitation, and back away, Gentle invitation, back away, pause, wait, drop agenda. So much going on, right?

00:54:58 Kevin
It’s beautiful, Rita. And again, I’m thinking not just Compassionate Inquiry, maybe let’s call it modern modalities of therapy that all of what you’ve just described would be completely tubby to a 1980s or even a 1990s psychologist or psychotherapist. That would be completely taboo. But what we’re inviting certainly in our Compassionate Inquiry world and in other worlds that you’re in, is this allyship, this connection, this willingness to be truthful with someone. And as you just said, that’s a really big bomb to drop on someone. I am not going to be complicit with you in shortening your life, again, that would be totally taboo and only 15, 20 years ago something like that. But we’re totally understanding that this honest, authentic, truthful, relational modality of working with people works.

00:55:59 Rita
It does. I mean, who’s going to tell you their unvarnished truths? I had classmate of mine when I was in ballet school and I was down to 76 lbs and I was 5 foot two and a classmate of mine who was a Sagittarian, and said to me, and man, she nailed it. She dared to say to me, Rita, you were the one in the class that improved the fastest all the time. “You’d get a correction, you’d apply it right away and you were the fastest improving dancer in the class.” And she goes, “Now you’re the slowest improving dancer in the class because you don’t have enough energy.” And it was jaw-dropping, devastating, the shame that came up in me. It was like that white heat in the head. And I will thank her for the rest of my days, because it turned the trajectory for me. That was a piece where I went, I cannot not be an improving dancer. I may be gained 5 lbs, but it was a start, because of her truth. And so I thank her. I thank her for doing what was needed at that moment. And so I pull that one out carefully. I didn’t learn it from a therapist. I didn’t learn it in training. I learned it from a friend who dared to say something. And so I’m careful in how I coach things when I work with clients. But when I get to a point where it’s, this isn’t really… I go, OK, listen, I would like to say something. I don’t know if I’m right. I could be way off base here. Is there any resonance in what I’m saying here?

00:57:37 Kevin
It’s a beautiful way to ask, isn’t it?  Rita I’m conscious of our time and I’m also conscious that I am totally engrossed in the conversation and as such, I could keep you here forever. I mentioned very briefly, and I want to do you, is the word justice? I don’t know? I want to be fair to you, and we’re going to post your website in the show notes. I would really encourage people to go look at those and the interesting things that you’ve done that we haven’t yet had a chance to talk about, and probably won’t. The writing of novels. They winning awards for novels that you’ve written and books that you’ve written. And can I ask you just, it’s just a little curiosity of mine. I’ll remember it and you can tell me more about it. The play that you wrote, produced and directed with our very own Gabor Maté. Tell me a little bit about that.

00:58:26 Rita
It was a germ of an idea that started with an essay. And then I did this kind of performance essay in Iceland and got a really good review from it from the Reykjavik Grapevine. And then I wrote Gabor an email before… I’d always wanted to reach out to Gabor, and… this Hungarian Dr. and look at what he’s saying. He’s so brilliant. I think I wrote to him before that in Hungarian, and it was so beautiful. I really appreciated that he wrote back to me in Hungarian and just the generosity of his heart and spirit to write back. And then we had a little back and forth. And then about a year after that, I sent him this review and I said, hey, I’ve got an idea for a show called The Damage Is Done, which is also a Neil Young song, by the way.

00:59:09 Kevin
It is, yeah. It’s a wonderful Neil Young song.

00:59:09 Kevin
It’s such a great Neil Young song. It was really in this play, it was a two person show, Gabor being Gabor and me being myself, but me also being my mother and my father and my brother and BB Gabor. BB Gabor was a really extraordinary Hungarian musician who fled during the revolution, went through England and then unfortunately took his own life in the 90s in Canada. But he was a punk musician from Hungary, BB King /Eva Gabor, so BB Gabor. And Gabor was being himself in the play. And what we were exploring was multigenerational, intergenerational, ancestral trauma and how it comes through relationally. So Gabor got to interact with my mother, as played with me. He got to interact with my father. He got to interact with my brother. But what was a really important part of the play is at one point, we stopped the whole production. And Gabor was like, “Stop!”  Because I’m playing out all these arguments and things that are going on between my family, right? And the dynamics. I’m playing out all these family dynamics. I’m playing all these characters. He goes “Stop.” We sit down. He does an onstage therapy session with me, and he goes, “Your father hates your mother, and your mother hates your father, and your father hates your brother, and you hate your….” And then he says, “There are no villains and there are no victims. There’s just a lot of hurting people.” And it was like, it was just like a fabulous moment where everything kind of stops. And then I pick up from that place when I start to play the characters differently. And I’m going to cry now again, because there’s this. I play my brother talking to my father as he’s dying, and that’s a hard one. And I play my father as he’s dying. And I play the last scene of my mother as my father has a stroke, but there’s this tenderness that starts to come out. I learned a lot from Gabor, about… one of the loveliest things Gabor ever did for me was I… I had been forceful with my brother. He’s older than me. He’s very severely traumatized. Now I know that my brother is doing the very best he can with what he’s got. We have a very different dynamic, very different. But at the time my husband and I had tried to help my brother buy a house, move out from my parent’s place, in his 50s. But Gabor said to me, “Were you forceful? Did you try to force your brother into this situation?” I remember this shame coming up in me because something hit a cord and Gabort just said, “Listen, I don’t care if this was right or wrong, I just need to know what you did. Like, there’s no judgment here. I just need to know what you did.” And I said, “Yeah, I did force this situation.” So he said, “Okay, great. That’s all I need to know.” And in that moment, I could absolve myself of my schemings or strategies to try to make things work. And that made a world of difference to me, that whatever accommodations or adaptations or strategies I had to try to make things function in the world, I was not an asshole. I was not a shithead. And that has stayed with me since, because the fear of judgment has been excruciating for me and how harshly I have been judged. I’ve been very harshly judged in my family, in my professional life. And in that moment, just to have that non judgment, I just need to know. So all of us, we just need to know, what did you do? Like, of course we get to the severe end of things. Why did someone kill someone? But I think we have to start coming back to, yeah, we can feel ethical shame and ethical guilt, important. And then there comes a time where we have to drop it, and understand how could I have done anything else given the family that I was raised in, how could I have done anything else? So anyway, that play, I’ll just always remember, I’ve got like these list of three words that Gabor says that have changed my trajectory. And really, right now it’s Gabor, in our personal relationship, which was very difficult at times. We had some really intense struggles, hard things that came up doing that work on many levels. But in my heart, no matter how bad it gets with anyone, there may be times where we can’t come together for a while. It’s just not skillful, but to hold in our hearts that nobody’s more right, nobody’s more wrong, that it’s just, as Gabor says, “a lot of hurting individuals.” And let’s look at our leaders right now. My God, what kind of accumulative trauma is coming up there? That level of chronic shame, to create that kind of power grab? Wow, you asked me about the play and…

01:04:36 Kevin
That’s obviously, it’s obviously very important to you. Rita, can I ask you one more question that’s just arisen from a curiosity of mine? Is it OK if we do that? Thank you. Listening to you talk. And one of the things that I’m realizing about myself now, and it’s of course through the work of Gabor and my own practices as well, is that when I heal myself through whatever modality that is, that sort of thing that you’re talking about, that ability to see this person’s not raging. They’re hurting and afraid. This person isn’t evil. They’re hurting and they’re afraid. And I was having a conversation with a young woman here just during the week, and I described it as that forgiveness is the flower on the tree of healing so that when we heal ourselves, these flowers appear. One of them for me is forgiveness. One of them is non judgment. One of them is compassion. These beautiful flowers appear in this tree and I’ve just as you’re a child, and I’m just curious on your thoughts of that. When we do this work, when we heal ourselves, when we help each other heal, the world then just becomes a better place because of how we’re seeing each other. Would you agree with that?

01:05:51 Rita
How we’re seeing each other, and how we’re feeling each other., How we’re creating space for the other. Two weeks exist. How our holding an awareness of the sequential development of another person. For me, it’s healing the human beneath what happened to them. To me, that’s my healing. My healing is never to forget another’s humanity. Yeah, or my own, actually. The minute I lose my own, that’s bad news. Yeah. So I, yes, I believe forgiveness, but I think that for me, healing is that I see the humanity in the other person, and see the value of the other human.

01:06:37 Kevin
Yeah. And I think maybe what I’m leaning towards as well is that I know sometimes that we can almost expect things like, being able to see the humanity in another person. In fact, we almost, I hear sometimes people demand that we almost, we have to see the humanity in the other person. We have to be compassionate. We have to forgive before we heal. And for me, all of those things almost become, yeah, like I say, fruits of healing. They almost become the symptom of healing or the reward of healing, that when we do our own work, then we’re more inclined to see the humanity in the other person. We’re more inclined to be non judgmental. We’re more inclined to be compassionate and forgiving and caring and tender.

01:07:16 Rita
I can’t always, it’s hard for me to see the humanity in Trump. It’s very hard for me. On some days it goes in and out. I think also the healing as well is our ability to be embodied. I’d love to continue that conversation maybe at some point, but to be embodied, because when we’re not embodied, we don’t feel the pain that’s being inflicted on us. We don’t feel the pain we inflict on others. So we don’t know when we’re in pain. So embodiment, really, it’s like when I asked my teacher, Sharon Stanley, what are we doing when we’re healing trauma? She goes, we’re healing disembodiment. I went, right on. That’s it. And so everything pulled back to that.

01:07:55 Kevin
Yeah, that’s a beautiful reminder. And that healing is the ability to establish yourself in your own presence. And that’s both thematically, psychologically, that I am back here. I am back home spiritually, mentally, physically, somatically, emotionally, I can occupy this thing that I’m moving about in the world in. And really, let me then, just final again, if you’ve listened to any of the podcasts, you’ll know that this question always comes at the end because I really like it. It is a playful question, but for me, it’s a very serious question too. And I like to ask my guests, if you had the ear of humanity and you could whisper something into the ear of humanity, what would you whisper?

01:08:39 Rita
Pay attention to what you choose to focus on. Pay attention to what you choose to focus on and what you choose not to focus on.

01:08:53 Kevin
Thank you. Rita Bozi, thank you for being on the Gifts of Trauma podcast from Compassionate Inquiry.

01:09:01 Rita
Thank you so much, Kevin Young, and so grateful to be here.

01:09:04 Kevin
Thank you. Take care, Rita.

01:09:06 Rita
And take care.

01:09:12 Kevin
My friends, if you are, or have, participated in the Compassionate Inquiry Professional Training program, please join us from June 17 to 19 at Renewal: a CI Summer Solstice Retreat, hosted by Sat Dharam Kaur and 18 CI Facilitators from around the globe. In this immersive journey into renewal and transformation, you’ll experience guided practices, nature immersions, creative activities, small group workshops, connection circles, meaningful conversations and much more, all designed to support your journey inward, as we celebrate the solstice in community.  Tap the link in the show notes to learn more and secure your place.

01:09:59 Rosemary
The Gifts of Trauma is a weekly podcast that features personal stories of trauma, healing, transformation, and the gifts revealed on the path to authenticity. 

Listen on Apple, Spotify, all podcast platforms, rate, review and share it with your clients, colleagues and family. Subscribe and you won’t miss an episode. 

Please note this podcast is for informational purposes only. It is not a substitute for personal therapy or a DIY formula for self therapy.