00:00:01 Sat Dharam
You can’t separate the individual from their culture or their environment or their land or the air or water. It affects us all and I think that’s a huge missing piece in most forms of psychotherapy. We can certainly be aware of that and invite people to link to those aspects of themselves which make us whole and ask, “And how’s your relationship to the land and where is your creativity flowing and how is that expressing itself these days? Who are you relating to in terms of other species, and when was the last time you swam in the lake…” Or whatever it might be? In most forms of psychotherapy, there’s a total absence of what’s going on outside your door. That’s to our detriment as a species because we’re so focused in these narrow regions with losing the connection to the whole and not being aware of the impact of our actions on the whole and how we need to change those actions for the betterment of the whole. And the poetry and the spirituality is part of that, those are pointers of some of the great writers, and poets are always pointing the way, as are the spiritual teachers to this importance of wholeness, the importance of seeing everything as one and connected and interdependent.

00:01:26 Rosemary
This is the Gifts of Trauma podcast, stories of transformation and healing through Compassionate Inquiry.

00:01:44 Kevin
We are here with another edition of the Gifts of Trauma podcast. My name is Kevin Young, and back by popular demand from our listeners is Sat Dharam Kaur, who is our Commander-in-Chief, our Leader, our…

00:02:01 Sat Dharam
The Queen Bee.

00:02:02 Kevin
The Queen Bee. Let’s go for that, Sat Dharam. Yeah. Do I have your permission to refer to you as Queen Bee from now on? 

00:02:10 Sat Dharam
Yes, you may. I like that actually.

00:02:13 Kevin
You’re very welcome, Sat Dharam. I’m delighted you’re here.

00:02:16 Sat Dharam
Thank you so much. It’s awesome to be here with you again, Kevin. Thank you.

00:02:20 Kevin
And Sat Dharam, I know that this is the third time we’ve been speaking to you, and I guess that most of the people that will be listening will know who you are. But would you, for the sake of anyone dropping in new, thinking, who is this woman that’s on the podcast? Would you like to take a moment or two and introduce yourself as you see yourself in this moment of your life?

00:02:45 Sat Dharam
In this moment of my life, OK. In this moment of my life, I am a grandmother, I am a farmer, I am a naturopathic doctor. I am a seeker. I’ve always been a seeker. My role in CI is as the Co-Director with Gabor, and my task in CI is to allow it to unfold organically in the best possible way and to keep together the community, both of the administration people and the facilitators and the participants. Kind of like a holding space, as it really is kind of like a bee colony, isn’t it? So to oversee, but with a light touch, that magnificent group of people that have come to us through Compassionate Inquiry. I’m also a Compassionate Inquiry practitioner, and as a naturopathic doctor, that is primarily what occupies my practice. I do less naturopathic medicine, etc. I’m also a Yogi and I teach yoga and I train people in Kundalini yoga. And I’ve done that for many years. And I would say that right now in my life, what’s happening is the integration between psychology and spirituality on a deeper level for myself, as well as in my teaching. And also on a more personal level, I feel a movement towards the expression of that, and not just the teaching of it, but what’s my self-expression of that, whether through writing or poetry or art is… many, many decades ago, I studied art and painting and drawing, etc, and I also wrote a fair amount of poetry. And in the last 20 years or so, there’s been less of that and more focus on these teaching systems that I’ve developed. And now I’m feeling a pull to go back to the self- expression, really deep connection with Source, but also with these times, and to determine what wants to be expressed through me from Source for this particular time, that can be helpful, but also aligned. I don’t know what the best word is, but just an expression of whatever is important for me and in my awareness, in my insights, in my connection to the world, to nature, because there’s so much that needs to be said right now. So that’s where I am. Thanks for asking.

00:05:34 Kevin

Thank you, Sat Dharam. I love that. We were having a conversation with Rosemary and J’aime just before you came on about arts, and I’d love to pop back to that just a second, but I’m also keen to hear, and how are you? How is your heart? How is your, how is your soul? How are you doing?

00:05:51 Sat Dharam
My heart and soul are very full, very grateful, very happy, I would say peaceful, and also what’s the word, excited about whatever’s coming next, I have a sense of quite a lot of freedom in my life. My family is well, I don’t have any major burdens of aging parents or problem child, or a huge amount of debt. I live in a, I live in a wonderful place, so my heart is great. I feel so absolutely blessed with where I am in my life right now. In fact, I was teaching a workshop these last nine days and we had a huge flood in my business building with the winter storms and ice and cold and the pipes burst, which meant that everything went into boxes. Which meant that when I was putting everything back, I had to empty all these boxes and look through a few things and I found many of my journals from way back, and in one of them I had been writing who I want to be. So I said, OK, I’m going to be this and this. And as I read it, I said, oh my goodness, I’m all those things right now. So it was a beautiful reconnection to my younger self and victory, but also, OK, now what? I’ve done all that, I’ve played that out. So what’s next? So that’s where I’m sitting right now is, an open canvas, literally and metaphorically. And even though I’m very busy, I do create space in my life to see what really wants to come through next. So that’s how I am.

00:07:44 Kevin
Thank you, Sat Dharam, it’s beautiful to hear. And my podcasting mind and my curiosity is offering me a question, and it’s a little bit nosy, let’s call it curious, on this blank canvas. You know, after reading these journals, “I’ve achieved those things. I’ve become this person. I am doing what I want to do.” And you have said, “What is next.?” Are there any little flutters or downloads or insights as to what might be next?

00:08:12 Sat Dharam
Yeah, there’s so much in my life up until this point that has been integrated. So when I went to art school, go way, way, way back. I remember you have this interview and you have to write a letter, why are you coming to art school? What’s your intention? And my intention was to integrate art, science and spirituality in my work, because I also have a degree in biology and I’m a naturopathic doctor. So I love nature, I love forms in nature. I love biology. I see unfolding creation, that constant beautiful miracle of light, all around me in nature, and I revere that. And so, the same thing back then that I wanted to express, I still want to express visually, poetically, and in the way I live. So it’s interesting now because this last week we had a Beyond Addiction workshop, which is 9 days, and I’m teaching, practicing yoga with people, and they’re going into their deep wounding and we’re doing Compassionate Inquiry with them. They’re doing it on themselves. And then I brought them to the farm and we planted blueberries, and it was just such a beautiful integration. And so I’m realizing that this is what it’s been about all along. It just takes time to create this integration in one’s life. Even if I look at myself when I was a teenager, it was the same. There was a big piece of me that loved nature. There was a big piece of me that loved the arts and poetry and beauty, and there was a big piece of me that was curious about human nature and psychology and wanted to help. 

So it was all there. So now it’s this deeper levels of integration that I feel that I’m doing, not only personally but also if you look at my life, it’s what I’m doing and I want to do that in a bigger way. I think it’s needed. This is where we have to go. I think we need sustainability first, before anything else, for our collective future, not just humans, but the whole environment. And that’s what’s missing. I sort of want to be a voice for that too, and offer a practical experience for people in the workshops that I teach, or on the farm, or whatever. So I don’t know if I’m answering your question, but that’s what comes to mind.

00:10:44 Kevin
But you are certainly answering it, Sat Dharam, and you’re very kindly easing my curiosity and my desire to to know you a little bit more than what we read on websites and what we read in emails. Just getting to know you. I’m going to go, maybe just go back before we go forward. When J’aime and Rosemary and I were chatting, just before you came on, I was sharing that there’s a particular guest we’d like to get on and he’s a musician. And I was sharing that I was at a conference last week in Prague, the Body Mind Unity Conference, and it was wonderful. It was really wonderful, but it became really apparent to me that all of these wonderful speakers, Stephen Porges and Sue Carter and different people, really fascinating. But there was a real absence of art, of beauty, of poetry, of spoken word, of music, of reference to nature. And we were talking about nervous systems, and talking about wellness and talking about spirituality and that, yeah, that absence of beauty, love, awe, the word awe. And I was sharing with J’aime and Rosemary that for me, quite often when I need to find some healing or some comfort, I find that in poetry. I find it in beautiful books. And yet it seems that it’s moving further away from us all the time. This idea of beauty and love and arts and music and creativity and poetry and nature. Where do you see the role of that in healing trauma?

00:12:27 Sat Dharam
It’s a very, very good question.

00:12:30 Kevin
We’re taking a brief pause to share what’s on offer in the Compassionate Inquiry community. Stay with us, we’ll be right back.

00:12:39 Rosemary
If you’ve been listening to our podcast, you may have heard guests connect their birth experiences with enduring subconscious, behavioural and emotional patterns. To help break this cycle, Compassionate Inquiry offers The Portal a 28 week trauma informed training for perinatal health professionals such as midwives, obstetricians, nurses and doulas, who want to empower their patients to trust their innate ability to birth, bond with and nurture their child. To learn more and register, just follow the link in the show notes.

00:13:15 Sat Dharam
It’s a very, very good question. You know, as a naturopathic doctor, when I was studying naturopathic medicine, there were certain principles that we sought to embody. And one is treating the whole person. So what is the whole person? So the whole person has a physical aspect an emotional aspect, a spiritual aspect, but we also live in a particular environment, which you can’t remove an organism from its environment and it loses its identity if you remove it from its environment. It’s part of the environment. 

So I’m a synthesizer, an integrator, like my natural nature is broad rather than narrow. I mean, I can be narrow, but I’m always looking at the big picture and feeling the big picture and noticing that right now in the trauma world, for example, because we’re all focused on trauma work and Compassionate Inquiry, there is an absence; What about nature? What about our relationship to nature? And there is an absence. We’re not talking about creativity when we work with people’s trauma. And also, we’re not talking about the gut when we’re working with trauma and we’re not talking about the adrenal glands so much when we’re working with trauma. So it’s a beautiful thing as a naturopathic doctor. I can see these missing pieces as a human, and as a biologist I recognize the importance of nature, and as a Yogi I recognize the importance of spirituality. So it’s like… How much can you put into one discipline or one approach?  Would be the question, how much we put into Compassionate Inquiry? I don’t know that we can add anything else, but we can certainly recommend and ask… “And how’s your relationship to the land? And where does your creativity flow? And how is that expressing itself these days?” 

We can certainly be aware of that and invite people to link to those aspects of themselves which make us whole. You can’t separate the individual from their culture or their environment or their land or air or water. It affects us all, and I think that’s a huge missing piece in most forms of psychotherapy, there’s a total absence of what’s going on outside your door. “Who are you relating to in terms of other species? And when was the last time you swam in the lake?” Or whatever it might be? That’s to our detriment as a species, because we’re so focused in these narrow regions, we’re losing the connection to the whole, and not being aware of the impact of our actions on the whole, and how we need to change those actions for the betterment of the whole. And the poetry and the spirituality is part of that, those are pointers. Some of the great writers and poets are always pointing the way, as are the spiritual teachers, to this importance of wholeness, the importance of seeing everything as one, and connected and interdependent. I think we need to do that.

00:16:25 Kevin
Thank you. Yeah, let’s get into that conversation a little bit more, Sat Dharam, but I’m… just, a little excitement is coming to my mind that I’m going to share with you. And    is very beautiful as well. And last week I was lucky enough… there’s a river runs through the garden, and I was lucky enough to see a little otter playing in the river. And then the week before I saw a little pine marten… saw a pine marten as well. And just this… I saw the otter for it was maybe 3 seconds before she or he saw me and dashed off. Just that aliveness. It made me freeze in my tracks. Just that aliveness. I was holding my breath watching this otter for three seconds and another thing that came to my mind is, you’re mentioning… you mentioned blueberries on the farm and the gut. It’s food, and it amazes me that we don’t be having, certainly in trauma work, we never hear anyone talking about food, or what we’re eating. And when I think of creativity, when I think of arts, when I think of nature, when I think of water and air, I naturally think of food. But yet we don’t… It’s not something we speak about in our trauma work, is food.

00:17:30 Sat Dharam
No, it’s very important. And as we eat so we become, right? As we think, so we become. So all of these things are really important and the environments we surround ourselves with, so much of the environment now is digital, and it can lack the nurturing that we get from nature. So that would be a question, how much are you surrounding yourself by a digital environment? And yet that’s where society, humanity seems to be going, into the digital and the unreal, the artificial intelligence rather than the real, in terms of what is real. But we need it. We need to be very much linked with the environment and the other species, the soil, the water, the food, the air, each other.

00:18:13 Kevin
Sat Dharam when we invited you on to the podcast again, you gave us 3 or 4 things that that you might like to talk about. And I know that we offered that back to you and said, why don’t you choose the thing that you’d like to talk about? And you come back very quickly with you want to speak about the can’t remember exactly how you called it, the merging of psychology and spirituality or the gap, the closing of the gap between psychology and spirituality. And you’ve maybe answered it a little bit, just chatting to you already. But I was curious when your answer came back so quick. I was curious why did you choose that one so quickly?

00:18:50 Sat Dharam
I think because people who participate in Compassionate Inquiry often call it… it’s spiritual right? And they are drawn to it partly because of that. And so there are many ways that in my own practice of Compassionate Inquiry and teaching it, either as a facilitator, as a mentor, that I recognize the spiritual bits where they show up in this approach. And I think it’s important to acknowledge that and share a little bit about that. So that’s one reason. And the other reason is that psychology and spirituality, in many different frameworks, are completely unrelated. There’s the mind and then there’s a spirit, but kind of like the body mind integration that’s happening now, right, with somatic therapies. It would be a lovely piece to fully acknowledge the spiritual piece as well within a body-mind, and to create a framework for it and understanding for it, a recognition of it, a common language, at least within CI, for how we see that. So I suppose this is perhaps the beginning of, or the extension of what Gabor has already done around languaging where spirituality fits within Compassionate Inquiry.

00:20:06 Kevin
I hadn’t intended to ask you this, Sat Dharam, but there’s a little question that comes up for me. There’s one of the videos with Gabor in our Compassionate Inquiry content, it’s a very short video. And the bit that I’m interested in is even shorter still. And he’s talking about forgiveness. And towards the end of the video, he says there’s one type of forgiveness. We can invite ourselves into a place to release this person from the hold they have over us. And then he said there, there’s a second type of forgiveness. You’re nodding. I think you’re familiar with the video I’m talking about, where he goes on to say, what if you’re absolutely fine? What if there’s nothing wrong with you? What if there’s nothing to forgive? And it’s interesting that we’re having this conversation now, because when I watched that video, my thought, from the stuff that I read and watching Gabor is, you know, it was a 3 minute video and he spoke about one minute, for one minute about this. What if there’s nothing wrong with… What if there’s nothing to forgive? And I’m asking myself, why isn’t that a bigger piece in our trauma work? Not just in Compassionate Inquiry, but in general? Surely that is one of the most important things we could teach.

00:21:21 Sat Dharam
Yes, but we have to get through the pain first. Otherwise, it’s a bit of a spiritual bypass. We have to arrive there rather… it’s not a cognitive understanding.

00:21:31 Kevin
Please elaborate. Please elaborate on that a little bit, yeah.

00:21:34 Sat Dharam
There’s a process. And on the one hand, we are spiritual beings living a human life, and both of those do need to be acknowledged. On the one hand, and in certain, in Hinduism or Advaita Vedanta or Buddhism, we would say we’re both formless and we have form. Even in physics there’s form and there’s formless. So it’s a paradox of attachment to the form, which would be attachment to the mind and the body, and at the same time full recognition that that’s not who we really are. The formless is just as real, or perhaps more real, then what the mind essentially has to attach to, which is what informs the mind, is what we perceive through the senses, and what we make it mean, because of the traumas that we’ve experienced as children and our parents, grandparents and cultures have experienced. That emotional pain and what the mind constructs as a result of that. 

So the emotional pain is held in the body. Emotional pain is held as a suppressed emotion, and that emotional pain is registered as an unconscious or conscious belief about ourselves. The, I’m not good enough, I’m not wanted, I don’t matter, I’m unworthy, etc. And we become, as individuals, identified in this world, as we identify as an individual in this world of form, we become attached. That’s the key, the attachment to that story about ourselves, to that past, even to those experiences that we went through. And some of them can be very painful. 

We can’t just wave a magic wand and they’re gone. So that’s where Compassionate Inquiry comes in. To be that empathetic abiding presence, to be attuned, to be a listener, to be a mirror, to be a holding container, and to be a relational presence so that the healing of the pain can occur. And it’s only when the healing of that pain occurs, that constriction caused by the trauma releases, and then something else other than this identity that’s somehow attached to the trauma, something else can be experienced. Oh, if I’m not that, who am I? If I’m not that, who am I? If I’m not the victim, who am I? If I’m not a child of someone who lived through the Holocaust, who am I? Because those identities become so super strong and they’re reinforced quite often by the culture and by others. So it’s extricating ourselves from the attachment to that identity while still maintaining the role which we have to maintain. The ego has to maintain a certain role in the world. So we have to be in the world, take on, assume, an identity of sorts. Because other people perceive us in a particular way. We perceive ourselves in a particular way. I think it can only come through some transcendental experience, the recognition that ultimately we are formless, we are love, we are absolute wisdom, we are unconditional love. And there’s not attachment in that space and in that space there’s nothing to forgive. So like when we say to somebody, “No, there’s nothing to forgive.” If they have a history of trauma, it comes as an insult. If they’re in a liberated space, it comes as a truth. So we also need the sensitivity to recognize when we’re with somebody. Where are they on this journey, and in this moment? Who do we have access to, closer to the formless? Or closer to the form? And that’s where our compassion comes in, the compassion of understanding, the compassion of recognition, as a practitioner, to speak to whoever is in front of us where they are, but plant the seeds of something else without hurting or harming or denying where they are right now. It’s just a really gentle, beautiful process of recognition and holding and awakening, but it comes through relationship with the practitioner.

00:26:13 Kevin
Thank you Sat Dharam, there’s a little phrase that I use for myself… and I’m really enjoying listening to you chatting, Sat Dharam. And it was maybe a little while ago, I realized for me to fully understand what I am, I need to fully understand what I’m not. And that fully understanding what I’m not is to get a full understanding of my body and my behaviours and my beliefs and my traumas. And, and I couldn’t agree more with you that we can’t, we can’t get to what I am, in this spiritual sense without a full understanding of this form, this thing. 

Can I read you a little something Sat Dharam? And I want to also acknowledge when you said there’s those things that you’d like to talk about, and we sent them back, and you came back with, I’d like to talk about spirituality and psychology. My initial reaction was, YES!, Because that’s just a space that I love to be as well. And when you sent that e-mail back, I was reading a beautiful book. I’ll just read you a little tiny bit from it and I’d love to hear your thoughts on it. The book is called The Wise Heart from Jack Kornfield. It’s a beautiful book. And an interesting, this starts with a little piece from the Heart Sutra which says form is not different from emptiness. Emptiness is not different from form, but that’s not the part I wanted to read. He talks about the 6th principle of Buddhist psychology and it says, “Our light has universal and personal nature. Both dimensions must be respected if we are to be happy and free.” And he then goes on to say, just a sentence or two. He says. “In the simplest language, we are spiritual beings incarnated into human form. We need to remember our zip code as well as our Buddha nature. Any psychology that denies our spiritual nature cannot help us fulfill our deepest potential. But to be true and complete our spiritual psychology must also honour our human incarnation in the body, in feelings, society and the earth itself. We are creatures of this paradox, this interpretation of form and emptiness.” And for me, that sums up what you’ve just spoken about.

00:28:22 Sat Dharam
100%. It’s so beautiful. Really beautifully written. Thank you for sharing that. Yeah, there’s one more piece too. Like here’s where East and West, in terms of the spirituality from the East, the psychology from the West, are meeting today and have been for several decades. But historically, my understanding from the yogic perspective and from the Advaita perspective, is that the body was denied. It was jumped over. It was, “Oh, let’s just go to the formless and celebrate that because that’s the true self.” And then we had a lot of suppression of urges and self mutilation and flagellation, all that denial, renunciation. There was a big period of that in both Christianity as well as in India. And that’s not the way either, because it’s neither craving nor aversion. 

So then the Buddha comes along with the middle path, which is perfect, right? Neither craving nor aversion. So where we are now is, it’s really about accepting and loving… accepting and loving the mind, accepting and loving the body, not being repulsed by it, not denying it, not suppressing it. And I think that’s huge. That’s so beautiful where we’re at right now with somatic therapies is moving towards, OK. I’m not going to deny the body, I’m not going to suppress urges. I’m not going to make myself wrong or bad. I’m just going to accept and love it all. And that’s what I see we’re doing and that’s why it’s very important. 

I think this time in history, from a psychology perspective, of integrating the body into therapy from a place of compassion, which I believe has been missing for hundreds of years. I’m not aware of where these two things have been coexisting. It’s either been excess bodily expressions or suppression, but now it’s about accepting whatever arises and and having compassion and understanding to where does this come from? What’s the function of this particular urge or what’s the function of this particular belief? Where did it rise? 

So I think we’re doing a remarkable job with Compassionate Inquiry of deep understanding of the roots of these things and integration of the body with the mind with compassion. But still what’s missing is this formless piece. And this formless piece can easily be integrated. It already is in Compassionate Inquiry, we just haven’t really talked about it very much. So that’s an interesting conversation just to go to. How does the formless show up in Compassionate Inquiry?

00:31:24 Kevin
Sat Dharam, thank you. I said at the start when I was just about to start chatting to you that I didn’t write any questions. And that doesn’t mean that I don’t prepare. And quite often when I come to prepare for conversations like this, I do it in meditation. So I’ll sit in meditation and do it. I’m here chuckling to myself, knowing that… not a belief, it’s a knowing, Sat Dharam and that as I meditate on this and I connect with presence and consciousness and divinity, of course you’re in that too, as is everyone. And I’m thinking she… she has got my question. She has been able to read my questions through my meditation because you’re, you’re doing a beautiful job with just landing on those words and terms that I was really keen to tease from you, as if you’ve read the questions that I haven’t written down. I don’t know how you’re doing that, but there we are.

00:32:13 Sat Dharam
Let me share something, okay, another one of my one of my affinities is Guru Nanak, the Sikh founder and his beautiful phrase “ek ong kar.” And ek is one, ong is creative consciousness, and kar is creation, and so that line has often been interpreted as there was one creator of the creation. But I think that’s not it. There’s one creative consciousness infusing all creation that’s absolutely connected. So there’s only one consciousness. So of course we know each other’s questions.

00:32:53 Kevin
But Sat Dharam with things like this. I think at this stage of my life now. I would be interested maybe before I read this to ask you things like that. So things like what has just happened for me and things like when you’re searching for an answer and you pick up a book that you haven’t picked up in years and you open it at page 82 and there’s the answer. Things like that used to really surprise me, and I really wanted to know, how does that work? And I find myself in recent years, it doesn’t surprise me in the least. It never ceases to amaze, but it just doesn’t surprise me anymore, when these things happen, I think. Yeah, there it is again, something working above and beyond me, and when we get into a conversation about spirituality and psychology, it’s just very apparent for me.

00:33:42 Sat Dharam
It’s the same too, when we do Compassionate Inquiry, requiring we work with somebody, maybe somebody brand new, maybe somebody you’ve worked with for a while and they come in and whatever their intention is is a reflection of something that I’m working on. Right? That happens. It’s so amazing because there’s only one creative consciousness and the right person comes at the right time so both people can move a little bit closer towards that one creative consciousness. It’s working through both of us. So that’s who we’re tapping into, with Compassionate Inquiry, when we don’t have an agenda, when we let the client, when we ask for the client to come up with an intention, and you allow this one creative consciousness to be present in the room with you and the mind takes the back seat and then everything starts to flow. That’s a beautiful thing. That’s an example of spirituality in Compassionate Inquiry.

00:34:43 Kevin
Yeah. Did you ever Sat Dharam, have an experience. Maybe this is me.  I like to chuckle and see the lightheartedness, but in a Compassionate Inquiry session or working with another person, and did you ever find yourself saying something and then think, “Oh, that was really good. I’m going to write that down. I don’t know where that came from, but it was really good.” And for me, that’s another expression of that one true consciousness speaking from or through me in some way.

00:35:10 Sat Dharam
Yeah, absolutely. And I love the quote we have in the first module about empathetic abiding presence from Janus Films, that this empathetic abiding presence comes from this place of non doing. So that’s it. So that’s the formless, the mind not being attached to doing anything in particular, but sitting back and allowing and letting the formless… hmm… have space really in the session. And then the, whatever you want to call it, the truth of both the client and the therapists, as in your wisdom, right, your wisdom, with the wisdom of the therapist and the wisdom of the client have space. And because we’re not intruding with some aspect of the mind, to try to do something. So that’s so important is like, who are you as a therapist? As soon as we occupy a particular identity, the client has to respond with the opposite dynamic. You know, if I’m a teacher, they’re a student. You know, if I’m a rescuer, they’re somebody that needs to be fixed. If I’m a cheerleader, they’re someone who needs motivation. Something like that. But when I’m just being, whenever in that state of non doing, they can be anything. So then the realm of possibility opens up. So that’s what’s also very important in terms of that link between spirituality and psychology and who we are as a therapist in that particular moment. Who’s showing up in us will determine how the client shows up. Everything’s relational.

00:36:43 Kevin
Beautiful Sat Dharam. I’m going to come back to that in a moment or two. And what I would love to tease from you Sat Dharam, are… from your point of view… a few ways that we might as either Compassionate Inquiry practitioners, or friends, sons, brothers, daughters, mothers, husbands, fathers, whatever, relate in that way. But I’m going to take it back just a little bit. I’m going to read you something and then invite you to give your thoughts on it, if that’s OK. This is from the same book, just another little tiny thing. This charter is, it’s Charter 8 and it’s called, The Precious Human Body. And it goes on to say, both Buddhist psychology and Western psychology have championed the need to include the body as part of wise psychology. Freud and his followers, such as Young and Reich, engaged in a hard won battle to help us re-inhabit our body as the conduit of life energy. Through their work we have learned the values of our instincts, the eloquence of our sexuality, the need to respect the root motivations and drives of physical life. This reclaiming of the bodily life is part of a long and continuous struggle”  

So would you elaborate just a little bit on, I know we’re talking about psychology and spirituality, but psychology, spirituality and the body and how health and wholeness of one promotes health and wholeness in the other two. Does that make sense, the question I’m asking you?

00:38:21 Sat Dharam
So everything is intricately connected and related and affecting everything else. In studying the gut, for example, a little bit, we know that the gut microbiome is affected by stress. So in terms of a top down approach, if an individual is going through a stressful period, and let’s say there’s worry or anxiety because of that stressful period, the balance of organisms of the gut will change, which I find extraordinary, because of the mind to the gut connection. On the other hand, if there is, let’s say, a really poor diet or inflammation in the gut because of stress, then the gut flora will change and perhaps they’re more toxins in the gut and that will affect the mind, and the person might have more anxiety and depression because there’s an imbalance in the gut. So the gut microbiome is incredibly important in terms of this mind body influence and the highway that goes both ways through the Vegas nerve. So that’s one thing. 

The other thing is we know that if we have had traumatic experiences in childhood and that experience was not completed, I’d like to say that it’s not completed. That means that no one was there to hold the child. No one was there to reassure them, to tell them everything’s going to be OK. The child did not express what they were feeling. The child was not able to connect to their body in that moment and allow the tremor to be released, or the scream to be released, or if it was held in, then it’s as though that whole state, the button is pushed on pause, but still there. It’s frozen in time, but that needs to be unlocked, but that needs to be unfrozen, that needs to be released. So that’s what we do in Compassionate Inquiry, and other somatic therapies and maybe also in yoga sometimes, is through work with a body, whether it’s just awareness and noticing, or whether it’s physical movement or deep massage, is that piece that was frozen in time and unexpressed because it was held in, can be expressed and then released. And then something opens up for the person that was hidden from them before, not available to them before, because of this constriction. 

So the body is like a… Bessel’s book. The Body Keeps The Score. It is like a, what I call an archaeological dig. It keeps the impressions of the past held in the body and mostly unconscious. But then, because of those somatic imprints and those impressions held in the body, the mind creates stories, the mind creates beliefs that resonate with those. And so then, if I have fear or sadness in my body from childhood trauma, then there will be a belief of, I’m helpless or I don’t have any power, or whatever it might be. This place isn’t safe. And then that’s the filter that I project onto the world, even when it is safe. So there’s huge correlation between body and mind and emotions. And then that becomes the screen, the projector from which we see the world, which is very unfortunate because our life becomes limited in the possibility shrink of who we might be in the world. The body, ideally, if we look at how should we treat the body, OK, So if we would go move towards it with affection, curiosity, understanding, trust, ideally, and start this process of exploring what’s there, exploring what’s been hidden, as though you’re an archaeologist, exploring the dig, right, with your fine tools, digging in to see what’s there. And then we want to free that up, that expression, through Compassionate Inquiry or other somatic therapies or body work or yoga, so that there’s more flexibility, resilience, responsiveness from the body. 

Ultimately, though, it’s also, from the formless perspective, this recognition that this body is a vehicle, an instrument, a temple. You know, something to care for, something to treat with deep respect. But it’s ultimately not who we really are. So that’s tricky, to like inhabit the body, take care of it, exercise it, feel all that stuff, but ultimately not attach to it. Or else we’ll have a lot of suffering as we age, and get all these various aches and pains and limitations, right? So it’s an interesting… as Jack Kornfield says, it’s a paradox, of how do you work with this and yet live in it, inhabit it fully, deeply, but recognize it’s not who you are.

00:43:08 Kevin
Thank you Sat Dharam, I’m very conscious of our time and how long I have you for, Sat Dharam, but you mentioned something there and I’d love you to just take a moment or two to develop it a little bit. Sometimes when people come to do this work, there’s the idea that looking after my body and looking after my psychology and looking after my spirituality can be very selfish, or it’s very egotistical or it’s very… what’s the word I’m looking for… that it’s individualistic. But what I hear you talk about there is that when we do this work, so when we treat our bodies as temples, when we take care of ourselves, when we mind our own psychology and our own spirituality, people often say to me, It’s really interesting since I’ve been doing this work on myself, “I’m noticing that my sister isn’t so much of a bother to me,” or “I’m noticing that my work colleagues are different. I’m noticing that my children are behaving differently as I do this work on myself,” and it really is apparent to me that when we do this work, when we change the inside, the outside changes too. So there’s a real benefit to everyone when we do our own work.

00:44:20 Sat Dharam
And everything exists in relation to everything else. So, even if I was not to have an interaction with a close friend or relative or something like that. And I, I worked and did some integration work on my emotions, my body, my self-care. I think the relationship would change with the other person. And certainly when we’re working with clients, it shows up all the time. If we’re not in a great space and haven’t taken care of ourselves, then how are we showing up for them? Right? So it’s, everything exists in mutuality for sure. And this deep self-care needs to be cultivated at least to the same degree as the care that we give to the people that we work with.

00:45:09 Kevin
A little strap line on my Zoom account says… I have two. One that says, go easy on yourself, you’re doing the best you can. The second one says, if your compassion does not include yourself, then it is incomplete. And I like both of those. Sat Dharam, in the last few minutes that we have together, you spoke a lot about a lot of things and our interactions with our clients, our patients, our friends, our families. And this idea you spoke of creating this space so that we can be joined in these interactions by our own level of spirituality, whatever that is, by some form of presence, truth, love, divinity. From your perspective, what would be useful practices to help us enable that to happen?  What could we learn from you? Two or three little pointers, that would be good.

00:46:00 Sat Dharam
A couple of things. So one would be any kind of breath work and really connecting with the breath, whether it’s just observing the breath, or whether it’s changing the breadth, and then observing the changing pattern and breath and how it affects the mind. But breathwork is pretty essential because the mind does follow the breath, and you can… the nervous system follows the breath. even if it’s just inhaling left, pause Exhale, right pause, you know inhaling through the left nostril that makes you more to the body and the present moment, parasympathetic nervous system right hemisphere of the brain. Big picture when you inhale left and your intuition. So just by inhaling left, as a practice and exhaling right and then the right nostril connects to the left hemisphere, your sympathetic nervous system, as you’re exhaling it. So you’re turning down the story making, which is more left hemisphere right nostril when you inhale left, exhale right. And then when you pause between, the mind becomes quite still. So it’s in the suspensions of the breath that the mind becomes quite still. So then you’re tapping into that formlessness in the pauses. So it’s a simple thing, inhale left, pause, exhale right, pause to whatever level of comfort, then get that slowed down to 6 or less breaths per minute and your ventral vagus turns on. So that would be one. 

The other would be, I think we have to move our bodies in a variety of ways. So whether that’s through yoga postures, whether it’s through dance, whether it’s through exercise of some sort, but continually move your body in new ways so that the old patterns, whatever they are, don’t get stuck. If we always sit the same way, walk the same way, we become rigid and we hold those somatic… we hold our character in the somatic armouring. So if you loosen up everything, you’re going to loosen up that somatic armouring and be a little bit more flexible on the emotional level and perhaps on the belief level. So that would be another thing. Just move in whatever type of way you like to move, but moving the whole body. 

The third thing would be to… obviously walking in nature. But what we, I think what we require is inner stillness. And whether you get that from walking in nature or whether you get that from city and meditation, whether you get that from chanting, and quieting the mind through chanting, whether you get it from embroideries, or painting, wherever that inner stillness comes. But that’s where we need too… is some activity where there’s deep concentration and absorption that leads to inner stillness so that the mind doesn’t keep agitating. And then we get hooked on our ideas, or hooked on our beliefs, or hooked on our agendas, or hooked on our limiting self criticism. So come into a space when we’re working with one another or when we’re with our friends and our families, where we’re coming to that space from inner stillness. That’s where the formless lives in the inner stillness.

00:49:13 Kevin
Thank you. Maybe a playful question, but I’m recognizing that something that I like to do is to play a beautiful record. I like to collect vinyl records and lie on the floor. If anyone come into my room and saw me lying on the floor, listening to a record, they might think it was a little bit crazy. Does that count as an inner stillness?

00:49:31 Sat Dharam
You’re listening through your whole body, right, when you’re lying on the floor.

00:49:34 Kevin
Absolutely.

00:49:35 Sat Dharam
Someone told me a story about Helen Keller, who listened to Beethoven through her hands on the floor. And, hands and feet on the floor, I think. And totally got him. And totally was merged with him and understood him and was ecstatic about feeling that music and getting who he was through the music. So yeah, that would work.

00:50:07 Kevin
I could remember I was lying on the floor on Friday night, I think, and I could feel… the music wasn’t very loud and it was gentle music, but I could feel it in the floor. I could feel the vibrations in the floor and I could feel my heart beating through my back and responding to the floor. And the reason I bring this up is just to let our listeners know that this doesn’t always have to be highbrow, high level spending lots of money doing things. It can literally be lying on the floor listening to a piece of music or bringing your embroidery and sitting under a tree and doing your embroidery under the tree, feeling the rhythm of the earth. Thank you, Sat Dharam, I really appreciate that. One more before I let you go. I’m going to just nail you down for one more question. We asked you twice now at the end of our conversation, about if you had a message or a word of encouragement. Yeah. If you had the ear of humanity, if you could whisper something into the ear of humanity that might help humanity in this moment, what might that be?

00:51:09 Sat Dharam
All is one.

00:51:11 Kevin
All is one.

00:51:12 Sat Dharam
All is one. And I think collectively it would be wonderful if we all opened up our eyes, our ears, our senses to the world around us, other humans, other animals, the lakes, the mountains, the soil, and to consider the well-being of the whole and make that the priority. Not the well-being of one individual, not the well-being of even one nation but the well-being of the whole, which includes everything on this beautiful planet. Then everything would be much better.

00:51:53 Kevin
Yeah, thank you, Sat Dharam. Just on our ending that really then creates a space for psychological and spiritual healing.

00:52:02 Sat Dharam
Yeah. And environmental healing, we need to integrate that in or we don’t have much of a world. So that’s a big piece that’s missing.

00:52:10 Kevin
Do you think, though, I know we’re still talking. Do you think, though, that just minding our psychological and spiritual wellness? For me, if we mind that first, we’re not going to harm each other or the environment, or… if we take care of our psychological and spiritual wellness.

00:52:24 Sat Dharam
No, we do have to. We have to look at the environment as well, because it’s where we as humans have established ourselves as the higher order on the Earth. And that’s the arrogance of humans. It’s… and it is not the case. We’re not any higher order, but we’re claiming more space, claiming more resources, thinking that we can own them. That’s the delusion and by taking without considering the well-being of the whole, or by using plastic or using petroleum products, we’re not looking at the impact on the whole. So that’s what has to change. So it’s more than… it’s like recognizing that this human body is also a part of the earth body. Unless there’s right relationship between the human body and the earth body, we’re missing something big that’s going to harm us going forward. So we need to include that in psychology.

00:53:25 Kevin
Thank you, Sat Dharam.

00:53:26 Sat Dharam
Thank you.

00:53:27 Kevin
Sat Dharam Kaur. It has been a pleasure to speak to you again. We will have you back, I’m sure. Is there anything that we didn’t say or cover or talk about that you think it is important to do so before you leave us?

00:53:41 Sat Dharam
I think that was fantastic, Kevin. Thank you so much, as always, and it’s wonderful to be with you and to connect.

00:53:47 Kevin
You’re welcome. Thank you. See you next time, Sat Dharam

00:53:59 Rosemary
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