00:00:01 Rhoda

So the compassion training is not about getting to your happy place or something, it’s not about swimming with dolphins after 8 weeks and just being happy all the time. It really is about building tolerance for negative experiences, because compassion can only arise when there’s suffering. If there’s no suffering and we’re feeling happy, then we call it meta, In Buddhism, and there’s just this loving kindness that is just present and there are no hindrances to it, so it’s just meta. But as soon as a heart that is full of meta in a way, meets suffering, then compassion can arise because compassion is really being able to be touched by suffering, whether it’s from yourself or from others, coupled with this need or this wish to relieve it somehow, to make it better. So people really learn, OK, that means that everything that’s there is OK, that it’s there. I don’t have to suppress anger. I don’t have to suppress sadness. I don’t even have to suppress depression. I can be depressed. I can even embrace that I’m someone who is recurrently depressed and that there is a big chance that I will have a depressive episode again, even after this training. For some people, maybe, it could be a cure. It has been a cure for me in some ways because I haven’t been depressed in a very long time. But for many people it’s more like, it’s collateral damage control. So people realize, OK, I’m probably still going to get depressed, but maybe not as deep, maybe not as long, maybe not with such an affect on my personal relationships or my job or any other aspect of my life. Because you don’t have to fight it as much anymore.

00:01:56 Rosemary

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

00:02:12 Kevin

So welcome to another episode of the Gifts of Trauma podcast, from Compassionate Inquiry. My name is Kevin Young and I am here with Rhoda Schuling. Am I saying that right, Rhoda?

00:02:26 Rhoda

Usually people say Shuling.

00:02:27 Kevin

Rhoda Schuling. Thank you, Rhoda. Rhoda, I am. I’m really delighted that you’re and I’m going to formally introduce you in a moment or two, but I wonder, would you like to take a moment and tell us what you would like us to know about who you are?

00:02:47 Rhoda

Oh, OK, Perhaps that I’m a person who likes to go beneath the surface. I think at some point or other in the past, I can’t remember exactly when I was asked what was the one thing that I cannot not do in this life. Because the answer to that would tell me something about who I am and what I meant to do in this world. And the answer that came to me was, I find it impossible not to go beneath the surface. So that’s one thing.

00:03:25 Kevin

Would you like to share anymore or is that enough for now? And if that’s enough for now, that’s fine too.

00:03:31 Rhoda

Maybe just share, that sounds lofty and all that, but it’s very difficult when you’re in a pub and you’re just trying to talk about soccer. So it’s also a bit of a pitfall for me.

00:03:41 Kevin

Yeah, I hear that. And it’s interesting, Rhoda, because, one of the reasons that I wanted to speak to you was because we met recently at the Body Mind Unity conference in Prague. And on our first night, we sat down as strangers in a hotel restaurant, to eat. And I was just very taken by how quickly our conversation got below the surface. Yeah. So we didn’t really talk about soccer. We didn’t really talk about the weather. We got straight into deep stuff. Yeah. So it works for me that you’re someone that likes to get below the surface. Yeah. And I am going to maybe embarrass you a little bit, but I’m going to read, maybe a little bit of a formal introduction for you.

00:04:37 Rhoda

OK, OK.

00:04:39 Kevin

Rhoda Schuling was born in Garmervald. She finished her secondary education at the… What’s that word there? Rhoda, Praedinius?

00:04:50 Rhoda

Praedinius. Yes, it’s a Latin word. It was a secondary grammar school.

00:04:55 Kevin

In Groningen and after spending a year in Bangor, North Wales to study English, Linguistics and Russian, which is something I’d like to talk about, she moved back to Groningen to study linguistics at the University of Rijksuniversiteit, in 2003 she obtained her Master’s degree. Then it goes on to say that you started your PhD project at the Department of Psychiatry and Radboudumc Medical Centre and within the Centre for Mindfulness, she conducted a randomized control trial and qualitative study which led to her current dissertation. And it goes on to tell us that you, during your PhD, you spoke at several international gatherings, amongst which were  the International Conference on Mindfulness and at the Omega Institute in New York. And besides her PhD project, Roda has worked as an MBSR – I’m going to get you to tell us a little bit more about that, an MBSR teacher at the Centre for Mindfulness between 2014 and 2017. And Rhoda, after all of the PhD and MBSR and linguistics and Russian and, as a coastal skipper and instructor at the… these Dutch words… Zeezeilers?

00:06:13 Rhoda

Yeah, that translates as sea sailors.

00:06:15 Kevin

OK. And currently she works as a researcher and the teacher at the Hanze University of Applied Sciences in Groningen, where she lives with her two children. So that Rhoda, is a little bit of a colourful curriculum vitae.

00:06:28 Rhoda

Yeah, it’s certainly not a linear, straight forward resume, no.

00:06:34 Kevin

Rhoda, I would really like this conversation to be about you. I think that you will have a lot to share with our listeners. I’m interested in all of that and I’d love to spend a little bit of time talking about what you’re going to be doing in the future. In the very near future from next year, you’re going to be teaching teachers, a teacher trainer program on MBCL. There’s another acronym that we’ll get to to broaden out for us and I want to hear a little bit more about that.

00:07:06 Rhoda

Great.

00:07:07 Kevin

So Rhoda, my first curiosity is when I speak to people who are in who, who do this work, who do some level of healing work, who have some level of interest in Buddhism, Buddhist studies, mindfulness, trauma. Your PhD was in compassion and depression, or the treatment of depression with compassion. When people land in this role, they usually are here for a reason, and in compassionate inquiry, Gabor refers to that as the wounded healer or the wounded helper. Would that be true of you? Are you a wounded helper or a wounded healer?

00:07:48 Rhoda

Yeah, definitely, definitely.  I remember when I was, I don’t know, maybe about 30, I think. And I was, no, actually it was when I was graduating, graduating as a mindfulness teacher. So this MBSR thing that you just mentioned, a mindfulness based stress reduction course. When I was completing that, my family was very proud of me and we sat down for a big lovely dinner together to celebrate that I’d obtained a certificate. And, and I remember thanking my parents for giving me enough trauma to want to do this work, but not too much so that I was too broken to do this work. And I remember they were looking a little bit dubious at this information, but for me it felt very true, like I’d been for me, exactly, had been given the sweet spot of trauma. So enough to be inspired by it, to be motivated by it, but not so much that it would prevent me from actually being effective as a healer. That journey, of course, started a little bit earlier because before I became a mindfulness teacher, I was just a mindfulness student. I started in 2008 with my first mindfulness course, here in the Netherlands and that really was from the suffering of my own life. I was in my late 20s and yeah, I had hit that point where everything I thought was going to be great in my life, it had actually just broken down. I’d quit my job, I’d quit my boyfriend. I’d quit my, my house, my, my city even. And I was actually moving back in with my mother at that point, and just really unsure of what to do next, and felt like a lot of things from the past were just getting in the way and I wasn’t dealing with them. And then one of my aunts, who’s a psychotherapist herself and very well versed in Buddhist practice as well, she said to me, there’s this new thing that’s just arrived in the Netherlands. It’s called mindfulness, and you’re going to do it, and I did, and I’m forever grateful for that because, yeah, that really was one of the changing points. Of course, as Kevin, there are many changing points in one lifetime, but this is definitely one of the bigger ones.

00:10:14 Kevin

Yeah, that seems like a lot of quitting. Yeah, house, boyfriend, city, job.

00:10:21 Rhoda

Yeah, yeah, I was pretty radical when I was young, yeah. Just burning bridges, yeah.

00:10:28 Kevin

And they can imagine as well, Rodda, the idea of moving back in with your mother when you were 29, I think

00:10:34 Rhoda

Yeah, that felt hugely successful, as you can imagine. Like this is really how things were supposed to pan out.

00:10:43 Kevin

Yeah, that could be a nice pinprick to an ego to, to move back in with your mother when you were 29 years of age.

00:10:51 Rhoda

Yeah, I really felt that by that time, I think as far as I can remember. And of course I always say there’s a little bit tentatively because my memory of my childhood changes, with getting older and having different perspectives on it. But I do in general think that, I don’t remember a lot of happy moments from about the age of 11 / 12. I think that’s when I first started getting a bit, maybe not depressed yet, but certainly on the road to depression. And when I was at uni, I was definitely quite depressed. Yeah. And that sort of continued on for a large part in my 20s. I really found it very difficult to be happy in essence. And of course we could go deeper into that if that is something that you want to explore. But I think when I was 28 / 29 and I hit this sort of rock bottom and I quit everything, I really felt like, oh, come on, this cannot be it. This cannot be the way to live life. There must be another way. Then there must be something that I’m not getting, that is, it just cannot be that this is it. And then, yeah, mindfulness and Buddhist practice in general really showed me a different way. And it’s not perfect. It’s not like it’s a magic pill and now everything is magically better. But it’s definitely much more authentic. And I think that was the biggest struggle for me that I felt like I wasn’t living an authentic life.

00:12:25 Kevin

Yeah, it’s mindfulness and Buddhist practice. It may not be perfect, but it’s probably better than drinking vodka or taking recreational drugs, or eating or overworking or whatever else that people do to manage this feeling that there must be something more. Yeah. Rhoda, I’d love to come back to that. But you mentioned something there at 11 years of age, feeling depressed. And I know you said maybe not depressed, but moving into that realm What does that look like? What does it look like for an 11 year old or a 12 year old to be moving towards depression? What are you looking back and seeing in that 11 and 12 year old?

00:13:08 Rhoda

I’m seeing a lot of confusion and a lot of self hatred. And just, I think when I look back, is that at that age when your horizon as a teenager just starts to broaden a little bit more, you’re starting to understand certain things a little bit more. Even though I wasn’t conscious of it at the time, I think the discrepancy between how I was being or acting or how I was behaving and who I truly was – was just all of a sudden so big. Yeah, it was it. It felt like it was killing me. I remember that. I was just so somber, so much at the time. I cried so much and when I was moving on as a teenager, I think because of that vulnerability, I had a couple of very bad experiences that really increased this self hatred. So I remember by that time I was 17 or 16, I would sometimes just look in the mirror and actually hit myself in the face because I hated myself so much. And I just could only hear this voice of how stupid and worthless I was. Yeah. And it’s weird because it’s, of course it’s not as one-dimensional as that. There’s not just the self hatred, there’s all these kinds of different things that you are. So I could feel that way just before I went to bed or early in the morning. And then I would go to school, and I would see friends, and I would actually have a good time, but then I would get home again, or there would be another moment. And yeah, it just all coexisted. So it’s a fraction of that Buddhist notion that you’re not, that there’s no self, actually, there’s just so many different things.

00:15:00 Kevin

And thank you for sharing that Rhoda. I really appreciate it. Rhoda, Could I just take a moment and check in with you as to how you’re doing, in this moment, as you’re talking to me about this?

00:15:10 Rhoda

Yeah, it’s not painful to talk about, so I don’t feel upset right now or or yeah, I feel maybe a slight wonderment at how I was back then. Not that it surprises me that I was like that. It’s just that looking back at it now, I can see so clearly that I wasn’t wrong, that there was nothing wrong with me, and it’s just very human, especially for teenagers to have these feelings, maybe not to the extreme extent that I felt it and that other teenagers sometimes feel it.

00:15:50 Kevin

Yes, thank you. Maybe we could reflect that already. We’ve been talking for maybe 10 or 15 minutes and I think we’re already under the surface Rhoda.

00:15:58 Rhoda

Think I have to agree with that, yeah.

00:15:59 Kevin

I think we are right now. Rhoda, How does, and again, please only answer what you’re comfortable answering. How does a young girl get to the age of 11 or 12 and find herself confused, full of self hatred, moving towards depression? Is it OK to ask what preceded that? What was going on in the previous eleven years that might have brought you to that place?

00:16:25 Rhoda

Yeah, it’s OK to ask. I don’t have all the answers to that so I can name aspects of it because I’m still searching and still working on it. It’s not done, as you can imagine. A lot of it has to do with upbringing in the sense that my parents were divorced when I was four. My dad left. We did see him, but we didn’t see him as much as children today often see their parents when they’re divorced. So we only saw my dad once every two weeks and we rarely took holidays with him. And he was a very, yeah, he was a very private person, so not someone to talk about his feelings easily. And he was, he seemed to me at the time, he’s changed a lot. He’s got a lot more open with me and my sister since then. But until I was about 18, he just, yeah, he seemed to be this person who wanted to do everything perfectly and particularly be very hard on himself. And that’s something that he taught us as well, to be very hard on yourself and to really realize from quite a young age that if you want something, you have to get it done yourself. You’re not going to get any help. So I think in our own way, my sisters and I, we each became very self reliant. But that’s also very lonely. Yeah, when you’re quite young. And my mother was a bit, she wasn’t like that, but she did have a very low tolerance for certain feelings. So anger was not very well tolerated in her household. That was not something that we could easily express. And it also felt very unsafe to get rejected quite harshly if you showed anger. So I think that also has something to do with our family history. So we on one side of the family, my mother side, we do have quite a few. I don’t know the English words for that, it’s broyard. Maybe it’s done from French, but it’s just where two family members decide not to speak to each other for a decade.

00:18:27 Kevin

OK.

00:18:28 Rhoda

Yeah, so people really, instead of dealing with their emotions head on, dealing with their conflicts head on, just cutting someone out, saying you’ve hurt me and now you’re out of my life, basically, until you can’t remember what it was about anymore or enough time has passed and then you get together and then they just go on from there, still not resolving the original conflict. So this is a preferred way, at least for that part of the family. And I think then there’s the other. There’s two more things that are probably very important. And one of them is that I am the youngest and my sisters are quite a bit older than I am, five years older, almost eight years older. And the youngest often, yeah, especially when your children, your development is so far apart, when there’s five years or eight years in between. So with a lot of the stuff that we did at home, I was told, no, you’re too small for that. Oh yeah, you can’t understand that you wanted to do this thing. But we all feel like that thing would be more fun. So we went with that instead of what you wanted. So I do think I very consistently got the message that what I thought or felt wasn’t important, just something that  other people could just very easily ignore and set aside. And so at the age of 11-12, I was already, it was, yeah, it was already my core conviction that my opinion and my feelings just didn’t matter, which led me into loads of trouble later on. And then the last thing perhaps, is, and I always feel a little bit shy about saying this, but I’m quite a bright person, possibly even slightly gifted, which means that I have a very pleasant IQ. But I mostly, I have a very big, a large lens through which I see the world and I sometimes pick up more connections or vibes or dynamics between people than other people might. And as a child, I remember very often, there would be situations where I would enter a room, or be with family, and I would get this feeling for the vibe. But people weren’t acting like that was the vibe because of course, maybe they weren’t aware of it or maybe it was about stuff that they didn’t want to talk about in that moment. But like I said, I’d like to go under the surface. So as a child I would often ask these really awkward and ill timed questions about how people were and then they would say oh we’re fine, and I would be saying but you don’t look fine or I would pick up that was a lie, and to me they were lying. They weren’t adults with little white lies or adults with, That may be true, but I don’t want to talk about it right now or not in this setting. But everybody present, and as a child, I didn’t pick up on that. I just felt, but I’m seeing that what you’re telling me is incorrect. I can see that you are a different way than you’re saying. So I think that also added to my feeling like, the way I see things isn’t correct, because people keep telling me that it’s not true.

00:21:41 Kevin

What’s interesting Rhoda, just as you…  I’m interrupting, I’m sorry. But just as you spoke about that, that last part, you were asking adults these questions and they were saying, I’m fine. And as you reflected what that child said, he said, but I can see that you’re not. And, and there was a projection in your voice and I wonder what a child would, what was that experience? What was happening just there when that child’s voice was saying you’re lying, you’re not fine, what was going on for you there?

00:22:09 Rhoda

I can feel now that I get a little bit angry about it.

00:22:14 Kevin

That’s what I saw.

00:22:15 Rhoda

Yeah, exactly that. And I think This is why I talked about authenticity. Before that I felt like I wasn’t living my authentic life because it’s a hugely important value for me, authenticity. And I got angry about people lying, but I also got angry with that discomfort, with their own feelings. I just never understood why you would be that uncomfortable with your own emotions. Why can’t we just live in a world where everybody just honestly says, say how they feel? Why is that a bad thing? What’s gonna happen? Of course, I know as an adult, why people don’t do that. But as a child of… it’s like, why is it such a big deal to just, even in a family gathering, just to say, well, not well.

00:23:02 Kevin

Yeah, Rhoda, you’re painting… I was about to use the word beautiful. That’s maybe the wrong word. You’re painting a very detailed picture of a highly gifted child. We might even say, a highly sensitive child who was having her opinions, her thoughts overruled. We’re not going to do what you want to do. We’re going to do what we want to do. You’re small, you’re the youngest. We don’t care what you think. She was seeing her family not acting in a way that was true to how she believed they were feeling. This was making her angry. I heard you say earlier, anger wasn’t acceptable there. There wasn’t a space to be angry. So how would that be for a child? How would that be, as you reflect on that experience? How would that be for any child to have that experience?

00:23:59 Rhoda

While it may be in psychotherapy terms, it would lead to not the healthy attachment styles. So it would lead to a child being  – and I can hypothesize about it, but this is also what I experienced, just not trusting her instincts and feeling unsafe a lot of the time.

00:24:24 Kevin

Could I pause you there Rhoda? Please? Let’s come back to what you were saying. When we describe things as not there, I always am very interested, but that thing’s not there. Then what is so when we describe unsafe? Yeah. So that’s the absence of safety. I don’t feel, I don’t feel safe. I I feel unsafe. So what were you feeling if you perceived yourself to be unsafe?

00:24:51 Rhoda

I felt like I had to be on my toes all of the time, be very mindful of what I said, how I acted. Just felt like I constantly had to prove I was worthy of attention, worthy of love,  and that I wasn’t succeeding. I knew I was always falling short, or that’s what I was convinced of anyway. So very much in the mindfulness based compassionate living program, we often talk about the threat mode, as one of our emotional operating systems, you might say, just the constant presence of danger, just being alert constantly, constant vigil. Yeah.

00:25:40 Kevin

Yeah. Thank you, and we might even use the word fear.

00:25:48 Rhoda

Yes, yeah, very fear based.

00:25:51 Kevin

Yeah, thank you. And here’s another question that pops up in our compassionate inquiry work quite often. Who did you speak to about all that?

00:26:02 Rhoda

As you might imagine, for a long time, nobody.

00:26:06 Kevin

Nobody.

00:26:08 Rhoda

No, nobody. I don’t think I started speaking about some of this until I was 20.

00:26:17 Kevin

OK, yeah, that sounds like that would be a very tough gig. I have two children both girls and I mean, they’re 20 to almost 22 and almost 20 now, but I can remember them being eleven. It wasn’t that far ago and as I drop them into the scenario that you’ve painted, I can imagine that would be a very tough place for an 11 year old to be.

00:26:44 Rhoda

Yeah, yeah, very much. I remember trying to talk to people but I mostly remember my mom saying that I had emotions that were too difficult for her to –  that she didn’t understand me and she sent me to a therapist when I was 13. So I talked to that person, but in hindsight, I think I never mentioned this. You know, it’s there. I actually stayed on the surface. It was perhaps just too unsafe. Perhaps I was too fearful to even, in that setting, to really talk about what was going on.

00:27:28 Kevin

Thank you. And even the, the expression as you reflect on that I was sent to it, it doesn’t sound it doesn’t sound very compassionate or very inclusive or my mother was worried about me and she ensured I got the best therapist and she went with me to these… It didn’t sound like that. It sounded like a this was against my will. I was sent to a therapist.

00:27:52 Rhoda

It wasn’t against my will. I do think I, I felt like I wanted to talk to someone, but it’s, it also felt like my mom didn’t really want to invest in understanding me. And yeah, so that was, that was quite painful. And, and I feel like I must say something in her defence now in the sense that the way I was raised was much better than how she was raised. Yeah. And that’s often the case, of course. So in hindsight, I do know that she did most of the things that she did in our upbringing with the best intentions. But for me, they fell really short. Yeah.

00:28:33 Kevin

And we recognize that too. And thank you for raising it, Rhoda. It’s a really important point. We are not here to bash or berate or beat up or criticize our parents. But in this work and your work, what we’re here to do is to have an honest overview or reflection of our experience. I’m sure your mum tried really hard. I know my parents tried really hard, I know all parents do their best, but for the child to not be seen and heard for who they actually are, to not have their self mirrored back is really detrimental. And before we move on, I’m really curious then. So with all this going on for this young girl at 11 years of age and no one to speak to until you arrived at the therapist that you were sent to, what does that young girl do with all that stuff? How does she manage that? How did she cope? How did you cope?

00:29:29 Rhoda

I kept it in, like I said, a part of me used fantasy to escape it. I have a lot of imagination and when I went to bed at night, I would often fantasize about just children’s stuff, really, things you’ve seen in movies or countries that you’ve seen in movies. And I imagined living there. So for a long time I clung to this fantasy of living in England, because I love the English language, and I knew that I wanted to study it from a young age. And yeah, on the occasion that my dad went on holiday with us, we always went hiking in the mountains. So I just fantasized about living in Scotland or in Wales and just studying and hiking and being there and falling in love with a rugged Scots person. It would be perfect. Just I think at the time that would have been Mel Gibson in Braveheart. He wasn’t actually Scottish, but to me he was Scottish enough. Something like that. And I was also quite a creative child. I still am quite creative. So I played the piano a lot and I drew a lot and I wrote. I did some journaling. I’m not a big journalist, but I did write a lot of stories. So these are things that I escaped in.

00:30:48 Kevin

And I heard you use the word, and I’m conscious of my own agenda here, I do think I want our listeners to hear this. I think you said something like I stuffed it down or I hid it. And might it be fair to use the word? I depressed it.

00:31:02 Rhoda

Yeah, yeah, I think so. And it’s, we’re probably gonna get to that topic later on. But as I was doing my PhD, I more and more started to realize that one of the primary symptoms of depression, which is rumination, is really an avoidance mechanism. Yeah. Just keeping the mind busy so that the heart doesn’t have to feel. So there’s nothing visceral to experience and just going around in these circles. Yeah. And that’s when you depress things like this. Then the mind seeks a way in rumination.

00:31:39 Kevin

Thank you for sure. I know that Rhoda. I really appreciate your honesty and your authenticity around that. And my guess is that a lot of people will listen, who might be living with depression or other things later in their lives, might now be able to look back and go, oh, OK, I had some of those things going on for me, too. Yeah. And I imagine that would be really helpful.

00:32:06 Rhoda

I hope so, yeah. In my research, I talked to over 100 people about their depression, and one of the things that I had to do was estimate how many depressive episodes they had had. And of course, I did this with them. And some would tell me how many. I’ve had four or five depressive episodes every year since I was 5. So you do the math. And these were, these were among the worst cases, you might say. But still, it’s just unbelievable to me. It’s not unbelievable, because I know how it works, but it’s just, yeah. It just makes me wonder what kind of life you’ve had up till you were 5 or 6 or even 10, still a very early age to have your first depressive episode to… Yeah. For that to happen, for that to come into being, that mechanism.

00:32:59 Kevin

Yeah. Thank you. And then so your auntie comes along and says, I know what you need to do. You need to get engaged with a mindful practice. And interestingly, it sounds like you were willing to do that. Tell me about that little piece in there. What was it in you that said, OK I need to do something about this and maybe mindfulness is a way to move forward with it?

00:33:27 Rhoda

As you can imagine, I had tried, in my way until then, to get better. I had tried different things. I I had some inkling about what led to more happiness and what led to less happiness, and… But yeah, it just kept slapping me in the face. After a while, it would just be back and I would be somber again and it didn’t seem to sustain and, and I’ve felt maybe a bit before all this social media and everything exploded, I felt like there should be a better life. I just, yeah, like I said before, it just felt like this cannot be the way. And I think up until then I’d been very afraid to, even though I’d burned bridges and I’d moved to Wales and later on I’d move to Thailand, and I’d moved to Hong Kong, just, you know, different places. And I just felt like I wasn’t making choices for me based upon what I really authentically needed. And then I actually didn’t start with mindfulness. My aunt first said I should do something called, I don’t know the English word, but it’s a form of psychotherapy. It’s short dynamic psychotherapy. As you can tell, I’m not a therapist myself. I’m not a psychologist, and this was just the beginning, but it prepared me for mindfulness because it was with this therapist who was just really good at stopping me mid sentence when I was rambling on about all these things because cognitively I’m a very well developed very cerebral person. So I could talk about this for hours, but she would just stop me after a while and say OK, and how are you feeling? And that’s when I really noticed for the first time that I couldn’t answer her. I didn’t know, just literally didn’t know which feeling I was feeling. And then she would just start with is it good or bad? Is it a good or a bad feeling? Just that. And then of course, 99% of the time it would be a bad ceiling. And then we would explore, OK, if it’s a bad feeling, which type of bad? And she would just say just one of the three major categories. Is it fear? Is it sadness or is it anger? You know, just, and, we can split hairs about that more when you’ve identified one of these three, but just very basically, and I think it shocked me at the time, that I just couldn’t give her a straight answer, immediately that she, she had to keep questioning me before I actually could identify what I was feeling. Because I had always experienced myself as a very emotional person, as a very intuitive, I guess as an adult, I had retained the memory of me as a child where I was very intuitive and I knew very well what was going on. And I think at that moment I realized, oh you can lose that. You can just really… things that were naturally given to you the sensitivity to all these things, if you just suppress it long enough, it is no longer available. And that really shocked me, but it was a very good prelude to mindfulness where of course, I had to be much more discriminatory about what I was feeling and what was actually going on in each moment. Yeah, so I think that was the start. And then in the mindfulness training, I had a very good teacher. And even though it wasn’t called compassion training at the time, and compassion wasn’t the word that was literally used in the training, she, with her embodiments, really put across how very OK it was to be as I was, to feel what I felt. And that’s also something that I hadn’t ever experienced before really. And she was also someone who was very logical. She just really presented mindfulness as something like something that gives you the tools to have more information with which to decide your path. If you’re unaware of what’s happening in your emotions or in your body, then you’re going to be making decisions about your life only with one source, which is the brain or your cognition. And even that, you’re probably not overseeing. Not all of it, but if you practice mindfulness, it’s like being a researcher of your own system. You’re just collecting more and more data points, and all this information can help you to find what you really want, and what really leads to wholesomeness, as we say in Buddhism. So that just made it very accessible for me because  I was raised by a scientist. My dad is a scientist and I was, yeah, I was a skeptic at first. Meditation and yoga, these were all things for wishy-washy people, of course, would just.

00:38:17 Kevin

Woo is the word. I was using the word yeah for yeah, yeah, this is this is for woo people.

00:38:22 Rhoda

Exactly. Woo people? Yes.

00:38:24 Kevin

We then found out that the woo people were right all along. Yeah, I’m keen. I’m really… I’m very conscious of our time and being a person, a lover and a practitioner of mindfulness. I’m conscious that I’ve got lost in this conversation and the time is just slipping by. Maybe that is mindfulness, in that I don’t want to diminish or skip over the work that you did around linguistics and learning Russian and English. We had a beautiful conversation when we were in Czech about colloquialisms and slang and how many words certain languages have, and which languages count and use numbers and which don’t, and the formation of language. I don’t want to skip over that. Maybe you could tell us a little bit about that and how that led then, into the MBSR and the MBSL. Yeah. And, and, and the teaching of that stuff. And then on to your PhD. The  PhD, which is, I have it in front of me. You gifted me a copy of it. Thank you. Compassion and depression. So tell me that little bit of that story. The move through going to Wales, studying English, Russian and then ended up as a mindfulness teacher, a mindfulness practitioner.

00:39:37 Rhoda

Yeah, who knew? When I teach students now and they ask me about their career paths, I always say it might be that you’re studying now, but the job that you end up doing has not been invented yet. And that’s very true for me because when I was 18, Mindfulness Teacher… It wasn’t a thing. Yeah. So that just happens then. And I guess with the linguistics I’d always been interested in language and I was very interested in English, but when I got to Wales I felt like I don’t know if I want to be an English teacher or rate English literature for four years. So I just asked them what else I could do, and they said you still have to do some English, that we could swap part of the subjects you’ve chosen with linguistics, and then either Russian or Italian. And because I always have to do the best thing or the difficult thing, I learned that from my father, so I chose Russian. Even though Italian’s not an easy language. I felt like Russian is probably harder. So it went with that and I didn’t expect to like linguistics so much, but I suppose I was fascinated with, and I’m still fascinated by it and I use it also in mindfulness, is I just find this point where chemistry in the brain becomes a thought and then a sentence. I find that fascinating. It’s how does that work, especially when I started reading about studies, that was later on when I was already practicing mindfulness, that there is actually a calming of the amygdala gas or fear centre or our worry centre, you might say in the back of our brain that actually calms when you know the right word for a certain emotion. So it proved to me, that’s why it’s so important to actually be able to identify your emotions, because if you know the right word, oh, this is anger I’m feeling. Oh I’m frustrated, I’m disappointed. Then just knowing the right word actually calms you down. And then nothing about the situation externally has to have changed yet and you haven’t had to do any action yet, or nothing else has changed. But just knowing what is going on is calming. And I think that sort of also translates to how mindfulness teaches and how Buddhist teachers speak because there is a very particular way in which they speak about experience when they guide practices or when they give Dharma talks. So also linguistically, I find that very interesting. It’s sort of a language that is calming, that is, I imagine that’s the same for the language you use in compassionate inquiry. Yeah. So the language itself is compassionate, mindful, calming, and is addressing your soothing system.

00:42:32 Kevin

Maybe a brief example of that Rhoda. I’ve just thought of something there. I wonder, would you agree? I could say, why do you do that? Or I could say, why do you do that?

00:42:43 Rhoda

Yeah.

00:42:44 Kevin

And justice, that use of tone, tonality, assertiveness. It is a totally different experience to be asked. That’s fascinating. I wonder why you do that. Yeah, rather than. Why do you do that?

00:42:58 Rhoda

Yes. So there can be a literal difference in types of words that you use, but intonation, of course, is so much of it coupled with your facial expression. So if you feel as a participant, or a client, that your teacher is actually curious, honestly curious, why is that? And wondering about things that you’ve maybe just, that you’re not wondering about, then it also invites you becoming the researcher, becoming curious like, oh, it’s,,, I started to meditate and then I got sleepy, so I fell asleep. And then my mindfulness teacher will say, OK, so you fell asleep, but what happened in the moments just before you fell asleep? Can you take me through that? And then it’d be like, why is that interesting? I’ve never been interested in that before, but a mindfulness teacher will be like, but things happened, especially when you were meditating at a time that you normally don’t fall asleep, then the mind is doing something in that moment and it’s important that you practice discerning what it’s doing. So yeah, the language is, I think it’s hugely important for that. And with the compassion, I think it was Paul Gilbert from the UK, a very well known compassion researcher and therapist, who also said that when he was practicing with certain types of cognitive behavioral therapy and he was asking people about their thoughts and trying to oppose negative thoughts with more positive thoughts or negative core convictions with more positive core convictions. He would say that after a while, I found out that people would replace them with a very harsh voice like, oh, I shouldn’t think that you should think that or this is so dumb, you better just think that. And he was like, oh, I’m getting a clue. Maybe just a tiny clue as to why just replacing the thoughts isn’t working. You have to tune into, with what kind of voice are you addressing yourself? How does that voice sound? Are you addressing yourself like a drill master or or like someone who’s actually patient, like a good teacher usually is? It’s maybe, it’s a bit of a black and white comparison, but the language is very much to do with how you would train a puppy. Do you think you will get a good dog if you beat him all the time and if you kick him and if you deny him food, do all these things? Or do you think you would get a good dog if you talk to the puppy with a soothing voice or treat him nicely, consistently, and most people understand it when they’re dealing with other people, but they find it very difficult when they’re dealing with themselves.

00:45:39 Kevin

I just had, I noticed a little thought pop into my mind and I have never during our Gifts of Trauma podcast set our listeners a little exercise. And I wonder, at this moment, if our listeners would take a moment to reflect on that. What is the voice? What is the tonality of their inner dialogue? Because my guess is that the majority of people will recognize, oh, I have the drill master. My inner dialogue is delivered from a shouting finger wagging. Yeah, accusatory, argumentative, condescending. Probably the use of  – if it was my one, probably the use of a lot of swear words and expletives in there as well. Name calling would probably get a shout in there. Yeah. And I wonder for our listeners, what’s yours like? What’s your inner dialogue? What is the voice of your inner dialogue?

00:46:36 Rhoda

For me, I have come to recognize my inner voice as someone who’s very judgmental, just very harsh. I’ll always be like, haven’t you learned this by now? One that pops up now because I’ve been practicing mindfulness and Buddhism for so long as he still has zero control over your mind. There’s still this and this going on, just it’s quite an impatient drillmaster. There’s a lot of impatience in mind and I know, and it’s also a very brightened drill master. So because I was raised to be perfect or strive for the best or the most difficult and just push through, I can also hear a lot of anxiety in the voice of the drill masters. So very often, not so much now, anymore. There’s been some progress. I think for the 1st 10 years that I practiced, especially in groups, I would always have this nagging voice in the back of my mind saying you do have to come across as the most mindful, most Zen person in the world. You have to be. You’re, you’re better than these other people, of course, because you just have to be. And so really, just really anxious about saying the right things and coming across as deep and mindful and, and whenever something just felt slightly off in that, I would just beat myself up over it a lot. Oh no, now they think that you don’t know what you’re talking about. Now they know you’re a fraud. Now they see that you’re actually just full of it.

00:48:13 Kevin

Thank you Rhoda. You’re reminded me I was reading just today, that over the last week rereading Awareness by Anthony Debello. I don’t know if you know that book. It’s a beautiful book. He’s an Indian spiritual philosopher teacher. And not that I want to make this a religious conversation and the word God can frighten a lot of people, but there’s a little chapter in the book and he said. “All there is God or fear.” And what he means by that is all of those emotions. Why someone would murder someone, why someone would abuse someone, why someone would steal something. He says, notice what you’re afraid of losing and in that example, you’ve given that taskmaster or drill master afraid of not being the cleverest person in the room or afraid of getting found out, or afraid of maybe even thrown out, she’s not as clever as she seems. Let’s throw her out of the building so that…

00:49:07 Rhoda

Yeah.

00:49:08 Kevin

And I could really hear that, yeah, fear is driving a lot of our emotions. Yeah. So I have here, and I know our listeners can’t see it, but I have a beautifully glossy bound book. Compassion and depression. Mindfulness based compassionate living for recurrent depression. And I don’t want to get too bogged down in the science and the figures, but talk to me anecdotally about, firstly your experience of carrying out the PhD and and doing that. And I would love to hear anecdotal stories from the participants,  if you have any, what was their experience of going through this piece of work with you?

00:49:50 Rhoda

Yeah. So I think I may have shared this with you in Prague as well, but I found it difficult to start working on compassion because it was so far from how I operated. I had a huge lack of compassion, but that also put me in a perfect position to really understand, I think the population that I was working with and it’s, and also something may be important to mention is that as a mindfulness teacher, you are a teacher or a trainer, you’re not a therapist. So I really felt discharged from the responsibility  to help people in a way, I wasn’t going to do anything for them. I had compassion teachers who were going to teach them skills and I was going to research that. So I was not teaching my own population. Of course, as a researcher, that’s a conflict of interest. So I was doing the research. But when I talked to people in qualitative research, doing interviews with the participants, of course, I got a lot more insight into what they were experiencing. And so very broadly, we could say that the compassion training, the  Mindfulness Based Compassionate Living program was effective. It did help reduce depressive symptoms for this group, compared to a group who wasn’t receiving this training. So that was the randomized control trial. And these effects were also maintained for at least six months after the training was complete and people weren’t receiving any guidance anymore. Basically, they were on their own after it, and we talked to them again six months later and they still showed the effectiveness of the training. And we thought that was very significant because usually when you’re not guiding people anymore, the effect will go down a bit. So this really fortified the idea that they actually did learn skills and that they were actually able to maintain them by themselves. And then what these skills are exactly that, it’s so diverse. On the one hand, the program is uniform and the practices are the same for everyone. But when you’re speaking to people in the interviews, then they just come up with completely different expressions of how compassion has worked for them. And a lot of this you cannot capture in the questionnaires that we had given them into scientific questionnaires because they’re just not items on a questionnaire. And I think one of the most, maybe not the most impressive patient, but somebody who stuck with me was a woman who said after the training, I no longer start my sentences with “…you must think me silly for saying this, but…” And I thought that was a really good example of mindfulness and compassion in one, because firstly she noticed finally that she started her sentences like that. And secondly, she noticed that had changed. And it may seem like a small thing for someone who doesn’t know how depression works or… But to me, it really seems what kind of life are you living, or what kind of view of yourself do you have when you feel the need to start every sentence with “you must think me silly, but” –  just always excusing yourself, always sort of laying yourself down a bit and just, and then to just have that change. Um, so that sort of comes back to linguistics. You… there’s a change in the language and you notice it. I really like that and there were other patients who said that the teacher, for example, was extremely helpful. Just having the teacher, even more than perhaps in a regular mindfulness training, just embodied that everything is OK. So the compassion training is not about getting to your happy place or something. It’s not about swimming with dolphins after 8 weeks and just being happy all the time. It really is about building tolerance for negative experiences because compassion can only arise when there’s suffering. If there’s no suffering and we’re feeling happy, then we call it meta. In Buddhism, then there’s just this loving kindness that is just present and there are no hindrances to it, so it’s just meta. But as soon as a heart that is full of meta in a way meets suffering, then compassion can arise because compassion is really being able to be touched by suffering, whether it’s from yourself or from others, coupled with this need or this wish to relieve it somehow, to make it better. So people really learn, OK, that means that everything that’s there is, it’s OK that it’s there. I don’t have to suppress anger. I don’t have to suppress sadness. I don’t even have to suppress depression. I can be depressed. I can even embrace that I’m someone who is recurrently depressed and that there is a big chance that I will have a depressive episode again, even after this, after this training. So it’s, for some people, maybe it could be a cure. It has been a cure for me in some ways because I haven’t been depressed in a very long time. But for many people it’s more like, it’s collateral damage control. So people realize, OK, I’m probably still going to get depressed, but maybe not as deep, maybe not as long, maybe not with such an effect on my personal relationships or my job or any other aspect of my life. Because you don’t have to fight it as much anymore.

00:55:32 Kevin

What I heard was that when we can access or engage with a mindfulness based compassionate living or mindfulness based stress reduction or mindfulness just in that way, that when we can start to learn ourselves, learn our inner dialogue, learn how we show up in the world, learn how we are behaving from a place of compassion. So a place of gentle observation of self, say wow, that. But when this external thing happens, this internal thing happens. And when we can learn that and start to work with that, rather than fight against it, then healing can happen. And I really like that, because what it’s saying is that we can learn a skill, a tool, a practice, but that the healing is coming from inside, itself created OK in an environment where we’ve created an environment to allow that to happen. But it is self created and something else. When you say the woman who really got a lot from the practice and she was very conscious of how she started a lot of sentences with you must think of me silly for saying this again. I’m checking with myself and I wonder for our audience how many people would be habitual or compulsive. I know that’s a strong word. Apologizers. The number of people that I meet whose first few words are I’m sorry, do you mind? I’m sorry, Is it OK or I’m sorry, can I ask you and the number of people that apologise for their own presence? Before they’ve even done anything, before they’ve even started a conversation, before our listeners in this idea of moving through trauma to healing, which you’ve described so beautifully, Maybe the 1st place for people to start is to just check in with, what can I learn about myself? And would a mindful practice help me do that? Would a mindful practice help me become an observer? But did you use the term earlier? A scholar of myself, a researcher of myself. I think that’s what you said, yeah. So I actually, I really enjoyed what you said and thank you for sharing it. Rhoda, I also want you to have the opportunity to talk to us about the teacher training program that you’re moving into. And that’s going to be early next year. So that’s going to be 2026. Tell us a little bit about that.

00:58:00 Rhoda

I’ve already taught a few teacher training programs. I’ve already moved into it. I just haven’t done it in English yet. But we have, as an MBCL collective, taught in other countries. So there’s been teacher training programs in Brazil, in Germany, in France, and we’re starting one in Turkey next year, many different places, Australia I believe. And this teacher training is really at the core of it. It’s a continued education for people who are already mindfulness teachers. So if you really want to be a compassion teacher and to teach the MBCL program, the Compassionate living program, then it’s mandatory to do this teacher training and you will learn to teach it. But actually, the vast majority of our participants are not mindfulness teachers seeking to become compassion teachers. Usually we have people in the groups who work with people, so professionals who work with people, and sometimes they’re psychologists or therapists, but sometimes they’re teachers or sometimes they’re policymakers. And these are just people who want to be able to incorporate compassion elements into what they do every day with their specific target populations. So these are the kinds of people that we give the program to, and we’re really just going through the MBCL course step by step, like a mindfulness course. The MBCL is as a course made-up of practices of psychoeducation and inquiry with the group. So we go through the elements of the psychoeducation, like why is this in it? Why not that, for instance, there’s quite a bit on the evolution of the brain, also to make people aware that our focus on negativity has an evolutionary motivation. Because a lot of people who are self critical, experienced the way their mind works as their personal thoughts, that they’re doing something wrong as a person. And it’s really vital to bring across that that’s actually just the evolution of your brain, and that’s the evolution of everybody’s brain. This is what brains do. So elements like that we go into and of course we go a lot into the didactics of the practices because unlike the mindfulness course, this program makes a lot of use of imagination in the practices, because like I said, it’s a compassion training, it’s not a loving kindness training. So we really explicitly invite negative experiences to the foreground so that you can practice with a compassionate attitude while you are remembering or imagining the negative experience. This takes a certain kind of didactics to really bring that out in your participants so that they can actually work with it and that they feel safe to do that. So in the didactics, there are also a lot of escape routes because it’s probably very much the same in compassionate inquiry that you just always try to get to that sweet spot with your practitioners that they are out of their comfort zone, but not too much. And this is exactly what we tried to do in the competition practice as well. And then the group inquiry also is very important because some people, actually, a lot of the people in my research, they come into this compassion teaching in the training actually, not as teachers. And even though they’re motivated, they have very little idea of what compassion actually is,for the first couple of sessions. That is sometimes a real big question mark for people who have so little experience with any warmth or safety or compassion. And then they really learn from each other. Then at some point someone in the group will give an example of how they worked with compassion. I remember there was one woman in my group who had just received bad news and in the group, she said instead of calling everybody to start managing this bad situation, I first went outside to just sit in the sun for a moment and let it sink in what I’d just heard. And then people like, oh, so that’s compassion. That’s what it could look like very practically, yeah. So this is very important that people learn from each other.

01:02:04 Kevin

Thank you. And we’ll put some information about that in our show notes that people can look up about that at Roda. Would it be OK if Rosemary asked a question?

01:02:12 Rhoda

Sure.

01:02:15 Rosemary

Thank you. My question is really for our listeners. Are there any red flags or signs that you can suggest that would help them understand that what they’re feeling might be depression or what they’re not feeling might be dissociation? Like, so that they don’t keep continually making themselves wrong. But as you said, having a word can make a big difference. So is there anything you can suggest to people who are listening to this and maybe, like me, found those check boxes? It’s like I experienced that. So, you know, maybe I was depressed. Maybe that tough time I went through was actually depression, and maybe there’s some way I could get help.

01:03:02 Rhoda

There are certainly red flags in the sense that when I look back, not really talking to anybody about this until I was 20 is one of the biggest red flags. When you feel all these feelings, or maybe not even the feelings, but you’re just in this constant state of confusion, and your emotions seem to be going everywhere, and you have no outlet for it, then that’s a red flag even after a short amount of time. I think for depression, it says two weeks of the big clinical symptoms, but it’s a little bit tricky because as teenagers, of course, there’s a lot of confusion and there’s a lot of big emotions. But if you feel that it’s really going in the bad category or, in yourself, even when you can’t identify the emotion specifically, you will know whether you feel good or bad. Maybe to make that clearer, I first got to recognize anger as confusion, and that was when I was in my late 20s. That was when I first realized, oh, when I’m confused, I’m actually suppressing anger. That is how removed I am from my anger. But that is how it shows itself. I would get all these, just very conflicting thoughts and everything would tumble over everything, and then I’d be like, oh wait, this is confusion and this is anger confusion. And like I said before, being able to name it, oh, OK, that made it easier to accept it and get curious about it. For me, feeling so unworthy, this is the biggest thing that I felt throughout my entire childhood, very unworthy. And it’s also the thing that really stops you from getting help, from speaking out because you just don’t feel you’re worth it. So I almost say it’s inevitable that you’re not going to get help until much later, when this is your dominant symptom, because it just isolates you and the fear is too big. So I don’t want to sound very negative, but there’s almost no answer to feeling unworthy if you’ve never expressed it. But it is a huge red flag. Feeling unworthy.

01:05:08 Rosemary

Mine was a little different. Mine was like, this is my secret, as long as I can mask it well enough. No one will realize that I’m unworthy and that just adds more layers. So thank you.

01:05:19 Kevin

I have a little story, if I can, shared very briefly that might lean towards that a little bit. Yeah, maybe 18 months ago, I was working with a woman and that was during a psychedelic experience, and she came out of her psychedelic experience and she had perceived that it hadn’t worked well for her. So she was very, very disappointed, blaming herself. Everything I do, I get it wrong. I can’t even do this right. Everyone else was having a wonderful experience and I just mirrored that back here. I said, oh, so you’re sitting with disappointment. And immediately I said it, the tears started to flood out of her eyes and she realized, that has been my whole life. I have been sitting with disappointment my whole life. So just to have someone’s name, that experience, she couldn’t name it herself, but to have someone name that experience for her was so helpful to her that immediately she started to cry and it seemed to just land perfectly for her that this was my thing. Disappointment. So yeah, I really value naming it and the red flags.

01:06:28 Rhoda

And I think what you just said is so powerful, because it’s not just the naming it, but also because you name it, you are implicitly saying I’m OK with that, with your disappointment, I can take it. You’re welcome here with your disappointment. And I think that’s equally strong as naming it.

01:06:47 Kevin

Thank you, Rhoda. Rhoda, I like to ask my guests a little question at the end, and I don’t know if you’ve heard it or not, but the question that I like to ask, and from you and your experience and your wisdom and education and mindfulness training, if you could whisper a little word into the ear of our listeners or humanity at large, what would that message be?

01:07:14 Rhoda

I had heard it, but I hadn’t come up with an answer yet. Something that pops in my mind now, so it’s probably the right thing to say right now. Sometimes I ask participants and I, I think I would ask the listeners as well, is for whom do you reserve your best self? And I think we all know that we very often reserve our best selves for other people, for our jobs, for our parents, our children. And especially here in the West, we are brought up with the idea that it’s very immodest to put yourself first and perhaps reserve some of that best self for yourself. But just imagine what your life would be like if you could reserve at least a portion of your best self for yourself.

01:08:05 Kevin

Thank you, Rhoda. Rhoda, thank you very much for joining us on this edition of the Gifts of Trauma podcast from Compassionate Inquiry. It has been an absolute pleasure and delight speaking to you. Thank you.

01:08:15 Rhoda

It was my pleasure, I enjoyed it very much.

01:08:22 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. 

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