Episode Details
Back to Episodes93 Three Inner Experiential Exercises
Episode 93
Published 3 years, 11 months ago
Description
- Summary: In this episode I discuss the crucial role of the right kinds of corrective and healing experiences in our lives. I then offer you three inner experiential exercises to help you understand three questions: 1) In what ways do you not love yourself (with a special focus on inner critics); 2) your inner tension between connection and protection; and 3) your internal battles with rigidity and chaos.
- Lead in:
- Experience.
- I have been wanting for a long time to offer you some experiential exercises
- In episodes 89, 90, and 92, I gave you a lot of conceptual information about polyvagal theory, about interpersonal neurobiology, some more about Internal family systems, but something has been missing
- And what's been missing, in my opinion, is the experiential part of this for us.
- Julius Caesar "Experience is the teacher of all things" De Bello Civilli
- John Stuart Mill: There are many truths of which the full meaning cannot be realized until personal experience has brought it home. -- On liberty
- Experience. There is no substitute for experiential learning
- Otherwise it can stay all in the conceptual realm, all in your head, all in your mind.
- Michael Smith: The major problem is that we tend to live our life in our head, in our thoughts and stories, cut off from our actual experience.
- Otherwise it can stay all in the conceptual realm, all in your head, all in your mind.
- What I want for you is much more than that. I want you to be able to change for the better in the deepest ways.
- And you can't think or study your way there
- What I want for you is much more than that. I want you to be able to change for the better in the deepest ways.
- Not the same experiences over and over -- some people have that kind of life.
- Rather, a capacity for experience -- the ability to take in, process, and integrate new experiences as part of your human formation.
- George Bernard Shaw: Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience.
- Not the same experiences over and over -- some people have that kind of life.
- What holds us back?
- Many would say fear. Fear of the unknown. Fear of putting ourselves out there. Fear keeps us from new experiences and for the corrective effects of new experiences. And I think that's true. But I don't think fear is the primary obstacle. There's some thing deeper than fear that holds us back.
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- What is it that really holds us back from new experiences? What goes deeper than our fear? [Drum roll]
- Our Shame. It is our shame that holds us back from new experiences and the healing that new experiences can bring to us.
- The fear is a secondary reaction. We wouldn't have the fear if we didn't have the shame, the gnawing sense of inadequacy or not being good enough. Too much shame makes us fragile, way to concerned about protecting ourselves
- And in the natural realm, it's shame that most often keeps us from taking in the love from God, from others, and from ourselves -- it's shame that generates our fear, the desire to protect our wounds, that shuts us off from ourselves and other people
- Shame generates fear -- fear fuels our self-protection and shuts down the openness to experience. The shame to fear to self-protection progression builds walls around our hearts. We see vulnerability as dangerous.
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- Brené Brown, Daring Greatly Vulnerability is the core, the heart, the center, of meaningful human experiences.
- Shame is so important, I spent 13 episodes of this podcast just on that one topic. Those 13 episodes, episodes 37 to 49 on it
- Those episodes on shame are foundational -- they are the most fundamental episodes of this podcast. So many of our problem go back to shame, and nearly all psychological dysfunction in the natural realm has its root and origin in shame.
- If you haven't listened to those episodes, or