0:02

It's a radical act of citizen ing

0:04

to change our story,

0:07

to change the narrative that we're living within and

0:10

our relationship to ourselves and others

0:12

in the world of like. I won't

0:15

participate in the authorizing,

0:17

the dehumanizing, the fighting, the oppression.

0:19

I won't.

0:20

I'm not going to do that to me. I'm not going to do that to you.

0:23

I am going to stand for love. I

0:26

will stand for love, and

0:28

in that being, this change

0:30

my world.

0:34

Welcome to How to Citizen with Baratunde,

0:36

a podcast that reimagined citizen as

0:38

a verb, not a legal status. This

0:41

season is all about how we practice

0:43

democracy, what can we get rid of, what

0:45

can we invent, and how do we change the culture

0:48

of democracy itself. We're leaving the

0:50

theoretical clouds and hitting the ground with

0:52

inspiring examples of people

0:54

and institutions that are showing us new

0:57

ways to govern ourselves. I

1:04

can't believe this is the final episode

1:07

of our fourth season of How to Citizen.

1:10

I'm so glad you're here now. If you've

1:12

been with us from the start, thank you, and

1:14

I hope we've given you new perspectives,

1:16

solutions and practices to

1:19

get inspired by and to try. If

1:21

you're new to the show, thank you as well.

1:24

It is never too late to start citizen.

1:28

We kicked off this season with Adrian

1:31

Marie Brown. It was a beautiful,

1:33

expansive conversation about

1:35

the importance of getting into right relationship

1:38

with each other and seeing democracy is

1:40

something we create at the micro level

1:43

at home and in our communities, not

1:45

just at the macro level via the ballot

1:47

box. Adrian shared

1:50

this idea that I'm still

1:52

playing with in my mind. The idea that

1:54

the external systems were fighting so hard

1:57

against also exists inside

1:59

of us. The inequality, racism,

2:02

extreme capitalism, all the isms

2:04

don't just exist out there, they

2:07

take root in here. So

2:09

as much as we need to citizen externally

2:12

to make our communities and our country better

2:14

by participating, investing in relationships,

2:17

understanding power, and valuing the collective,

2:20

we also need to citizen internally.

2:25

And that brings me to our second pillar,

2:27

invest in relationships. We

2:31

have mostly focused on using

2:33

that as a way to connect to the people around

2:35

us and to the planet, but

2:37

the full line is invest in relationships

2:40

with yourself, with others,

2:42

and with the planet. And it's so important

2:45

that we take that first piece that relationship

2:48

with ourselves as equal

2:50

to the relationship with others in the planet. Today,

2:54

doctor Sam Raider is helping

2:56

us go deeper so that we can understand

2:59

what it takes to create a culture within ourselves

3:02

that supports creating a culture of democracy

3:04

for all of us. I

3:07

was introduced to Sam through my wife Elizabeth,

3:10

who you should know by now is executive

3:12

producer of this show. And if I'm being

3:15

honest, when I first met Sam,

3:17

I thought she was a bit out there. She

3:21

was always talking about alternative

3:23

approaches to healing and what we could

3:25

learn from quantum physics, and what we could

3:27

learn from psychedelics and how to

3:30

undo our internal wirings from childhood

3:32

and blah blah blah. It was a lot

3:34

okay, But over time, Sam

3:37

and the way she sees the world, they

3:40

started to click for me. In

3:42

her eighteen years of practicing psychology,

3:45

Sam couldn't ignore these patterns

3:47

she saw her clients living through and realized

3:49

she needed to step outside of that traditional

3:52

practice and try something new. So

3:55

she developed an approach called source

3:57

Code, which she says focuses

3:59

on the speed theirritual dimension of healing.

4:02

Sam believes that our early childhood

4:04

experiences write a code

4:06

in our unconscious which then determines

4:09

the way our story unfolds. And

4:11

she's committed to helping people rewrite

4:13

their code.

4:16

And I want to be clear, this isn't

4:18

talk therapy, and I'm not going to ask

4:20

you to lay back on your couch, but it

4:22

is deeply vulnerable. What

4:25

Sam asks people to do is get

4:27

honest about the role we cast for

4:29

ourselves in our lives and the responses

4:31

we think we're hardwired to have.

4:37

If you have any exposure

4:39

to the modern world of wellness

4:41

or healing or Instagram spirituality,

4:45

then you know it can feel completely

4:47

divorced from and even in denial

4:49

of reality.

4:51

I have found that Sam has a foot in

4:54

both worlds, the internal and

4:56

external. She protests

4:58

signed petitions, her money where her

5:00

mouth is. I literally depend on her

5:03

for my LA voting guide every

5:05

time we have to vote, which feels

5:07

like every other month. Sam

5:10

is so dedicated to this inner work

5:12

because she believes that our personal healing

5:15

is what's going to help us create collective

5:17

healing. After

5:20

the break, Doctor Sam Raider

5:22

on the source code running our lives and

5:24

how turning inward can help us create

5:27

a culture of democracy that supports

5:29

a just and loving world. We

5:41

are so excited to have you here

5:44

to explore this belief that I've

5:46

had for a while now, based some on my own

5:48

experience, based some on your work about

5:50

the importance of healing ourselves before we

5:53

can heal the world, and how we can

5:55

sit as in better. So that's the

5:57

crux of why you're here, and I

5:59

want to start with just asking you, how did you

6:01

come to make this connection that

6:03

our internal worlds directly link to

6:06

our experience of the external one.

6:08

Did it happen in a moment a series of

6:10

moments with some of your discovery

6:12

of this link.

6:13

I was a psychologist for eighteen years

6:15

in private practice, starting with

6:17

my practic and going through, you know, having my own business,

6:20

and I started to see

6:22

that there were these patterns that

6:24

people were coming in and saying

6:27

the same things to me, even across

6:29

all different walks of life, all different

6:31

socioeconomic status, race,

6:34

gender, you know, it didn't really matter. There

6:36

were these universal patterns. And

6:39

when I started relating with the patterns

6:42

instead of the specifics

6:45

of what the person was bringing in, I

6:47

noticed that there were these radical shifts

6:50

not only in how the person showed up in the

6:52

world, how they felt, how they behaved,

6:55

but also how the world showed up for them

6:57

in an almost mystical way. Things

7:00

change in their external environment to now reflect

7:02

their new internal environment. And

7:04

it started happening so many times

7:06

that I couldn't unsee it. And

7:09

that's why I guess I walk this divine

7:11

paradox, like, yes, I create the voter guide

7:13

every vote.

7:14

I believe in.

7:15

Citizen ing deeply, and

7:17

I believe it's all an illusion,

7:20

kind of how the Hindus have been saying for thousands

7:22

of years. It's all you know, everything

7:24

we're experiencing is a part

7:26

of ourselves.

7:28

The idea that everything we're experiencing

7:30

is a part of ourselves links to some

7:33

of my in field experience

7:35

is making America outdoors and

7:37

the idea that we are a part of nature, not apart

7:39

from nature, and so we see ourselves

7:42

in the external in these patterns

7:44

that you were seeing in your patience,

7:46

your clients in the psychology realm you

7:49

described, you know, a shift in

7:51

them that would then shift some of the world

7:53

around them. What's an example

7:55

of what you were noticing and

7:58

what changed after you

8:00

called attention to or intervened in some way.

8:03

Yeah, so I was thinking in preparation for this interview

8:05

about this client of mine whose political beliefs

8:08

were those that are sort of associated with oppression.

8:11

And when we explored his internal

8:13

landscape and the sort of symbols that

8:15

run him, we found that he

8:18

experienced his father as oppressive as

8:20

a little one, and actually said

8:23

sometimes when his father would get really angry, it felt like

8:25

a silver back gorilla. And

8:27

so we started talking about

8:29

the silver back gorilla, this part that's

8:31

so big and so scary

8:34

and gets to have all the power, and

8:36

that that part is paired with this other part

8:38

that feels so powerless. So

8:41

in his symbolic landscape, there was this

8:43

big thing and this little thing and

8:45

they went together in such a scary, disturbing

8:48

way. And so if

8:50

you're living in a universe where there's

8:52

big guys and little guys and the little guys always

8:54

lose, of course you're going to want to be

8:56

a big guy.

8:57

Logical' that's just that.

9:00

So you know, I never spoke to him about

9:02

his political beliefs, and all

9:05

we did was work on the symbols that run

9:07

him, this awful split in power, these

9:11

symbols of bigness and smallness, and oppression,

9:14

and we started to alchemize those symbols

9:16

and replace them with new symbols of togetherness,

9:19

connection, empowerment,

9:21

equality, equity, and

9:24

we started shifting things down, down, down

9:26

at that symbolic layer. And

9:28

then he comes in and says to me, you

9:31

know, I've been thinking about the way

9:33

that I vote. I think there's something off here,

9:36

like I'm realizing it doesn't actually honor

9:38

the human beings in the world.

9:40

And then a few weeks later he comes in and says, it

9:43

doesn't feel right anymore to have a gun yet

9:45

a gun, and it's like, yeah, well,

9:47

if we're living in the big guys and little guys paradigm

9:50

of dominance, it makes a lot of

9:52

sense to have a gun, right, Yeah.

9:55

But this is someone who would

9:58

find himself regularly these

10:00

pickles in life. You know, people on

10:02

the road would cut them off and they'd get in these battles

10:04

or just odd problems

10:07

would be coming into his life in various

10:09

social settings where there was a lot of conflict

10:12

and shows of dominance, and as he

10:14

shifted his internal landscape, those

10:17

things just didn't show up in his world anymore. He

10:20

wasn't being beckoned into that fight because

10:22

he wasn't organized around fight.

10:25

Thank you for the silverback gorilla tail.

10:28

I've been on a tour over

10:30

the past few years doing a lot of talking

10:32

and connecting, and one of the

10:34

stories I've been trying to shift with the

10:36

audience I connect with is like, I'm not here

10:39

to take anything from you. You know, there

10:41

is so many of us wired to believe in

10:44

what Heather McGee, another previous guest on

10:46

our show, calls the zero sum game. If

10:48

you get something, it's got to come at my expense.

10:50

And it's like, that's a possible interpretation,

10:53

or we could get more

10:55

together, which.

10:56

Is how nature has worked for

10:58

time immemorial. Everything springs

11:01

up interdependent with one another.

11:03

You know.

11:03

It's just this ecosystem of

11:06

life that supports itself and each other,

11:08

and everyone wins and everything

11:10

keeps each other in checks and balances and

11:12

thriving. Something

11:14

about the way we've started

11:16

to organize ourselves in the last couple

11:19

thousand years. We're getting away from

11:21

that, but we can also return

11:23

to that.

11:24

I keep thinking back to the

11:27

first conversation this season

11:29

with Adrian Marie Brown. We spent some time

11:32

on fractals. We

11:34

talked about how fractals you represent these patterns

11:36

that replicate at the small

11:38

medium at every scale. The implication

11:41

being if we change something at the small

11:43

scale, it will replicate,

11:45

it will ripple to the larger scale. And

11:47

I know you're a big fan of fractals,

11:51

and even the story you shared has you

11:53

know it hints at this. But where

11:55

do fractals fit into your worldview when

11:58

you think about the connection between shifting

12:00

our internal world to shift the external world.

12:03

So, for those of you who don't know, a fractal

12:06

is a pattern that keeps repeating at

12:08

every scale. So if you zoom in,

12:10

it's the same pattern. Zoom all the way out, same

12:13

pattern. Turn to the left, same pattern, turn to the right,

12:15

same pattern. It's infinite. Fractals

12:17

are everywhere in our universe. The

12:20

branching in our lungs mirrors

12:22

the branching in nature in trees

12:25

and so on and so forth. So there are certain

12:27

patterns that keep repeating. Now,

12:29

source code is based on the idea

12:32

that in our first five years of life, our

12:34

early experience encodes into us some

12:36

patterning. What we learn explicitly

12:39

by what we're taught and also implicitly

12:42

from how we're treated in our environment, creates

12:45

this deep patterning

12:47

inside of us, and that pattern keeps

12:49

repeating. So for that client, it was that pattern

12:51

of dominance and oppression, and

12:53

that pattern keeps repeating like a fractal.

12:56

There's actually this really beautiful book called

12:58

You Matter more Than You Think. It's written

13:00

by Karen O'Brien who's a professor

13:02

of human geography at OSLO in Norway,

13:06

and she talks about that this is

13:08

a fractal universe. You know, quantum

13:10

physics and mathematics is bringing us closer to

13:12

this, knowing that we really do live in

13:14

this place where it's all just patterns that keep repeating.

13:17

And for us at the societal scale,

13:20

how we're citizening. It's the idea

13:22

of paradigms. So the

13:24

paradigm of dominance has become

13:26

really big, but it's become really big

13:29

because as children, there's a lot

13:31

of children who experience that dominance

13:34

thing in their family system, so then it's

13:36

encoded into them, then they embody

13:38

it, and then our collective

13:40

embodiment creates these larger macrosystems

13:43

that mirror like a fractal. So

13:46

the cool part from that book You Matter More

13:48

Than You Think, is she says, you know, every

13:51

point is the center

13:53

point in a fractal universe.

13:56

So what each of us embody,

13:59

how we show up up, what we believe,

14:02

how we citizen is the beginning

14:04

of a new world. Every moment can

14:06

bur the new world of how we want

14:08

to show up.

14:09

All right? So I literally got like

14:11

slightly emotional slash chills because

14:15

I don't think I speak just for myself when I

14:17

say that the world can feel very frustrating,

14:20

can feel very overwhelming. In terms of the challenges,

14:22

I could list off a litany of

14:25

isms and ologies, yes, which

14:27

are impeding our growth and our evolution,

14:29

and patterns and stories and systems

14:32

that we were born into, sometimes

14:34

literally in our families, sometimes more metaphorically

14:37

as a society. And if I want

14:39

to counter that, right, if I want to change

14:41

that, I'm like, I got to join the right

14:43

organization, I got to fund the right

14:46

politician. Oh everything they said was a lie.

14:49

And what I'm hearing in this you matter

14:51

more than you think. And the

14:54

center is actually everywhere, is

14:56

that the front line is also in here. And

14:58

so if I just start right the

15:01

place, the space matters a little less

15:04

than just the commencement. And maybe I could

15:07

start with me and have

15:09

that be my own front line.

15:11

Absolutely, Oh my god, I feel you

15:13

know, tiriy I just hearing you talk about it.

15:15

And in twenty sixteen,

15:17

when Trump was elected, I wrote this cheeky article

15:20

entitled why Trump's presidency

15:23

might promise more hope and change

15:25

than Obama's.

15:26

What Okay, hold on, I'm

15:28

with you, I'm with you, But I mean that's

15:30

the very clickbaity great clickbaby.

15:33

My emotions are moving now because nobody speaks

15:35

against my man, old I

15:38

loved you. Would you talking about doctor Stale?

15:40

Well, when we go looking out

15:42

there and absolutely keep citizen ing, keep

15:44

contributing, keep funding, keep going,

15:47

keep protesting, and when

15:49

we're only looking out there, we forget

15:52

that power that every point is the center point

15:54

in the fractal. So the way I see

15:56

Trump is that he's kind of a caricature

15:59

of our collective wound in this nation of

16:01

otherizing. So he does this

16:03

big thing about let's build a wall, and these

16:05

people are bad, and you know, I'm

16:07

the greatest, and then we

16:10

liberals say no, you're

16:12

bad and we're good. It's

16:15

just a mirror image. It's Malkovich Malkovich.

16:17

So the dehumanizing

16:20

that's festering at the core of our nation. He's

16:23

coming forward as this big

16:25

embodiment of that going do you

16:27

see? Do you see who

16:29

we are? And it's our opportunity

16:33

and invitation to go inside

16:35

and go Okay, where am I dehumanizing even

16:37

them? Because if I had

16:39

lived the sum total of their life experience, I would

16:41

also believe and act the way

16:43

that they are. And so it's

16:46

like, there are no bad people, only

16:49

hurt people, hurt people.

16:51

I've heard that line so many times, and

16:54

you know, the people who are hurt in turn hurt

16:56

others. I think, you know, Trump

16:59

is a tricky caricature

17:02

as a particular example, where yes,

17:06

we hold the truth that hurt people hurt

17:08

people, and we

17:10

act to counter the harm and the hurt

17:12

that's being created by this person. It's

17:15

the both, at least for me, I don't even know if that's a question.

17:17

It's more of a statement to get your response

17:20

to, Oh, because I don't want to feel

17:22

like so just have to vaguely

17:24

love, you know, hurtful people

17:27

and the world's going to fix itself.

17:29

Oh yes, I do think there are some

17:31

people who, because of their coping styles and wounds,

17:34

are living in a little bit

17:36

of denial of reality and doing what I call

17:38

spiritual bypass where they're

17:40

like, everyone just needs to raise their level of consciousness.

17:42

And I'm like, okay, you tell that to a

17:45

slave in chains in a diamond mind

17:47

right now, like, oh, just raise your level

17:49

of consciousness. Like we have to hold

17:51

both.

17:52

We have to hold.

17:53

Both that there are certain sticky

17:55

spots in this universe where people

17:58

don't have the flexibility like

18:00

on Maslow's hierarchy of needs to

18:03

be thinking about the quantum and my embodiment

18:05

and what story am I telling? Sometimes things

18:08

are just really real, and

18:10

how can we hold both that

18:13

our relationship to things matters,

18:15

that are embodiment matters,

18:17

that are being this matters, and that there

18:19

are very real things going on in the world that need

18:22

to be stopped, that need to be talked about, that

18:24

need to be addressed and not swept under the rug.

18:27

Yes, and it's improv It all comes

18:29

back to improv comedy. I

18:33

want to back up on some terminology.

18:36

We've got source code, We've got a coding

18:39

session rather than a therapy session. We've

18:41

got symbolic versus

18:44

concrete or circumstances. I

18:46

think you use that word can you give

18:49

us a lay of this linguistic land that

18:51

you're also creating. What is symbolic

18:55

versus the traditional way

18:57

we tend to approach kind of articulating

18:59

our our problems are in our selves.

19:02

Yeah.

19:02

Sure.

19:03

So if we think about the client who had

19:05

the dad that he associated with the silver Back

19:08

guerrilla, the concrete circumstances

19:10

in his life that week may have

19:12

been that some dick cut him

19:14

off on the road. He comes in and he wants

19:16

to tell me about this specific

19:19

situation that's so frustrating

19:22

and so irritating,

19:24

and what do I do about these

19:27

people everywhere that are trying to cut me off?

19:29

Right?

19:29

And it's this very specific thing. But

19:32

instead of going with the concrete specifics,

19:34

we're going to dive deeper beneath

19:36

to the symbols, the symbolic landscape

19:39

or symbolic nexus that got encoded

19:41

into him when he was little, that's running

19:43

his life now. It's the algorithm of his matrix.

19:46

It's what he notices, it's what he

19:48

attracts, it's what he orients around.

19:50

It's his favorite story to keep telling, no matter

19:53

how awful and enraging it is. And

19:55

so we go down, down, down, and we work

19:58

with the symbols instead. Like we were talking earlier, there's

20:00

this gorilla in the mouse, the big part

20:02

in the little part. Those are archetypal

20:04

symbols. And when we can resolve

20:07

things down at that symbolic layer, poof

20:09

his life shifts. He notices different

20:12

things, he attracts different things, he creates different

20:14

things, he embodies different things, he believes

20:16

different things, he relates in a new way. And

20:19

that's the work that I do.

20:21

Yeah, and I want to dive deeper into

20:23

your source code world and your coping

20:26

styles world. What have

20:28

you found when you've gone inside?

20:30

What are the wounds that you've

20:32

been able to kind of categorize and label

20:35

and give some structure to to help

20:37

us make sense of that internal landscape so we could

20:39

adjust how we show up in the external landscape.

20:42

So source Code has identified

20:45

that there's twelve coping styles

20:47

that we all share, and all of us have several. I had

20:49

all twelve, which is sort of what allowed me to be the conduit

20:51

for the work. But those coping styles

20:53

are the defense mechanisms that we inherit

20:55

in our early experience when we don't

20:58

get the precise support need

21:00

at each developmental stage. So all

21:02

of us are walking around with these patterns or coping styles,

21:04

or glitches in our matrix that make things

21:06

hard, these tough patterns that keep repeating.

21:09

But what's more interesting to me is that

21:11

under them, as soon as we dissolve

21:13

them, which is what source code does, under

21:17

those defenses, each of us

21:19

is the most exquisitely beautiful

21:21

energy, the most loving, relational,

21:26

curious, playful, magical,

21:29

gentle spirit waiting

21:31

dormant inside of each of us to awaken

21:34

beyond those defenses. That's

21:37

what I find inside when I assist

21:39

someone in stepping out of a lifelong nightmare that

21:41

they've been trapped inside of. You know, when you

21:43

think about your life, you notice

21:46

those patterns that keep repeating of like why am I always

21:48

invisible? Why does no one hear me? You

21:50

know? And it's like, because that's something

21:53

that got encoded into you and now

21:55

you keep reliving it. But it doesn't have to be. So this

21:58

morning I received a DM from a student

22:00

who was in a class with me last night, and

22:03

she said, you know, I was feeling very upset

22:05

and missed because in the first half of

22:07

class, every time I wrote something in the chat, you missed

22:09

it. You skipped over that and read everyone

22:11

else's and I felt so invisible

22:13

my whole life. And so during the break, I decided,

22:16

let me stand taller and speak

22:18

my truth and speak my needs. She

22:20

came forward and was like, I won't be invisible,

22:23

and then she got the love and the support she needed.

22:25

So she saw that it was a pattern, a

22:27

pattern from childhood that keeps repeating, and

22:30

she shifted her energy, she shifted her embodiment,

22:32

she shifted what she's willing to participate

22:35

in. I'm not going to keep playing out that old story.

22:38

And then she got to have a new experience.

22:40

So what flash into my mind just now was

22:43

an image. It's a civil rights image

22:45

from nineteen sixty eight. The Memphis sanitation

22:48

workers are striking. They're all black.

22:50

They're holding up signs that simply say I

22:53

am a man right,

22:55

just affirming and asserting a

22:57

different story, a different ownership of self

23:00

that's been denied, you know, and encoded

23:02

right into laws and practices and

23:04

cultures. Also children who

23:06

created those laws and practices and cultures,

23:09

and not being seen, not being humanized.

23:11

But to humanize yourself first

23:14

and demand you know that others humanize

23:16

you as well, and so even in that

23:18

image, for me, there is a bridge from

23:21

this symbolic work and the things that are going

23:23

on in any individual person right

23:25

back to the way

23:27

you even protest. The way you show up

23:30

can affirm a truth that you find

23:32

in your own, you know, kind of internal landscape.

23:35

Yes, Like it's a radical

23:37

act of citizen ning to change

23:40

our story, to change

23:42

the narrative that we're living within and

23:44

our relationship to ourselves and others

23:47

in the world. Of Like, I

23:49

won't participate in that

23:51

old way of being, the authorizing

23:53

me to you, humanizing, the fighting the oppression. Yeah,

23:56

I won't. I'm not going to do that to me. I'm

23:58

not going to do that to you. I am going

24:00

to stand for love. I

24:02

will stand for love, and

24:05

in that being this change

24:07

my world.

24:08

So standing for love it

24:11

literally sounds and feels beautiful.

24:13

You've mentioned, you know, this term coping

24:16

styles. Can you describe

24:18

one or two of them and how they relate to that

24:20

early childhood development.

24:21

One of the things we're developing as children

24:24

in our first five years of life is our sense

24:26

of will. What do I have control

24:28

over? What can I impact?

24:30

What's my scope of influence? And

24:33

we need to be able to feel that we can

24:35

control things and not

24:37

everything. It's got to be that optimal

24:40

frustration like ooh, I don't get to control

24:42

absolutely everything, and also the optimal

24:44

indulgence of but I do get to

24:46

decide what I wear to school, but not

24:48

a hero costume, not a superhero costume.

24:51

But you know, I can wear any of my shorts or

24:53

any of my tops. Right, So that we

24:55

need to feel that we have some say, some voice,

24:57

some choice, some agency,

25:00

agency power, but not despotic

25:02

agency, not control over absolutely

25:05

everything, where our tantrums can control our entire

25:07

families. So as we're developing

25:09

our will, which really happens between ten months

25:11

of age and four years of age,

25:14

during that process, things

25:16

can go wrong in one of two ways or

25:19

both ways, which is we can

25:21

be over indulged or we

25:23

can be overly frustrated, and

25:26

those create the indulged coping style and the frustrated

25:28

coping style, and

25:31

you can actually have both. But when

25:34

we're overly frustrated, it's

25:36

like everything is in no, we're

25:39

constantly blocked and thwarted. Our will

25:41

doesn't matter, our voice doesn't matter, our

25:43

needs don't matter. And so the

25:46

cool thing about the human spirit is that it can never

25:48

be broken. The will does not disappear,

25:50

but it goes underground, and

25:53

it turns against the self and against the world,

25:56

and we become self sabotaging, and

25:58

as frustrated people feeling

26:01

bad starts to feel good. Somehow, we

26:03

couldn't win by winning, so

26:05

we learn how to win by losing and

26:07

making everyone else lose. And we feel

26:09

a lot of stuckness, a lot of resistance, a

26:12

lot of warlike energy.

26:14

Life is hard.

26:15

That's our mantra, and we're literally

26:18

frustrated. And the antidote of frustrated

26:21

is to get in flow, to

26:23

say no to what we don't want directly, instead

26:25

of kicking under the table, say

26:28

yes to what we do want. Want what we want, get

26:30

what we want, feel clear, feel direct.

26:33

So one of the ways that the frustrated

26:35

coping style can play out in terms of citizen

26:37

ing is if we feel like there's

26:40

no way to win and my will doesn't matter and I

26:42

won't be heard, why the f would

26:44

we show up to vote? I

26:47

don't matter, No one listens to me anyway. You

26:50

know, f the man, and we don't

26:52

realize we are the man.

26:54

I am the man.

26:56

I am one of we

26:58

the people who get to decide

27:00

what goes on here. But if we didn't feel

27:02

empowered as children to be able to make

27:04

decisions, then as adults

27:06

we also don't feel we have the power to make decisions.

27:09

So the indulged

27:11

coping style is sort of equal and

27:13

opposite. It's when during the time

27:16

of socialization, no one sort of showed us

27:18

how we impacted others. So

27:20

either we were deeply indulged by our parents

27:22

or neglected by our parents, and in

27:25

either of those situations, our

27:27

will ruled the roost. Whatever we wanted,

27:29

we got.

27:30

That's what I'm feeling. I'm feeling like

27:33

I don't know who coined it, but you know, to the

27:36

person born into the benefits of a

27:38

system of oppression, other people's freedom

27:40

feels like their oppression because waits,

27:43

you got something you wanted, Well, that was

27:45

mine. I was supposed to get that, And

27:47

so like we've indulged at scale.

27:50

You know, some groups of people men have been indulged,

27:53

you know, relative to women in the world. The

27:55

backlash to feminism by people

27:57

like and Andrew Tate, who's a caricature as well,

28:00

well, there's something indulgent about

28:02

that, right. The lack of patience, perspective,

28:04

respect that someone else's will also

28:07

matters.

28:08

Yes, And really the indulged

28:10

experience is an unawareness

28:12

that anyone else is even real or exists

28:15

or matters. It's like I

28:17

want what I want at any cost, and

28:19

I'm going to get it. It's kind of like the Stanford

28:21

marshmallow experiment, like I

28:24

can't even think about later. I never

28:26

really fully developed my frontal I.

28:27

Think you're talking about an experiment involving torturing

28:30

children with access to marshmallows.

28:34

It's like, if you don't eat this one now, you can

28:36

have two later, okay, And to it's

28:39

developing their capacity to wait.

28:41

That's what a PhD would say. Yeah, from

28:44

the outside, I'm just like, give the kid the marshmallow.

28:46

Come on, man, Like they're a child. They can't

28:48

like rationalize this right.

28:50

Well, that's you know, that's that critical period

28:53

in development when they start to be able to either wait

28:55

or not wait. And if we can't wait, we have that

28:57

indulged coping style. So how looks

29:00

as a citizen is why would I vote?

29:02

It doesn't affect me, doesn't affect

29:04

me. Yeah, yeah, it's all me,

29:07

me, me, me me, It's not

29:10

anything against anyone else. It's

29:12

like, I don't want to mess with anyone

29:14

else, but don't tread on me. Don't take

29:16

away my freedom. Don't take away

29:19

right exactly, don't take

29:21

away my capacity

29:23

to always have exactly what I want in every

29:25

moment, because I'm used to that indulgence.

29:29

So with these styles you've mentioned, you

29:31

know the word antidote. As far as what

29:33

we do with them, what does that mean? What

29:35

are we trying to do with these styles beyond

29:38

get over them or process them?

29:41

Right? What's the goal?

29:42

I like to say that we go from

29:44

being possessed by them to possessing

29:47

them. I have this coping

29:49

style, but I'm not unconsciously

29:52

ruled by it. So each

29:54

of the styles has an antidote, which is the healed position.

29:56

So for indulge, the healed position is actually

29:58

intervening, which is a

30:00

term coined by the late Buddhist

30:03

monk tik not Han. He

30:05

coined that term to talk about how

30:08

within every single being is every

30:10

other being. So in

30:12

a piece of paper, you've

30:15

got to know about the tree that made that paper,

30:17

and the birds and the squirrels that lived inside

30:19

of that tree, and the water

30:22

in the sunshine that nourished the tree, and

30:24

the logger that cut the tree, and

30:26

the mill worker who made the paper, and

30:29

the mothers of the humans who

30:31

were involved with making this book who

30:33

fed them from the land, you know,

30:36

and the big bang that created

30:38

all of this divine unfoldment

30:40

forever ago. So starting

30:43

to know about we're all

30:45

nodes in a web of being. I'm

30:48

not the only node. And really

30:51

the wound inside of the indulged wound is that

30:53

we didn't grow up in a village.

30:55

And it's this deep emptiness

30:58

that causes this consumer and this need

31:00

for more and more and me and me, because

31:03

we don't have a sense

31:06

of belonging, and so we're in

31:08

this sort of solitary confinement of

31:10

the myth of separation that it's

31:12

me against you and we're competing for finite

31:15

resources dominating

31:17

a land instead of being of the land,

31:19

of the animals, of one another

31:22

and belonging. If we

31:24

had that sense of togetherness and rootedness

31:26

and belonging, we wouldn't be me. MEI me,

31:28

gimme, gimme.

31:29

You just described something Elizabeth

31:32

and I talk about a lot, like why

31:34

the suburbs is responsible for gentrification

31:36

in the hood, right, It's like people who didn't grow up

31:38

with a village out there in the Bonies,

31:40

coming into the city because it's cool, don't know

31:42

how to be around other people. See some black

31:45

kids on the Stuplan music, don't know how to inter

31:47

be so they call the police

31:49

instead and say, like, this

31:51

is disturbing my existence, right, this

31:53

noise is foreign to me. Therefore I have

31:55

to squash it and mute it and silence

31:58

it and push it away. And that's lack

32:00

of practice at inter being at

32:02

some larger but still I think

32:04

parallel level. That's my translation.

32:09

When I'm hearing things that have to do

32:11

with early childhood development and what we inherit,

32:14

I think of generational healing,

32:17

right, these inter connections

32:19

between generations. What does

32:21

that term mean to you? And

32:23

do you see any connection between that

32:26

and our ability to create better

32:28

circumstances to have a healthier

32:30

democracy, to create a healthier culture

32:32

of democracy through generational

32:35

healing.

32:35

Absolutely, So we're talking about the fractal

32:38

nature of reality and how our outsides

32:40

reflect our insides, and how our insides

32:42

get encoded in our first five years of life.

32:45

So we are born into a long lineage

32:48

of unconscious generational pain

32:50

handed down through the millennia. But

32:53

for some incredible reason, we're alive

32:55

right now at the time where we actually

32:57

have the capacity to become aware of the

33:00

paradigms and dynamics and patterns and

33:03

say the buck stops with

33:05

me. I won't

33:08

unconsciously pass this down to my children. I'm

33:10

going to see these things and I'm going to shift them.

33:13

When I would do it as a psychologist, it

33:15

would take me a long time, and it was pretty laborious

33:17

because I was working with the mind, which can

33:20

play tricks and go around in circles. But

33:23

the thing about energy is it can shift in the

33:25

now. I did a coding session

33:27

on.

33:28

That's what we call them coding sessions in source

33:30

code.

33:30

Okay, yes, because we just work

33:33

with the symbolic code. We don't work with any of the circumstances

33:35

going on in your life. But I was coding

33:37

someone who essentially realized

33:40

and named I was born into this metal

33:43

chamber of fear around

33:45

me. My father had one kind of fear,

33:48

my mother had another kind of fear, and both made

33:51

me feel so trapped and

33:53

so scared and like I can't trust

33:56

myself. And so we started

33:58

to know about that started to know about the metal

34:00

chamber, started to feel how impossible

34:02

it was, how it wasn't, can't, can't, And

34:05

we started to dissolve and resolve

34:07

that so that he could

34:09

energetically feel this shift of

34:11

that outside thing oppressing him. Ah

34:15

release, and he was like, I trust myself,

34:18

I trust my instincts, I trust my energy. I've

34:20

never felt like this in my body before. I've

34:22

never felt this much good energy circulating

34:24

in my body. And I said,

34:27

you know, there's always some fear when

34:29

we outgrow our parents' paradigm, that

34:31

we're going to have to split off from them, or

34:33

that this means we don't love them. But no, we

34:36

invite them in.

34:36

We go. Come with us.

34:38

There's a new world where we're not ruled by

34:40

this metal chamber of fear. Come

34:43

with me. I love you, Let me contain

34:45

you in a new way. Let me show you. This

34:47

is evolution. And he felt

34:49

it. He was like, I want to invite them into this new

34:52

world. I don't want to keep living

34:54

as a captive to my parents'

34:57

childhood wounding.

34:59

It seems like if we break or

35:01

shift, you know, our paradigms, if

35:03

we rewrite some of our code, that can

35:05

also shift the relationships around

35:07

us. If we outgrow our parents,

35:10

right, we're also shifting and maybe

35:12

they're not ready for that shift. You

35:14

know, maybe we are losing people.

35:17

We are erecting a new boundary and they don't

35:19

fit on the new inside of us. Can

35:21

you speak more to the consequences,

35:25

especially relationship wise, of

35:27

shifting our internal landscape.

35:30

Yeah.

35:31

I think that sometimes people

35:33

have such calcified coping

35:36

styles, and we're so tormented as

35:38

little ones that they show up in

35:40

a way now as adults that really

35:42

is legitimately unsafe.

35:44

That no matter how relational we try

35:46

to be, no matter how safe we are as we show

35:48

up, no matter how much love and understanding

35:51

and forgiveness, which is just understanding

35:54

that we give, they're still abusive

35:58

and cruel and frightening and

36:01

disturbed.

36:01

You know.

36:02

If that is the case, I do understand

36:04

erecting that boundary of you

36:07

know, until you can be kind,

36:10

I'm not available for contact. And

36:13

you know, another one of my students a couple of

36:15

days ago, had an experience with her father where

36:18

he has really not shown up for the family.

36:20

And my student's sister is quite

36:23

sick, and she said, hey,

36:25

dad, this is what's going on with my sister's condition

36:28

right now in the ICU. And he said, I didn't need to know that.

36:31

And she used the technique that I just taught

36:33

them, which is, if you want to go deeper, just go slower.

36:36

And she said, you didn't

36:39

need to know that.

36:43

She just mirrored that back to him slowly, and

36:46

he said, it's hard to hear that,

36:49

and he started showing up. He went to the hospital

36:52

for the first time when she wasn't planning on doing. He reached

36:54

out to his other children, which he wasn't planning on doing.

36:57

So her courage in that moment to not be

37:00

victimized to his pattern

37:03

that she'd experienced her entire life and instead

37:05

lovingly reflect it back to him patiently,

37:07

slowly. He shifted because

37:10

within each of us is that essence. I was talking

37:12

about an innate healing function

37:14

that wants to express

37:16

and receive love. And she gave

37:18

him the opportunity to

37:21

be freed from that lifelong defense

37:23

of avoiding.

37:26

With a person like the father you

37:28

shared with us. I almost want

37:30

to say being forced, but even that language doesn't feel

37:32

adequate. Being given the opportunity

37:35

to see themselves, A

37:38

lot of folks don't get that right.

37:40

And it was done slowly,

37:43

just gently in this particular example. And

37:45

there's power in just you know, holding

37:48

up that mirror with love but still

37:50

holding it right. You're not accepting

37:52

it, You're just saying like, here you

37:54

go, you like what you see, without

37:57

saying all those words either yes.

37:58

And that is the essence of source code. That's all

38:00

we do is we hold him loving mirror

38:03

up to the code we've

38:05

with precise aim and

38:07

accuracy, reflect the code back

38:09

to itself and it starts to shift.

38:12

I keep finding these

38:14

other historic sort of external world

38:16

concrete world examples. I'm a

38:18

huge fan of Frederick Douglas. I

38:21

think he was just like Savage with

38:23

his language, and this brother

38:25

held up mirror lovingly

38:28

to a country that in

38:30

so many ways refused to see

38:32

itself. Honestly, but

38:34

he found words, He found language, He found

38:37

jokes, you know, he found rhetoric,

38:39

He found panash and style to

38:42

help dress up what was ultimately

38:45

a mirror. Is this your fourth

38:47

of July, America? Is this

38:49

what you're celebrating? In one of his most epic

38:51

and famous pieces, which is posed

38:53

as a question, what to the slave is the fourth of July?

38:56

So the power of the mirror, fractally

38:59

with a father figure or with a founding

39:01

father figure.

39:02

Absolutely, because when

39:04

we mirror something back to itself and it starts

39:06

to alchemize and dissolve and shift,

39:10

that person is now the center point

39:12

of a fractal universe, in a new reality,

39:15

a reality that can connect instead

39:18

of disconnect. And the

39:20

ripple effect of every minute

39:23

change is unspeakable. I

39:26

literally went to a yoga class a couple of days

39:28

ago and it was so good that

39:30

I was like, what is going on here? She was

39:32

having us talk to our neighbor, touch our neighbor,

39:34

look at eye contact. When we walked out, she

39:36

sprayed each of our faces with rose. Missed all

39:39

fifty of us from the class, and I said,

39:41

Alex, what is happening? And

39:43

she goes, I read your chapter

39:47

and I was like, what she said,

39:49

I was inspired by your book and it

39:51

shifted me. Now her shift

39:54

from reading my book shifted

39:56

that class. Those fifty people are

39:58

walking out into the world now from a place of deeper

40:01

connection oneness, inter being, love,

40:03

safety, joy, pleasure,

40:06

beauty whoa

40:09

Every ripple effect is so

40:12

so strong and so meaningful.

40:15

And what I took is spray

40:18

myself in the face with rose water. So

40:20

see, we all have our stories, right,

40:22

that's my coding, that's my After

40:26

the break, Sam shares how we can

40:28

recode ourselves without abandoning

40:31

our responsibilities to our communities. How

40:38

do we stay present to the process

40:40

of recoding ourselves

40:43

while still being present to our responsibilities

40:46

to others, to our families, to

40:48

our communities. Do you have any advice

40:50

on how to practice the both here?

40:53

Yeah? I mean that.

40:54

Actually that question speaks to one of the

40:56

other coping styles called the premature

40:58

style. And I won't go too deep into it, but it's

41:00

basically this idea that my

41:03

only way to know about love is to give.

41:06

That receiving is not okay, So

41:09

all my energy goes out. I give, I do,

41:11

I volunteer, I caretake. But we

41:13

don't know about feeding, receiving, needing.

41:16

It just feels wrong. It's

41:18

a feeding injury from toddlerhood.

41:20

But when we're premature, it

41:22

really feels like a split, like either

41:25

or, and you know that split

41:27

around giving. I can either give or receive.

41:30

It's a misunderstanding because

41:32

if we just give and give and give, we're

41:34

pouring from an empty cup and eventually we

41:36

burn out. But when it's that beautiful

41:40

loop of nourishment, of

41:42

taking and tasting

41:45

the love, receiving, receiving, receiving

41:47

support, receiving care, receiving

41:49

guidance, and feeling so nourished

41:52

and so full that it's like my cup runneth

41:54

over. Of course, I'm here to share

41:57

and show up for you. I mean, it's as simple as put your

41:59

own oxygen mask on first. It's

42:02

a give and take that's much more sustainable

42:04

and pleasurable for everyone.

42:06

Much of your work centers

42:09

on this belief that what we experience

42:11

in our families, our early childhood, shapes

42:13

our lives as adults in major ways.

42:16

And in talking about dissolving

42:18

these childhood wounds, these coping styles,

42:21

we pick up, you've also mentioned the importance

42:23

of growing up. Right when we do this

42:26

work, we're growing up from this adolescent

42:28

stage and stepping into more fully

42:30

formed adulthood, becoming elders,

42:32

not necessarily an age, but in kind of self

42:35

knowledge. What does that shift look

42:37

like to you? And can you give any other

42:40

examples of how someone can begin

42:42

to think about moving past that

42:44

hurt child into more full

42:46

adulthood or elderhood.

42:49

So my sense is that we've

42:51

been living in what I call the age

42:53

of the wounded child, where that generational

42:56

pain has been passed down through the millennium.

42:58

Hello, hello, Elon. Sorry, I

43:00

just again, Well,

43:02

that's right.

43:03

It's not just us that are wounded children, but

43:05

it's also you know, our leaders that are wounded

43:07

children, and so our infrastructure and

43:10

our laws, and you know, the systems

43:12

that are holding us are created

43:14

by wounded children, and they perpetuate wounds.

43:17

And so it is my heart's greatest wish and

43:19

my intuitive prediction that we are now exiting

43:22

the age of the wounded child, and

43:24

what that means to me is becoming true

43:26

elders. In indigenous communities,

43:29

they know about the importance of that right of

43:31

passage into elderhood, and adolescents

43:33

go through vision quests and other rituals

43:36

to have an initiation into

43:38

elderhood. And we don't have any of that. We're still

43:40

running around as wounded children,

43:43

creating democracy, as wounded,

43:46

stinking.

43:46

Children in our adult bodysuits.

43:49

Yes, and I'm always inspired

43:51

by psychotherapist and soul activist

43:53

Francis Weller, and he talks about

43:55

how moving from adolescence

43:58

to elderhood is about

44:01

going from looking for places

44:04

of connection, seeking for places of connection

44:06

to building them. So

44:08

I want to talk about when you talked

44:10

about Grace Lely Bogs and

44:13

Adrian Marie Brown's reference to that in

44:15

that interview, the first interview of this season,

44:18

she was talking about Grace Lely Bogs

44:20

being accused of a politician of being a naysayer

44:23

you don't like the way we're running this country, and

44:25

she said, yeah, I'm not just a naysayer. I

44:28

can create. And she went out

44:30

and created many places of belonging

44:32

and places of social change. So one

44:35

way to citizen and to become an

44:37

elder is to literally go out

44:39

and create places of belonging. And

44:41

also, if we think about source code and

44:43

the fractal nature of the universe and that our

44:46

inside world creates our outside world, simply

44:49

our being this when we

44:51

stand for love, is inviting people

44:53

into the new world. Instead of saying,

44:55

gosh, darn it, I'm living in a world that I don't

44:58

like, that doesn't resonate, that doesn't feel like a

45:00

fit, that doesn't feel safe, that's not organized

45:02

the way that I want it, and focusing on

45:04

what we don't want. Instead we

45:06

embody and live into exactly

45:09

what we do want. You know, the yoga

45:11

teacher brought a little more love to the room and

45:13

everybody lit up. So when

45:15

we bring more love into everything we do,

45:18

that's how we citizen. That's true

45:21

elderhood.

45:21

Yeah, what does that true

45:24

elderhood look like for you in

45:26

your life?

45:26

Oh?

45:27

My cry. I was talking

45:29

to a friend who's known me since I was fifteen,

45:32

and she was looking at the source Code community and she

45:34

said, my god, Sam, you created

45:36

the love you always knew as possible. Like

45:39

the way we relate with each other in

45:42

my dy networks and our membership and

45:44

all courses, all the groups is radical

45:47

transparency, unconditional

45:49

love, safety, unconditional

45:52

welcoming, and the boundary

45:54

that you know, cruelty

45:56

is not okay, Meanness is not okay, Hiding

45:59

is not okay, Lying not okay. There are

46:01

pillars of boundaries protecting this space.

46:03

But within that everything else is

46:06

just met with love and understanding and

46:09

support and care and fun.

46:11

It's really fun.

46:13

I think fun is a big part of the new world. I

46:16

think we've been taking things really seriously.

46:18

Yes, you're like a quantum

46:20

time traveler, and so your report back from

46:22

the future world being more fun is

46:25

welcome news. Thank you Paul

46:28

Revere from the symbolic

46:30

world to tell us that fun is on the horizon,

46:33

not just threat. Well, congratulations

46:36

on your own transition into elderhood and breaking

46:39

that cycle, and thank you for sharing

46:41

that with us. I think you know that's also

46:43

a demonstration, and I think a lot of us

46:46

expect stoicness and

46:48

stiffness and hardness and

46:51

coldness and softness is also

46:53

very powerful. So yeah, thanks for practicing

46:56

and not just preaching. There's a sequencing

47:00

in terms of I guess it's a statement

47:02

I'll make and then see how you respond, Okay, because

47:05

I'm putting some of these pieces together that you've shared already

47:07

that even if we embrace

47:10

a fight mentality, we have a fight lens.

47:13

We have a fight writer in our internal

47:15

writer's room that sees and projects everything

47:17

into the world as a fight. So I'm a fire. That's my identity.

47:19

I'm just going to do that all day, every day, real

47:21

hard, and that's how I'm going to citizen,

47:24

right, I'm going to citizen as a fight. We

47:26

have us them, right, it's

47:28

us versus them, and I'm going a citizen in this binary

47:32

of you versus me as opposed to

47:34

you and me, And so

47:36

people who've done no internal searching

47:38

whatsoever are citizening every day. Right,

47:41

But it seems like while we're

47:44

doing some of that external stuff, if we rewind

47:47

a little bit, if we dive inward, citizen

47:49

inward, then the effect

47:51

of what we're doing externally is going to be healthier,

47:55

more sustained, last longer.

47:57

And so is it a prerequid

48:00

it is it preferable to try

48:03

to work on and heal some of those wounds before

48:06

we engage fully in all the dreaming together.

48:09

Otherwise we might corrupt our own dreams and

48:11

envision something that's not as whole

48:13

or as healed as we really want the world to be.

48:15

Yeah, I think that's exactly right. And I

48:18

noticed this when my students

48:21

try to, you know, dream about what they

48:23

want for their personal lives or the life at large,

48:26

and their dreams are tainted by their coping styles. I

48:28

don't even realize it. Like

48:30

I had a student who just really

48:32

wanted to win his court cases so that the judge

48:34

would believe him, and that was an enactment

48:36

of his childhood when he was judged

48:38

and wouldn't be believed and

48:40

it's like, what do you really want beyond the wounding?

48:43

So yeah, but I don't think it's that binary. First

48:45

you have to do this and then you have to do this. It's always like a

48:47

you know, it's all happening simultaneously.

48:49

Because the center point is everywhere.

48:51

I'm taking up what you're putting down.

48:54

But I feel like I want to share this story

48:56

because this idea of dreaming together

48:59

can sound a little woo woo. But

49:01

there was this troop of wild baboons

49:04

in Kenya that was studied by a man named

49:06

Robert Sopolski, and he wrote a book

49:08

called a Primate's Memoir. But what

49:10

happened was that this was well,

49:12

let me back up. So primates are

49:14

one of the only animal species with a lot of learned

49:17

behavior. Most animals are just guided

49:19

by instinct, but we actually teach our

49:21

young how to do things like use tools or

49:23

what the social rules are. And in

49:26

this particular troop of baboons,

49:29

like all baboons, there were alpha males

49:31

who were really violent and rowdy, and

49:34

there was a lot of oppression in the group. So

49:37

the female baboons were taunted and

49:40

new males coming in from

49:42

other troops which is what the adolescents do. They

49:44

have to leave home and find a new troupe so

49:46

that there's no inbreeding. They

49:49

would taunt the new males and haze

49:51

them, and they would prevent the females from

49:53

grooming them in order to assert their

49:55

dominance.

49:56

Sounds like a college fraternity, Yes, exactly.

49:58

So these males we're

50:01

going and eating food from a nearby tourist

50:04

attraction place from the dumpster, but

50:06

only the alpha males were allowed to go eat that special

50:08

food. Well, they contracted

50:11

tuberculosis through the food,

50:13

and they died. All the alpha males

50:15

in the troop died. And it

50:17

was mostly female baboons

50:20

and their instinct and their sensibility

50:24

was to groom everyone and to touch everyone

50:26

and to include everyone, and so

50:29

new males that would come into the

50:31

circle would be immediately met with

50:33

touch, welcoming connection,

50:36

and it became a peaceful maybe

50:38

the first peaceful troop of

50:41

baboons. There was no conflict,

50:43

there was no fighting, there was no hierarchy,

50:47

there was no alpha. It was a new culture.

50:50

Now, new baboons are coming in all the time

50:52

into this and so he

50:55

didn't know what would happen. But the researcher

50:57

seven years later came back and

51:00

it was still peaceful, Which is

51:02

why I say things can shift now.

51:05

If every human laid

51:08

down their arms literally and metaphorically.

51:11

That would be that. Are you saying

51:13

we have to kill all the alpha males.

51:14

Doctor saf No, we

51:16

have to love them and

51:19

set boundaries with them.

51:20

There again, that's my inner child.

51:23

Yes, so there are ways to

51:26

be powerful. They just don't know how else

51:28

to be powerful. They're scared.

51:29

You know, I get it, there are other ways to

51:32

be powerful.

51:32

I know in the moments when I

51:35

when I get intense and dominant, it's

51:37

because I'm scared. It's because I'm scared.

51:40

And when I feel held and supported and safe

51:42

and attuned to and believed and I

51:45

calm down, I stop dominating. So

51:50

I'm just like them.

51:51

We all are, and and that is

51:54

that's really powerful. I'm just like

51:56

them. Can be very hard to say about

51:58

people We judge harshly because

52:00

we want to believe that we're nothing like

52:02

them. My sister Belinda

52:05

is nine years older, thirty

52:07

years wiser. She is a Yogi.

52:10

She's a Buddhist. She is a teacher

52:12

and very spiritual leader in Lansing,

52:15

Michigan. That's I don't know if she called herself a spiritual

52:17

leader, that's baby bro looking up to assist. But

52:19

I remember during some of the deep intensity

52:22

of the Trump era in her yoga

52:24

classes, she was encouraging people to

52:27

feel compassion toward Donald

52:29

Trump, and a lot of her students

52:31

were like, that's where Jordan line b. We're not doing

52:33

that, Like he's nothing, I am nothing, like she's

52:35

like, there is a part of us represented

52:37

there. It's not the part we want to

52:39

amplify. We don't want to turn it up to eleven the way

52:41

he's caricaturistically display but

52:44

we got to recognize the self and the other.

52:46

Our very first guest, Valerie Corps, shared

52:49

that lesson with us. There is no stranger.

52:51

The stranger is a part of myself. I do not yet

52:53

know who do not yet acknowledge. So

52:56

thank you for sharing those words.

52:59

In that perspective that we are in

53:01

everything. We are in everything. We

53:04

ask all of our guests one final

53:06

question. Because we have a definition here of

53:08

citizen as a verb. We have some principles

53:11

associated with that interpretation. But

53:13

given your life story, given your work,

53:16

given your source code and the coping

53:18

styles and everything you've been journeying

53:20

through. What does it mean to you the

53:23

word citizen if we interpret it as a verb.

53:26

I suppose it's the functional side

53:28

of knowing about inter being, that

53:31

we're a part of something larger, that

53:33

each of us matters, that what

53:35

we do affects everyone else and

53:37

what they do affects us, and

53:40

that it's worth giving that some time

53:43

and attention and care.

53:45

We have a transition now to

53:48

a live audience Q and a yes. All

53:50

right, so yes, say your name, where you're at and your

53:52

question. Cynthia lloyd Hurst.

53:54

I'm in Palm Springs, California.

53:56

Today, we I think

53:58

a whole hell of a lot of people we are working

54:01

to be more

54:03

self aware and I'm loving

54:05

your way into it.

54:06

I think it's fantastic. What

54:09

I keep noticing time and

54:11

time again, and you've mentioned it just a little

54:13

bit today, is that sense

54:16

of I'm

54:19

growing in my goodness and awareness

54:22

and if they would just stop, everything

54:25

will be okay. Those

54:28

jerks need to leave for my

54:30

world to be wonderful. And

54:32

I'm just wondering if there's

54:35

just one other thought you might give us

54:38

around our own work there.

54:41

So what I do with source code

54:43

is I look for the symbolic realm. So everything

54:45

we're experiencing is

54:48

a reenactment of our early experience in

54:50

our coding. So if our sense

54:52

of self is I feel okay

54:54

in here, and if they out there

54:57

would just stop, everything would

54:59

be o okay. That

55:02

person is telling us about what it

55:04

felt like to be a very young child. If

55:07

they would just stop, everything

55:09

could be okay. And that

55:11

echo and that haunting of that

55:13

feeling as a little one becomes

55:16

how we see the world and how we make

55:18

sense of the world and how we talk about the world. So

55:21

if I was doing a coding session with that person,

55:23

I would say, we need to know about

55:26

this thing outside that's doing something

55:29

that feels like it just wishes something

55:31

could stop this, and

55:34

inside feels okay, but outside doesn't feel

55:36

okay. And we just

55:38

work that symbolically, and as

55:40

we did, something would shift inside,

55:43

and because we're fractal, something would

55:45

shift outside.

55:46

How much time we talk in five minutes, five

55:48

weeks, five months, Like, what's the

55:50

lag time? What's the Doppler effect

55:52

on the internal shift to the external

55:54

shift? And I'm sure there was no formula, but

55:56

I am curious about measuring

55:59

the rip I guess, and

56:02

when we see signs

56:04

that something has actually changed.

56:05

I think again, it's the yes, and like it changes

56:08

everything right now, and

56:11

there's also incremental change over time.

56:14

Thank you, Aaron Mast from the good

56:16

old little state of Delaware, not the city on

56:18

Ohio. First of all, Sam, thank

56:20

you so much for everything it was for

56:22

your insight. I am very

56:25

aware of my short

56:27

temper and ease of frustration

56:29

sometimes with my kids. Been

56:31

working on it. I'm much better where I

56:33

am now than one it used to be about two years ago, probably

56:36

so. I have a son who's turning five. Pretty

56:39

sure with my short temper and frustration I've

56:41

already imprinted on him a little bit at least.

56:44

I just want to know do I need to work on myself.

56:46

Is it better to change my code first before I

56:48

start working with him? Or can we do this together?

56:51

Aaron?

56:52

I just want to celebrate

56:54

you coming forward as a man and

56:56

owning your impact on your child

56:59

and owning your coping styles with

57:01

such grace and dignity. I

57:04

find that when we change,

57:06

our children change without

57:08

much effort, sort of instantaneously,

57:11

especially if they're younger. But I want to speak

57:13

to this part of you that I think

57:16

is the omnipotent coping style, which

57:18

is one of my core wounds, which

57:20

is how we didn't feel safe as infants.

57:23

This is pre six month stuff, and

57:25

so when everything is not ordered in the way

57:28

we think it needs to be, we

57:30

feel very threatened and frightened, like

57:32

life or death kind of feeling, and

57:34

we explode. And so I would

57:36

encourage you to be with your

57:39

five month old, six month old little

57:42

Aaron and hold him

57:44

and just let him know he's safe, because

57:46

the antidote to omnipotent is safe. We

57:49

didn't feel safe. Things don't feel safe,

57:51

and that haunting comes with us

57:53

into adulthood. Things have to feel very

57:56

controlled or else they don't feel safe,

57:59

and so we just want to that little baby you

58:01

in so much love that didn't feel safe and

58:03

that wasn't helped through feeling

58:07

difficult feelings and knowing that it's all okay.

58:09

It's like okay to not feel okay. Sometimes we

58:11

didn't get that support, and so feeling

58:13

not okay feels really not okay, and it becomes

58:15

a very FASTI ear to sixty reaction. So

58:19

notice what might shift for you if you can

58:21

hold this part of you with even more

58:23

care the way that a very young infant

58:25

needs to be attuned to, instead of judging

58:27

this self, which I didn't really

58:29

hear you doing. But I just want to even encourage more,

58:32

more love and more understanding

58:34

for this very young part that still doesn't

58:37

feel safe yet. Just help him

58:39

feel safe, little by little and

58:41

come join us in the source code community.

58:43

We can help. Thank

58:46

you so much for that question,

58:49

Aaron. I think you've captured and represented

58:51

many people beyond yourself. So you've done You've

58:53

done a bit of citizen ing right there all

58:55

right. Next in the queue is Mishaq Weber.

58:58

Go ahead with your question.

59:00

I'm calling from Minneapolis, Minnesota. We

59:02

Shack Weber. So what I find

59:04

creates a lot of change is kind of simple recipes,

59:08

And I was just wondering if there's just a few,

59:10

like everyday things that come to

59:12

mind that we can

59:14

do to help create a stronger sense

59:16

of interveing ourselves or others

59:19

the belonging that you talked about, or any of these

59:21

other kind of healing methodologies.

59:23

I was just kind of curious if you had kind

59:26

of everyday practices that people might have

59:28

in mind.

59:29

I think what's beautiful about

59:31

the process of healing is it's often

59:33

a lot more gentle and a lot more

59:35

pleasurable than we thought.

59:38

So one way to

59:41

activate a sense of intervening is to just connect

59:43

with ourselves first, because

59:45

again, deep in our hearts, deep in our bones, deep

59:47

in our beings, deep in our bodies is

59:50

all the truth we would ever need to know, and

59:53

this deep connection with all things. So

59:56

simply slowing down, having a

59:58

cozy cup of tea, journaling, getting

1:00:00

a massage, which Bear Tunda and I are huge

1:00:03

proponents of.

1:00:04

Massages for freedom. That's my new movement.

1:00:06

You know, baths, snuggles.

1:00:09

It's really that simple. It's just softening, becoming

1:00:12

more embodied, connected to that

1:00:14

deep wisdom that lives inside of all of us and our

1:00:17

connection with.

1:00:17

All that is. When you say embodied, Sam,

1:00:19

what does that mean? I think the way that

1:00:22

I.

1:00:22

Use it just there was different than I sometimes use it. But when

1:00:24

I just said embodied, I meant living

1:00:26

more from the energy in our body than

1:00:29

the little ticker tape in our minds. And

1:00:32

also when I talk about embodiment

1:00:34

in terms of emerging from a coping

1:00:36

style and entering its antidote, when

1:00:39

we are stuck in a coping style, we are stuck

1:00:41

in a certain embodiment. It makes us tense,

1:00:43

it makes us feel a

1:00:45

certain way in our tummies, in our viscera,

1:00:48

in our emotions, in our energy field.

1:00:51

And if we shift

1:00:53

that embodiment and we start to soften

1:00:56

and loosen, That's why I say the shift

1:00:58

can happen in the now with energy is

1:01:00

like, Oh, I'm not close anymore. I'm

1:01:03

open. And that shift and embodiment

1:01:06

to walk through the world open, receptive,

1:01:08

warm, heart centered creates

1:01:11

those ripple effects. It's not just a concept

1:01:13

that we think about in the mind. It's an actual

1:01:16

embodied way of being and living.

1:01:18

Thank you for that, and thank you miss Shack. We

1:01:21

have a question from Elizabeth

1:01:23

Gratch that our producer Ali

1:01:26

will voice for us, which means you all

1:01:28

get to meet Ali. Hello.

1:01:31

This is Ali coming in from Toronto,

1:01:33

Ontario, Canada, and I'm

1:01:35

voicing Elizabeth Gratch's questions.

1:01:37

So this is for veritunde. Have

1:01:39

you always been able to nurture your confidence

1:01:42

and was there someone or someone's

1:01:44

in your life who helped set that beautiful

1:01:46

self possession, focus and

1:01:49

drive in motion?

1:01:50

And how yo not

1:01:53

expecting a question from me? Thank

1:01:56

you, Ali Slash Elizabeth Ah.

1:02:00

I had a

1:02:02

complex and diverse

1:02:05

array of early coding by

1:02:07

my mother and by my hood, and it

1:02:09

was filled with a lot of love and

1:02:12

the confidence that you are perceiving.

1:02:14

First, thank you for nice words, self possession,

1:02:16

focus, drive, and like, I'll put this on the LinkedIn. But

1:02:19

I remember that my

1:02:22

friends often dreamed

1:02:24

of being things that their parents wanted

1:02:26

them to be, and I noticed

1:02:29

that because my mom was so different.

1:02:31

She was just like, you could do this, or you

1:02:33

could do that. You could be an actor if

1:02:36

you want, or you could be like a gardener or

1:02:38

as you tell me now, a garbage man. I

1:02:40

really wanted to be a garbage man for a long time

1:02:42

because you get to ride on trucks yay,

1:02:44

and you get free stuff double yay. Like it's

1:02:46

a win win situation. That

1:02:49

built an early habit of me of confident

1:02:51

exploration of possibility because

1:02:54

there was not so much weight attached

1:02:57

to the specific path that I would walk, just

1:02:59

encourage to find and walk the path.

1:03:02

So I just give like a thousand pounds

1:03:04

of credit to my mom for

1:03:07

encouraging that and embedding that

1:03:09

piece in me. She embedded some other stuff

1:03:11

too that wasn't always sustainably

1:03:13

useful. But in answer

1:03:15

to that question, that's Mom's

1:03:17

work. So thank you. Rest in peace, Anita,

1:03:20

Lorraine Thurston, and whatever you're

1:03:22

perceiving there, Elizabeth is a piece of her shining

1:03:24

through.

1:03:25

I just want to acknowledge that a

1:03:27

lot of what we inherited from our parents

1:03:29

was really good and beautiful and useful.

1:03:32

So much of our coding works. It's

1:03:35

just these twelve glitchy things that are

1:03:37

in our way. But all

1:03:39

of us got good stuff too.

1:03:42

Thank you for that.

1:03:43

You know.

1:03:43

The way you describe these

1:03:45

styles is I think healthily

1:03:49

judgment neutral. Right, you talk

1:03:51

about finding antidotes, not destroying,

1:03:54

erasing, shaming. These

1:03:57

are not like diseases to be eradicated.

1:04:00

They are pieces to be integrated,

1:04:03

not being possessed by, but possessing.

1:04:06

And so if we can own those

1:04:08

parts, then we can own our full selves. And

1:04:10

I always skip to the macro

1:04:13

metaphor with a society,

1:04:15

a city, a nation, a species, and

1:04:18

it's like, let's own the

1:04:20

glitches. You know, they

1:04:22

are features, not bugs, and they give us an opportunity

1:04:26

to walk a different and better

1:04:28

path. They give us an opportunity to learn, They give us

1:04:30

an oh yay me I get a chance

1:04:32

to recode myself. I get a chance

1:04:34

to refound myself. I get a chance

1:04:36

to reconstitute you

1:04:39

know, myself and a nation at the same time.

1:04:42

All right, last up, we've got Janine the novig

1:04:45

one of our most frequent contributors.

1:04:47

Thank you, Philadelphia.

1:04:49

Here's my question. It comes from

1:04:52

my location as both a

1:04:54

parent and a daughter. This has

1:04:56

been so resonant for me in this way. I

1:04:59

think other people too. I'm looking at Aaron and

1:05:01

other folks in the chat where we were kind

1:05:03

of resonating about how we

1:05:06

raise our kids and then how do we raise up

1:05:08

the little us that was hurt? So

1:05:10

my question is, like in that silver back

1:05:12

example, right, we're

1:05:15

all very seduced into

1:05:17

being the silver back, Like we all have a

1:05:19

version of a scenario where being

1:05:22

the silver back is adaptive. It's

1:05:25

safe, it has worked

1:05:27

for in my case, forty some odd years.

1:05:30

It satisfies my ego, it

1:05:33

matches the world around as

1:05:35

opposed to being soft. You know. So I'm

1:05:38

in this work all the time,

1:05:40

and I'm wondering if you have daily

1:05:43

practices for interrupting that

1:05:46

seduction to be the

1:05:48

silver back of you know, your own life.

1:05:51

Thank you so much, Janine, and that

1:05:53

question really helps me clarify that

1:05:57

to me, it's not that the alternative

1:06:00

our silverback or soft that's

1:06:03

still that old paradigm of

1:06:05

dominance. But to me, standing

1:06:08

for love is very firm, very

1:06:11

firm. Do not

1:06:13

touch that stove because I love you. I

1:06:16

love you. It's

1:06:19

different. So it's

1:06:21

beautiful that you're firm with your children.

1:06:24

They need that. Where's it coming

1:06:26

from If it's coming from love?

1:06:29

Yeay.

1:06:30

I want to formally thank you again

1:06:33

Sam for being a part of this with

1:06:35

us. Welcome to how to citizen

1:06:37

community, and thank you for showing us how

1:06:40

to citizen within so that we can citizen

1:06:43

better out there.

1:06:44

Thank you. I have truly loved being here.

1:06:46

I've been listening to your podcast from the beginning

1:06:49

and it is an honor in my life to be your dear

1:06:52

friend and to

1:06:54

learn from you. You are quite a

1:06:56

force of love and goodness in this world.

1:07:00

In the face of all this work we've

1:07:03

collectively got to do, it's

1:07:05

easy to feel like the last thing we have

1:07:07

time for is ourselves. But

1:07:10

I want us to really take in what Sam said.

1:07:13

It's a radical act of citizen ing

1:07:16

to change our story, to

1:07:18

change the narrative that we're living within, and

1:07:21

our relationship to ourselves and others

1:07:23

in the world. She reminds

1:07:25

us. She reminds me these issues,

1:07:28

especially the current culture, the

1:07:31

things that we don't like about the

1:07:33

way the world works, they all

1:07:35

came from us too.

1:07:39

We are at the end of our fourth

1:07:42

season and I'm so glad that Sam

1:07:44

helped us close it out. After

1:07:46

this interview, we let Sam drop off

1:07:48

the zoom and I stayed on to have

1:07:50

a conversation with a few of the live audience members,

1:07:53

and I got a question that felt heavy.

1:07:56

Aaron mass from Delaware asked, what

1:07:59

direction do you see the country headed in? Do

1:08:02

you have hope for our future, for

1:08:04

my kid's future. Whoo,

1:08:07

Aaron put his kids on me. All that was a lot.

1:08:09

That was a lot, And I want to share with you a

1:08:12

version of what I shared with Arin. I

1:08:16

see the United States of America getting

1:08:19

harder to live in. You

1:08:21

can sense it in the weather, and

1:08:23

that's not a metaphor literally

1:08:25

the weather. You see it on the ground

1:08:28

in our behavior. There's something

1:08:30

really sad about a nation that requires

1:08:33

this many firearms. It's

1:08:36

an explicit indicator of the lack

1:08:38

of inter being the lack of

1:08:40

trust that we're all building

1:08:43

walled cities around our two car garages

1:08:45

and trying to recreate entire societies

1:08:48

within that as opposed to joining

1:08:50

and participating in the societies

1:08:52

were already a part of. And

1:08:54

so what I'm observing is this large slide

1:08:57

in that direction, and it feels like it's picking up.

1:09:01

I don't think the climate migrants knocking

1:09:03

on our southern border are inspiring

1:09:06

evolved levels of political response

1:09:08

from our federal or many of our state governments.

1:09:11

I don't think that the human beings who are recognizing

1:09:14

the inter being within themselves in

1:09:16

terms of gender identity and giving

1:09:18

a voice and new names to that, I don't

1:09:20

think they're being met with the most

1:09:23

mature, evolved, healed

1:09:25

response from the prevailing establishment

1:09:27

of rule makers and gatekeepers. And

1:09:30

I don't think most of us are afforded enough

1:09:32

time, space and security

1:09:35

to truly meet this moment we find

1:09:37

ourselves in. So yeah,

1:09:39

I think it's gonna get harder, it's

1:09:42

gonna get hurt, and

1:09:49

I have great hopes for us and

1:09:52

for our children because

1:09:54

this culture's unsustainability

1:09:57

is so readily obvious

1:09:59

to so many of us, Because

1:10:01

our ability to indulge in and digest

1:10:04

the lie that more and

1:10:06

more and more and mine and mine

1:10:08

and mine will get me everything I need

1:10:11

is on full display to be a

1:10:14

lie. And I think

1:10:16

that underneath all that froth

1:10:18

and that noise, there's

1:10:21

this stillness, there's

1:10:23

this deeper truth. There's people like

1:10:25

Sam and Adrian, Marie Brown

1:10:28

and Ruhab Benjamin and John Alexander

1:10:30

and Claudia Holitz and Steve Kerr

1:10:33

and Priya Park for all our guests, and

1:10:35

they're all coming from different experiences,

1:10:38

saying essentially the same

1:10:40

things, trying to take us

1:10:43

to this same place, a

1:10:46

place of completeness,

1:10:49

of peace, of belonging, of

1:10:51

membership, of

1:10:53

citizen ing. And

1:10:55

I'm willing to keep hoping

1:10:58

and fighting for that place for them, that journey

1:11:00

to that place, no matter how hard

1:11:03

it is to keep envisioning it. What's

1:11:07

keeping me citizening is holding

1:11:09

both these feelings. I'm

1:11:11

exhausted and I'm

1:11:13

excited. I'm

1:11:16

pessimistic and optimistic.

1:11:19

I mourn what we've lost and

1:11:22

celebrate what we can still create.

1:11:25

And we can still create a lot

1:11:28

of good as long as there's

1:11:30

enough of us working towards creating

1:11:32

a culture based in love. One

1:11:35

where we try to live together better.

1:11:38

Then I'm in for

1:11:49

more ways to connect to doctor Sam's work.

1:11:51

Head to her website Doctor Samraider

1:11:54

dot com. There you're going to find

1:11:56

a free quiz to discover your coping styles,

1:11:59

as well as ways to access the forthcoming source

1:12:01

codebook through her Return to Love

1:12:03

membership program. As

1:12:06

always, check the show notes for links

1:12:08

to all this as well as the books referenced

1:12:10

in this episode. If you take

1:12:12

any of these actions, please brag

1:12:14

about it online and use the hashtag

1:12:17

how to Citizen. Also tag our

1:12:19

Instagram how to Citizen. I am

1:12:21

always online and I really do see your messages,

1:12:24

so send them. You can also visit our

1:12:26

website howdocitizen dot com,

1:12:28

which has all of our shows, full transcripts,

1:12:31

actions, and more. And

1:12:34

I want to thank you one last time for

1:12:36

joining us this season. Please stay

1:12:38

connected. Follow how to Citizen

1:12:41

on Instagram, Visit howtocitizen

1:12:44

dot com to join our email list, explore

1:12:47

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1:12:49

with our massive library of actions

1:12:51

that you can take together. Let's

1:12:54

keep citizen it. I look forward to

1:12:56

seeing you again. How

1:12:59

to Citizen with Baritunday is a production

1:13:01

of iHeartRadio Podcasts and Row

1:13:03

Home Productions. Our executive

1:13:05

producers are me Baritunde

1:13:07

Thurston and Elizabeth Stewart.

1:13:10

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1:13:12

associate producer is Donya abdel

1:13:14

Hamid. Alex Lewis is our managing

1:13:16

producer, and John Myers is our

1:13:18

executive editor. Our mixed

1:13:20

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1:13:23

music by Andrew Eapen with additional

1:13:25

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