ASM214 Emotional Mindfulness with Ron Frederick

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[Music] welcome you are listening to ask science mike a weekly podcast where we believe that every sincere question deserves an honest and non-judgmental response i'm your host mike mccarg the science mike that you heard mentioned in the title and uh i'm just so happy that you've decided to join me this week where we're doing something a little different we've been doing a series where we talk to people whose work has influenced my life and work over the last few years and that's all moving towards a big event in my life and hopefully a small event in yours that's april 28th when my book you're a miracle and a pain in the ass comes out and uh the title is cheeky yes and uh and frankly very true to what the book is about i wrote a book about growth and transformation and why sometimes it's so hard to live with and understand ourselves and so when you and i uh go through the day sometimes we're confused by what we do and what we feel and what we think and this is a book about understanding that and on that process we are introducing you to an amazing lineup of researchers and authors and communicators and educators all of whom played a major role in my life and therefore played a major role in this next book and today's conversation is very very special to me we are talking uh with ron frederick a doctor ron frederick actually who wrote a book called living like you mean it and another book called loving like you mean it and he specializes in something called emotional mindfulness and here's everything you need to know about ron uh he's the co-founder of the center for courageous living in beverly hills california and is a senior faculty member member of the accelerated experiential dynamic psychotherapy institute for over 20 years ron has provided emotion-centered experiential therapy to individuals and couples and actively trains other psychotherapists ron is the author of the best-selling book living like you mean it and a recipient of the american psychological association's mayland smith scholarship award for his research on the fear of intimacy he lectures and teaches workshops around the world and as you will hear in this conversation that ron and i have together he has also been the therapist who's been working on me dealing with my experience with trauma and my growth and learning to accept and understand my own feelings so it is my sincere pleasure to let you in on a conversation that was so heartwarming for me being able to reconnect with ron after we spent many many many months together working through some of the greatest challenges in my life so here's my conversation with dr ron frederick well you all know that i get really excited in the interviews i do and today is so special to me because i am talking with dr ron frederick who is the author of a book called living like you mean it and another book called loving like you mean it and uh is a really special person in my life because you've been hearing me talk about my process in therapy and in dealing with trauma for the last i don't know year on the podcast year in change that's also a major topic of conversation uh in my next book that comes out in april so we're doing a series right now uh if you are just tuning in where we're kind of connecting you all with the people behind this journey of growth that i've been on taking you right to the source and because of that it is my deep honor to welcome to ask science mike today ron frederick um it's so nice wow nice i have to pause for a second i am so moved to be asked to do this yeah i feel really touched in the moment yeah um to be here with you and to feel your gratitude and recognition that's a lot that's a lot feels really really special and really important it feels special and important to me too um you know i would say that the listeners of this program they're invariably kind and thoughtful people and they are all on their own journeys of growth and transformation and i'd say the the average amount of therapeutic experiences may be higher than the average person you might encounter on the street and um i think there'd be a lot of people listening who like me thought that they're already experts in being on the client side of a therapeutic relationship in talking therapy where the the primary goal is to discuss events that have happened to arrive at insights and then you know through some almost entirely verbal process uh arrive at a greater pace of healing and and we know by outcomes in many cases that is an effective form of therapy but what i was struck with in our time together is when i came into a therapy session doing what i'm so good at which is telling stories and i would feel like i was just getting into like what was going to be a great three-act play for you to hear you would stop me and it and ask me what i felt and what was happening in my body and at first that was so confusing to me and so i wonder if we could begin our time together with you kind of talking about the approach to growth and the approach to emotional regulation that is behind your books and your practice and what makes it different from the therapy that people might be used to well listening to you talk um i mean have a very very personal reaction which i think is probably and hearing what you just said about your listeners and your audience uh it feels very familiar and feels like good company um because my my doing this work really comes out of my own process and i talk about this a little and i think probably both of the books um but i went to therapy for the first time when i was in my early twenties a really really hard time for me and um i saw a therapist really very kind very smart older man wise and the therapy you know was very helpful in the ways in which you were just referencing so in i mean i really had never really thought about how my experience in my family had really impacted me um and uh so it it helped to open my eyes to see that there were dynamics in my family um uh that had impacted me and were uh you know part of the reason why i was struggling so i was struggling emotionally um uh struggling with anxiety struggling in relationship in uh in my own um sense of self and self-esteem and confidence and um you know i did seven years almost seven years of that therapy and gained a lot of insight but i still was really struggling and i so and there was a whole process of change that was going on for me because i went from working in musical theater to deciding that i wanted to become a psychologist that's a very very short version of that story oh wow that sounds fascinating yeah and um so when i entered graduate school i really was on a mission and a way to figure out you know what the missing piece was and i wondered you know is it something about me is it something that i'm not getting you know there was an aspect of well there was wonderment about it and fear you know that it was i was was going to be able to crack this nut or figure it out um and but but also i had a deeply held belief though maybe not conscious at the time that psychotherapy could be transformative so it's through that i got interested in short-term dynamic psychotherapy so this was um mike like in 1991 when i went into graduate school and i was on the east coast so living in new york um or being in that area and it's a very psychodynamic psychotherapy has a real stronghold and in essence it's about analyzing our you know understanding things in a way from a top-down approach which is making sense of things and the short-term psychotherapies we're really focusing on affect emotion and helping people break through whatever barriers there were to emotional experiencing and that healing came from opening up to our emotional experience and in particular feelings that were unresolved and were not or were conflictual or unprocessed so i got interested in that and i went on internship at beth israel medical center in new york and i was doing a rotation in these kinds of therapies and we were encouraged to go to this workshop at city university in new york and it was a group of people a group of therapists who had studied with davenlu who had created this intensive short-term dynamic psychotherapy um a long time ago was at the time a much more confrontational approach and these people had studied with him but they had um moved away and were um exploring uh a similar um not a similar they were exploring uh empathic and relational ways to be able to help people feel safe enough so that they could let go of their defenses and open up to a deeper emotional experience and uh you know the principle was that it's a bottom-up process rather than top-down so like get out of the story get out of the details get out of our defenses and get present with what's really happening inside so it's there that i was introduced to and saw diana fosher's work and diana fosha developed what would then would later become accelerated experiential dynamic psychotherapy which is the therapy that i practice and i t and now teach and that therapy is an attachment-based emotion-focused neurobiology informed model of psychotherapy and it's very much about relationally working with and helping people together you know undo the aloneness that makes things so scary and to relationally provide the support and the safety and the understanding and the empathy to be able to open up because that's ultimately what we need we develop defenses early on in life to maintain our connections because we learn in our families that it's not okay to feel this or to show these particular feelings we learn how to connect in ways that oftentimes we leave parts of ourselves behind and that's all we could do really to survive but ultimately as we grow older we see that it's impacting us and that it's um thwarting our capacity to really flourish to really be intimate in our relationships to really arrive on the scene wholeheartedly so the example that you share with your listeners about me stopping you and stopping the story and really focusing in on what's happening inside of you is all guided by that which is that all all of it's inside and we really want to change things on the level of the nervous system we can't do that top-down we have to do it by leaning into our experience and um dealing with the anxiety and the fear and it's all old anxiety and all old fear that's telling us that it's dangerous to be present but the more that we do that and can open up and move through these things we come to see that actually no it's better for me to allow for my feelings it's better for me to lean forward and be vulnerable and find other ways of being in relationship with you know loved ones with myself and with my loved ones so um you know that and so i learned actually in within this story i um ended up in my 30s uh having the bottom kind of fall out myself so 20 as i first went to therapy and then 30s i get 10 years later i'm leaving graduate school and the bottom falls out and i go into a therapy that's the kind of therapy that i was just describing for you only to discover that even after seven years of psychotherapy i felt so anxious about being present and i thought that i thought i was in touch with my feelings um you know i think i thought i was an emotional guy you know i'm not afraid to cry you know i go to the movies and this happens or get angry and little did i realize that there was so much of my emotional experience that had gotten um suppressed that i wasn't really aware of there was a level of fear that i wasn't really aware of and with the help of my therapist and it was pretty scary it took i would say almost a good year of slowly sort of being able to lean in and get in touch with myself i mean i write about this and loving like you mean it when i my therapist encouraged me to go inside i felt like it had landed on the moon i mean you know those photographs of like the you know when the astronauts landed on the moon and you see like a little bit of land and then it drops off and it's all i mean that's how it felt to me like it was foreign territory had never been there before i'm not exaggerating really i mean the process of going inside was really new for me uh because it was so anxious and you can't it's hard to be and be drop down and be inside yourself when you're so anxious um and but slowly over time uh that started to change and then bigger breakthroughs and more access to my true self you know and it which lies within our emotions um started to happen so it's it's the it's this mix of something very personal because then that changed me and made me even more passionate about uh the work and and doing work and which some is something that i've remained passionate about which is really learning like how do we change how do we transform and that's what the therapy is about and so my interrupting you is about interrupting a process that's actually thwarting your flourishing and your healing and coming back to something inside of you and that we can open up to that which is really where healing starts to happen does that make sense oh gosh you're nodding a lot so total sense i mean um you have there we're gonna go three ways i'll start with this just as a a personal validation to any listener right now who might feel skeptical about um this stopping and focusing on feeling and setting aside the story mechanism you know the month of january has been wonderful for me because i took time off for medical rest and then i started traveling for work again and i realized even with better health practices and even with access to more of myself some amount of travel is actually still too much for me and i had the awareness to realize oh i over booked this month so maybe i'll be more cautious about how i booked the rest of the year um but then i you know i get worried about trying to make rent in la if i don't travel enough it's an expensive city sure and uh two nights ago i started feeling just this intense anxiety about the idea of traveling less and i was sitting at my desk in my office with excel open just trying to master the problem through numbers and feeling worse and worse and worse as i did and i stopped and i realized that i was not doing business at 9 00 pm i was defending my mind from a feeling i was afraid of using microsoft excel so i closed excel and i didn't turn my computer off i opened um my music app and started playing some music um that i enjoy but that is something i play when i i'm feeling blue and i sat at my desk and i checked in with myself and i just started to cry i mean just feel that right now as you're talking my eyes start to get a little teary right it's sensing what's inside yeah yeah and then i cried i probably cried for 10 minutes and then i felt much better and as we explore these ideas together i wonder if we could catch up some folks on what a couple of these terms are so they can keep up with our conversation the first would be when we say affect yeah what do we mean when we say affect i really appreciate you asking me and i i don't want to talk in a way that makes things i talk a lot to therapists but i talk to people too we're talking about emotion so affect is another word for emotion basically i mean there are some distinctions uh i i use the words emotions and feelings interchangeably some would argue that they're different emotion is something that can happen without you um wait a minute affect we can have an emotion and not necessarily know that we're feeling and not be feeling it right because you know there were sadness was somewhere inside of you right but not knowing that you know it was there was trying to make itself known um but we're really talking about feelings we're talking about you know we're wired to feel that's the other thing you know we didn't think that for a long time we thought we meaning the field of psychology that uh we feel things because of the way that we think and if you can change the way you think then you change the way you feel and that um belief uh you know um predominated for a long time but fortunately uh you know not in more recent years um not for not too long but really um we now understand that emotion is a wired in process we have responses to things that happen in the world and that happened to us and or you know it gets released um and uh often this is part of why we have problems because we're not even realizing you know that we're being impacted and we're having feelings um you get anxious right now it's understandable you get anxious you're wondering how am i going to pay my bills anxiety is a um you know reasonable response but there was more going on and so then you focused inside and uh if this is what happens if we lean into the anxiety instead of running away to it starts to move and it gives away to something much deeper so like the anxiety and always telling us you're having feelings and feelings that make might make you uncomfortable so we're really that's what we're talking about you know and what we're talking about is trying to um we'll be more mindful of what's happening and more aware of what's happening but really be better shepherds of our nervous system it's having reactions yeah um whether we like it or not so affect emotion feelings what you would think about when we think about what you feel you know what you feel inside what we feel and what we may not be aware that we feel and the story i just shared to make a more clear connection for the listener i wasn't just generically sad what i experienced was that my anxiety um in that case was masking a feeling keeping me away from a feeling right but then when i went to the feeling the feeling had real information for me and so i realized why i was sad is i wondered if i traveled less if people would remember me and still care about my work and the sadness was about um not just some unnamed thing it was a specific fear from childhood that was kind of coming back in response to my life situations in that moment which kind of leads me to another thing i'd love to wait i'm gonna i'm gonna interrupt you yes go ahead well that's so poignant to me yeah and that's such a i mean it's it's painful i also get it what's painful about it is am i going to be remembered if i'm not there right and we trace that back to a little boy who had to work at being seen didn't necessarily now i'm surmising here i'm not just divulging yes absolutely i want to make that clear i am not divulging confidential information not at all i'm thinking about it more in general why you know when people feel afraid of the lack of consistency and if i don't show up will i be remembered will i be seen that comes from a very early place because when we arrive on the scene it's what we need the most you know to feel that connection to feel the presence to feel the presence of others to feel secure in that and if we had felt secure in that we would doubt it less so it's an amazing example that you share there's so much in there that you're talking about oftentimes you know will we trace these habitual ways we have of being i'm going to throw myself into my work and get on an excel sheet and do this stuff and get online and figure it out you know because these are strengths but that's not really addressing what's going on inside which which is underneath sort of the panic or the anxiety is this fear will i be what will happen you know what will i lose will i be abandoned all of this stuff and that traces far back but then look what happens right so when you slow down and you're with that then like when you're when you lean into it the feelings come so this is bottom up but in the feelings comes all this information like you say and i talk about the wisdom of our feelings oh so this is what was going on you know and you have the capacity to sit with that and sense and feel that it goes really far back this comes from a young place this is a young fear and and then if we stay with the process you know and we move through the feelings it sounds like other perspectives come online as well oh wait a minute i do have you know connections they don't disappear yeah perhaps you know i think you've hinted at something again that an astute listener might infer um this notion of bottom up and top down yeah as being different ways of yeah relating to our own internal processes um would you be willing to kind of say a little more about to verify the difference between those two approaches yeah so let's make it really simple like top down is using your brain and your thinking to sort of make sense of things right so we say top and away because your head you know and then everything below it is sort of the bottom but the nervous system and how we feel things we feel it in our body right so that's sort of lower so a top-down approach would really be around let me think about this and why is it that way and trying to figure it out cognitively and top also meaning the prefrontal cortex so that's the front part of the brain that's the part of the brain the newer so to speak part of the brain in terms of evolution and the lower part of the brain bottom perhaps is the emotional part of the brain and that has been around a lot longer and that's sort of all these sort of primary and can be primitive while we're prior um wired in things come where our feelings come from [Music] so uh to not get too heady about it but our feelings this bottom-up experience uh can be pretty powerful and they can overwhelm our rational thinking this is why for a long time we thought we need to you know feelings are you know crazy and batty and you gotta like you know work use that you know head of yours as a human being and not let not succumb to this you know irrational irrational force but it's very hard to do that you know we all know it like just a simple example is there's nothing to be afraid of and yet you feel afraid anyway and you might even know it you know i've done this before there's no reason to be afraid but your nervous system is telling you something otherwise and people will tell you and many people have told me like you know it doesn't work like to try and reason myself out of this so what we need to do is to really work with our system which is to learn how to be with our feelings from the bottom up as they come up and regulate them and move through them and as we move through them then our brain the top can start to come online and make sense of things and both parts of the brain then work together so the bottom approach that i'm talking about is like we try and put our thinking aside and tune into what's happening in our bodies which is what you did in the example that you shared and make space by that try to open up stay present and allow because feelings are like our energy it's an they have energetic waves and we're learning to surf right we're learning to ride the waves and move through and get to the shore and as we get to the shore we can connect up with that front part of our brain that says oh now i see what was going on for me oh and now i see what the answer is you know it's not unnecessarily you know figuring out the schedule is you know is dealing with this fear that comes up for me that can't be driving the show because that can put me back under that can you know spoil my health all the things that i've done to have some balance in my life does that help to answer that oh so well okay thank you yes um well the work i'm doing in these interviews is um i've read and nearly memorized both of your books so i have to try to go back in time and imagine what my questions would have been before but that that was such a good and helpful answer but it it does raise a question you know i have a very intimate relationship with an absolute guru of emotional presence uh her name is ruby and she's my dog i'm right and she is in her feelings whatever she feels she expresses and you can watch her body as she has a feeling if it's fear if it's joy if it's whatever it is you can watch her surf that wave expertly which by the way because she's so in her body she is totally unself-conscious about asking for affection and connection in a way that people are often afraid and i wonder if our brains evolved feelings first and then got thinking how on earth is it that we as humans get conditioned or unlearned this process that seems so natural right to many of our mammal right companions right um it's a really good question i think i want to i want to qualify something and say and say you know we're not saying that you know the emotional part of your brain is more important than you know the our cognitive capacities those are those things are really important too it's really about integration and balance how do we get the whole brain to work together and my emotional brain would have had a hard time setting up the podcast equipment right right exactly exactly and my emotional brain already was feeling anxious about if i had to do it and i you know watching you do it and marveling how you could do both talk and set that up um you know uh okay so i'm trying to think about how to answer this question um we haven't you know we're continuing to learn um about the brain right and the science that of psychology and um effective neuroscience which has to do with emotion and the brain and how how it works and how the and neuro um uh what am i talking about neuroplasticity which has to do with how the brain changes and grows which is everything is something we want to be able to harness because that's how we heal right and that's how we learn uh new ways of being that can be that are that are healthier for us um it's all fairly a new science you know in some ways we've been sort of like muddling along and just trying to figure it out and uh there were theories you know about this and theories that for a long time we're saying you know uh um you have to learn how to control the unconscious and you know uh and make sense of things and live a more sort of cerebral life and you'll be okay but we're realizing that that wasn't the you know that's not true so it was maybe in the 80s where daniel goldman's book emotional intelligence came out and that started a real shift because what he was saying is look intelligence is important but so is emotional intelligence and he you know was bringing this information to the general public and saying look emotions are wired and experiences we need to learn how to work with our bodies and work with our brains okay so and you're right because it's like so if this stuff is all innate why the heck do we have such a problem with it well lots of discomfort around feelings and misunderstanding social mores you know uh the things that we grew up with in our families in particular and then also in society it's not okay for men to be sad that that means that you're weak you can't show your vulnerability it's not okay for you to be afraid it's not okay for women to be you know angry um and we know what that connotes you know um and i know that i'm painting with broad strokes but these are all things that we've lived with and listen to the messages that they give us about our feelings you know this is what keeps people from being able to really be themselves and really be able to connect to stand up for themselves when they need to and to be able to show our vulnerability and our fear and because it's ultimately useful to us right so fortunately um more people are learning about it and unfortunately many of us grow up with have grown up with parents who were emotionally mindful and emotionally intelligent and then that's what happens you learn to be mindful of your feelings you learn to resonate with feelings and others and you learn to use your mind and work with your emotional brain and make sense of things and stay in this place where you can navigate your feelings and also be able to think well let's say that's about 50 of the general public and i'm using these numbers loosely but it's close but then there's like a whole other 50 of us who did not have that experience myself included did not grow it's i like to say it's no coincidence i'm writing a book on emotional mindfulness because that was not a part of my experience and i had to learn it the hard way the way that everyone else is learning it and it's still a process um so uh why this is partly to the answer like so why don't we do this naturally because of all those reasons and why many of us struggle is because it's like we didn't get the manual and i hear this from it's astounding to me in a way that when i i just get back from doing a workshop um at krapalu and unloving like you mean it and when i do my living like you mean at workshops it's astounding to me that i don't even feel like i'm offering um profound things around change but helping people to connect with uh themselves and understand how their defenses get in the way and it's eye-opening and transformative and people are saying i've walked around my whole life like not understanding not getting not knowing really no one taught me this so we've had to as we become better um [Music] shepherds of our own emotional experience then actually that changes ourselves and changes who we're with and there's a ripple effect i so love that ripple effect you know that's um that's how i came to know you in the first place my friend hillary mcbride who's a therapist who took a seminar with you and i remember when i first met her um i almost couldn't believe she was for real if that makes sense because her sincerity and her presence and her feeling it um evoked in me some kind of cynicism or defensiveness that i don't know i would have been aware of at the time but it it it it presented itself to me as a skepticism about her intentions and motivations and the more i knew her the more i was like wow no she just um shares what she feels but in a way that doesn't we can share our feelings in a way that [Music] um is raw and unprocessed and burdens people or we can cheer our feelings in a way that communicates social value and boundaries and she had done the work to do the lab and um as we were friends and i started having um an experience it sounds like you were having in your 30s for me i was in my 40s and i just started having panic attacks all the time and basic tasks associated with life and living driving and parking would be a big one but also i'd have panic attacks right before i went on stage after i came off of stage which i loved going on stage so having that be a challenge for me was very disorienting and she said because she's my friend right even though she's a therapist she doesn't do therapeutic work with me so she said if i found someone for you to go see would you go see them because i think this is important for your quality of life and i said yes and that's when i met you and um i was struck in our first session together um some similarities in uh the way you and hillary um interact with people like interpersonally or conversationally the um well the presence that comes with access to our feelings um and that i've watched that ripple from hillary and then uh working with you it started to change the way that i interacted with people and then i would have friends come to me and you said something in the very first question i asked you you did seven years of therapy but you were still struggling and i would have friends and they would say i've done any number of years of therapy but i'm still struggling and i would say well go see ron frederick it's really going to help and if you're not ready to go see ron i have great news for you you can read all about his process because he's published it and so i would have a stack of living like you mean at books in my house people that i think will help them and um and then what i've seen is as they change and as i've changed it changes a family system and it just starts rippling out interpersonally and i've gotten this great hope that some of the most pressing issues we face as culture and society and i i'm not going to go pollyanna here and say would be solved but would be greatly aided by more people having more access to their feelings and being less afraid of their feelings you describe that and then i interject something right there absolutely feels important for your um listeners more people having more access to their feelings and being able to put them to good use right so we're not just talking about having our feelings and you know having our and you said this about hillary right you know as you described her that we um just walk around emoting right you know uh that it's really about one having access to them and then being able to manage them and to good effect which is what you're talking about move through them hear them hear the messages that are inside not be reactive to them have space to be able to [Music] figure out the best way to respond right you know and that's that's really the that's really the whole process and yes the more i talk about emotional mindfulness that's what i call it the more we can be emotionally mindful that is attuned to and be and able to stay present with what's going on in ourselves and make good use of it that really is at the basis of flourishing having connection communication having better relationships so we did our loving like you mean at workshop for the first time this weekend i'm not saying this to be boastful i'm saying this because of what you're speaking to and that is uh there were a few couples and couples and singles and people in relationship but by themselves in the group everybody's welcome and a lot of people saying the same thing i've been to so many workshops i've been in therapy for so long we've seen all these different therapists um and then having experiences by tuning in to themselves and starting to and also stepping back and seeing beginning to see their defenses see how they get triggered see how they respond habitually but finding the space to disentangle themselves a bit to have other experiences and share this was happening in a three-day weekend that was profound and saying i've done all this work in therapy but i've never felt or i haven't this is spoken to me in some way in a visceral way that is allowing for change to happen because that's helping me to feel different and i don't say that to be boastful i mean i'm proud i'm proud of and and so moved by um you know what's happening and i'm happy that i can share that but we're really talking about principles you know and about what actually leads to transformation it's about understanding it's that mission that i went on when i went into graduate school i want to understand what helps people you know helps us heal i want to heal and i want to understand what helps people heal and that's you know sort of what's the day so the amazing thing is you know that it's there it's it's so frustrating too because it's all there for the taking you know and so you come here and you're saying you're having these experiences but i would say to you so do you feel like you're more your true self or do you feel like you became someone else did this did this help free you up to be with what needs to happen inside of you i don't know the words i would use it's almost feels too sacred i will tell you some things i've noticed mm-hmm that when i see a picture of myself as an eight-year-old child wearing a red hawaiian shirt and a bowl haircut um i feel such affection for that child and such pride for everything that he survived when i look in the mirror today i just really like what i see and in my life and in my work i've had a pattern of wanting to help people and in our work together i realized that i wanted to help people because i was afraid that otherwise they would not value me or like me or continue to be around me and now i like and accept me and there are things i do in my life and work that invite people into their own process i'm so grateful to have that opportunity but what i've noticed probably the biggest change is the hours per week that i spend reaching out to friends and to family just to talk and connect with them and not to share something impressive that i've done and not to not to be afraid to reach out to them because reminding them i exist will give them excuse to not be with me the unself-conscious way in which i'm able to be in relationship with my wife with my children with my friends and even the people that i work with is that a new me is that a deeper me i don't know all i know is that it's me that i like mm-hmm and that feels new it's not so not so moving and from my perspective um it's really this work is about really freeing people freeing us from our early programming that was basically constricting us from really flourishing so when you talk about calling people and connecting i think you know that's what's innate the desire to connect the desire to be close it's innate in all of us but we adapt in different ways and we become afraid of reaching out or depending on anyone or expecting that will be you know rejected or abandoned or ridiculed and so then we don't reach out or we do other things um and when we can find a way to move through those fears we loosen the reins up and i think it's really about our true self being able to come to fruition [Music] and i think that's why you feel compassion for that boy when you look at him in the picture all right because there's this beautiful spirit and then he was struggling he was not getting the help that he needed [Music] but he is now right but that's what comes like when we face what's scary in ourselves then we feel different we don't have to defend and keep our walls up and then all of a sudden you feel compassion for ourselves that's the hardest right i think it can be easier to feel compassion for someone else but when it comes to ourselves and to our child selves that can feel really challenging but when we don't have to have defenses when we don't have to be afraid and we can start to move through that it naturally comes mm-hmm for people who now feel curious and feel like they want to learn more and connect more while they wait on the book to arrive from the bookstore because i'm sure they're going to order it what are other ways um to connect with your work um i know you mentioned the workshops and you know are there other ways that people can engage with the work that you're doing in the world um well thanks for asking me that um one place to go is to our website and that's the it's cfcliving.com so that stands for centerforcourageousliving.com it takes courage to really open up and be who we are and connect more deeply and hence the name and if people go to the center for courageous living website um there are resources there and they can register for our newsletter and hear about where our workshops are happening they can connect up with my blog and read things and hear podcasts and likely at some point people will be able to connect and hear or they're already hearing this interview wherever they found it but other interviews and um and you know can reach out you know there you can reach out through the um website and ask a question or if you're looking for help in your area or you're wanting to you know talk to me about uh doing some work all of that's possible and links to that website as well as uh living like you mean it and loving like you mean my books right we'll be in the show notes of this episode so right in the podcast player that you're listening to you can just tap on those links it'll take you straight there you could even do that while we're talking if you'd like to um ron it is so significant and meaningful to me that you agreed to spend time together and have this conversation today i think you you know how impactful and transformative your work has been in my life and oh gosh it just feels so special to me to be able to invite so many people in my audience on their own journeys directly with kind of the person that that helped me along in mind that feels really it feels nice so thank you i feel it i feel your gratitude and you've always been you know um open about that and explicit um [Music] and i feel so honored you know to be able to do this and be here with you and um to do this with you and i know about the amazing amazing work that you do and all these people that you touch and i feel so grateful actually for the opportunity to be able to share this with other people because that's what we want i mean you said that in there if this could sort of ripple out what would it do to our world and that to me is the most meaningful thing people ask me you know why did why did you write a book like what did you and there are different reasons to write a book and i say well you know the main reason is because someone will come up to me or they'll send me an email although tell me at a workshop how it's helped them and how it's helped them have a better life and that to me is that to me what is what it's about that is so moving to me thank you thank you [Music] isn't it wonderful that our world has people like ron in it who are you know so educated and so experienced and yet so kind and so compassionate uh during that interview i was just i was just left with as i always am when i talked to ron just his his sincerity and his desire to see people heal our world needs more of that i think um and so i hope that conversation opens some new ideas to you perhaps or or or helped you understand maybe some things about yourself that you did not understand before and i do hope that you'll visit the show notes of ask sciencemike.com this week and that you'll you'll connect with ron's work more deeply both of his books are wonderful but as he mentioned if you're not quite ready to grab one of the books that's okay he's got a lot of resources available on his website as well and uh gosh what a great conversation that was made possible by some very special people the patrons of ask science mike who you know they send money every month maybe a dollar maybe five dollars and uh in doing so make this show possible they're the sustaining force that makes a science mike happen every week if you'd like to join them or learn more you can do that by visiting asksciencemike.com there's a little patron button on there and the show was also made possible by caitlyn hermstad who is our producer and greg nordeen who does production and sound design and editing and basically makes the whole podcast andrew golucky does the pre-production uh so the way that your shows make it to the patrons to get voted on is through andrew's hard work that i'm so grateful for bret cradle provides management services and keeps that whole team from uh running into each other in the process of making the show and the other things that happen kind of in the science mic world of media and of course our theme song was written and recorded by my longtime dear friend jeb bottaford who i am one of my favorite things every week is having this moment to just think about jeb for a second he's a good friend thanks for listening everybody and i can't wait to talk with you again next week