John Prendergast

what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf m Thanks for joining us.

Our guest on this episode is John J. Printer Gast, PhD. He's a psychotherapist, retired professor of psychology, spiritual teacher, and founder and editor of chief of Undivided, the online journal of Non Duality and Psychology. He received his undergraduate degree from you See Santa Cruz and m A and PhD from the California Institute of Integral Studies. He is licensed as a marriage and family therapist. His latest book is called In Touch, How to Tune into the inner guidance

of your body and trust Yourself. Here's the interview. Hi, John, welcome to the show. Well, thank you very much, great to be here. I'm happy to have you on. You came to me recommended by Locke Kelly, who was a guest I don't know, some number of episodes ago. The really enjoyed that interview, and when you know, when he recommended you, I thought it was a great idea to get you on. And I read your book and enjoyed it, and we'll get to talk about it here in a minute.

Sounds good. We'll start, though, like we always do with the parable. There's a grandfather and he's talking with his grandson. He says, in life, there are two wolves that are inside of us, that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops for a second and he looks up at his grandfather, and he says grandfather, which one wins? And

the grandfather says the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. It's interesting, um, I suppose it depends what we mean by feed. And it is true that if we favor the good wolf those nineties they will grow, and so they can be cultivated to a certain extent. And it's true that we don't want to act out these less conscious and more destructive impulses. But at the same time, if we repress them, they have a way

of biting us. And so simply favoring one and dismissing the other. I have found in my work, because I've worked for many years as psychotherapist and trained therapists as well, we actually need to make room for these shadow elements, not to act them out, not to indulge them, but to give we might call the dark wolf, some space actually and begin to inquire, to be curious and to

welcome what these unwelcome elements have been. And what I found, which is very interesting working with people, that if we take this approach, not to indulge them, but not to repress them. Very surprising qualities emerged that I would consider

often the polarity of it is initially expressed. So, for instance, if we take the quality of terror, if you actually begin to explore it intimately, breathe into it and feel where it is in the body, and sense it um and begin to tolerate it, it becomes a kind of portal or opening to a place of fearlessness. It's very interesting how that kind of flip can happen, and it can happen with desire as well. If we really explore what it is that we seem to be greedy about.

You know, we may feel a sense of lack and deficiency, and if we explore that sense of lack, we'll find fullness ultimately. And it's true for all sorts of these unwanted qualities. It's quite interesting, I find so um I would say, whichever wolf is the wolf that correct trying to not favor If we actually kind of welcome it in as a guest and in a certain way, interview it in the way that you interview your guests, you know, and kind of find out what's really here, something essential

begins to emerge. Like if you take rage, You'll find you rages is because we feel powerless and if we actually enrage can actually be even though it's misdirected, could be a very strong life protective force. So if you go into the essence of rage, you'll actually find power there as well, and that can be channeled then in a positive way. So when I when I consider your parable, this is what comes to me. Excellent. So your book is called in Touch, how to tune into the inner

guidance of your body and trust yourself. Um. A lot of what you're talking about in this book is something you call inner knowing. Could you tell us a little bit more about what that term means. Yeah, Well, we've heard the phrase the small still voice within. It's voice of sometimes it's called intuition. It's a very quiet voice. It doesn't insist on anything, it doesn't judge anything, it

doesn't assert itself. But it's something that's inherent in all of us, um, And it's something that loves the truth. It just loves to see things as they are, even if they're not particularly in our favor. And this is what I'm referring to as knowing. And and so we also the body participates in this knowing I've I've found in my work and this is what my book is about, that the body has a sense of this knowing. I

felt sense of this knowing. There can be a knowing about things like it's this situation really appropriate for me, this partner or this work. For instance, we all know the experience of going out on a date with someone and we have a feeling. I don't think so, but we you know, we want to play it out for a while and then it's confirmed. You know, we had an initial sense, an initial knowing about this. That to be a knowing about relationship and could be annoying about work.

But there's also a knowing about oneself, about who we truly are. And this is a subtler kind of knowing. It's like honing in into what's essentially human, this open, spacious, radiant, loving awareness actually which is inherent in all of us. And this is self knowledge and this knowing refers to that as well, So that the deepest knowing is actually

the knowing of ourselves. That makes a lot of sense that that inner knowing what I found interested in the book though, that you said, and this is really something that I wrestle with as you say that most of what we call hunches or intuition is based on fear or desire. Are inner knowing is heavily filtered by how we do or do not want things to be. And I think that that's really challenging. Certainly, there have been times in my life where my inner sense of what

I should do was really bad. I was you know, I was an addict for years, and there was an

inner sense of like I must um. So how do we go about starting to filter out those things that are driven, like you said, by desire or attachment, and how we filter that out to get to that still or smaller voice that is actually who we are because and you talk about in the book a little bit about the idea of there's a lot of static in the system, right exactly, Well, we kind of know it because it doesn't have that compulsive feeling, right, and it

doesn't have it's not judgmental, and it's not sort of well I'm kind of describing what it's not right, So it has a it just has a different flavor to it um and sometimes we're pretty unfamiliar with that. We're heavily conditioned and we know what it feels like to be compulsive. We're obsessive about something and we kind of know it's not that, up right, if that's what's happening,

it's not that. And we can also tell by contractions in our body if we feel really nervous or guilty or ashamed, you know pretty likely you know, acting on those or from those is not a good ideas. So it comes from a from a peaceful and in quiet place internally. So what is the process at a high level of beginning to move into inner knowing and beginning to be able to listen to our body? What's that? What's that look like? You know, you talk a lot

in the book about going from the head to the heart. Yeah, exactly, which is you know, the cliche is it's a you know, it's a really long journey, and it's because it's true. So what are some of the ways that you work with people to start to move into being more aware of who we are inside? Well, one of it is

actually to use our body as a resource. And and sometimes is when we you know, I had difficult childhood's in terms of bonding with caretakers or trauma, it's really uncomfortable actually to feel what's going on, and so we live on the outside of our body, either a short distance from it or kind of on the surface, and we really don't know what's going on inside. So part of it is just actually beginning to breathe and slow down, and since you know what's happening here, you know, what

am I feeling in the heart area? What am I feeling in the gut area, and actually beginning to listen in a different way and knowing that or at least being open to the possibility that there's a different kind of knowing that's not driven by the condition mind. So one thing is just kind of slowing down and breathing and beginning to feel into the interior of the body,

you know, taking a few minutes to do that. And another is actually to begin to question our thoughts, particularly are repetitive and limiting and negative thoughts as well, because when we're caught in our thinking and we're identified with it, um, we're deeply entranced and and acting out of delusion as well. So getting getting a bit of space, some separation from our thinking, to being able to observe thoughts as thoughts.

This is, you know, it seems like a very simple idea but for some people it's quite radical, but it's an important step to This is kind of a mindfulness step, you know, just to be aware of thoughts, to be a witness of thoughts, and to be more intimate with the sensations and feelings of your body. So those are kind of entry entry level approaches to a different kind of listening, I would say. And then another thing is

as you have to experiment with it. If you get a kind of quiet inclination to move in a particular direction in terms of relationship or work or whatever it may be. It maybe small movements, not particularly life changing significance, you might act on them and see how they go and and take note, and then you begin to reinforce. Okay,

I'm starting to listen. I'm starting to tune in as well as we do, so we'll feel more congruent with ourselves, will feel more in our integrity, will feel more connected with ourselves and with others, and we'll notice that our listening becomes better and our judging diminishes of others as well. So it has an impact in our relationships quite immediately

as well. Where there's about eight different directions, I want to go from there because I think you touched on about five or six of the different questions I want to ask, So I need to think through the best best direction here, but I think I'll start with just an observation I had, and you were talking about living in our thoughts, and there were a couple of things you said. To live in our head means that attention is largely centered in the forehead, which I thought was

really an interesting thing to look at. And then you went on to say that one of your main teachers, John Klein, calls it the factory of thought, which is I interviewed Mary O'Malley recently. I don't know if you know Mary, but but she wrote a book in a lot of there's a lot of crossover in what you guys say, but she talks about that we are basically

thought factories. So I thought it was very interesting to have heard that term, you know, referring to our thoughts as a as a factory um twice in the last week, which I think is a really interesting observation. Yeah, you're bringing an important point. It's like we begin part of scanning the body is noticing where our attention tends to

localize something we're not normally aware of. But as as we just begin to do that investigation, very often we will find it localizing in the forehead right because we identify. It's almost like we think we're up here, somewhere in our brain behind our eyes, and we live up here. And when we do so, it means we're really identified with our thinking. The less identified we're with our thinking.

It doesn't mean we stop thinking. It doesn't mean we devalue our thinking, but we have a different relationship to it. We're not yanked around by it. We're much more in a witnessing mode. As that happened, attention begins to fall actually and begins to drop down, usually gradually. This is not something dramatic, although we may occasionally experience it more dramatically, but attention tends to begin to fall down into the trunk of the body, you know, either into the heart

or in the gut, or both. With time, I used to be very head centric when I was an adolescent and a young adult as well. I was very reliant on my intellect, and I gradually learned that it was a limited way of being partial, not to devalue it, but to know that it's just a partial way you say early in the book that really the first step is to have an intellectual openness to the possibility that there are other ways of knowing than the rational mind. And I think that's a statement that it's easy to

breeze past. And I think that a lot of us, you know, where people are getting into mindfulness and we're thinking about this, but we don't think that we're discovering different way ease of perceiving or interpreting the world, which is is a pretty big shift. That we can be aware from a different place than the brain. That's right.

And and even physiologists, neurophysiologists are realizing that, you know, the whole body is involved with of course sensing, but also with a kind of intelligence and a kind of knowing. Dan Siegel, who has done a lot of work on neurobiology, uh and neurophysiology, is discovering, you know, just the nervous system and these different organ systems they all contribute, so we know, even on a physiological level, increasing that these are sources of information and understanding. And as we pay

more attention to them, this is the interesting thing. They grow in in capacity as well, and we as we learn to trust them more and as they proved to be trustworthy, UM, they actually develop in an interesting way. So we become more balanced, we're not so top heavy, you know, we actually feel ourselves more deeply seated in our body and yet expansive and open. And it's a much more peaceful and actually economic that is to say, we're not wasting energy worrying about things that we don't

need to. UM. It's a much more peaceful and joyful and efficient way of being. So for people, say who have a daily mindfulness practice or a meditation practice where they meditate, let's just pretend for twenty minutes a day and it's pretty much focus on the breath or um, you know, repeat a mantra type practice. What are ways that they can take that time, you know, and engage in an interior practice that that becomes more body focused or body centric. What are some techniques that can be

worked into that. There are many techniques and you know, one of them is to to scan the body and and and breathe deeply into the body. And it can be a nice way actually to start a meditative practice, whether it's mantra or focusing on breath mind typical mindfulness, you know, feel feel your feet on the floor, feel the bottoms of your feet, you know, imagine you're breathing up, you know, into the bottoms, you know, from the earth up into the bottoms of your feet and exhaling down

into the ground. And feel the lower half of your body and and feel your lower abdomen um you know when Japanese called the horror Japanese martial arts and so on. So you begin to actually bring attention down and then you can start your meditation practice if you like. One of the interesting things about meditation, and I used to be a t M practitioner and teacher um. I was a teacher for very long, but I practiced TM in from quite regularly, and probably it was useful in terms

of quieting the mind, but also it felt constrictive. And what I discover is when I began working with my my root teacher at Jean Klein UM, he introduced me to a different kind of meditation, which is like just

resting in awareness and being in silent. So for people who practice meditation for a while and may feel a bit dull with it or dry with it, it can be interesting to begin the meditation with that initial focus and let it go and then stop efforting and trying to achieve or trying to concentrate or focus anyway, and just relax deeply into this open, spacious awareness and rest in and outs that. So that's a beautiful practice. And interestingly, in so doing, um, it's like bathing the whole body

mind in warm, soapy water. You know, has we with dirty dishes, you know, it has a way of energizing the whole system because we're no longer subtly focusing and trying to effort as well, it's very restorative. In the book, it seems to me that there is a combination of techniques of becoming more in touch with the body, and there are also psychotherapy type techniques that are tying maybe previous emotional wounds into that practice. So how do those

two things come together? How does this sense of ourselves knowing ourselves and our body ultimately you you had to the point of that, you know, we're not a separate self. How does that marry up with the more standard psychology based dealing with things in our childhood? What's the what's

the connection? The connection is that we are a multidimensional being and we have many levels of experience and as you were alluding to initially, are there's this kind of quiet, deep listening and then there's a lot of noise in the system and a lot of static and um, that's the condition body mind, and that primarily is our psychological conditioning,

most of which originates in childhood. So I worked with people, you know, I've been a psychotherapist for over three decades now, a licensed psychotherapist and taught therapists you know, on a master's level graduate program. So I know this field very well. And what I see again and again with people who are experienced meditators and they're interested in really resting, in

being and becoming acquainted with their deeper knowing. Um, in many cases that process is heavily filtered by our hijacked by our conditioned body mind, you know. And we particularly noticed that when we're off retreat, our off our meditation Christian and we're interacting in the world with other people, it's in relationship when we tend to get triggered and UM. So I work with a lot of people who have a deep spiritual practice but are also working with psychological

material because it interferes actually with that. And so there's certain ways of being with experience that I've developed, and I'm not unique in doing that. I've certainly borrowed, if not stolen, heavily from others, quite shamelessly, i should say. But you know, I'm very pragmatic. So you know, people will come in and they may feel anxious or depressed and at the same time have a kind of deep

spiritual orientation. So we need a way to address that that's not avoiding, you know, and this is one of the problems that you see in with spiritual practitioners as they actually they're motive is to feel better, and so they're trying to transcend or get away from their experience, and you can you know, you can only do that for so long. That was my experience as a as a very anxious being who could sort of calm myself a meditation, but then become anxious out of it, particularly

in relationships. So that said is a kind of background. You know, there are a few basic principles that I work with and helping people work through their conditioning, and it's all under the rubric of what I call being intimate with your experience. So for instance, often I'll guide people to feel in their bodies what's happening both in terms of reactive feelings and somatic contractions, because those generally

are always accompanying each other. If we're kind of triggered emotional state, there'll be some kind of constriction in the interior of our body as well. So the invitation then is actually to begin begin to be curious and more intimate with it, which would be which would mean to breathe into it, for instance, and be willing to just feel it, not to change it. Though this is where the condition mind gets in. It's always trying to change and manipulate and get rid of our experience, but much

more innocently to be curious, what is this? You know, what's in the very center or core of this? To feel into it, and very often simply by bringing that the breath and attention into some unpleasant somatic experience, contraction, or emotional reaction, it'll start to soften and open of its own. It just is wanting some loving attention. Now, sometimes that won't happen, and in that case there's usually

an underlying belief that's fueling that reaction. And that's why being aware of core limiting beliefs, and I devoted a chapter to that my book I found to be very important, and I'll just say a word about that, if that's okay. Part of my approach and working with people is and when they're dealing with their this noise in the system, is to start to be aware of whether core limiting

beliefs are. And usually they're very simple, and they're simple because they originated in childhood, so it's like a child's formulation. And usually there are variations on two main themes. One is I'm lacking, I'm not enough, and another is something's wrong with me, I'm plawed. And almost all of our negative beliefs can be traced back to some variation of

one or both of these. So we can just ask ourselves, you know what, what are my limiting beliefs and make a list and boil them down to five or seven words, and see if you can find the ones that really pack a punch, you know, really, And you can tell because when you think the thought, there'll be an emotional reaction and a contraction in the interior of your body, so you know you've sort of struck gold when you've

uncovered one of these. So another is you can you can know them just by going through the body with a chronic contraction, and then feeling into it and just inquiring what's the belief that goes with this, and then make a note of what that might be. And in a third in common way, as through our reactions to others, our projections, you know, what we just cannot stand in someone else is usually something we can't stand within ourselves,

and we have some belief that's associated with that. So the first step is to uncover it, and the second step is to inquire into it, and not to inquire in itto it from the thinking mind, but more from the heart. And so it's a little method that I've developed that works quite beautifully, which is to ask yourself, what is the thought here that's really the core limiting belief, And then bring your attention to the heart area in the center of the chest, and ask yourself, what's my

deepest knowing about this? And then be quiet not to go to the thinking mind for an answer. It's like you're dropping a pebble into the pond and you're just you're you're you're open, You're waiting for a response, and it's really interesting. You know what can happen sometimes you know that riot that's still inner voice will respond, you know, and it may say, you know, that belief is completely irrelevant, you know enough, not enough, flawed, not flawed, it has

no relevance at all. Or it may answer in the positive you are enough, you know, or there may just be a kind of release in the heart area or in the gut as well. So this is a way to work with our subconscious mind and with our reactive feelings and our somatic contractions. And as the noise diminishes, it's much easier to a tune with this quieter inner knowing, and it facilitates that process. So that's the connection I

found working with people in the book. You tell some stories of people, you sort of describe this process that you you were just talking about, and these people respond to you in very poetic and deeply felt ways. When I inquire into myself generally with that, there's a lot less being said, and it's certainly not as poetic or as metaphorical or as graphic. Is what you're describing is that a individual personality thing. Is that a thing that those people have been working for a longer time, And

so what's coming out is more rich. What would you say to somebody who says, well, I do those things and I don't get much back. You know, it could be any of those things. It could be that people are more familiar and with their internal experience and so a kind of richness of description comes out of that. Could be that they're inclined in that direction already temperamentally. Um and and then of course if people don't have a lot to say, it's not a good case presentation.

You're you're pulling the more dramatic stories. I am, you know, I mean, you just you have to do that because you want to engage the reader, and so the descriptions are not so important. What is important is that people are in touch, you know, with what's going on. And sometimes it's rather worthless, you know, there's there's very little

that said. But you can feel a shift when there's an understanding that opens, and that's the felt sense that's really you're you're tapping into the inner knowing and there's a kind of there's a release that happens, there's a sense of settling down and in there's an openness. These are the qualities, you know, but I've tracked that are frequently emergent as people get in touch you know, everything in life tends to take um. You get better at

things as you do them. And one of the things that I talked about on the show a lot is I think a lot of us will hear some technique like if I just try and be with my experience, then that you know that I hear that makes everything better. And we go and we be with our experience twice and life doesn't change dramatically, and we go, well, that must not work, and we cast it off. And my experience has been that some of these things that we're talking about are it takes a while to start to

know how to do some of these things. So maybe does it take a while to learn to listen to your body? Maybe the first time you do a body scan and you're paying attention to what's going on in your foot, maybe you don't notice much, But over time do you begin to develop a better sense? Is that some of what this is also is kind of sticking with these practices. It is, but you know, I'm not a big one on practice, Okay, so that is to say arduous practice or I'm more like, I'm more playful

than that. I'd like to be more spontaneous and in the moment and and curious and kind of interested and engaged and what's happening now, rather than doing in a kind of a formal, serious way of sitting and okay, I'm going to scan the body, and in other words, when that tends to pull for the you know, the controlling mind, I find often that becomes dull and kind of dry. So it's much more about certain qualities of curiosity, I would say, and a willingness to experience what's actually here.

It's not about, you know, so much about practice, although sometimes you know, we may be drawn deeply to sit or breathe deeply, or go to nature, or we've got our own special ways of whatever to be more in touch with ourselves. But I think it's important that it be done lightly and playfully too, that we kind of have fun. On the flip side of that is that very often it's our suffering that becomes the incentive to

look more deeply in our lives. We live our lives according to certain routine patterns of self medication and distraction and avoidance, and after a while it becomes rather unsatisfying, if not painful, to us. You know, we have repetitive relationships that don't work, we find ourselves involved with work that's not truly creative or congruent with what we are.

We actually start paying attention to that, we get curious, you know, and we begin to notice, I'm suffering, I'm really not very happy, and I wonder if there's a different way to approach life, and that becomes the fire for some people. Often it's two things. One is like, there may be just a calling to be really, what is life all about? Who am I really? You know? There may be that kind of existential questions that are very lively for us. That may be our love of

the truth. That's one one pole. And then there's a push from our suffering from really not being intimate with life and being intimate with ourselves. And actually it's a combination of those two that get us engaged in a deeper inquiry and investigation of our lives. And I think that is where the real fire and the real aliveness comes from, rather than some mental agenda and self improvement.

In the book, you also say something to the effect of that if you don't remember much of your childhood, it's a pretty safe bet that you've been in the practice of disassociating so the healing from that comes from learning to be in your body, not in learning to remember your childhood. That's right, Yeah, I mean we left our bodies and distance from our feeling because it was

simply too painful to be with. And it doesn't mean that we have to go back and somehow remember all of that, But it does require a re entry into the body and a renewed capacity, a kind of thawing of whatever froze you know, early on in our experience, And in so doing there may be some very strong early feelings that emerge, Feelings of abandonment or invasion or you know, who knows what may arise in the process. But it doesn't necessarily mean we have to go into

psychotherapy and uncover and remember everything. But I would say sometimes spontaneously, you know, we start to remember that which we had repressed, that was too much to bear as a child, but now as an adult we can bear. Can that become a tendency that persists even if you're not in the same painful situation um that you just in general are not much of a remember, Does that does that sort of carry on even once you're an adult and not you know, not necessarily in painful situations,

we don't remember because we're actually not paying attention. And what happens is we start paying more attention. And when we pay attention and we tend to remember more. So, Yeah, we become less spacey, we become more aware of our surroundings, more aware of other people, more aware of our interior experience, and we tend to remember it more. Yeah. I think some people are more oriented towards remembering than others, But I think it's generally true what I'm saying, some of

us not naming anyone can't remember much of anything. Well, we will name any dings. Um, you've got a line I want to explore a little bit deeper. And you say judging is different from discerning. What what's the difference between those two. Discerning is just seeing things as they are, Okay, Um, it's not evaluating them from any moral or ethical stance. And that's what judging is. It's saying good or bad,

right or wrong. So if we take our inner experience, for instance, let's say we're experiencing grief, you know this heaviness or depression, discernment would be just acknowledging, Oh, this is grief, right, it's a very matter of fact. You know, there's a sense of loss here, there's sorrow, maybe there's depression. It feels like this, and it locates in the body as a kind of heaviness in the heart area. Let's say the judgment would say, you shouldn't be feeling this way,

snap out of it. This means something's wrong with you or you're a victim, you know, and whatever happened to you that caused this should not have happened. Do you hear the should? Like the should? Is that the should is the big clue in our thinking and our speaking. Should or should not? It's always point to the judging mind in operation. Discernment does not go to shoot or should not. That's I think the clearest way to actually

discern the difference between discernment and judging. Judging is about setting up an ideal. Right, we have some ideal to which we imagine our experience should controm either our inner experience or outer experience. We should not be feeling this way, We should not be thinking this way, We should not be acting this way, nor should anyone else. Right, I should be this way. I should be happy. I should be you know, full of I should be peaceful, I

should be you know, generous or whatever. So that's the that's the judging mind at work, but discernment just doesn't go there. Very interesting. So so discernment is actually accepting reality as it is, it's not measuring it against some ideal. And this was a This is a point I wasn't clear about for a long time. I didn't see it, But once I saw it, it's like my question really changed from what should I be experiencing or should not be experiencing? To what am I experiencing? And that was

a very liberating transition for me. Because one of the effects we know from judgment is that it creates distance in some subtle way internally or externally. I shouldn't be experiencing this. That creates distance from our actual experience. You shouldn't be experiencing this. I create distance from you. So that's another effective judgment we we we can recognize it by its effects as well. Whereas discernment actually invites intimacy.

To be close to intimacy means to be close, very very close to experience, and that's what's actually wanted and needed in our system, is like be close to both of the wolves, embrace both of the wolves, you know, and then see what happens. Not to change the walls, you know, but in a way, the black wolf and the white wolf are not really separate their polarities in our nature, and it's kind of a spectrum, and when we embrace both wolves, we could have blend. There are

a couple of things I wanted to explore. One of them was this idea of I should or I should not. And I really think we're kind of in like a double whammy situation these days, because I think that the natural human tendency is to sort of go towards what's pleasurable and go away from what's painful. So there's a there's a natural I'm in pain, and so there's a natural movement away from that course. I think it's so compounded culturally these days by the fact that we're we're

constantly shown what life should be like. And so the combination of those two things that the sort of innate human tendency, and then with the cultural addition, it becomes very very hard to get away from the should's. It's true in the mass media, we're constantly being pitched, you know, the solution to our suffering and fulfillment, you know, if we buy this or get this, or have this object or experience as well. So it's reinforced kind of amplified

in media, but it's always been there in culture. You know. If you look in traditional cultures, there's all sorts of taboos, you know, of how one should and shouldn't be, and those are used to reinforce social hierarchies and keep control and ultimately protect the tribe as well. We're very tribal in our thinking and and our acting, and so there's

always been strong currents in this direction. And so it actually takes a real love of the truth, i would say, and courage actually to find out what's true for us, you know. And this is the this is the movement towards autonomy and integrity as well, to step out of the herd, you know, and the cultural mentality, and we can begin to question for ourselves, and in so doing we discover our inner power and our inner authority as well. But it can be a little lonely, a little scary,

and sometimes a bit overwhelming. So it can be it could be nice to have, you know, a few friends along the way. Absolutely, you mentioned the word depression, and depression is certainly something that I have had my share of challenges with, and I'm curious how your method works because depression, to me, by and large, is a complete absence of any feeling. So how how do we work with depression when we when what what is? Really there is almost a nothingness or a blankness? Is it just

going in and embracing that? Well? Yes, in fact, I mean there's two things. One is I tend to work more cognitively with people who are depressed because depressive moods are often linked to subconscious beliefs, and there's a lot of research about mindfulness, meditation, cognitive therapy, you know, in in conjunction with the use of medications as being the

most efficacious treatment for depression. But that being said, actually opening to a sense of nothing, you know, an absence, even though it seems contradictory to the mind um, can be very fruitful and we simply begin to tolerate this kind of absence or nothing. It's like going into a dark well, and it actually can open to a sense of fullness eventually. I can't remember the wording of how you put it in the book, but I'm always fascinated

by the interplay of thoughts, feelings, and action. They all seem to have an interaction with each other, and there's a there's a desire at least, you know, I have this desire to say, well, it's thoughts, you know. Cognitive behavior therapy says it's your thought that drives the emotion. And yet I know lots of people who it seems like they have an emotion and then they have to

go thinking about why they have the emotion. So it doesn't seem to be thought always causes emotion, and you reference something in that about how for some people it really goes the other way. It's an emotional thing first, and then the thoughts follow that. I think in the majority of the cases it is rooted in thought, but it's usually subconscious thought, so we don't it's not like we're consciously thinking of it. It's it's more going on below the surface, you know, more what we call automatic

thought or subconscious thought. And that's why I'm going to think and trying to figure it out rationally or even approaching it rationally is incomplete. It has some superficial value, but often not lasting. So that's why getting deep into the body and the feelings and then finding what those

core beliefs are can be really really important. That said, sometimes the source of let's say the disturbance is prior is so early on developmentally in someone that the really the brain wasn't developed to formulate much in the way of cognition, and it's much more on the level of

feeling and sensation. So, for instance, you know, if you're a baby and you're being raised by a caretaker who's really not there, are you know, not really connected with you and not really attuned with you, there's not much in the way of thinking going on, but there's a big impact in terms of feeling and sensing, and that you know, when you're working on that level, you know, verbalizing and talking about beliefs is not going to be

very relevant. You have to work more directly with the body and sensing, and there are specialized approaches for that. So it sounds like you're saying that there isn't sort of a one size fits all here with this stuff. That's been my experience. Some people are going to get

a lot out of cognitive behavioral therapy. They're going to recognize that what's going on in their head all the time is you know, well, we know that what's going on our head is not reality, but that we have particularly clear and easy to identify distortions that are causing lots a lot of pain. And some people can get

a lot out of that. And then there's other people who are really going to need to do more of a somatic or a body oriented way of getting into it and it and and probably most of us need a little of both. Yeah, there's a spectrum here and and then some approaches really work with the subconscious thoughts as well, you know, so yeah, all of them, And

it could depend where someone is. I heard you say, I don't remember whether it's in the book or somewhere else that you were talking about that subconscious thoughts can be made conscious easier than we think. Well, it was I did mention that in the book. It's just like, uh, you know what I call sort of the direct approach was just to ask yourself, you know, what are your core limiting beliefs, and then to start writing them down, you know, and you'll be surprised. It's almost like it's

waiting for the invitation and we're not. They're kind of when I say subconscious, you may be vaguely aware of them, you know, or not fully focused on them, and simply by shining the light of awareness of inquiry, they'll pop up as well. But sometimes you know, they're not as easily accessible, and we know them in the other ways. That I said is you have somatic contractions and our projections onto others. We are kind of at the end of time here, but I want to wrap up with

one final question. There are people who believe that all the pain that we feel in our body comes from emotional sources. They trace it all back there. Is that your belief? Is that kind of what you're saying, or yes, no, I don't believe that, okay, because you're sort of getting into that area of you know, what's happening and our

body is tied to emotions. Now it's a it's a very complex area, you know, psychosomatic experience, and um, certainly some we know that some some sensations and some illnesses are more clearly tied to emotional disturbances than others. But I don't think they all are, and and if they are, they may be you know, small amounts, much more than some people imagine. Yeah, yeah, that's kind of been my

sense to at least my understanding of it. And when someone sort of starts saying that it's all emotional and like, well, that doesn't really make any sense because if I break my leg, I mean, that's like not an emotional component to that. Now. I may add emotional components onto what I think about it, but there's you know, there's real physical pain that underlies that. Right, So there's one point

before we end, if we have time. But I just wanted to mention because it's really the heart of my book, and that is that our bodies do have a sense of our deepest knowing are relative and absolute knowing, and that I've discovered that there are certain markers, somatic markers I call as you read those are And one of them is a core relaxation and sense of groundedness. Another is a sense of inner alignment congruence. Another is a sense of growing openness of heart, and another is a

sense of spaciousness. And these are all facets of the inner knowing, and we may experience some more than others, and we may not experience them at all. But as people drop in and really get in touch with their truth, generally one and often more of these qualities begin to emerge, and it's valuable to know this because it lets us know we're on the right track. That's why I wrote

this book. You know, I've worked with people for years and years, decades, and I've done you know, I've been a meditator, you know, for longer than that, and also do spiritual teaching. And when people begin to hone in on their truth, their bodies respond, and this is very useful feedback. They're not ends in themselves, they're pointers, and they're pointing us to who we are fundamentally. And that's

really the deepest kind of teaching of the book. And I would hope you know your readers who are interested not only in the psychology that we've been talking about, but what's beneath the psychology, are inherent true nature. I thought the other thing that was great that you did in the book because you talk about all these childhood things that we go through, but you also addressed the fact that there are fundamental existential things. It's not all

that you were damaged in childhood. Some of it is that you're a what appears to be a you know, nearly completely insignificant human in a in a constant, you know, thousands and millions and billions of us, and that we're all going to die, and that has its own role to play in what happens with us. Absolutely, these are the existential questions that all of us grapple with, regardless of our conditioning, you know, and and we have to face. And there's a there's primal anxiety, you know, and and

confusion about these points. And and as we deepen into our inner knowing, actually they begin to resolve. And that's that's the beauty of the felt sense of knowing. And when you say those begin to resolve, the question that people want to ask is what what is that? What does that mean? And I think you're saying that you're not going to get there through the conscious mind, right, Yeah, it's not coming from the conscious mind. It comes from the inner knowing. So it's the knowing and the being

of that. What we discover is that we're not the separate self that we imagine we are. We discover we're unimaginably vast, and we could say connected. We're not separate from everyone and everyone else. And that's where the resolution comes. And that resolution comes from a sense of knowing that that that's what you just said. As an intellectual concept that we hear over and over and over again but

doesn't provide much actual comfort. No, the thought, the thought is pretty useless, but the actual experiential knowing of it is profoundly transformative. Excellent. Well, I think that is a great place to wrap up, So thanks so much for taking the time to come on. I've really enjoyed the conversation. On our show notes page, we will have blanks to your book your site. We will also have a free download of some of my favorite quotes from your book so people can explore it a little bit deeper and

hopefully will then go through and explore it further. Great. Thank you. Yeah, I've really I've really enjoyed our conversation or excellent. All right, thanks John, all right, goodbye. You can learn more about John J. Prendor Gast and this podcast and one you feed dot net slash j J. P.