Micro-dosing Mindfulness to Unlock Your Potential with Jake Eagle, LPC

0:00:00 - Speaker 1
Welcome. Welcome, jake. I am so excited to have you here. Thank you for joining me today. 

0:00:06 - Speaker 2
No, I've been looking forward to this. I know that you spoke with my co-author, I think, a few weeks ago. I haven't heard the conversation, I just know that he loved it. 

0:00:13 - Speaker 1
Yes, it hasn't come out yet, so by the time this one comes out, the listeners will have heard that conversation and it was such a fun conversation and I just really wanted to say that how much I enjoyed reading your book, because I've been in this self-help world or whatever you want to call it for a long time and each time you read something it feels like you dig deeper, you learn more. It's always just another way to say it, but I feel like it's been a while since I've read something and it's like this feels very different and really right. A lot of times it's more about oh, this is such a great way to look at and express it and I'm learning from it, but it wasn't like a new concept, whereas I feel like a lot of the things you guys talked about just felt new and profound and I just really appreciated that. So, thank you. 

0:01:01 - Speaker 2
That's great to hear. 

0:01:02 - Speaker 1
Yes, absolutely, and I feel like I can go so many places with this. But first let's start out by letting people know a little bit about yourself and how you got to where you are today. 

0:01:12 - Speaker 2
Okay, well, I'm living in Hawaii now. My wife and I moved here about seven years ago and before that we had lived in Santa Fe, new Mexico, and I had been in private practice there for 27 years as a psychotherapist, and before that I had spent many years running businesses. So I tend to be pretty pragmatic and grounded, and that was kind of my approach to doing therapy. And then in 2019, michael Amster and I Michael is my co-author, he's a doctor, pain specialist. He and I started getting interested in the emotion of awe, and there isn't a great deal of research on awe. It's been studied since about 2003. And a lot of the positive emotions have kind of been overlooked. The world of psychology focused on the negative emotions, thinking that's what we needed to study. But then positive psychology came along and there was a little bit more attention on positive emotions, and awe is one of those, and I don't know how much Michael talked about this, but I was teaching a course online and in that course I was asking people to meditate 10 minutes a day, and about half the people said they couldn't do it, they didn't have time, and so I asked them to do what I called a micro meditation and eventually, michael came up with the name micro dosing mindfulness and the idea was that people would meditate, essentially for 30 seconds maybe a minute, but generally less than that by focusing on something that they enjoyed placing their attention on, and it would give them a little bit of a break from whatever was going on. So I had people do that, and then, whenever I teach courses, I always do a pre-evaluation and a post-evaluation, and what surprised me was that in the post-evaluation, the people who did the micro dosing were getting results that were equal or better to the people who were spending 10 minutes a day meditating. So Michael and I became just sort of fascinated how does that work? Because we'd both been lifelong meditators, we had understood you have to meditate 10, 20 minutes a day. 

I think that Michael's pretty good and comfortable at meditating. I'm not. I don't enjoy it. I never felt like I was good or natural at it, and so I really like this micro dosing. So we ended up digging in and spending a week together, including my wife, who is. She and I teach workshops together, and she's very, very comfortable in terms of experiencing her senses and not getting lost in her head, which is where I tend to go. 

So the three of us worked on this and we recognized that what was happening is, when we introduced people to experience these micro meditations, they were experiencing the emotion of awe, and when we experience the emotion of awe it alters our state of consciousness and we can talk about that later but it alters our state of consciousness in such a way that it shifts our physiology, which shifts our emotional state, and it can be done. It turns out in 10, 15 seconds, it doesn't even take a minute. So we then decided we would do our own pilot projects. We each ran a pilot project a little bit more rigorous than the first time, and we got the same results, just great. Michael then tracked down a gentleman whose name is Dacker Keltner. Dacker is probably the best known researcher in the world on the emotion of awe and he runs the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley. And Dacker was fascinated when we shared our results, and so he helped us put together a substantial study at UC Berkeley. 

And we started this study just at the height of the COVID pandemic, and we had two groups one group because we wanted to try and help people who were struggling with the pandemic, so we had one group of doctors, nurses, healthcare practitioners, another group of patients, and the total number is about 500 people. It was a three week program where you practice using the awe method three times a day for three weeks and at the end of that study which was extremely rigorous and well done and managed by some grad students at the end of that study, what we saw were these statistically significant improvements, where there were decreases in anxiety, depression, loneliness, burnout, decreases in symptoms of physical pain and discomfort, increases in well being, increases in mindfulness, and it's important to keep this in perspective. All of that happened with people spending less than a minute a day doing these micro doses of mindfulness, and so this was really surprising to have such dramatic results. And that ended up leading to publishers coming to us and asking us if we would write a book about the study which we did. The book came out in 2023. 

And I think one scientific paper came out so far. Another one will be coming out. And then Michael and I went on and we did another study at UC Davis, which we just finished we don't have the results yet and that was for people struggling with long COVID, trying to see if we could help those people, because people struggling with long COVID or people who are dealing with severe depression or fatigue. They often don't feel like they can sit in meditation 10 or 20 minutes a day, and what we've done is we've found an alternative and, as you said in your opening remarks, it's really novel. This is something that is new in the world of mindfulness, and the idea is that you practice three times a day more if you want, but at least three times a day about 10 to 15 seconds, and you can bring about these very dramatic changes. 

0:06:42 - Speaker 1
Yes, I love that and I want to reference everyone back to Michael's episode, which I don't have the number right now but I'll make sure I link it in the show notes, because he does go in depth about the awe method and using it and so people can reference back to that of what they're doing during that 10 to 15 seconds, since he explained it really beautifully. And, of course, in the book it is all detailed out as well. And it is so profound because I definitely came from the feeling of like I got to be doing more and I think so much of us feel that pressure, of like we're not doing enough right. A lot of my audiences, like me, are recovering perfectionist and we put we're really hard on ourselves and put a lot of pressure on ourselves. So it's profound and I think sometimes it's so helpful to have the research back it up to be like this actually makes a difference, these micro doses. I know that helps me a lot to hear that. 

0:07:33 - Speaker 2
Yeah, and what's happening when people are doing this is they're interrupting a pattern, and to me it's a pattern of chronic tension. Primarily Right, you could say it's about being busy, or it's about feeling overwhelmed, or it's because we're in pain, but all of those things create tension. And what we found is that when people practice the awe method, the metaphor I've been using recently is that your nervous system is like a spring and when you wake up in the day, in the morning, it's kind of loose and then as the day goes along, it starts to get compressed more and more and more and by the end of the day the nervous system is tightly wound and more reactive and more sensitive to signals of pain and things like that. What happens when we practice the awe method is we're relieving the tension on the spring, we're releasing the tension in the nervous system and, as I say, it takes maybe 10, 15 seconds to do that. 

0:08:26 - Speaker 1
Yeah, I love that. And what I love about the book as well and the way you both speak of things, is that you both acknowledge that the profound effects of this and also that there's more to somebody who has deep chronic pain or trauma or things like that that there are other elements to it as well but that this piece is so important. And I think that for me I know that was a piece that was missing in my own journey is that I spent so much time in the more intense trauma work, because I think there is so much I mean, I've seen it, that's what I do is the value of helping rewrite stories at a deep nervous system level. But also we have to break those patterns throughout the day as well, because otherwise they build up and this is such a beautiful way to do it. So, yeah, yeah. 

0:09:13 - Speaker 2
And you talk about stories and part of what's happening is that we all have experiences and then we create a story about the experience. It's a way to encapsulate it. It may be a simple label or it may be a fairly involved, complex story that we tell, and many of the stories we tell we've been telling for decades. You can talk with people, whether it's in therapy or whether it's casually, and people will go back and they'll recite a story they've been telling for 10, 20, 30 years. And the question I have always is is that story useful, is it constructive? And very often our stories are not really very constructive. We use them in ways where we limit ourselves and we hold ourselves back in an outdated version of who we are. 

What I like to say to people is that there are three different ways that we can work with our stories. The first one is the most elegant and, for me, the most difficult, and that is to stop telling them and that's to just be so present that all the internal dialogue stops, goes away, and what we've found is the best way to do that is to pay exquisite attention to our senses. So when we hear, the story starts to come up in our mind. If we can go to our senses and, by the way, most not all, but most of our stories start with our senses. We have a sensorial experience Maybe it's pain, maybe it's discomfort, maybe it's pressure it could be not in our stomach which makes us feel anxious, and then we start telling a story. 

Why am I anxious? What is it that's going on? So, before we tell the story, if we can just pay attention to our senses and go back into them not labeling them, but just simply noticing our senses and not let the story take hold, that to me, is the most elegant way to stop the story, and some people are very, very good at that. I find it challenging, although I've gotten much better with practice. 

0:11:08 - Speaker 1
Yes. 

0:11:09 - Speaker 2
The second thing we can do is we can change the story, and this, in my mind, this is something everyone can do. It doesn't require any particular skill. When I say change the story, I give you a few examples. Let's say that you and I had a conflict, we had some tension, and I'm ruminating about it. I'm telling a story about what you did to me and how unfair it was. 

Well, almost all the time when we tell stories, we tell them from our perspective. So the first thing I can do is I can change the story by talking about it from your perspective. What was this like for you? How did you feel? What was going on? And as soon as I do that, my orientation and my relationship to the story changes. So shifting perspective is great, and if it's not that I am going to step into your point of view, I could step into some objective third person point of view someone who I really respect I might say what would Gandhi think of this? And I get a very different orientation. 

Another way I can change the perspective is by changing the time frame. So again, you and I have some tension or conflict in our relationship and I start telling a story, but I can stop myself and go out 10 years, five years a year, and look back and think will this matter? Will I remember this? Does this have any significance whatsoever? It's very simple but it's very effective, because most of the time when we run out in the future and then we look back, we realize what we're dealing with is probably not that significant. 

0:12:39 - Speaker 1
Yeah, thank you Absolutely. Those are three beautiful ways. I love the different ways. I think that's something I've been playing a lot with lately. Just putting a course together and teaching this on a more broad spectrum instead of just one-on-one, is how to know which thing to use when, versus which tool and what to move to. I'm curious if you have any ways, but what I'm coming into is that the more you're practicing different things, the more you're just open to. Let me just try this and see what happens, without any attachment to the outcome and just having a willingness to play with different things and just notice how your body responds, the better you get at knowing which one is likely to be supportive in the moment. But there's really no one right answer or perfect script or flow chart of which thing to go to. 

0:13:32 - Speaker 2
I think that's right. I don't think there's an always go to X, and I agree with you that one of the most important things is to pay attention to our body. We do something, we try something and we pay attention. Did that help? Am I more relaxed? Am I more present? Am I clearer? If the answer is no, then maybe we try something else. However, I want to also suggest a counterpoint, which is what I see is that people are doing so many things, trying so many techniques, listening to so many podcasts, reading so many articles, that they oftentimes don't take any one thing far enough and become skilled at. These things are practices. We call them practices for a reason, and I think I would encourage people to pick something they find attractive, desirable, and spend a month just using that skill, using that method, and see what happens as you become more proficient at it, because a lot of these things are wonderful, but people don't learn to develop the skill to the point where they get the complete benefit. I think that's really important. 

0:14:38 - Speaker 1
That is yes. I want to just have you shout that from the rooftops, because I know myself fell into that and it's still a pattern that I now even know what that pattern feels like in my body when I'm hearing something new and it feels like the shiny squirrel, whatever. My brain is like, ooh, ooh, that could be the next thing. Right, it's actually gotten to the point where I recognize a pattern and that is actually almost my sign to not pursue that thing and to focus on what I'm working on, because especially again for the listeners who are struggling with chronic pain you're dissociated from your body that often what happens when we start tapping into our body or paying attention, what we often feel first are really uncomfortable emotions. It often doesn't feel good or all of a sudden some of the discomfort is brought up, or some of the repressed emotions are brought up, and then we make that mean that something's gone wrong, when in fact that's the way through. 

And if you don't mind, I want to read this quote that I thought was so good from Kirk Schneider, the author of Awakening to Awe. It says accessing awe can be more difficult if we become numb to our feelings. I have come to realize that the day I'm immune to pain and completely healed is the day when I have become numb to life. Contrary to this, I believe that one cannot feel awe if one has not seen one's own wounds and accepted that scars are inevitable. For me, healing involves being in awe of my whole self, which requires great attention and appreciation of who I am, my shadow side not being an exception, yeah. 

0:16:14 - Speaker 2
Beautiful. Yeah, we have a chapter in the book and I don't remember where that quote comes from. It may be that chapter, but it's about accessing the emotion of awe in what we call times of strife, when we're going through difficult things, we are in pain, we got an unfortunate medical diagnosis, we lose a loved one. The point that we're making is that awe is part of everything, including the so-called painful or negative emotions. In other words, if I lose a person I love and I'm experiencing grief, I wouldn't be experiencing that if there wasn't something precious about that same experience, which is that I was deeply attached to the person I love. We can focus our attention on either side of that coin. We can focus on the grief where we can focus on what it was and maybe still is, that's precious to us. We encourage people, when they have these negative feelings, instead of labeling them as negative, to see a broader perspective, so that they reconnect with the preciousness, they reconnect with the love, they reconnect with the beauty. It changes the experience of loss or grief or anxiety. 

0:17:33 - Speaker 1
Yes, yeah, you have a story in there of Jade who has run over and she has this issue. I mean sorry I didn't write down all the details, but I mean she was run over in a pretty bad accident, and it says she had already been practicing this. I think that was such a key point is that she was skilled in this. It had been something she had brought into her life, and she asked the question or had the statement of I have a choice in how I respond to this life altering event that just happened to me as she was lying there. It actually made me think of if you don't mind me sharing personal experience when I was giving birth to my son. I think I was like I didn't have the language to use it, but I had been doing a lot of my own inner work and mindfulness work at this point, and there was a moment of his heart rate drops. Something happened, and I had the epidural, which meant I didn't have control over half my body, and I remember them all of a sudden, people rushing in and flipping me over, and I have this. 

My memory of that time is the awareness of something had gone wrong with him, and all I remember, though, is having my head down on the pillow, because I was in them on all fours, and having my head smushed down and just being so aware of my breath. 

It was like everything slowed down and I could feel my heart beat, and I didn't feel like there was awareness of the seriousness of the situation. It wasn't diminishing that, but the anxiety and the dread and the fear wasn't there. It was actually this calm that just totally overtook me of like everything that could be done is being done right now, and I truly feel like I'm being taken care of and we're here, and my husband was there, and he remembers the moment very differently, but I was like I was actually pretty chill at that moment, and my son turned out just fine. There were other complications that happened, but it was right, it was everything ended up being okay, but it was. It was this moment of just everything slowing down and just being so present and just yeah, it's very powerful. Anyways, it made me think of that when I read her story. 

0:19:35 - Speaker 2
Well, what you're describing connect a few dots. I'm guessing that maybe you had been practicing various things for some time and we were talking before about becoming good at these skills. Yeah, that when you're in a critical moment, like you were, or the story about Jade in our book who was hit by a truck, that skill comes into play. It's not like you have to think about it, it's there, it shows up. The other thing is that what you described is almost a timelessness. 

0:20:04 - Speaker 1
Yeah. 

0:20:06 - Speaker 2
And we've identified is that there are three levels of consciousness that we readily move in and out of, or we can, and the first level is called safety consciousness, and that's where we spend most of our time. That's all about taking care of business, getting things done, checking off the things on our list, taking care of loved ones, doing things that are necessary in part of life, and we want to get good at it and, by the way, it's where most therapy takes place is in safety consciousness, and I think this is a pretty big mistake, a pretty big limitation in the world of psychology. The next level is called heart consciousness and that's simply going into a state of gratitude and appreciation, and when we do that there's all kinds of research to back this up that we have a heart opening experience, and when we have that experience we shift our physiology, we shift our perspective of the world, we go into a more relaxed state, more of a parasympathetic instead of a sympathetic state, and it's taught in many different ways gratitude practices, there's the heart math program, there are many things out there, and I think they're great. The next level is the one that we access the least and that is what we call spacious consciousness, and the historical way of getting there was through some kind of contemplative practice that required a lot of time and expertise and often year of skill development to be able to go into spaciousness. 

When we go into that, we lose track of time. That's why your story reminded me of this. And it doesn't matter that you were in a hospital, you were in a critical situation you still went into what I would call an altered state. Time disappears. Typically. When that happens, words disappear. We often can't really describe what happened, and that seems like that's true for you. And when we have no sense of time and we're no longer using words, we become remarkably present and we're connecting with something beyond ourselves that I'm not going to label because I don't know that there is a label, but it's bigger than just us. So there's a diminishment of our ego and our self-importance and there's an awareness of something greater. 

This is a state called spacious consciousness, and what we found and this is we stumbled on this and it's, I think, it's the opening line of our book that we were kind of embarrassed that we found what looked like a shortcut to transcendence, and what I mean by that is that literally in 10, 15 seconds, we can take ourselves into that space of spaciousness and when we do, we've completely altered our physiological and emotional state and I think that's what happened to you. I know Jade well and I know that when she was hit by the truck and she was laying on the ground and she had those thoughts about I have a choice, I know that she entered this very expansive state and then she sort of came back down. We can't live in that state, we can't stay there all the time, but just going there occasionally gives our system a complete reset and I think that that's a little bit of what you're describing. 

0:23:14 - Speaker 1
Yeah, absolutely, and I loved the description of the three levels of consciousness and just the acknowledgement of the goal isn't to live in spaciousness all the time. I know for me that's again as a recovering perfectionist, right? You hear about these states and you're like, oh, but I'm not there, something's gone wrong. Oh, no, I got caught up being busy and it's like I would just make myself wrong and beat myself up for it, and I know my listeners feel the same. So it's just really refreshing to hear like, oh, yes, like we're supposed to move in and out of these states and that spaciousness isn't one that we need to be living in. But you're saying only these brief moments can be enough to reset. 

0:23:52 - Speaker 2
It's all about fluidity and flexibility. The idea is to fluidly ask the question what state am I in and what state do I want to be in? So I'm trying to connect with somebody on an intimate level, but I noticed that I'm in safety consciousness, worried that maybe the conversation won't go well. I say to myself is this where I want to be? No, no, I want to be open, I want to shift into hard consciousness, and that doesn't always mean that we can do it just because we want to. But as we develop the skill, we can shift our state of consciousness very quickly. 

0:24:27 - Speaker 1
Yes, if you don't mind, I want to go back to the developing skill piece. Yeah, because I feel like you know what you were saying earlier about people not spending long enough to just concentrate on one and pick one thing and learn the skill is so true, and I mean, with all the abundance of podcasts and books and social media bites, I mean it is so easy to be distracted and to feel like you're constantly just chasing the next best thing. 

0:24:56 - Speaker 2
Yeah, and I actually think that the current state of variety and the plethora of things that are out there, I actually think we're working at odds with our own self development, that we're just trying to do so many things and we're just skimming the surface and at the real point. For me, the real point of self-help and self-development work is not to entertain, not to distract ourselves, but to go more deeply into our experience of living a conscious life, and that comes back in some way to practice and intention and developing skill. I'm writing a course actually it's going to be released in probably another couple of months and one of the requirements of the course it takes six months to go through it and every month you get a booklet and then you get two audio tapes every week to reinforce what was in the booklet. But one of the requirements is that at the end of each booklet you have to go online and take a little. You know it's a little quiz and it demonstrates that you read it, it demonstrates that you understand it, it demonstrates that you've been practicing and if you haven't, then you don't keep going. 

And what I'm asking people to do is take this seriously, take six months and commit to essentially a practice and try not to distract yourself with a lot of other things and then at the end of six months you can see whether it was worth it or not. Did you get value out of it? And I think people will decide month by month. Is this worth continuing? But it's an example of I'm trying to create a balance to this concern. I have what you and I are talking about, which is people just lightly touching down, skimming the surface and never becoming proficient at these skills. 

0:26:41 - Speaker 1
Yeah, and I mean to be fair, it's a fantastic way to avoid having to look deep inside, right? I mean so. Ultimately at least I know that was what the pattern was for me is, you know, there's a part of me that felt very threatened by looking within, so it's like, just look over here, oh, maybe try this thing. And the whole irony was that, yes, there's a multitude of techniques and they teach them in different ways and talk about them in different ways, but the end goal is, all the same, pretty much of coming back to ourselves and being present. It's just what gets you there. 

0:27:15 - Speaker 2
Yeah, and I would add to that. I like that. I think it is coming back to ourselves and being present. And then remember when we started I said I ran companies for years and I'm pretty pragmatic. So I think we come back to ourselves, we are present, but we also have to build skills to be mature, to communicate well, to be considerate, not to be self-indulgent all the time, which I think the self-help world in some ways promotes. So there are these very basic, fundamental qualities and I would put them under the general category of maturity that are necessary. We do need to learn how to communicate, how to respond appropriately to criticism, how to witness other people and not take what they're saying and make it about us or take it personally, and these are all aspects of maturity. 

0:28:09 - Speaker 1
Yes, I absolutely love that you brought that in. Thank you for saying that. It has been something that I have been playing with how to communicate behind the scenes. I just feel like I haven't fully put my own words together for it, but that was so beautifully said of this, just like radical responsibility, which I mean that's not my phrase, obviously, but for ourselves, and I feel like our culture so lacks the transition between childhood and adulthood. This is my personal reflections that I'm sharing out loud for the first time so you don't mind hearing it. 

But it's like, even when you're a teenager, it's like we're in school, we're still being told exactly what to do. We're in this structured environment where really at the end of the semester, everything disappears. If you didn't do your reading or you failed a homework or something like that, it just vanishes. There's obviously some consequences, but it's like you kind of keep getting these sort of fresh starts anyways. It's very easy to just be like oh well, I didn't make a lot of friends, or maybe I made some bad relationships here in high school. Well, I'm going to go to college where I could just reinvent my right. There's just this. I don't know. It's a really weird place and I remember being thrown into adulthood. I'm like wait, I don't know how to take care of myself, like no one taught me these things and I feel like, yeah, we're kind of stuck in this perpetual childhood and immaturity At least I found myself was, and that's been my journey is actually becoming mature and taking responsibility, which is really uncomfortable. 

0:29:39 - Speaker 2
Well, it's uncomfortable when we don't have any guide. 

We don't know how to do it, we don't know what the steps are. 

If we know what the steps are, if we have, for example, a great mentor, it's actually exciting. It's an exciting journey, and I agree with you that we don't have a clear transition in our culture from childhood to adulthood. What we're lacking, I believe, are rituals, and what I would like to see is a ritual for kids, say, early impuberty. That is one step, and then I'd like to see another ritual somewhere around the 18 to 20 year age mark, where we recognize that we are individuating from our parents and it is time for us to start taking more responsibility, and it is also time for us to begin to recognize that they are people too they are not just a mother and a father and go through a process, and it's not a quick process. The process of individuating is a lifelong process and we do it in stages along the way and hopefully we get to a point where we're relating to our parents as adults, in other words, having adult-adult interactions instead of child-parent or child-adult, and we have very little in our culture that shows people how to do this. 

0:30:50 - Speaker 1
Yeah, and I think, as a parent with six-year-old, what I'm seeing in a lot of the parenting circles is, I think, that people trying to avoid this happening, as if it shouldn't happen. So I feel like people are trying to promote showing up as a parent, you know, like they're trying to show their whole selves to their really young children. I can see a lot of things that are trying to alleviate this tension that happens as we are taking on responsibility for ourselves and realizing that our parents are their own people. But they're trying to do it by actually putting the onus on a young child to take too early on versus accepting it, as this is just going to happen. We all have to go through the discomfort of realizing we're not a child anymore, and it's a really interesting thing. So I think it's what you're talking about, of having the rituals and having it much more intentional and seeing the phases as they are, of just knowing these are just continued phases of development. 

We have the milestones for little kids, but I think we forget that. Yeah, I mean, I don't know what the milestones are of adult development, like when is my maturity level supposed to catch up, or you know what's supposed to hit at certain times. I probably missed some of those already, but, like you know, I had my bot mitzvah when I was 13. But beyond that it was kind of like there was no marker of am. I kind of at the phase because I do like to think, obviously, that we continue to develop over time, but, yeah, I feel like I've lost all or don't have any reference point for that. 

0:32:18 - Speaker 2
Yeah, we generally don't have roadmaps. I'm fortunate in that one of my mentors, hen, and I studied with a couple who developed a model of human development. They also developed a way of talking, speaking that helps us take more responsibility for ourselves. It's called Persep language, but they developed a model that shows 10 stages of human development and what we do to go through each one of those, what the challenges are, and I'll send you a PDF of that and if you'd like to share it with your listeners, you're welcome to do that. Awesome. 

I think it's incredibly helpful to have a roadmap that says more or less this is about where I should be at this age. It's not precise, but in general, and if I have a hole in my development, I can look back and see what did I miss, what didn't I get and what can I do about that now. Now there are some things that we miss early in childhood and we actually can't go back and fill that hole, and I believe again that current day psychotherapy often misrepresent this to people and it suggests that we can go back and fill a hole when we had a lack of nurturance from our mother or our father as a child, and I actually don't believe that's true. I think we end up living to some degree with that hole and we can find ways to compensate and we can understand it. But it's hard if, as an adult, you're trying to get another adult to play that role in your life. It really it's very complicated. 

0:33:45 - Speaker 1
Yeah, I so agree. Yeah, and the way it was taught to me which I always appreciate in this kind of almost mixing a couple different of my own mentors of if there was a need that wasn't met as a child, you can never fill that, but you can attend to it as your adult self and learn to hold it in a different way. So that part feels like they're stuck in a perpetual state of unmet need. So it's acknowledged and validated and held, but yeah, it's never, it can't ever be met, and especially by another person. That is a recipe for repeating patterns that are unsupportive. 

0:34:21 - Speaker 2
I think the best chance of getting it met actually is in therapy, with reparenting. Sometimes a therapist a really skillful therapist can play a role where they help us reparent ourselves, but that doesn't mean that they can fulfill all the needs and roles that a parent should have played in our lives. But they can help us to some degree. 

0:34:42 - Speaker 1
Yes. 

0:34:43 - Speaker 2
I wanted to come back to because you and I have gone off on some tangents and I wanted to come back to. All of these things we're talking about are pieces of the puzzle and they're pieces that I had 10 years ago, before Michael and I started working on the emotion of awe. But something changed when I became aware of the emotion of awe, because I knew most of the things that you and I are talking about. But what I didn't know, what I didn't have, was a way to break the cycle of perfectionism, break the cycle of striving, break the cycle of chronic stories, and that's what awe changed. So, instead of carrying discomfort, pain, tension for days, weeks, months and years, the awe method gave me a way to just let go again numerous times a day so that I didn't build to. That point could lead to despair or depression or severe anxiety. And that's what's been so profound for me about the awe method. 

It's not that the method itself solves all of our problems. Of course it doesn't, but it gives our nervous system a break that I think, very few things in our culture do. We go to Tai Chi class that would do it. We might go to a yoga class that may do. It depends how much we're in our head, but those things take 45 minutes or an hour and often people feel they can't do it. And with the awe method I've never had anybody say, no, I don't have 10 seconds to help myself feel better. Everybody's like well, I mean, if it really only takes 10 seconds, sure I'll give it a try. And then they step into this very simple process that they feel at a physiological level and it feels good. So now they want to do it more. And that, to me, is what's so significant about tapping into this positive emotion. 

0:36:39 - Speaker 1
Yeah, absolutely no, it really is. It is beautiful and I've been intentionally practicing it more myself since I've been nice and yeah and I know I am someone who carries sometimes feeling the positive emotions is what feels so uncomfortable. Like I have the visceral reaction to like feeling good. It's like, oh, that feels uncomfortable. Do I deserve to feel good? Right, which is a whole other podcast episode there, but the 10, 15 seconds in itself has been such a great way to like even micro dose being like and I felt a positive emotion and I'm safe to my nervous system, right. Exactly Like who is okay to feel really good, that that was safe case. You haven't heard anyone talk about it in that way Like it's been really effective just because it's so short. 

0:37:21 - Speaker 2
Well, actually in our book we talk about Dr Stephen Porges, who developed polyvagal theory, and for people who don't know, I won't go into a lot of detail about it. But Dr Porges has done a lot of research and he's reached the conclusion that, fundamentally, people cannot fully heal if they don't feel safe, and so his entire emphasis is on how do we help people work with their nervous system, get them to a place where they feel safe, before we ask them to do a lot of personal work. And what's unique about the emotion of awe? Are your listeners very familiar with parasympathetic, sympathetic nervous system? 

0:37:58 - Speaker 1
If they've been and if not I have earlier. If you go back to my very early episodes, they talk about it. 

0:38:04 - Speaker 2
So, just briefly, the sympathetic is the fight flight and the parasympathetic is when we're relaxed and most self-help methods are trying to get people deeply into the parasympathetic, very relaxed state. That's what mindfulness does or can do. What's unique about awe is that if you imagine a scale from zero to 10 and 10 is being chased by a tiger, your sympathetic nervous system is at 100, it's just revved up, or at 10, right and zero is completely relaxed. Fully relaxed, no concerns whatsoever. 

Awe is probably somewhere around a three, so you're deeply relaxed but mildly energized, and Dr Porges talks about it as a state that's similar to when we are playing, and he says if you watch children play, they're relaxed, but they're energized, and there's something about that that makes the experience of awe, the emotion of awe, more desirable to a lot of people than just simply going into a deeply relaxed state. There's something refreshing or rejuvenating or energizing that people seem to feel is really helpful, and so that's one aspect of why I think people do this a few times and then they want to do it more. There's a little juice there. 

0:39:21 - Speaker 1
Yes, absolutely, and I know for again myself and so many people in chronic pain or who have experienced trauma and things like that the very act of the full relaxation, yes, is what feels threatening Right exactly your body's like we can't relax, someone could come attack us right now. 

So I have found and I think I mentioned this in my podcast with Michael, but it was so interesting to read your book is that I use something called the wonder driven mind. I didn't have the language of awe and I was like, oh, I guess there's a lot of overlap of I've found wonderment to be so accessible from any state versus trying to like force relaxation or force positive thinking of like I can have wonderment that I feel super depressed right now. They don't create the same tension and they feel like I can hold them much easier together. So I feel like awe is the same way, that it's like you can bring it in from almost any states of like you could even have awe about the amount of pain you're in right Like you can bring it in and it's just so much more accessible. 

0:40:25 - Speaker 2
I agree. I think it's one of the unique things about awe. And just to clarify, I don't know that it's awe about the pain and maybe it's possible, but awe is bigger than the pain. I can be in pain, but I can also connect with the awe of being alive. They can coexist right and I suppose it could be about the pain also, but it can be about other things as well. 

0:40:49 - Speaker 1
Yeah, I brought it in and, if you don't mind me sharing, I just had this conversation with a client recently. She's really realizing how certain interactions will bring on a very intense pain, and so she's been able to bring in wonderment of like wow, it's amazing that saying words or someone saying words to me, while you know this body part isn't moving or experiencing anything, can create pain. Like wow, that's fascinating, right. And so it's like bring it in that perspective just helps not get totally sucked. Yes, I'll put that, it's been. Yeah, it's a really fun place to play and I just think it makes it sometimes more accessible. When someone feels like they're so tunnel vision in on themselves or their pain, it's like, okay, at least I could have the wonderment or awe about this. And then it's like, okay, now I can go to the next level and slowly bring it into the more peripheral, you know big picture view, or possibly quickly. 

0:41:46 - Speaker 2
Yeah, possibly quickly, yeah. That's one of the other misnumbers or misconceptions in psychology is that personal growth and change takes a long time. It's hard, it's slow, you can't chip away at it. I do a lot of couples counseling and when couples work with me I always say to them if you think this is going to be hard and take a long time, it probably won't work because your relationship may not survive that you need to shift this very quickly, where you start treating each other respectfully and kindly and considerably now. And if there are reasons you can't do that, we can explore those. But that shift needs to happen quickly and the faster it happens, the more likely you are to be successful. So I hold that expectation and that possibility for people. 

0:42:33 - Speaker 1
I love that. I love that I think change can happen so much faster than we ever expect when we're open to it. 

0:42:39 - Speaker 2
Yes, yeah, I'm not sure where you are time wise, but I wanted to just quickly mention the steps of the awe method for people who didn't hear the recordings. Yeah, absolutely. I won't go into a lot of detail, but I just wanted people to know that we created an acronym out of the word awe, and so the A stands for the first step, which is to place our attention on something that we appreciate, value or find to be amazing, and that can be a physical object, or it could be a memory, it could be an idea, so it doesn't have to be something in our environment, but it can be. Second step is the W, and that is for weight, and the idea with that is that we are going to just pause slightly and I'm talking two, three seconds where we exaggerate the attention that we've placed on whatever is the object, the source of our awe. We take it from 100 to 110 percent and something profound happens in the weighting, which is that parts of our brain known as a default mode network, they quiet down so we have no internal chatter. 

And then the E in awe stands for exhale and expand, and this whole process is essentially a cycle of breathing. So we're inhaling with the attention, we're pausing with the weight and then we're exhaling and expanding, and as we exhale we activate the vagus nerve, which induces a relaxed state, and it amplifies whatever sensations are in our body. And so, because we were focused on something positive, the sensations are positive and when those are amplified it's a profound moment, and in that moment some people will experience just a mild sense of joy or ease. Other people will have a real release of energy that they'll feel moving up their spine, and that's quite dramatic when that happens. So I just wanted people to know the process is about that simple. I suspect that Michael went into a little bit more detail on the previous recording and it may be good to go back, but this is something that's easy to learn, it's easy to do and, as far as we know, there's no downside to this and it's free. 

0:44:45 - Speaker 1
Yeah right, that's awesome for sure. Yes, Thank you for going over the steps and thank you so much for your time and your insights and for being here. I so so appreciate it. Are there any last words or anything that you want to leave people with? 

0:45:01 - Speaker 2
I think just this idea that personal development doesn't have to be hard, it doesn't have to take a long time. Part of the reason it seems hard and it takes a long time is because we think that it will. We think that way, but it's not necessarily true that when we change our perspective. Doing this kind of work it can be relatively easy and change can come about relatively quickly. And of course there are exceptions. But in general I encourage people to approach personal development work in a lighter way, while also, as I mentioned earlier, while also putting emphasis on the need to develop our own personal maturity, sort of this combination I can approach it lightly and yet I need to take responsibility to develop my own maturity and my own skills. 

0:45:51 - Speaker 1
Yes, absolutely beautiful. Thank you so much, jane. For anybody who's watching, this is the book right here and I will link all the resources in the show notes. The book is called the Power of Awe and, yes, all the links will be in the show notes and I'll send you that. 

0:46:07 - Speaker 2
PDF with the 10 stages of development. I think you might find it interesting. 

0:46:12 - Speaker 1
Absolutely, and I will put that in there as well. Thank you so much for your time, jake. 

0:46:17 - Speaker 2
Delightful to be with you. 

Transcribed by https://podium.page