C (4:06)

What a beautiful question. And you know, I just really used a phrase recently to, to listen, to disappear, to, to literally watch. I, I really have five steps, if you will. Five steps that I'm constantly thinking of. I call it the Tai Chi of empathy.

B (4:33)

Okay.

C (4:34)

And it's, it's, it's literally watching the body language of the person, then allowing what they say drop into the content, into your ears, and then drop it 12 inches. This is the most difficult part for all helpers because what ends up happening is they drop it upward to their pesky ego and they get curious or they get into advice of solving, or they move into I statement, which is, I know exactly what you're going through. I got I, I too. And so all of those 2 inches above the ears, but 12 inches away is this felt sense of if I was you, I would, I, I would be thinking, which is the first domain of empathy, which is, what are they thinking? And then the second domain is if I was you, what would I be feeling? And then I offer that. That's a deeper form of empathy. And when it lands on people, if you do it gently, if you do it with a genuineness, then what will end up happening is it'll land on them and they will feel your vulnerability. They, you'll feel the desire to know you, and then what will be evoked from them is their own story, their narrative in a safer way. So what's going on with me is that I practice regularly to be mindful, to get my own material out of the way, get my own history off to the side, move that out of the way, because I want to listen to you, experience you from a place of disappearance, that I don't matter. Now, what that simply means, Stan, for me, is that it's not a partnership. It's a place of radical humility. It's like I don't matter, at least in the initial phase of this conversation. And if I can do that, if I can demonstrate that, if I can practice that mindfulness, to put it over to the side, whatever my counter transference is, whatever my story is, whatever I'm carrying, just gently put it over to the side to disappear into. If I was you, I would be thinking. If I was you, I would be feeling. I'm going to put that in a, in a genuine way, in a gentle way. I'm going to offer it to you. And then the most important part of all of this is to be so attuned to how it Lands, watching how it lands. So those are the five steps. You see, you hear it, you drop it to the heart, get a felt sense. You offer that, and then you watch it, how it lands. And then you take in that, and then you go through it again, and then you go through it again. And that's how I end up in this idea of Tai Chi, of empathy. If you do that regularly, then you created a state of compassion.

B (8:08)

We. We often everyone. A lot of people know the kind of. The old notion of. Of walk a mile in someone's shoes or whatever, I think was that To Kill a Mockingbird or something. And. But you just. The way you describe it there just makes it come alive, really. You know, it's. It's not a. It's no, it's no small thing. It's. It's not a flippant idea. It's profound. And there's this very. This intention to disentangle ourselves and all of who we are and what we've experienced and so on. To disentangle that, I suppose, from that sense of the other person and their thoughts and feelings, it's probably not possible to. Well, I don't. Maybe this is where you really do aspire, is to sort of really disappear from. From that moment. Which is an interesting thought for me because I often feel like, you know, there's always a little bit of me that's kind of trying to kind of relate to the other person and their thoughts and feelings. But I guess the aspiration is certainly to separate that out, to disappear, to not matter so much in this conversation as to really have that kind of felt sense. And it takes a lot of humility. It takes a kind of a courage in a way, too, because you sort of having to just back yourself that you're able to be in that space and to not reach for something to feel better or calmer or, you know, sort of to relax yourself, but rather to just sit in that unknown of what's it going to be that I arrive at with. With that felt sense. So there's a whole lot of really deep qualities that one has to engage to, actually. And I really love that, you know, just to drop it 12 inches from. From the ears to the heart sort of thing and really. Really start to experience that other person.

C (10:24)

And. And that pattern of doing that with everybody you serve becomes the practice of compassion. The practice is the dropping the 12 inches, and then everybody's throwing something at you in many different ways, you know, And I. I'm thinking about, you know, this. This guy in a state hospital saying to me, did you know there was a camera in every electrical socket here? And everybody was gonna like, that's your mental illness speaking. That, you know, how do you know that all of these things was 2 inches? But if you drop it down to your heart, you can hear. You can hear the person say, I'm not sure I can trust you. I'm not sure I can trust this place. Now, if you do that gently, you could even be wrong. And the person will develop a partnership with you and go, no. And then they'll start telling you what it is, and then you get to do it again. What if we chose that to be this, The, The. The number one skill?

B (11:43)

I listened to your most recent episode on your podcast. I think it's, you are not alone. And there was that moment in that conversation where your guest there said, I'm going to push back on you a little bit there, you know, there was a moment where you kind of didn't get it quite right, I suppose. And that sense of safeness between you meant that he felt quite able to, you know, kind of. Yeah. Say, nah, not, not quite that. But that's. That's sort of the whole point really, I suppose, is, is these are just hunches that we might be offering. We're certainly not necessarily going to get it right every time.

C (12:28)

Well, and, and what I do is, in my trainings, I. I ask people, would you be willing to screw up 20% of the time? Would you really be willing? Because I don't know if you can do what I'm asking you, if you're not willing to be that radically humble to get it wrong. Because it's a guess. Empathy is a gas. If I was you, I would be thinking, that's a guess. If I was you, I would be feeling, that's a guess. And so what we're trying to do is guess, why are we guessing rather than just repeating. Because that's not empathy. Empathy is merging into another person's soul and then differentiating. Just like our breath. We breathe in and we exhale, and it's. It's the same rhythm. And I'm going to go in, and I'm getting as close as I can, and then I'm going to step away. I'm going to watch how it lands before. Just a couple of minutes before, you used one of my most favorite words, and that is the word courage. You know, courage to me is. Is embracing the mystery. It encourages to take a risk and not know what the heck the outcome's going to be right. And, and again, what I've witnessed in trying to train helpers is they're so caught up in not wanting to be wrong or not willing to accept the idea that there's a mystery, that they continue to do power over. And when they do power over, they restimulate the original trauma. They, they create the trauma whisper and they actually make people more anxious. And then if we really follow through on this compassion, it quiets the nerve endings. It really does quiet the nerves. It's the medication. And you would say, well, a good question could do that. No, it doesn't. Because a question is a demand for information. It's cognitive and it's fun. So my definition, for instance, of motivational interviewing, which is not what we're talking about, is we change people through the heart, then through the mind.

B (15:17)

How much of the thoughts and feelings, you know, dropping into the heart space, imagining for a moment how that person might be thinking or what they might be feeling. How much of that are you feeling yourself.

C (15:40)

On a great day? All of it, right? That's a good day. Not so much. It's the quality of the work comes down to can I practice? Can I practice? Can I practice just what you just said? I. I want to. If somebody has got tears behind their eyes, I want to feel it in my heart. They haven't even cried yet, but I can, I can experience it behind their eyes. And so what am I going to say if I wanted to? You. You're filled with tears right now. Because I can feel it, I can see it, I can experience it. It's the mat it that. That's when I'm doing my best. Now I have a lot of projects, a lot going on, so I can get my brain going and not be present with people. But I do think that, you know, the Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese monk, said the, the greatest gift you can give another human being is your presence. And I think that's true. But this is the hard work, right? We have to put it aside all of the projects. I, I can sit easily in my. With, with a person and all of a sudden find myself, flick it off to the, oh, wait a minute, I'm supposed to get back to her or get back to them or, you know, I mean, I can feel it. It's. But the discipline, it's just like mindfulness. It's like a meditation. The discipline is like, can I sit in this moment and be in that kind of mindfulness? So I can only say some days I walk Away going. And some days I go. That was not my best. But what I know is that my practice, after 25 years of practicing and being focused on, you know, I'm so much better. I'm so, so much. Yeah. And people know it.

B (17:55)

There's sort of. There's mindfulness, there's humility, there's courage, and there's a strength, really, in a way, because, well, when I listen to you talk about it, there you want to be that. That's the. That's the goal, in a sense, with empathy, is to be kind of feeling the feelings of that other person. And also that means that you are feeling difficult feelings and you're sensing and feeling the tears that are building behind the person's eyes. And so that might sometimes become tears building behind your eyes. And how do you manage that? You know, that. That real kind of that. It really is a sort of a felt experience, a resonating with suffering in those moments.

C (18:52)

Which is my definition of compassion. My definition is the ability to sit with suffer, not. Not to alleviate it, not to change it, not to just to be able to sit with it all the way to life and death. Now, what I know is that if I do this right, I won't have compassion. Because what I'm going to do, very honestly, is I'm going to have a felt sense of it, right? Deeply, as deep as they are, hopelessness, despair, anger, rage. And I'm gonna. I'm gonna try to experience all of that. But the good news of what I've just said, Stan, is I'm going to give it away. I'm going to give it back to them because it's not mine. So. So I'm going to go through this Tai chi that says I have a felt sense of what it must be like to be you. I'm not keeping it because it's disrespectful to keep it. It's yours. And that creates a duality for you. That creates a story for you that. That's your narration. But if I hold on to it, then I feel responsible for it, and then I'm going to be exhausted. So I really believe in the phrase be responsible for the intervention, not the outcome and how powerful that is. Like, I'm going to do what I know will work and what I believe will work. And I don't think there's any argument that empathetic understanding, that compassion, that radical acceptance, those things work to quiet down the nerve endings, to quiet down what I call the trauma injury. Now, trauma injury is the Suffering now I've changed. You know, I, I like the lang. I don't like the language of trauma because they think it's static. But if I call it trauma injury, I have hope attached to it because I'm thinking that it too can actually be healed in different ways. So if I think of trauma injury, Stan, if I think of trauma injury and I think of people suffering now, when I think of trauma injury, I think of family of origin, I think of community of origin and then I think of macro levels, macro levels being grew up poor, you grew up in a different race than dominant. I believe in the oppression, which is the systematic training done by people of power about people with less power and that lives in the cell structure. And so what I'm trying to do is to be able to medicate that with empathy and not try to change anything in their lives, but to actually allow them to feel heard, believed, valued and seen. Now that takes a lot of practice.

B (22:22)

Yes, the focus is on the process and not holding tightly to the outcome. And you see, you hear, you drop to the heart, you offer and then you watch for the response. And it's that kind of process, the Tai Chi of empathy that really backing as the thing that helps and the offer piece. One of the things I really enjoyed in listening to some of your conversations and I don't know if this is a little thing or a big thing, but was the way that you'll often reflect with an I. But what you're doing is you're using I there not as this is me, but as a very deep connection to the eye of the other person. And I, I know having watched lots of Carl Rogers videos, for example, he, I see him doing that as well. And, and I, I do, I try to kind of sort of think in the, you know, and feel, I suppose, I suppose that's the way that it's coming out as that really profound, deep, deeply felt sense of it. But yeah, what, what do you, what's your, you sort of. I was going to say what are your thoughts there? But I'm going 2 inches again. But what? 2 inches up. But, but yeah, what are your comments there?

C (23:59)

Well, I think you're saying it like, you know, you want a mixture of I and you statements and you're doing I because I imagine, and now what you're trying to do is to say I, I'm in this thing, I'm in this with you. I, I, I know that the, you know, this may not be true, but I think it is really, really true. I Know that you're not going to find a way out unless there's somebody traveling with you. I, I just believe that wholeheartedly. And you're gonna have one other compassionate witness in your life. Now. You. I think you need more than that. But, but, but the truth is I think you need four compassionate witnesses to be honest in your life. And those are people that are not going to try to solve it. They're not going to pepper you with a lot of questions. They're going to like, sit with you and have a felt sense of what it is like for you. And you. They. They become the cadre of. Of. Of the way in which emotional disturbances come into your life. And they, they become the medicine. They become the medicine and that they, they need to have that compassion for it to work. Because you can have four people and they all give you advice and you don't feel like you've gone anywhere. You can't get anywhere with. With the felt sense. So I use the I periodically through the words of I. I imagine you're really not sure you want to live, but I don't know if you can see it, Stan, but at that moment I'm crawling into. I'm crawling into death and dying.

B (25:57)

I think you actually skillfully go beyond that.

C (26:04)

Actually.

B (26:04)

I, I noticed you. The person might say, you know, I look around and there's just nobody there. I just can't find anybody to, to sort of to. To support me or to be there or. I just. And. And then you might reflect and say, I just feel so alone. And, and there's something incredibly powerful. It's not even. I imagine you feel so alone. What your reflection actually is, is I feel so alone and that. I don't know, I just feel like there's a. The reflection, the mirror that, where. That you're putting up there is profound. It just creates this sense for the other person. You know, you really get me. So that, that's the one that I really find, you know, kind of so, so important in the, in the sort of, I guess that the offering skills, the outward skills that, that you're using in, in those conversations.

C (27:11)

Yeah. And. And what I. What I thank you for that. And the minute you say it, I am alone. I'm with you.

B (27:23)

Yes.

C (27:25)

You know, and you said something earlier that I, you know, makes me smile a lot, which is, you know, empathy is walking in the moccasins of someone else. It is such a trivial making empathy trivial, you know, when, as you know, the, the book Effective Psychotherapy, they finished the the number one skill, the superpassed, everything else was empathetic understanding. And then. Which is what you just picked up. The second one was authenticity. So you can feel my authenticity. So what I've done is I put together these three words. A genuine, gentle guess. A genuine, gentle guess is authentic. It's gentle. That's the tone, and then it's a guess. If I was you, I would be thinking. If I was you, I would be feeling and, you know, being thoughtful about offering that genuine, gentle guess. And if you're skillful at that, then it literally does take the trauma whisper and quiets it down. I don't know if this is true, Stan, but this is my way of framing things, because I find myself needing to frame. And if I have a frame, I can relax. So I think that the trauma injury cognitively says to the people I'm serving, it says, one, I don't matter. A way to manage the trauma injury is to have this, what I call whisper, trauma injury whisper that says I don't matter. Now, if you're working with substance use or domestic violence or intimate partner violence or some, you can see if they have a message in their head that I don't matter, why they would stop. Has anybody got any idea. If I hear in my head that I don't matter, why would I stop? Why would I change? Why would I be courageous? Why would I lean into doing something different? Whatever the language we want to use, the second whisper is, I am not lovable, that I am broken. Now, I'm. I'm a little simplistic, but I think we came here to love. Well, that's why we're here. Whether in Australia or Paula Maine, it doesn't matter. We came here to love. Well, and then third is, the world is not to be trusted. So if that's the person you're trying to serve, I don't matter. I'm not lovable. And that the world is not to be trusted. That's the person that's sitting in front of you, park bench, I don't care where, right? And that's what they got going on in their head. Wouldn't empathy, authenticity really change that? Wouldn't it say, I'm going to demonstrate to you that you matter, that you can trust. Wouldn't that compassion that has been your life's work be so powerful that says you matter, you are lovable, and that the world can be trusted, at least between the two of us, wouldn't that cause a cognitive dissonance? Because if I believe that and it goes around and around and around and somebody comes along and goes gently, genuinely says you matter. Wouldn't that have to slow down? And if that slows down, maybe we could dream out loud. Because the purpose isn't to quiet down the nerve endings. The purpose is to dream out loud.

B (32:00)

Shame, isolation, fear. Yeah, these, this is where the person is sort of sitting and swirling in the waters of, you know, know, kind of shame, isolation and fear. And, and it's, it's, it's those very ingrained, primitive kind of experiences. You know, the, we're just such.

C (32:30)

A.

B (32:30)

Hyper social species and those kind of things really matter. I mean if, if, if I don't matter in the world, if no one is going to love me and you know, if people can't be trusted, I'm dead sort of thing. It's almost a life or death feeling.

C (32:45)

Exactly. Yeah, you got both sides right there. It's a life and death issue right there. You can feel it.

B (32:55)

Yes, there's. It, you know, it's interesting a number of the words you use, not least, you know, courage applies to, to that other person in a way, doesn't it? Because they are fronting up to this conversation. I mean imagine the, the courage, the wherewithal that it would have taken the person to even begin what we really hope to offer. This, this, this compassion, this conversation in compassion and somehow they've gotten there. How do you think about that? The sort of, the, the, the kind of, the, the co. Creation of something that's happening here. The, the massive contribution that that other person is, is making by even just, you know, kind of expressing their vulnerability such that we can see and hear and drop and offer and you know, like. Yeah, the kind of. I guess there's a safeness that has to be created first of all or gradually created as part of this, I suppose.

C (34:04)

Yeah, I think the word is gradually. I don't think it's, it has to be there. I think it's the helper's responsibility to go through that gradual process of. I know, I trust that your trauma injury has protected you by saying you don't matter and you're not lovable and the world is not to be trusted. It's a protection. And I'm going to come along and I'm going to gradually and gently through the use of compassion, empathy and radical acceptance. I'm, what I'm going to do is to gradually have you feel safe. And I've been changing the word safely. I've been thinking more about the word secure and I'm thinking about it not as safe because again, safe is a, a platform. But secure is something that you start to feel in a moment, right? You start to feel like, ah, this, this person is trustworthy because they keep doing the same thing rhythmically, consistently, repetitively. And the power of all of your work has been to focus in on that compassion. And that compassion is the medication that makes people feel secure. And it's gradual. And what happens is that people get to the thing that you talked about three minutes ago, like life and death, they start to feel the pain of that duality and they go, I want to try, I want to try to do something here. And sometimes they meet a helper that starts to try to fix them and then they feel discouraged. And sometimes they meet a helper that is highly practiced at saying, I'm here for you, dear one, I'm here for you.

B (36:11)

What we do matters, doesn't it, in that sense? And it is a gradual or iterative process. I suppose. I like the. I like. I quite like both words safe and secure. I suppose it sort of harks back a bit to safe haven and secure base, that some of the attachment work, the attachment theory and so on. And, and yes, it sort of almost sounds like there is a safe haven element to it. The person can come to the conversation, you know, to, to sort of, you know, when, when there is such difficulties in their life or in the world. They can come to the safe haven of this compassionate conversation. But then it becomes a kind of secure base as well because the person is predictable and is able to, to demonstrate, you know, trust and so on. And so from the conversation they go back out to the world, I suppose, or something like that. So I don't know. That was this kind of, of pondering that as you were, as you were talking.

C (37:13)

Well, I think about the, the word just because you just said the attachment theory, you know about that when you don't get, when you're been abandoned or engulfed or shamed that what ends up happening is that you have an insecure attachment.

B (37:32)

Yes.

C (37:33)

And then go out into your life and you're, you're meant to love well. And what ends up happening is you're not able to because you have this insecure attachment. And this insecure attachment can be done by, you know, being codependent if you want, or, you know, too much into the relationship or being a caretaker, or it can be an isolation if it doesn't matter. But two ends of the continuum is what. But that, that insecure attachment does. So the reason I'M shifting it is that I'm thinking about. This is what you deserved. This is what you deserved when you came into this world. You deserved a secure haven as you just described. And so what I'm going to do is I'm going to try to create that in your life, individually, collectively. And more recently, I've moved, you know, well, I say more recently about 30 years now, but I, you know, I moved to groups, you know, and I. And I'm doing 10 support groups a week because I want people to feel that it's not about me, the skillful clinician or helper, it's that this can be done by any group of people as long as there's some container, as you just said, secure haven. And boy, what a. What a remarkable thing it's done to move people from, you know, like the world is not to be trusted to. I have a group of people in my life who are always and consistently going to show up with compassion and radical acceptance. Well, what would that do to you? You know, that's a mark. And we're not even. I'm not even trying to deal with their diagnosis or their alcohol problem or their violent problems or they've been in prison 14 times. It does. What I'm doing is saying if you have this, if you witness this, if you can give away that your life will change because then you'll matter, you'll feel loved. And guess what? You'll begin to trust the, the world.

B (40:10)

And then it spreads too, I think, you know.

C (40:13)

Yeah. Yeah, amazingly. So I, I just sit back and sit in my nice chair and listen to them. I don't even have to work so hard. They're the ones doing the work. Yeah. And it's friends. It's like wildfire.

B (40:32)

Just to slightly change, change gears, I suppose, because one of the things that I have been wondering about, I think, as many of us have, is, is just the, you know, when, when we disagree, when, when we're speaking with someone who's across the aisle, as they say, or, you know, there's so much of this division, it seems, and people are not listening, but, but yelling and at each other. And there's a wonderful paper from the early 80s from Carl Rogers that I dug up a little while ago, where he talks about taking his approach to sort of global negotiations around the Cold War times and so on. And I suppose it's a little bit of a different question because some of what you're talking about is a compassionate conversation where one person really is the listener and the other Person is the person that's discussing and exploring and, you know, kind of gradually creating that sense of security in the relationship and so on. What about compassionate conversations where we, where we are disagreeing, you know, where there's pain or, you know, there's, there's threat or there's difference sort of thing between the two parties? What are your thoughts there?

C (42:01)

Well, I'm going to pause because it's, that's the painful part right there. I, I moved my practice of sitting with people from individual to couples because they're worried. They're worrying. They, they cannot. Generally, the people that come in, they, they hold the right position so powerfully that they destroy the relationship. That's my quote that I, I tell people. If you hold the right position, you will destroy the relationship. Yeah. Now, it's not the right position here. It's the holding of it, the attachment to it. And what ends up happening. When you have a secure attachment, you can let go for a greater good, which happens to be love, the loving. Well, and if you're insecure attachment, then what ends up happening is you get attached to the right position, to the isolation. So what happens for me is I believe there are three skills that are essential to deal with. And the first is I, when I totally disagree, totally disagree with the person's perception. Just happened, actually, somebody left. A couple just left my office. I totally disagree with the man's, with the man's perspective. What I do at that point is I say to myself, this will not change between the two of us unless I can offer him empathy. And then I don't want to be a doormat. I don't want to give up my soul. I want to say, and then, and then I will tell you what I need. If I can set compassionate boundaries and also do empathy, then I can meet any human being with any dilemma. But I have to lead with empathy. Unless it's unsafe, and then I have to lead with boundaries and then do empathy. The truth of the matter is I need to lead with empathy. When, when I disagree with somebody, my role is to go out there and follow that Tai Chi of empathy. If I'm unable, then I got to drop into silence and find that place within myself, myself. Because anything that comes out of my mouth is holding a right position. And to hold the right position is exactly what I see over and over and over. And that it will destroy, it will destroy whole communities. It'll create wars. The list goes on. Relationships, families. It, it just by holding a right position, I don't know if this is true. But for me, I'd like to believe there's actually no right position, there's only perceptions, that there's no truth, that there. That none of us have that, and that the possibility, if we were to have one, is that we came to love well, that may be the only truth, but to love well is not to give up myself to their view. To love well is to hold them and then say what I. What matters to me. So the first skill is to be empathetic, to create a compassionate, radically accepting atmosphere. Skill number two is the compassionate kind. Clear, consistent, repetitive boundaries. And the third skill is a heartfelt apology. When I muck up the first two, I got something to do here, which is to say a heartfelt apology, which means no blame, no shame to them. I take full responsibility for what just happened. And those are the three skills that I essentially believe in that will actually repair the discord in the individual as well as in the relationship, as well as in families, as well as in communities, as well as in nations.

B (46:51)

Yes, that's a brilliant answer, Stephen. I really appreciate that.

C (46:56)

I.

B (46:57)

You were saying before you like to sort of break things down and sort of, you know, kind of get your head around them. And that's a really great example of the 1, 2, 3. And of course, the moment you said it, I thought to myself, ah, you know. Yeah, you know, the first skill is really about empathy. In fact, the greater the disagreement, the. The more empathy plays its role, you know, in a sense, I mean, if we already agree on something, then, you know, we maybe move on to the next bit. But it's actually empathy is the piece, and then the compassionate boundaries as. As, you know, kind of that. That expression of one's own kind of experience and perspective and so on. And then the apology, if one or two of those steps, you know, don't. Don't quite work. And you mentioned silence in there, too. Can you. Can you expand on that, I guess, the role of silence in these compassionate conversations.

C (48:03)

How beautiful that question is? Well, this is. This is a spiritual question. This is the mystery. What. My brain is, you know, smart enough to get me through a lot, but there are times in which I can't ask myself the answer. I don't know the answer, but can I trust breath? Can I trust taking a breath and then allowing my own cell structure, my own right, my own cell structure to quiet down. And then a whisper starts to emerge. And that whisper will send me in a direction. Now, I have a framework, so I know the direction. It's going to send me, it's going to send me back to empathy. Because what's happened is that I've been triggered. I've been hooked by, you know, this messiness of life. And now I want to be, you know, I want to say what my piece is. I want to say what I believe I will. I want to leave you. I, I want to just abandon you. I want to be defensive, I want to be microaggressive. Those are the three things that I watch people do in the face of them being hooked by their own stuff. But the only thing you can do then is a prayer, which is, can I trust that there's a whisper within myself? Can I, can I trust in self determination? Can I, can I trust in the resiliency? Can I trust that there's what I refer to as a whisper of hopes and dreams? You know, people, people use Kyle Rogers and say, you know, the, the phrase commonly meet people where they're at. And I say, don't, please don't. Meet people where they're at. Meet people where they dream. Leave, leave that at. And go towards the dream. So what does that mean? Well, that means that I have to drop down, I have to quiet my nerve endings. If that's the work that I believe that I'm doing with people is quiet the nerve endings and then listening for the whisper of hopes and dreams. That's self determination, that's resiliency. And people are not going to put out their hopes and dreams in a place where they can't trust. But once they begin to trust, once they feel secure inside themselves, they, they feel the nerve endings quiet, which is what trauma injury does. It creates a, an anxiety. Then people can dream out loud. What a gift. I want to do the same for myself. So, you know, a quick story is a, is a man that came into my office with his partner and started to be as incredibly mean, incredibly violent. And I could feel my nerve and he's like, I gotta stop him. He's beating up emotionally. He's beating up his partner right here, right in front of me. I gotta stop this. I could feel me getting all tied up with the right position. And then I took a breath and I could feel what it must be like to be him. I had this lot, this story where I had this imagination that we could be drilling for water miles and miles and miles apart from each other. Just hundreds of miles, can't see each other and you're drilling for water. You're going through these layers of a narration of people's Stories and as you get through the sand and the gravel and the. And all of that, and you hit the water table and this person who is 400 miles away, can't even see them, is going through their lens and drilling for it, you end up in the same water table. And that's really what we're trying to do, is we want people to join each other and know that we're all in this thing together. And so when we have this discord, this horrible discord, I have to get to the place where I'm going to drill down and find that table of water that we all can enjoy together. That's all one table. But then again, I could be full of crap.

B (53:26)

The listener has their own trauma whispers in a way. And we can sometimes have our own shame or our own fear activated. And it can be sort of really, you know, drive us towards just sort of out it comes and, and we might do or say things, you know, but more coming from that almost threat protection kind of motivation and to pause and to connect with silence means to allow for the whispers and hopes of dreams, the whispers of hopes and dreams to get a voice, I suppose, in our hearts and then we're able to sort of return to empathy and to. Yeah, to kind of find that. That water table that, that connects us once again.

C (54:31)

Oh, yeah. And then can you drop it down, you know, can you drop it down to your own heart and think, what is it like to be them? What are they? What are they thinking? What are they feeling? What is it like to be there?

B (54:54)

I highly recommend your podcast to people. I, I think it is a. Just a, A display of, of exactly all that you've been talking about. You're very, very skillful in both the, the, the inward and the outward kind of aspects that we've been, we've been thinking about. And there's a lot to kind of, you know, sort of model oneself when, when, when moving to one's own listening and, and opportunities to have compassionate conversations. Listening to your podcasts gives, the gives gave me certainly little, well, many clues about how, how to do this thing. But it's, It's. It's. It's a real practice. It's a, It's a something that, you know, we're always practicing and sort of working on and growing and improving. I mean, if someone was really wanting to have more of these conversations in their life, maybe not even in a professional sense, but just with people around them and their loved ones, but, you know, they haven't had the kind of training or experience that, that you, that you've had. Where would, where would they start? You know, like, what would be a kind of a, an everyday action that someone might just begin to practice in their, in their conversations, to move from that more reactive thing to that more relational piece that's, that's kind of grounded in empathy.

C (56:31)

Well, I think you mentioned, you know, what I've tried to do is that I wrote six tiny books. They're very tiny, like, and, you know, they're loving, Love in action, listening deeply, Magic of connection. The last one is called Embrace the Mystery, you know, and the other thing was to do the podcasts, you know, for a reason of, like, you have to, have to either read or, or intellectually find some framework. You have to listen, if that's your style. You know, audio is to listen to it, to, you know, to, to begin to see the rhythm of it. It's sort of like music, you know, like, you might like jazz. So how do you understand jazz? Well, you turn on jazz and you listen. You're listening. Some jazz artists are not so good. Some are really, really good. And you can feel it, you can feel it in your body. And so your first is to become, you know, get your own, get that frame. Get the framework that you and I have talked about today. Make, make it your first thought. You know, how do you move, you know, I, I, I say in the groups a lot, like, first thought wrong. And people go, what do you mean? Well, because it's based on your history is your first thought. So how do you hesitate to, to get to the second thought, which is about your heart? As your first thought will be in your cognition, it'll be in your ego, which I call easing the goodness out. Easing that goodness out is just like, I'm pushing it out of the way. And we're in a time where that's, this is so valuable, you know, we, I don't, I don't know. You've heard it here, but we get a vice president that said our problem is empathy. That was his quote. Our problem is empathy. Oh, we're, we're in difficult times. Yes. So, so to answer your question, you know, find, find, find your mentors who you trust to find that. Get a framework, practice, find a place to practice, find a support group. That's what I'm doing with 110 people. Practice, practice, practice. But in my, in all of my groups, I, I send out once a month, once every, I send out information so that they. It's a framework, you know, it's cognitively I'm trying to satisfy the cognition so they can get to the heart.

B (59:21)

I mean, the Tai Chi of empathy, I think, is a brilliant takeaway. You know, just to sort of. To see, to hear, to drop to the heart to offer and to. To watch for the response. And the other bit when we're dropping to that heart space is, you know, what might this person be thinking? What might this person be feeling? What might it be like to be them? And sort of that's where we come up with our guesses or our hunches and, you know, that's what we offer back. Well, yes, you're doing some amazing work, and I really appreciate the way that you sort of. Your turn of phrase and how you kind of put things into words, and it's very evocative and poetic, really, but also sort of, you know, kind of nails it in terms of trying to just convey what is this thing we call empathy? You know, what is it to be with someone compassionately and to have those compassionate conversations. So, yeah. Steve and Andrew, thank you very much for speaking with me on Compassion in a T shirt.

C (60:37)

Thank you. Thank you so much.