Dr. Kelly Brogan The Path of Reclamation

[Speaker 2] (0:00 - 0:07) You are now listening to the Here for the Truth podcast hosted by Joel Rafiti and Yerasimos. [Speaker 4] (0:11 - 0:14) All right everybody, welcome to the Here for the Truth podcast. [Speaker 3] (0:14 - 3:23) I'm Joel Rafiti, I've got my co-host Yerasimos with me as always. Thank you so much for being here, thank you for listening, thank you for your support. Today we have Dr Kelly Brogan in the house. This was one of my favorite conversations we've ever had. It's only 60 minutes but it's absolutely value-packed. So please listen closely, intuitively, apply what's being shared and if you feel the call, share with someone who might need the information that's being presented here. This is a really, really powerful conversation. Before we get into that, I want to let you guys know that round three for Rise Above the Herd is now full. Thank you so much to everyone who has applied and to those who are taking part in the journey with us. We're excited for the next eight weeks with you. At this point in time we're not certain whether we'll be doing a fourth run this year, although you will hear from us if we do. But we have been working on something exciting for you guys and we're excited to right now, right here, launch Friends of the Truth. Friends of the Truth is a monthly membership community for individuals and families striving to grow in consciousness, integrity and authenticity. It's an opportunity for you to meet fellow truth seekers, stay empowered with the cutting-edge knowledge and be in the same room as some of the leading names in the truth, health and freedom community around the world. So what it is, is it's a monthly membership and you get access to one live teaching slash presentation with Erasmus and myself each month plus one live guest expert call with some of the names you're now familiar with through our podcast. You can submit questions, you get to be in the same room and interact with some of these legends. And also it's only one membership required per household, so this is something that the whole family can take part in in the live calls. So if you're interested in that, please head to friendsofthetruth.co you can learn more about it and please join if necessary and we really look forward to connecting with you guys on these calls and sharing the knowledge which is why we're here and what we love to do. Thank you so much for listening, thank you for your support, please subscribe wherever you're watching or listening and without further ado, actually preface, this was 3 30 a.m in the morning for me, this episode, so bear with me on that one but please enjoy, take care. All right everybody, welcome to episode 87 of Here for the Truth podcast. We have another amazing guest for you today, we have Kelly Brogan in the house. She's a holistic psychiatrist, New York Times best-selling author and reclamation queen. In her psychiatric practice, she specialized in a root cause solution to psychiatric syndromes and symptoms. She's on a mission to hold the vision for an embodied reclamation and whole life empowerment with guidance and resources and community to help her clients shed their struggle and lead them to finally choose their self to experience the specific pleasure of who they are. Kelly, thank you so much for being here for the truth. [Speaker 1] (3:24 - 3:24) It's an honor. [Speaker 3] (3:25 - 3:41) One thing that we always like to start this off with is just if you can give us a brief rundown of the major rites of passage that you experienced in your life that really shifted your reality, cultivated deep transformation and really allowed you to be the person that you are here today. [Speaker 1] (3:42 - 7:39) So I'm on like number 12 in the past five years I feel like and each of my sort of rebirth portals, if you will, seem to have a signature energy and I've described it as this self-initiatory process as being an opportunity to walk into the fire of loss and specifically loss of something I thought I couldn't live without. So how could I possibly live without New York City? How could I possibly live without my first marriage to the father of my children? How could I possibly live without my credentials and my conventional medical practice? How could I possibly live without my second marriage? How could I possibly live without my small close-knit group of female friends? And all of these things have exploded, some with grenades and some with gentle release, but with no less grief and fear. Honestly, existential terror has attended each of these losses and more. What I have found is that when I recognize these opportunities now at this point, it's like, okay, here we go. And it's time to walk towards the discomfort and know that confusion, this sense of almost like nihilistic dissolve, like the chrysalis melting caterpillar vibe, it's part of it. It's how you know you're about to expand and specifically expand into ease and deeper sense of fulfillment and pleasure. And so it began seemingly when I was diagnosed for the first time ever as a very unconscious embodied being where I never ever thought about my health. I've always been naturally thin, never thought about whether it was a bad idea to eat McDonald's every single day or Twizzlers and Snickers all the time and take birth control and dye my hair black. I just never had thought about it. And I was in a very survivalist kind of like get an A on life, meritocracy spiritually. That's how my consciousness was at that level of controversy and fighting and power over and will-based living. And so I was a really perfect match for the conventional system and really an ambassador. I specialized in prescribing to pregnant and breastfeeding women. That's how much I believed in the pharmaceutical model of health. So when I was diagnosed and I had that cognitive dissonance of like, oh, well, it's fine for my patients, but I'm not interested in a prescription for life. Thank you very much. Where's the exit door? I had this opportunity presented to me when I put my autoimmune condition into remission in black and white on paper. I had this opportunity to either suppress the meaning of that and say like, as we do in conventional medicine, like, oh, it's anomalous, like, oh, whatever. It probably would have resolved anyway, you know, it was part of onset or to walk through the door into the, not only total unknown, but the adversaries camp. Right. So I walked through the door into alternative, you know, non-traditional medicine and naturopathy and ultimately functional medicine. And that was the beginning of having to rewire my entire self around this to encompass this, you know, really what was a miracle, honestly. And a miracle is really just what you can't explain through your preexisting worldview. And that began, you know, my dedication to natural healing and orienting my private practice around discontinuation of not only psychotropics, but other medications. And that's when I really started to learn about the dark night of the soul and became, you know, almost a mirror for so many of the women I was working with and began going through a lot of my own spiritual, you know, birth canals, if you will. [Speaker 2] (7:41 - 8:36) Yeah. Thanks for sharing that. I remember first coming across your work. I think it was a documentary, maybe one of Ty Bollinger's documentaries. I'm not sure which one it was. And I was so curious, you know, how you made the transition from being part of, you know, conventional academia and then being someone with such an open mind and talking about the things you're talking about. One of those things is, you know, for years, I know you've been challenging the notion that depression is caused by chemical imbalance in the brain, which I think a lot of people have talked about for years. But as is usually the case, it takes 20 or 30 years for certain elements of mainstream society to catch up. And so there was a recent study that came out pretty much confirming that. So I want to ask you to talk about that a little bit, but also from your experience, I know the word depression is like, so it's such a vast thing, but what are for you, what are the causes of depression? [Speaker 1] (8:38 - 19:25) So such an important topic. And it's for whatever reason, like still very frustrating for me to hear the serotonin mythology echoes through the halls of, of natural medicine and conventional medicine. And, you know, I record a little video recently sharing that my, my, my, one of my daughters even recently said like, Oh, serotonin, the happy chemical or something like that. Like she was referring to like, and she was making a joke about like boosting serotonin as a happy chemical. And I was like, okay, clearly you need to read my books because it's not how it works. And in my own house, they're parenting this, right? So imagine how penetrant this mythology is. And, you know, it's part of groupthink, right? It's part of maybe even work of resonance. And it's certainly part of the antics and shenanigans that the pharmaceutical industry is permitted in the realm of direction, consumer advertising of very curated outcomes, right? So, you know, FDA approval requires to publish studies and you can flip that coin as many times as you want, you know, until you get the studies that you feel as a, you know, as an industry support the, you know, the service of the marketed product. And, you know, it was really Joanna Moncrief published the, and others published the recent review you're describing and she and Peter Reagan and David Healy, and a lot of the work of Irving Kirsch. These were the, you know, the four mothers and fathers of whatever field of awareness that I walked into. Thankfully, you know, with this well-paved path of there in now seven decades of published research, there is literally no evidence that serotonin has anything to do with mood, cognition, or behavior, let alone is causally linked, right? That you would have such a thing as a chemical imbalance or a serotonin deficiency. Right. Because even look at those, the language, I'm very big into the spells associated with words and rhetoric and semantics, right? And you have an imbalance or you have a deficiency, right? And what do we all believe in our core woundology? We believe that we're broken, like fundamentally damaged, and we're just hoping nobody will notice, right? Or we're just hoping we'll beat them to the punch and own it first, right? So that we don't feel the crushing pain of being called out for our, you know, our brokenness. And so when we get these labels, right, these psychiatric labels, I've been told by many patients that strangely, you almost feel relief. You feel almost seen for something that you have felt and believed, and that's been reflected back to you, which is, wow, there really is something wrong with you. Instead of there being a mismatch between your lived experience and, you know, the environment that is around you, right? So how is it that you are, I call it trying to buy eggs from the hardware store. That's what I would call the driver of pretty much what we call mental illness, right? And obviously there are nuances and, you know, I'm a big believer in family constellation work and parts work. And so there are many different explanations for things, even in family lineage that we call psychosis and suicidality. But just to be general about it, when you are interacting with your, the context of your life, with your environment, as if your needs can be met through certain sources, when they simply cannot, right? When the meeting of those needs is simply not on offer, then we call it your problem, but it's really a mismatch, right? There's a no and a yes, trying to convert the no into a yes, instead of two yeses meeting, right? Like recently I was interacting with a friend whose daughter is having a really hard time changing schools and she's crying and she doesn't want to go. And I used to be a big believer in like, well, it's hard, not a school of hard knocks, right? So just like work through it. And there's a power and commitment and follow through. And you said, you know, you wanted to switch school. So here you go. Like we made your bed, sleep in it kind of a thing. And now as somebody who doesn't even believe in school, right? Let alone forcing a kid to go to school. When, you know, she asked me, what do you think about getting her support? You know, in terms of like therapeutic support. And all I can think about was like, you're messaging to her that something is wrong with her. When in reality, she could be rightly sensitive to many aspects of this, you know, that are very wrong and specifically very wrong for her. And there's myriad examples of that. So when we frame, choose to frame what is an emotional and spiritual and sometimes physical matter, right? Because you can have a physical mismatch with, you know, the toxicity of your environment, with your diet, you can have a physical mismatch with, you know, so many aspects of what you're exposed to. When we frame that as an inbuilt inborn problem that you can't do anything about other than to submit to psychopharmacology, we have changed the locus of power. We've moved it out from the individual into this all knowing hierarchical system and authority that you then as a patient become dependent on. So there's a lot of nefarious layers to the chemical imbalance theory beyond the fact that it's actually not evidence-based and it's not scientific by any measure, right? So I'm talking about all different kinds of science, right? Whether we're looking at post-mortem analyses, whether we're looking at cerebrospinal fluid analyses, whether we're looking at genetics or blood, you know, assays, we have not demonstrated that you take a normal person, you induce deficiency or imbalance in their serotonin, they become depressed. Like we have that data for gluten, okay? Like you literally can take somebody who is, you know, well, expose them to gluten, take it away, and you can see a causal relationship. We don't have that data for these so-called chemicals. And it's because that's actually probably not how human biology works. It's not the buttons and levers, gears model of robot we would like it to be. And this multifactorial, this complex assessment of how it is that your unique individuality and specifically your perception, so how are you narrating your experience of that which is unfulfilling in your life, right? Because you could be in very adverse conditions for which you are a very strong mismatch and your needs are not being met, and you can actually continue to narrate your experience through the lens of empowerment. I've seen it many, many times over, especially as people are in transition from a disempowering lifestyle and environment into an empowering one. There's a way you can, right? Like that's like a Viktor Frankl model of like how to talk to yourself about like the really very real things that are happening. You know, so the existential question, you know, that an experience of depression, apathy, you know, anxiety, deep sadness, nihilism, the existential question that is being asked of you, the invitation, the opportunity therein is something only you can answer. And it has nothing to do, honestly, with published scientific research. And I don't say that easily, because I love public scientific research. I certainly wish we had an easy answer to what makes people suffer, and that science could show us the way home. And I just don't know that that's the case. And so I've come to what I refer to as like an order of operations, right? Like you may be invited as I was personally, like onto a spiritual quest to heal your, you know, early childhood schisms and fragmentation and your lineage level, you know, abuse history and all these things. Or like you may just need to take dairy out of your diet, right? And so let's just start with the low hanging fruit of sending your nervous system a signal of safety through the power of your choice, making sure that your diet is at least a rudimentary level of whole food, right? Exposure. And then you can start to assess, okay, well, what about my marriage? What about my job? What about my relationship with my family of origin? What about my big secrets I thought I could get away with never ever, you know, uttering to a single other human? Yeah, how is it that I'm carrying all of this baggage that's draining my vital force? How is it that I feel I live in an unsafe world rather than in a benevolent universe connected to God? Like these questions become so much easier to explore when you don't have hair falling out, joint pain, bloating, constipation, and insomnia. Okay, that's just my bias is like, start with the lifestyle change. There's so many layers of empowerment therein. There's a lot of physiologic balancing that comes. And you know, there's interesting things that happen. I mean, I have a published case of recidivistic schizophrenia in a young gentleman that resolved meaningfully, symptomatically in five weeks. How do you explain that? Right? This is like one of the big gun chronic, you'll be on this for life medications. And he started his medication taper after, you know, working with the basics of my protocol, which honestly is not any sort of, you know, brain surgery. And I actually think that, you know, it's a combination of the choice, activating the choice. And then also like, literally what a mismatch, you know, hybridized wheat is for human physiology. It seems so crazy. No pun intended, you know, that that could have that kind of impact. And I've seen lupus case, there's one 18 years of chronic lupus resolved in the space of this same protocol. How? So I do think that just like me with my Hashimoto's that sometimes basic commitment to dietary change, really eliminating, like, you know, the screeching scream of some of your dietary exposures, probably not coincidentally, most of which we were weaned onto as children, right? Like the Farina wheat cereal and the, you know, the cow dairy during peak trauma time. So there may have even been a coupling of those two exposures. I don't know why it is that so many of us have these issues now. Of course, there are theories about like the biodiversity of our inner microbiome, and I think they're all valid. But I do think that just starting with lifestyle is how you begin to answer the question that, you know, so-called depression might be asking. [Speaker 2] (19:26 - 19:47) Yeah. I just want, I want to share something on that. Just a story that relates like in 2007, I was going through this holistic nutrition school. And, you know, we were learning all about different ways of eating healthy eating. I had been eating healthy. And I was like, I want to do an experiment because things were going well, I was feeling great. And I grew up in the diner business, a Greek owned diner in New Jersey. What a surprise. [Speaker 1] (19:47 - 19:49) I know all about those. I grew up in New Jersey. [Speaker 2] (19:50 - 21:27) Yeah. So I was like, you know, I'm going to go back home for a weekend and eat like everything on the menu, drink alcohol. I wasn't even drinking that. I'm just going to eat and drink like processed foods, whatever, all the traditional diner food. I spent a weekend doing that. I came back into New York City where I was living. I felt depressed. I felt like shit. I remember I'd broken up with an ex-girlfriend like seven months prior. And this is in the days of MySpace. I went back onto MySpace and was like looking at her profile and like yearning for that connection because I was like, oh, I don't know. Maybe I made the wrong mistake. I made the wrong decision. But I just decided to use myself as like my own personal case study over a weekend. And just that simple act of going and eating food that I think just doesn't align ideally with being a human shifted me. And so I know to us, this is something we know. Inherently, we've talked about this. We live this. But for so many people who they just they're living by the standard American diet. They're going by what the TV tells them to do. That this like just to reiterate what you said about the simple act of shifting things in your lifestyle, what that does. But then on a conscious standpoint, like I'm a new student of German medicine, Germanic healing knowledge. And so even the act of like what does it take in your consciousness to make a complete shift in your lifestyle and eating? What does that do to you? Just like the kind of person that would change their eating and change their lifestyle. What does that do to your biology as well? So there's so many fascinating factors around this. [Speaker 1] (21:27 - 24:38) Absolutely. I mean, you know, I have a relatively costly online program. Right. And I thought so much when I started to see that the outcomes in that program were surpassing the outcomes in my private practice in terms of like, you know, wow, like I must publish this, you know, sort of nature. I started to think, OK, what what if it's just clicking the buy now button, actually, because you are then the type of person who invests thousands of dollars in your health. That is a type of person. Right. And I have become really interested in what is the alchemy of change, what actually drives readiness to make bring the seemingly formerly impossible into your field of possibility. And the closest I can come up with, because I think about this a lot, is that you get to a point spiritually where movement in the direction of change feels like a relief. You know, when I when I, you know, decoupled my smartphone and phone number, because I still have one for artistic usage and video and whatever. I did that, gosh, I don't know, over a year ago, a year and a half ago. And when I did it, I felt relieved. I thought I would feel like paralyzed. Right. And I felt relieved. And there's so many. And that doesn't mean that it's not challenging or whatever. You know, when I I left my marriage, I felt deep exhale level relief and the deepest grief of grief of my life also. Right. So there is something when you when you move in this direction that that begins to feel better, even as it's so scary. And, you know, first of all, I love your story because that's literally how I grew up. I grew up in diners in New Jersey, you know, like gravy fries and jello with whipped cream and grilled cheese, American cheese, like regularly. OK. And and it's so it's so true. And how do you write like what what do you do if that's just like how you're used to eating and how you're used to socializing? Right. Like I have a handyman who's like a friend, like he's an incredible individual. And he came to me to talk to me about some health challenges that he's having. Right. And he's joking mostly. But I was like, OK, listen, like, you know what I'm going to say. Just do a month of, you know, taking these things out of your diet. Just that just start with that. You don't have to meditate. You don't have to do coffee. And I was like, just literally start with that for one month of your life. You can do it. OK, you literally lift like hundreds of pounds over your head. I watch you do it. You can do it. OK, this is the figurative hundreds of pounds you're going to lift. And he was like, you think that I can go a month without eating pizza? No, without beer. No, I can't. I can. There is no way I can do that. Meanwhile, he's been put on his fifth medication. OK. And I really felt like, wow. OK. I can feel how this isn't available to him. [Speaker 4] (24:38 - 24:38) Yeah. [Speaker 1] (24:38 - 26:46) Right. And it's just what are you going to do? Right. Like I was like, oh, why don't you order this meal delivery plan? Right. It's like and in the end, when he's ready, he's going to be ready. And that realization of the spiritual underpinnings and Germany medicine takes it to a whole nother level of what it is to take into your awareness, like these inner conflicts that you've been participating in biologically and psychically. That's why the science wars, the info wars, it's just not where it's at. It's not where it's at, because that's not how and why people change. It has to do with this elusive element of a fortified strength on a nervous system level so that honestly, you can even capacitate the feeling goodness that's awaiting you, because I don't know about you, but I have had to grow into a capacity to feel things like calm, right, to feel things like contentedness, to feel things like fulfillment and satisfaction. Even to this day, I will tell you today, probably caught myself in 10 different moments searching for things to be stressed about, literally like walking through my gorgeous yard, like sun on my skin, my animals all around me, enjoying this experience and literally in vigilance, looking for something that's going to bring me back to that familiar field of problem solving and victim consciousness. If this is what I literally do for a living is to bring awareness to this and it's challenging for me, then I can only imagine how addicted the average person is in this realm to their struggle. You can't take that from them, right? If you take alcohol from the addict at the wrong time, what happens? They go right back to it or they get put on psych meds. That's the other option, the revolving door. It's about resolving habits because you are now filled up. You're sated in a different way that you no longer hunger for that thing in the same way. [Speaker 3] (26:48 - 27:33) It's amazing. It's like there's something deep within the unconscious that just calls the person when they're ready and they know what the thing is. When it comes up, it can't be that simple, but at the same time, it can't be that hard. I can't let go of that thing. I can't have that conversation, which I've been avoiding for so long. That just arises and it's like, then you do the thing and you're right. The way you started this conversation about your experience of rites of passage, there's an existential terror, but the moment you act upon that, there is this relief that comes with it as well and a realization where it's like, yeah, I knew that all along, that that was the thing. It is so elusive. You mentioned victim consciousness there. Could you go a bit deeper into what that is? [Speaker 1] (27:36 - 38:10) Sure. I've said many times, I do believe this, that victim consciousness is the only human pathology, that it is the driver of what we call evil, because it is fundamentally a state of disconnection from your divine nature, if you will. The extremity of that disconnection will determine how much struggle, how much habitual dysfunction and honestly, how much injury you purvey in the world. As a vector of all those things, what is it? How do we get to this place? I found the framework of the Karpman Triangle to be the most helpful depiction because we all recognize easily how it is that we can interface with all of the different phases of victim consciousness, but briefly, there is the victim. The why me, no fair, I hate this. I hate this. I hate him. I hate her. I hate reality. I hate my life. I hate my job. It's the random universe model of life, just the bad luck, bad stuff that's happening to you and you're powerless to change it. That's the victim part of the triangle. Then of course, if you're a victim, you have an enemy. And the enemy is the villain, right? The villain to you. However, the villain usually in their own triangle is the victim. Sometimes if it's dyadic or oppositional, the victim is the villain to the villain. It's a perspective. It's a point of perspective. There are silos of perspective. That's really important that there isn't empathic bridging. There's not an awareness of the role of projection, which means that the aspects of myself, I have not yet come into contact with that I've disavowed. I am projecting and fighting with on the outside, judging, condemning on the outside. I can give an example of that from my own life, many of them actually. Then there is another point in the triangle, which I often describe as the sneakiest. It's the most nefarious because it's the rescuer. You wouldn't think of the rescuer as being in victim consciousness. They're just here to help. What's the problem? I would actually put most, maybe if not honestly, all activists in the rescuer dimension of the victim triangle. I know that is not what I would have wanted to hear somebody say to me when I was in the peak of my sort of loft running naked on the battlefield, righteous bitch activist phase of my life. However, I do now believe that it's the case and that activists are really in prime position to do a good amount of shadow work and inner reflection, lest they perpetuate that which they purport to resolve through their efforts. The rescuer is there to help the victim. The challenge is that not only are they reifying the victim's helplessness. I often say, if I swoop in to pay my girlfriend's rent because she can't afford it this month, I am signaling to her, you do not have yourself. You don't have a connection to your guides, angels, God. Let me help you instead. You're not going to figure out how to alchemize this. There is a place you should not go in your life. If you go there, horrible things will happen. Meaning, what if you don't pay your rent? What could happen? I'm translating all of these subliminal messages to her, reifying and crystallizing her disempowerment. Then I'm also putting her at odds with whatever she's struggling against, whether it's her career or her boss or her bank account or whatever it is. That is the enemy I'm going to save her from, her own scarcity mindset, whatever it is. The triangle is a place we know we are when we are finger pointing. When we are saying, I don't like this. This is bad. This must change. This must change is the anthem of the activist. This must change. Really? Are you so sure? Do you have a God's eye view on reality? You're so certain that it must change. It must change in the way that you insist it must. Trust me, I'm saying this. I'm feeling this all the time. I think many aspects of life must change right now. I also understand that when I'm in that energy of focusing outward on what must change, there is a place I'm not focusing on, which is inward. When I'm not focusing inward, or at least checking, and I'm not talking about some self-absorbed navel-gazing. It's a checking within for that which I am judging without. I get easily triggered, honestly, gentlemen, by men who get overwhelmed. That's a thing for me. I feel unsafe around men who get emotionally, logistically, intellectually overwhelmed, and that push me away, or say I'm too much, or say no, or whatever. This can be in the workspace, or it can be in my private life, it can be in my family. I have a too much wound, which is just the opposite of the not enough. It's the same thing. However, my thing is like, oh, Kelly, you're too much, you're too crazy, you're too wild, you're too this, you're too that. Chill out, tone it down, rein it in, slow down. When I am triggered, and feeling judgmental, and superior to those individuals, let's say, can I check with myself and see, is there a part of me that is overwhelmed that I am not acknowledging? How would I know if I'm overwhelmed by myself? One way I would know is because I cannot, or choose not to be with myself, because I find myself too overwhelming. I fly up into my mind, because to simply be with my body, to be with my sensations, is too much. I learned that on a recent water only fast that I did, where I was just with myself for a week. It was the hardest thing I've ever done in my life. It helps me to understand how it is that I might vilify something that actually is an inner job. At the beginning of the pandemic, the first work I got down to the business of doing was to explore how it is that I am a tyrant. I found many ways that I am a tyrant, not only in my lived experience and simple stuff like telling my girls to finish another bite of food or clean their room. I am a very radically libertarian kind of a parent. I found these places. I've never punished my children in their lives. I still found places where I am in tyrannical energy. What about in my business? I decided to step down as CEO and to try a different business model on my team. Then what about with myself? I talk to myself often with, hurry up, get it done, walk it off. What's your problem? Why did you do that? I talk to myself this way. I have a manager part within me that feels it's protecting me by doing that. That feels like it's serving the good. That probably still thinks that I'm seven years old and hasn't gotten the newsflash that I actually don't need that kind of internal motivation to express myself and my faith in the divine unfoldment of life. The whole fractal nature of these judgments shows you when you're in victim consciousness. The way out, if I could be super simple about a very deep process, is to first accept and approve of what is, and to recognize that we have choice. To exercise choice, you actually have to know what you want. It's a reconnection to desire, which I believe has to be done through the body. You start to feel whether something is a genuine, intuitive, wanting, longing, a desire, or whether it's a reactive running from what is unwanted. They're slightly, but importantly, different, in my opinion, like the inner yes that leads you somewhere beautiful. You connect to desire, and then you recognize you have choice. Then, when people disappoint you and you might otherwise feel resentment, you see, oh, this is who they are. It's not personal. This is how they love. I have a choice to stay or go, to communicate or not. I have all sorts of choices I can start exercising. I can continue to show them benevolent energy, kindness, compassion, and even what we would colloquially call love, even if I'm making a choice to move in another direction. I've called sovereignty. I'm sure there are many ways to define it. I've called it a state of finding okayness within without needing anything to change with that. I cannot say that I have achieved said state in pretty much any arena of my life. However, I know that that's what I'm going for. It's not being right about how wronged I am. That's not to say that I don't vent to my girlfriends and create a container where I say, listen, I just need you to validate me right now so that I can get my sea legs under me. Is that the expression? Begin to practice empowering speech. Begin to find the meaning. Begin to locate my choices so that I can orient towards what is with acceptance. [Speaker 2] (38:12 - 39:44) Yeah. Thank you for sharing all that. I've always been an advocate. I won't say always, but when I first started getting into personal development work and consciousness work, it was your triggers or your teachers. Parts work was the entry stage for me. One of my acting teachers in my mid-twenties was highly influenced by Drs. Howell and Cedra Stone. They're psychologists who developed something called voice dialogue, the psychology of the selves and the aware ego. It was all about interviewing different parts of you. How this whole idea is that there's a compensatory nature of the psyche. If you over-identify with one way of being, the other part of you goes down into your unconscious. Very often, that's what you project. When you see people like that, you'll be triggered. For me, that was so huge for me to just be like, oh, wow, I'm judging this person, but yet is that something within me that I'm not aware of? Is that something with me that I don't like? It just created more space. Everything that we're talking about today, even just talking about the reductionist model of science, etc., is like consciousness has been left at the door. When we're talking about all these things, when we're talking about what makes a person symptomatic, when we talk about what makes a person live a life where they're like, oh, I'm not happy. I love consciousness. I love studying it. I just think we can never stress enough how important it is to know yourself on the deepest levels and express yourself or accept yourself in the deepest levels, even the light and the dark. It's just important to dance with those energies. [Speaker 1] (39:45 - 39:47) Did I cut out at all? [Speaker 2] (39:47 - 39:49) A little bit. You're all right. Okay. [Speaker 1] (39:50 - 46:29) Okay. I was just going to add, yes, 100%. As somebody who's a relative newbie to the inner work, in the past, I would say five, six years of my 12-year journey of health reclamation, it's way easier said than done, know thyself, because there's a huge ... I don't need to tell you this. There's a huge ... all these shame walls, and shame is used socially, societally, to keep us in order. It's like trauma-based behavioral control. We have interpersonal learned shame conditioning, and then we just have this very, could I even show this to myself? I don't know why that makes me teary. Could I even admit this to myself? I was in a silent retreat a couple of years ago at the beginning of the pandemic with Adyashant, a spiritual teacher, and he asked this question that I have asked in front of audiences ever since, which is, what is it that you know that you deeply wish you didn't know? I was like, mic drop. That's it. That's how you find where you are hiding literally from thyself. I need to leave my marriage. I'm having too much sex. I'm drinking too much alcohol. I should stop eating meat. I'm really treating my daughter, whatever it is, your personal list, and there's probably at least one or two things that you feel like, I would never say this out loud. I'd never even write this in a journal. The shame wall that is helping to protect that vulnerable space, the protector part, so to speak, in the language of Kartzberg, believes that you will literally die or you'll be stoned to death or otherwise if that is ever exposed, that exile is ever exposed for the energy of fear, anguish that she is holding. That protector part is doing the job for a reason. I actually think that we need to get to a place, again, on a nervous system level where the energy of shame can be held for even a few minutes because it is that difficult to hold that emotion in the body because it's not a cognitive thing. Emotions are not like a thought. They're different. How do you feel shame? Well, sometimes it's just a matter of practicing being wrong. I call it the villain crown. How do you put on your villain crown? I've done that work so many times with my daughters. I'm just going to be the wrong one. How do I just be the wrong one doing the wrong bad thing? Even one of my girlfriends left me a message yesterday to support me in a process. I'm in a dynamic in my life. I felt the shame. She was just inviting me to look at how I am participating in the pattern and why. I'm like, oh my God, I've been working on this for so long. I'm not wrong. I'm right to this time. It's because I felt just a little residual flavor of I don't want to be wrong again. I don't need to be wrong again. Of course, that's an illusion. That's not even what it's about. It's a co-creative process always. We have choices. There's no right and wrong in the realm of relationships, at least not through the lens I look through. What is it to just feel the shame on the other side of which is this aspect and dimension of yourself that's so sweet and tender and innocent? All the parts I've recovered, it's like little girls in tutus who want to play with kittens and put on fairy crowns. I just weep at the end of every session I have, just like, oh my God, I cannot believe that I locked you in a cage that's so fucked up. It's also perfect and exactly what was needed according to the learned script of my childhood and all of ours, probably. There's so much here. That's why I know, like you, I'm so allergic to spiritual bypass and this suggestion that it's like, oh, do the work or whatever. Really? Have you tried? Because it ain't for everyone. To just reach for the good feelings, in my very real experience, it often results in the squiggly, dark parts squirting out and all others, like whack-a-mole, right? They squirt out in all other places and you can do your mantras and burn your sage and talk about one love and curtain and whatever all day frigging long. But if you, in your lived reality, in your real relationships, how are your real relationships going, right? When you call yourself like a spiritual person and it's fine if there's incoherence there, totally fine, totally common, probably even normative, right? Like probably that's actually how it is, is there's incoherence, right? That I love wearing lipstick and I call myself a reclamation feminist or whatever. What we think of as incoherence and therefore hide, when we just get used to owning it, everyone feels that authenticity and it starts to reorganize our relationships. And honestly, people might bounce out, right? Or people might deepen an intimacy with you, but this authenticity is an organizing principle and it's not available until we learn to own what I refer to as shadow work as being like owning your hidden intentions, right? Like why am I doing this interview? Is it to help people? Maybe. Is it to connect to people I value so that maybe you'll like me and think that I'm like smart and interesting, right? Is it to support my celebrity status that I feel makes me worth, whatever, like I could come up with a laundry list of like really unsavory and unsexy reasons I'm doing this interview and they don't look like I'm serving humanity and I'm trying to help others generate more awareness around health reclamation. I like to tell myself that's why I'm doing it, but who knows if I can't own the ugly reasons, then they're going to be felt. You know what I'm saying? So it's such hard work. It's so uncomfortable. It's so uncomfortable. [Speaker 3] (46:31 - 47:08) Yeah. Something that a mindset shift that I've found really helps is like we have to learn how to value real, how to value reality, how to value becoming really deeply friendly and intimate with the facts of our inner and outer realities, because really only from that place that we can ever enact any kind of profound change. And I mean, even if you look at the study of the whole concept of self-esteem itself, it's nearly impossible to develop self-esteem unless you're intrinsically reality oriented, you know, but yeah, that's hard. Reality is hard. [Speaker 2] (47:11 - 50:32) Yeah. And I love that you talked to like shared what you just shared about, because these are the things that people don't want to acknowledge, you know, like, oh, I made a choice, but there's different parts of us that have different opinions on these different things of why you do the choice. You know what I mean? Like, like you gave such a great example about being on this podcast. Like, you know, I could say the same thing. Oh, I wanted to reconnect. Oh, like, oh, you're awesome and amazing. You do great work. It'd be great for our audience to list all these different things, you know? And, and I just think like that realness is so, I don't know. I don't know. I love that process. I love like, oh, this is, this is why you want to do this. Oh, this is why. Oh, this is why. Oh, interesting. You know, but then ultimately you're holding the tension of all these different parts of you. And then you come and you make a choice. You make a decision. Hopefully I think it's a decision that drives your life forward. But when we talk about these different parts, like I can see why the work is so challenging because things that, that it starts at such a young age, the trauma and the patterning, you know, back in the days, I had a friend of mine who I met in an acting class and our acting teacher, he was so focused on the actor's instrument. Let's support you and, and, and, and working on why you have all these blocks and inhibitions so you can expand who you are. So then you can be more integrated and tell and empathize with characters and tell more stories, you know, that was from an acting standpoint. And he had us do all these crazy exercises. And one of this exercise was a silly dilly exercise where he's like, just get up in front of the whole class and act like crazy, like cartoon characters, silly, crazy, like, Ooh, like, like just doing crazy stuff, you know? And my friend, we weren't friends at the time. He just couldn't, he just was like, like just completely blocked. Later on through his own process of doing this type of parts work, he realized anytime he laughed or giggled or cried when he was a child, his dad, and I'm, I'm, I'm pretty sure I'm remembering the story. His dad put a shotgun to his chest and said, quit crying, laughing, quit being a faggot. I'm going to use that language. And so that part coming in to protect him from that saved his life. And so like, when we can look at these aspects of us as like saving our lives in some, in some situations, you know, we build a different relationship to them. So we could almost be like, Hey, listen, thank you so much. But right now I'm, I'm pursuing an acting career, or I'm in this relationship and I need to, I need to open up. You're not going away. I know you're there, but I need to do this, this kind of work. So it doesn't create like a combative internal relationship. It's more like you said before, this acceptance, this embracing of these different parts of us. And I remember when that happened and even just having my own experience with things like that, it's like, man, like, thank you. You know, like I grew up, my mom was like, you know, Greek, you know, mom, like overprotective and raised me to be like a people pleaser and to be nice to everyone. And, you know, I liked those, some parts of those that some part of that, but then so much was repressed. Like that part that was like, no, this is me. This is my life. I want to do what I want to do for me. And so when you bring some balance and you can hold, you know, both sides, let's say it's, you have your, you're living life with two feet on the ground instead of one. But again, like you said, it is way easier said than done. Um, so. [Speaker 1] (50:33 - 55:49) Absolutely. I mean, I'm, there's so much I could reflect on what you shared. I love this conversation, you know, because I think one of the hardest parts for me to acknowledge is in there is the part that actually wants people who hurt me to suffer, right? Like the vindictive, vengeful, like competitive, like destructive part. Right. And to, of course, acknowledging that as somebody who's like saying all the things I'm saying in this interview, like, how could I, how could I relate to this part that not only is this one thing to judge and condemn and blame, it's another thing to actually want suffering to be induced at my hand, right? Like, how can I actually, yeah, I guess. And that was very uncomfortable for me to be interacting with. Cause like, like I could be like, Ooh, wow, this is crazy. I've been having all these ruminations about like how I really want for this person to like suffer or whatever, like do poorly in life or have horrible things happen to them or whatever. It's one thing to sort of like, Oh, joke around about it. And it's another thing to recognize that that's like a very alive entity within me. And what role could that entity possibly be playing that, you know, she imagined she can't play any other way. And what is the web of interaction and how do I just allow that part to exist? So when we get to the point where we can hold that in ourselves, how do we ever say that there's such a thing as like oppression and subjugation and violence that's senseless or whatever, if I have that within me, that punisher, then it's going to be reflected outside of me until, and if I can own that, right. So I can be like that spiritual gal who also has like, you know, this, this rageful entity within her. And if I have a relationship with that entity, what I have found honestly, is my lived reality is becoming more and more controversy free. Right. And that is my, you know, that is my goal. And, you know, I think as men not being one, to get in touch with this, right, this killer, this Hunter, what I, what I would call the dark, dark masculine, like this is essential. This is more essential than the feminine reclamation, maybe perhaps, right. For, you know, the plane right now is for men to get in touch with this part. Why? Because if I could be so sort of like reductionistic about it, this is the part that wants, you know, to, to murder, you know, your, your mother for castrating you, right? Like, it's the part of you, your lovely mother who probably adores you, I'm sure. And who meant nothing but good things for you in life, but taught you to be a nice boy. You know what? There's no such thing as like a nice man. Nobody wants a nice man. Okay. All people on this earth, I believe, want a man who is in touch with his killer. That is a man we can trust. And that is a man we can have, you know, ordered relationship to. But until you recognize that the figurative castration that you suffered at the hands of a woman who's probably afraid of men, because she's probably been, I'm not trying to say this about your mom, but just let's say, generally, you know, has been traumatized by men who are disconnected from their hearts, who were traumatized themselves. And this chain we all are dealing with, right, that she needed a safe man in the house. I don't have sons. But I think about this all the time, that I would absolutely figuratively castrated my sons 100% guarantee, because I am just now ending the war with men, right? And just now understanding what it is in my spiritual development to come into proper submission to safe men. And safe men does not mean beta man. It does not mean nice man. It does not mean sweet man. And it does not mean compliant man. It means a man who can occupy his directional, you know, sort of guidance oriented place energetically relative to me, and I can exhale and know how to comport myself and complimentary energy so our needs can be met together, right? So this is talking about relationships, but it's really relevant to any sort of dynamic of a polarity kind of play. So like, until you recognize that your rage and vengeance that might have been inspired by that initial imprinting is in there, I don't know. I mean, I don't, that seems like really difficult, right, to just appreciate all of the wonderful things that our parents did. And that's not to condemn them, and it's not to blame them. It's to acknowledge that this is universal, right? Our so-called darkness is universal. Until we come into a sacred relationship to it, we're going to be playing out these dynamics in all sorts of manipulative ways. And this is, I think, at the root of so many manipulative dynamics of indirect need meeting in romantic relationship where we just don't get to this really sacred complementarity that can come through polarity, right? Like, you occupy this place, I occupy this place, and together, we're, all of our yeses line up, right? I don't know that that's really possible until we've done this in our work. [Speaker 2] (55:50 - 57:31) Yeah, I completely agree with you. And I've found that paying attention to your daydreams can really shine a light on those parts that maybe you haven't yet fulfilled. Because like you said, I definitely have a part of me that's like, if I feel like I've been wronged and blamed for something that I didn't do, I have the, I will fucking end you fantasy. Like, it's like, it was just like, I will end you. Like, you will no longer be in existence because of what I shall do to you. And so obviously, to actually make the choice to end someone wouldn't work out well for my life. But to be able to, and I've talked about this before, like, what would happen if I took a homeopathic dose of that energy and integrated into my life? You know, like, I'm much more clear with my boundaries. I'm much more like, this does not work for me. You will not speak to me this way, etc, etc, etc. So I think like, again, like the more a person can hold space and like, okay, wow, that's fucking interesting. I can't believe I just went there. It's like road rage, for instance, you're driving along the road. I'm such a nice person. I love people. And then someone cuts you off. It's like, I'm going to follow you home. Well, first, I need to drive by you and look at you. So I could just see you. So I have a face to associate with all the shit I'm going to do to you in my mind. And that's going to continue for another, like, 18 seconds. And I'm going to follow you home. And then okay, cool. Let that go. Okay, I'm on to my next destination. You know what I mean? Like that was big for me in the past. Like the road rage part would like take over for like, 30 seconds. And I would like my other other consciousness now that just took over the wheel, you know, literally and figuratively. [Speaker 1] (57:31 - 57:32) The fragments, they're not talking. [Speaker 2] (57:33 - 58:31) They're not talking. There's no center being like, okay, well, I'm going to take a little 30% of you to support me in this situation. And it's just like, complete takeover. And that's where like, you have to live life. You can't semantically spiritually bypass, you have to experience life. And then after you have those experience, take some time and go, huh, why did I do that? Why did I say that? What was going on? There has to be a deep curiosity in an individual to do this kind of work beyond just curiosity of like, what's going on in the world? And what are the evil lords doing? Like, no, let's turn that gaze back inwards and be really curious about the nuances of thought of behavior of emotion. And that I think, is a good starting place, you know, having that curiosity. And if you don't have it, how do you build it? How do you that's it? I feel like that starts at a young age curiosity, and that can get stamped out of people. Amen. [Speaker 3] (58:31 - 58:40) So, guys, this has been like one of my favorite conversations ever. So thank you so much for sharing this absolutely incredible conversation. [Speaker 2] (58:41 - 58:46) Kelly, I'm happy that you got up. I got up at 3.30 in the morning in Australia for this. [Speaker 3] (58:47 - 58:58) This started at 3.30 for me. Absolutely worth it. Kelly, do you have like, any final parting message for our audience here? [Speaker 1] (59:02 - 1:03:46) I absolutely love this conversation, too. And I think more and more people are feeling like, I don't have an another path, right? Like I like I've just done the old thing, the old way of healing the old way, like a pursuing okayness for so long, I'm still at it. And so what other way of framing my life experience can I offer myself? And I do think that's what we touched on here, right? It's like, oh, you'll get to the place where you laugh, where it's like so funny to hear you talk with such authenticity about like, what a dick you can be. Okay, like, it's funny. It's funny. And I'm sure I'm not alone in thinking like comedy is such an antidote to so much of what we're struggling with. And it's not bypass, right? It's not bypass. It's not the same thing. In fact, I think the most, you know, dangerous elements in our midst right now are those that seek to spiritualize and whitewash, you know, the stark elements of reality that once we can see them, like you were saying, you know, once we can see them, then we can know how to interact with them. And so I've become really interested as I have a lot of our colleagues in alchemy, right? Like, what is what is alchemy? What is its role? Whether it's, you know, the literal, like physical alchemy of healing, whether it's exploring our lived environment through the alchemical lens, looking at the role of water, or whether it's spiritual alchemy. And so I love that, because it's no longer like, I have bad in me must get bad out, right? It's like, how do I work with the power of my attention to alchemize that which would otherwise continue to attract suffering, struggle, and pain to my life. And you'll get to that point, we all get to that point where a pattern comes up for, you know, transformation. And you'll know it, because the, the moment of should really do this intuitive speaking, right? What it's like, it's a quiet little, like, yeah, do that, right? Have that conversation, give up that thing, walk away from that, say no to that person, right? Say yes to that person. Yeah, do that. And it's quiet, right? It's quiet, it's uncharged, right? Like, I've come to this sort of observational conclusion that like inspired action doesn't have a charge. It's just the next right thing, you know, to do for yourself. And anything else is like reactivity, right? Because I might feel like, as I have a million times, like, it's time to have a conversation with someone in my family, right? And then I'll be like, no, no, it's cool. Everything's fine. I already had that conversation or close enough or whatever, like, maybe later, maybe I'll wait for a sign. And then the pile on of no is the charge. But the intuitive directive was a very quiet, neutral, yep, do that. And sometimes it'll be the opposite, right? Where the very quiet, no, that's not for you. Right? Or this relationship is no longer for you, or this job is no longer for you, or whatever, this substance is no longer for you. Like, it's like, okay, we're done here. And then on top comes like, no, I need this. I can't. What? That's not true. It's going to be better. It's going to be better. I promise. I promise. I'll go to another course. I'll take another, you know, healer on or whatever. And the yes of reactivity on top is really big. So I think that's like a way to navigate in this realm is to start to pay attention to where there's that little yes or little no. And it's honestly very hard to do if your body is not your ally, right? If you're still in the fighting, warring with your body, symptoms are bad, like running to the doctor thing, like this probably isn't for you. And I'm guessing you're probably not listening anyway. They're all on the same page. So that practice of like identifying the yes or the no, where do you feel it in your body? For me, it's like super low down and central. It's like, dink, dink, dink, dink. It's like, yes, no, yes, no. And it's just like a little, it's like an attack, a whisper. And then I feel my own, you know, like inner lawyer come to the stand and say, well, no, no, no, no. Yes, yes, yes, yes, do that. And that reactivity is something that I've come to uncomfortably recognize as part of my own inner play of, you know, creating challenge for myself, because apparently I enjoy it. [Speaker 2] (1:03:48 - 1:03:48) Cool. [Speaker 3] (1:03:49 - 1:03:49) Thank you. [Speaker 1] (1:03:51 - 1:03:51) Awesome. [Speaker 3] (1:03:52 - 1:04:04) Thank you so much for being here, guys. Thank you so much for listening. Kelly, is there anything that you'd like to share about your work or what you're currently offering? Let's just put all your links in the bio and let people find themselves there. [Speaker 1] (1:04:05 - 1:05:54) I have two things that I created in a flurry of like post-Dark Knight Shakti flow. Yeah, that I'd love to share because I feel super excited about them. And I imagine, you know, they'll be resonant. One is called the Sovereignty Series, where I started with the intention of building a library for my kids brainwashing. So it's like the conversations that I knew they wouldn't hear necessarily from these sources, which are my friends and experts. And it's a growing library. So perhaps I'll include you, you know, that would be amazing in the future. It's just really whoever I want to talk to. So anyways, it's kind of like my podcast, if you will. But we, you know, we just talk about things I've never spoken about publicly, like what are my beliefs about the shape of the earth? And what do I really think about, like, you know, the validity of things like urine therapy, or, you know, even going deeper dive in water fasting and parts work, you know, I demonstrate that was vulnerable. I demonstrated parts work session that I had with a professional, and all the sorts of stuff that I wanted the dot connecting, which I know is your wheelhouse to you know, the dot connecting of all these seemingly disparate topics, like what do they all have in common. And then something I'm calling faces of fierce femininity, which is the 11 women who inspired my central embodiment journey. Over the past five years, I was in very intimate conversation with each of them and put it together as a collection, just thinking like, wow, five years ago, if somebody was like, forwarded me an email, and they were like, here are your choices of tools and resources to support this process of healing your own inner relationship to your sexuality and coming into a daily relationship to sensuality, start here, I would have been really psyched about that. So that's why I created or at least one of the conscious reasons why I created it. [Speaker 3] (1:05:56 - 1:06:01) Amazing. We wish you all the best. I hope to do it again sometime in the future. And thank you. [Speaker 4] (1:06:01 - 1:06:02) Take care, guys. Thank you.