(00:01) so we’ll both be in awesome for that um yeah most likely it’ll be a black swan yoga uh-huh what’s going to be the theme of the show um movement so um i’m not sure if you’re familiar with pirangi he does a lot of plant medicine type music i know my shaman uses his music during our ceremonies uh he’s he’s pretty amazing so he’s gonna do um us we’re gonna interview him and then we’ll do like an ecstatic dance so we’re really excited i’m a huge fan of him so yeah um so we like to tell all of our guests like

(00:41) you can be as candid and open as you’d like and if you ever feel like oh you know what take that part out we can always edit it out later and we’re going to air this episode next wednesday so that we can promote your saturday’s workshop so you can bring that that up as many times as you want but we’ll also bring it up at the very end of the interview okay yeah awesome so um okay mercedes you want to read off the intro yeah sure he is a dream studies researcher and writer who has held a phd in counseling

(01:16) psychology for over 37 years and also works as a certified rolfing body worker and health consultant in austin texas he holds numerous workshops and seminars on topics and techniques varying from the use of dreams for psychological and spiritual guidance to the power of meditation for potentiating creativity and health additionally through his psychological orientation rooted in the depth psychology of carl jung and through his passion for functional nutrition and medicine this man not only talks the talk but he also walks the

(01:49) walk when it comes to mind body spirit connection combining all three of these facets into his integrative therapies boys and babes please open your minds hearts and ears to dr len worley [Music] i yay want to meet this guy most people say that about themselves after our intro that’s all you man that’s all you yeah i didn’t realize it had been so long [Laughter] that’s awesome so len your your work is quite extensive as i just mentioned and covers so many you know interesting and unconventional areas and i know we’re only going to be

(02:34) able to cover so much of it today so maybe a good place to start with you would be by diving into the world of dreams um and perhaps maybe you can first fill us in on how our current culture is misperceiving dreams and misleading us from the potential wisdom and intuition that can come with our dreams that’s a good setup well currently we’re quite fascinated with dreams i i don’t think this is new i think it’s an ancient fascination however most people view their dreams as entertainment and they if they do speak of their dreams

(03:20) they speak of them in such a fashion like you won’t believe what i dreamed last night um that’s it people even take the time to linger in bed long enough to remember directory so primarily it’s entertainment um for people who take their dreams more seriously i i think there is a most common error of taking the dreams literally so that if um you dream about your your boss at work then you presume that the dream might be showing you something about your blocks it’s what i would call externalization or literalization and

(04:11) we’re very caught in that the other way of course which is more out of debt psychology and uh more ancient spirit traditions is to see the dream as symbolic as a metaphor and i even um have another way of understanding the dream which is to see it as a simulator much like how pilots or astronauts are trained prior to going into actual flight they’re in something that has the same cockpit and they’re presented with many different scenarios that are intended to show them where their blind sides are where they’re not

(04:59) skillful enough for their lacking knowledge and the simulation is designed to find out we are the pilot this week and i think that’s probably what dreams are are doing for us as well if we can um use it to see how it is we’re not masterful in our dreams so if we’re for instance overly aggressive we tend to be shy and afraid passive or run away then we can see what intimidates us and that will give us a chance to in a sense replay the dream in a waking state and choose a different way of acting so this latter approach you might say a

(05:51) dream as a simulation is um takes a dream and not as entertainment even though it is quite entertaining but as something very serious that’s happening in the personality that’s intended by nature to make us more adaptive um you know which is the purpose of evolution yeah that’s beautiful that’s so important i think um that yeah i mean i’ve spent the most money i’ve had very vivid dreams throughout my life and i feel like i always just like you’re saying relate them to oh i dreamed about you know

(06:34) whatever it is but um cheating on my boyfriend i must be you know uninterested in him anymore or i don’t know what whatever the things are i don’t i never looked too deep into it but having you know looked at some of your work and listened to a lot of what you’ve had to say uh previously i’m really interested to to dive deeper into what’s really going on in my head and pulling that stuff out yeah well this this is a huge area i think misunderstanding when it comes to dreams when it has to do with

(07:06) sexual attraction and dreams we generally consider it in the culture at large that it’s wishful this comes out of sigmund freud’s idea of why we have dreams it’s to release attention from the day that could not be acted out and so that has to do primarily with sexual desire and anger so freud saw that that was the purpose of dreaming is essentially to let off steam uh but there are there are a lot of problems with this theory and most people um particularly in the tradition of carl jung j-u-n see that that’s a very

(08:04) reductionistic and narrow understanding of what’s happening in dreams and for instance you can see sexual desire as um a way of merging which is what happens there’s the two become one so to speak and one way to understand the actual desire and dream is that we’re attempting to merge with some needed quality in another person yeah so this i think explains why we can dream of celebrities or people we we don’t even know and there can be wrong social component and i’m kind of merging with something essential

(08:51) in that person’s personality that would be good for us yeah so someone very strongly let’s say a woman would draw in my dream of well it could be tom cruise you see who’s going going in a sense as the archetype of the hero that’s a quality that would round such a person out the dreamer out you see if they could bring more of that tom cruise capacity into their own personality they would be much more equipped to face life so yeah when i’m going into a dream that’s for instance i had this really uh moving dream that has stuck

(09:41) with me which a lot of dreams don’t you know they come and go we have a mini indonesia it seems when we wake up from a dream but um i dreamt that i was in this really like a storm like a turbulent storm i was somewhere in like a forested area or something so that all the debris from the trees and stuff was you know physically hitting me and stuff i was running through this storm trying to get out of the storm and i duck into this cave and in the cave i find my grandparents are in there there’s like a couch i mean it’s very lux and and calm

(10:14) and nice and super serene in this cave like a safe haven right and my grandparents who were deceased uh at the time i had this dream and uh i go in there and i’m like hey you know what are you guys doing in here like oh like what are you doing here you know this is where we hang out or this is our place and and i so i thought to myself oh and i knew in my dream okay well my grandparents are deceased so i know that i’m somewhere not on earth you know anymore and uh even though i’m having this really

(10:49) earthly experience but it comes to me okay i’m having this experience i’m with my grandparents i’m hanging out with them for a minute and it’s very peaceful like i said like the serenity came over me from the storm i had just come out of and so then i go you know i sit there with them for a minute conversating whatever it is and i i have the idea like i gotta go check out where i’m at if this isn’t where i thought i was you know this isn’t my normal reality and i walk outside of the

(11:15) cave and as i walk out i notice the storm is calm so i walk above it’s kind of like i’m looking into a mountain sliced in half i can see the cave there i can see the forest there and i walk up on top of this mountain and uh there’s like a beautiful scenic lake with its everything’s like pristine and calm with the little you know sparkles on everything and everything was really gorgeous and i i started crying i was in tears with uh just like this elation that this was heaven you know this was like what

(11:45) ever as a child or whatever it is you would envision is this perfect place you know this place is just so peaceful and calm and that’s what’s there after the storm and i woke up crying after that and i was more good to know where my grandparents were type of thing you know this is i was a lot younger when this happened but i don’t know can we look into that a little bit sure so what if you consider the dream as a purposeful simulation it’s putting you in a situation to help you develop some quality or to reassure

(12:21) you of some truth you might ask what is the purpose of this experience that you’ve had it it was a real experience even though not in the dimension that we normally live right and something really happened to you you had an encounter with these ancestors with people that i’m assuming were positive for you and it um reiterated the importance of their presence meaning their attitude what they stood for in life what they believed in um the nature of their personalities the whole of them was very consoling for you

(13:06) yeah definitely so i would ask why was that important at the time of your life and i i’d probably answer that by saying first of all they died within nine months of each other um and i lived you know i lived with them for a big period of my life uh it wasn’t then while i was living with them that they they passed away but they’re a very important part of my life they were probably what i would say held um the larger part of that side of my family my mom’s side of the family together you know once they passed we

(13:45) stopped all doing christmases in the same place and it so the family unit became you know not separated but maybe just disperse more and because i come from a divorced family maybe there’s something in there where i already have this like uh fear of that type of separation or abandonment issue or whatever it is that um i don’t want to see that type of separation happening so perhaps that played into it and maybe just knowing um i was also in that same same time frame around that same time and really since i can remember like seventh

(14:21) grade or so is when this this like a spiritual journey of soul-seeking thing started for me where i was getting really interested in the history of religions and just trying to figure out okay um coming from a background with those grandparents being very religious and they always like kind of pushed me into religion so exploring what what all my options were when it came to spirituality i guess and and now that my grandparents who were these very religious people passed like where do they think they went and where

(14:52) um what what makes sense for me you know with my logical brain trying to figure out um spirituality in that same time set of them them passing so i don’t know there’s a lot in there i guess well let me see if i can help make it even more intimate for you okay you when you think of them how would you describe their assets what is or was good about them uh both very uh loving but um my grandma more stern and judgmental comes to mind or she you know she’s where she a lot of shame came in my life but also a lot of guidance in

(15:48) that okay how was she in the dream um they were both as a unit more than it was singular like i don’t remember a big experience with one or the other it’s more like they were there together and maybe that was even the bigger thing is that they were together that’s what i’m getting too and what is the essence of that togetherness that might be important what what is good about that togetherness not being alone i think that’s a you know one of i’m sure everyone’s biggest fears but definitely one of my biggest fears and

(16:26) and other dreams that i’ve had several times throughout my life is where i’m actually at my grandparents house again standing amongst relatives like we would do and we would have family gatherings there and there’s this light that’s shining on this group of us that are standing there but otherwise it’s dark around it’s actually this like bug zapper light that they used to have out in the front patio we’re all standing there and we’re illuminated by this light we’re all conversating or

(16:53) whatever is happening but little by little each person is fading into the darkness and one by one they go and every time i blink someone else is missing and i’m i know what’s coming is that i’m going to have to i’m going to be there alone i’m going to have to face this darkness and eventually i do and then i have to i’m standing there in this light and i have to decide you know my what to do and i turn and i walk into the darkness so i think it’s a similar correlation there where it’s like

(17:22) uh togetherness symbolizes not being alone or not having to face things alone maybe yeah and what would happen to you if you breathe the essence of their union of being together if you breathed it into you and took it into your personality how might that help you to have their wisdom and knowing how to be together and how to stay together how might that be helpful to your your personality review through your breath could breathe that wisdom into you yeah i think i i definitely it’s something i definitely need um

(18:24) to almost feel safer in relying on my relationships with other people or just relying on people to show up in general to know that it’s possible i mean they’re showing you what’s possible yeah and it’s easy to get jaded and to think oh well i’m not just made i’ll never find someone to be a partner a companion in life and to give up on that dream but you in a very tumultuous experience like in the dream it’s crazy story and you find your way to the antidote which has to do with seeing this

(19:15) beautiful unity togetherness companionship of grandfather grandmother yeah and what a motto for you it would be easy to lose sight of it yeah is it do you think that it’s true that the others in our dreams are representing ourselves i think they’re representing potentials [Music] yeah this is a potential that is dreamed the possibility of union of companionship that endures yeah and uh it would be easy to lose sight of that yeah so i think what you’re asking also is when when you dream of someone is that about

(20:16) them or is it about you right mm-hmm yeah so it’s interesting we’re interviewing you right now because i have a plant medicine ceremony saturday so i’m abstaining from any other sort of medicine um i usually use um uh to fall asleep uh plant medicine as well so uh you know when you abstain from that your dreams kind of go crazy um so it’s interesting that we’re doing this interview now but most of my dreams when i do have them sorry could i back up and say something when you abstain from taking your

(20:56) nightly uh smoke [Music] you notice you start dreaming more yes big time and that’s probably because smoking suppresses rem the dream yes and when you’re finally free biochemically to dream there’s this pressure to catch up with dreaming because it’s so essential to creativity and memory yeah i think i’m gonna try to not use it anymore um and i do use my dreams as tools but it’s interesting when i do dream it’s often about others trying to hurt me and i was i was wondering if that’s because

(21:46) they’re representing me and i’m maybe hurting myself and like my i often dream with all boyfriends i’ve ever had that they’re cheating on me and my current partner when i told him that once he said well maybe you’re cheating yourself like me you know maybe everyone in my dream is just representing me well yes but i would want to let’s say this is a flight simulation okay so you have you want to be you want to get the details one of the guiding principles i use is stay with the image so let’s say with the image of one of

(22:33) these trees and ask the boyfriend why are you cheating on me what’s the reason i i um actually have a story to publish about this a man that i worked with for years who began to dream that his wife was cheating on him and it pulled the rug out it brought into his name because and he would go to her and say look i think my dream is giving me a warning and she would say and i knew her to be telling the truth i have no interest in having an affair the one of your dream is not me it’s about something else and he eventually

(23:32) came to ask the question of this woman his wife in the dream why are you leaving me and if once you learn what is called active imagination you can pose these questions to dream figures once and wait for impressions to be informed [Music] with the answer and she said when he did that she said i’m leaving you because i am so sick of your hyper masculinity and you’re always in control you’re very competitive and i can’t get close to you that way now this is what his imagination gave him as the reason for

(24:22) his dream wife leaving him and it cut him to the truth like nothing else and um this went on for about six months and gradually he was able to absorb the truth and and see how his early beginning had made him overly competitive it had paid off in making a lot of money but it had made him very one-sided and his soulful partner in the picture of his wife was complaining and demanding a change so and um so i think the answer is is as different and unique as there are yeah i would say let him talk to you about how you are

(25:26) that makes him want to cheat on you so in the dream ask why are you cheating on yeah actually well if you’re lucky enough to lose a dream and do that but probably you’re not going to be able to but you can do it once you’re away you can do it yeah i dream while i meditate often there you go but another way to do it is go in your laptop and you pose the questions why are you cheating on me what are you not what’s the reason and then you push all cap and let your imagination speak for him yeah that’s interesting that’s actually how i

(26:09) journal i write a question at the top and then i just let whatever comes out come out that’s cool i didn’t think of this as a then you get a conversation going back and forth you and your ego identity and with another potential in you [Music] and that is rich you you can discover much more than what was even in the dream hmm yeah i love that that’s really cool the fear of truth dialogues yeah i’ve i’ve also heard you mention some interesting stuff about the neuroscience of sleep and dreaming so

(26:49) would you bring us up to date on the science of how this plays into our physical and mental well-being well there are two things currently that we are deprived of that is having a huge impact on our home two things during sleep one is deep sleep which is happens generally in the first four hours i don’t get much of it yeah deep sleep is that sometimes it’s called slow wave because your brain waves are actually at your slowest and it’s the most restorative time it’s when immune functions come on strong

(27:41) it’s when the brain is cleared of toxicity for instance during the deepest phase of sleep the spinal fluids actually come up and wash the brain in between the neurons and help remove uh an enzyme um that if not removed turns into plaque which is associated with alzheimer’s disease wow so it’s very important that we sleep for immune function and for brain health as well now in the second half if if you’re getting eight hours of sleep so the last four hours it’s when we usually start dreaming and most people are if they’re getting a

(28:31) full-length sleep or dreaming about a total of two hours every night whether or not you remember your treatment unless you’re being suppressed by alcohol to some extent marijuana can suppress rdm the rapid eye movement period yeah and if we don’t dream enough we know for instance in learning a language that if you don’t dream enough you will not learn that language as quickly as someone else oh wow dreaming yeah so dreaming makes us smarter it gives us greater creativity to solve problems the next day and it helps us retain information

(29:22) that we’ve learned the previous day i love this info yeah it also helps regulate anxiety and depression um that’s huge i struggle with both we’re currently dream deprived in our culture because most people are sleeping well about six and a half hours six and a half we’ve been eight and so they’re cutting off an hour and a half of dream time [Music] compared to let’s say 70 uh 80 90 years ago we were sleeping an hour and a half more yeah is that due to uh light eventually like the actual light

(30:07) bulb and being able to see at night time and lighting and not having a pure darkness the way that we would if it was hundreds of years well yeah and not only the light bulbs certainly but it’s also for us now blue light emanating from computer screens um because this lures the output of melatonin hormone that kicks in and there’s darkness and helps us sleep the more blue light coming in especially the closer you get to sleep it’s interrupting the circadian cycle and it’s essentially telling the body that you need to stay awake because

(30:56) it’s still daylight in the sun so even substances like caffeine is that i mean you know we talked about marijuana a little bit being disrupting the dream cycle or me and certainly alcohol doing that is caffeine what kind of effect does it have on the dream cycle and on sleep in general i mean obviously it’s not easy to sleep while you’re on it yeah a huge disruptor and the rule of thumb i mean i love coffee and black tea and green tea me too yeah i i you need about seven hours to clear it out of your system that’s what i do yeah

(31:38) i don’t let myself have it afternoon yeah if if if let’s say at three you’re you’re doing more caffeine just so that you finish your day well you’re setting yourself up yeah issues and is there uh like a storing of that dream energy uh when you do when you’re drinking alcohol on a daily basis or using um marijuana or some other thing to fall asleep do you because jade always you know i’ve heard from other people as well and jade talks about how you have this like all these vivid dreams that come up that she might

(32:20) not have had these vivid dreams before she was smoking you know before she was had a time while she was smoking um but now that she’s off of it for a stint of time they all come full force yeah it’s actually called dream rebound and you know when this happens the most is when people have had alcoholism and they finally stopped drinking and it’s and unless they’re medicated they get something called dts or delirium actually begin to hallucinate wow and people used to think oh that’s just a result

(33:03) yeah a withdrawal but what it appears to be is that it’s the the necessity to catch up on the dreaming and it’s so strong that people are even dreaming while away yeah but they call it like your subconscious is like deal with all of this i’ve been suppressed yeah i am i have like i mentioned i have dreams while i meditate and there’s a recurring dream i’ve been having for half my life now during meditation not sleep where there’s a really peaceful river with some really smooth large stones

(33:41) that i can walk across to the other side i’m always barefoot and in a really pretty white lace dress the stones are really cold and i step on them and sometimes it’s graceful and sometimes i slip into the water and hurt myself but get back up well when i get to the other side it’s just so beautiful and there’s a lion like a very majestic lion beautiful mane sitting over there and i go sit and cuddle with him and sleep on him and i’m safe and there was no danger on the other side but there’s this place of like oh this

(34:17) is this is where i belong this lion is my master my keeper my protector i don’t know and i’ve always associated it with maybe this is the lord maybe this is god my version of god but what’s interesting i’ve had this my entire life whether i’m singing meditating um trying whatever meditative state i get into this vision comes and um it’s been really helpful in dark times when it comes but my um kind of weird question here is that my son who’s three has a lot of nightmares and i think he has a little bit of anxiety possibly but

(34:56) he has a lot of nightmares and his nightmares always involve lions trying to get him and he’s never had an ex he’s never seen a scary lion on tv he’s never been around lions but he has dreams that lions are trying to get him and either me and his dad are not home to protect him or he’s only safe if he gets his head on our chest but there’s always like a lion trying to get him and i thought it was interesting that could could you say that again he’s only safe when either we’re not home and so he’s not

(35:28) protected and he ends up getting uh attacked by the lions or he’s safe because he gets his head on our chest is what he says on your chest or his dad’s yeah well so a lion has great potential yeah as you have come out in your spontaneous meditation you’re safe because of its capacity to protect after all it is king of the jungle yeah so it’s big it’s ferocious it’s courageous and those qualities when we are aligned with them within our personality you know give us the feeling of of safety one thing you can do remember i talked

(36:24) about how you can have a dialogue after the dream yes so a good thing to do especially with children is to say do you know it’s possible to make friends with this but let’s talk about how you do this first of all you have to become very calm one way to get calm is to breathe calmly take a nice round you fill up and then just slowly let it go and you coach him on how to breathe which you may have already done and then you could ask him to turn around now that he’s out of the dream and speak to the lion and what would he want to say to them

(37:23) i love this yeah now you’re getting a conversation going and then you you you go from there what what do you think he might pay privileges um [Music] probably he would tell him to go away or um to not eat him you know because he’s only three so i’m guessing that that would maybe okay and you could say to your son and what does that lion say to you um back what does he want to say to you yeah i love that that’s a great practice for a toddler a little living journal yeah this is imaginable dialogue um so already if you’re getting him to talk

(38:24) with the thing that he must fears yeah something that happened there’s a change yeah you can ask him for what you would like for him to do and he may not go away you know you’re assuming that he’s trying to kill you but what if he’s trying to catch up with you to help you um yeah i haven’t shared with him my my vision either so maybe that would help oh wow yeah we often assume in dreams children and adults that the thing that is chasing us means to harm us but it very often especially if it’s

(39:16) a potential that we’re unacquainted with that our personality isn’t big enough yet to handle we assume that it’s meaning of us harm but some of my biggest dreams have have been realizing that what i thought was trying to hurt me was trying to help do you think that dreams in a sequential order start out i don’t know if there’s anything to this i’m just throwing this out there do they perhaps start out more um calm at first and then as you don’t address whatever the situation is or

(39:57) whatever the issue is that you needed that is subconsciously yourself trying to tell you you need to address it they grow stronger and stronger and into nightmares i would say yes to that but they can start out really uh frightening as well and then gradually come down as you integrate them for instance i remember many many years ago waking up from a dream that was nightmarish for me in the dream i was in my bed asleep and in my bedroom and i hear the window open and while in the dream i look over and see this african

(40:50) bushman dressed in loincloth and a spear come in crawling through the window and of course i’m as frightened as can be i just happened to have a shotgun that i had one crawls in dressed the same way with a spear from the primal um jungle bushland i shoot him and a fourth one come and that’s when i wake up in a panic and i say to myself there will be no end to them now what did that dream mean of course it was an early sign of a lost masculinity a masculinity

(41:54) wasn’t allowed to develop and made that trusted primal instinct that could defend himself if needed i grew up to be a very good fundamentalist sunday school boy that was very immediate and try and try i didn’t develop this needed masculinity and this was still true at age 40 when i was when i had that dream you say it took me years to integrate that masculinity and it took a lot of dreams to do it and in the early days i was always running for this type of man either he was kind of lower socioeconomic hispanic or usually african-american

(42:52) and because i lived academically up in my head but i was cut off from this primal masculine wow that’s really powerful yeah so so now that we’ve got did you have anything else well i’m just going to say one beautiful series i actually recorded this it’s on my website uh in the dream studies page and i talked about three nightmares i had of the white volvo being destroyed by nature by the jungle or by the ocean and in one there was a little black inner city ten-year-old kid who tore the roof off of my

(43:38) very secure by bravo and as when i understand what you understood what was happening i realized that this here’s this primal child-like masculinity this little boy knew how to be very savvy on the street you see something and he was wanting to do away with this orientation like the volvo that was very safe and secure but not very satisfying interesting wow things that frighten us often come to help us yeah all of our fears are trying to teach us something yeah we need to be shaken sometimes too when we react to fear more than we do to

(44:32) things that aren’t scary you know yeah so it reminds me now of the stream of your son i wonder if he could practice being more like a lion hmm that’s good for him masculinity that is interesting and seoul her son is very like tender and sweet and definitely you know he’s emotional beating up others yeah no he’s emotional yeah that’s so yeah he’s in need of some claws yeah wow all right so now that we know we have this direct access to this newly found magical superpower thanks to you len um how do we begin to

(45:27) and i know you’ve already explained a lot of how to do this but um maybe you can give us some finite guidelines here of how to decipher our dreams and and uh make use of the truths and insights we find in them well well the first thing is of course remembering your dreams um you have to linger with that your dream you can’t jump into the activities of your day which are all external and expect to remember much of your dream life so staying in bed hopefully not having to wake up to an alarm clock hopefully you’ve had enough sleep that

(46:18) can wake up naturally and then when you do to take a minute or two see what emotion and then ask the question oh i wonder what i’ve been dreaming that resulted in me having this feeling when i woke up and then if you get any images you have to rehearse it there before you get up to be or make coffee you have to have it in your memory it has to be rehearsed and then it needs to be written down yeah secondly yeah secondly right this is complex so i’m gonna have to make it simple sure i i would say the most helpful

(47:12) model for me is to consider the dream as like a flight simulator and i would ask why was i put in this situation what is there for me to learn yeah yeah definitely so the the first tip that you gave of um making sure you have first of all enough sleep so that you can wake up naturally and not to an alarm clock hopefully and then think about what you actually just dream about when you when you are in a dream how what is the chemicals or what’s happening um there that’s making it so that you don’t remember it like you remember something

(47:55) that happens in real life who that’s out of my league okay you when i why we’re not able to remember i i do not know the answer to that but there’s something that we’re not producing i heard i heard something about i’m not sure which hormone or chemical uh that we’re not producing but there is something that doesn’t allow us to capture it the same way we do in a waking sense maybe it was noradrenaline um i’m not sure but anyway so the idea is it doesn’t really matter yeah that i’m sure there’s

(48:34) a neurochemistry in this i know serotonin and dopamine is lowered in the dreaming process choline is elevated in fact it’s one way that that people increase dream recallers to take some kind of um supplement that will increase acetyl activity and you take it at the four-hour mark in the night wow so that is important though i think just knowing that we are going to forget our dreams like i i remember some vividly but i think it’s because once i wake up i’ve i’m i’m then having such an emotional experience i re i sit there

(49:14) and recall okay what happened and i maybe even say it out loud to somebody and now i’m just recalling what i’ve repeated almost more than the dream itself that makes sense well is there is there a certain meditative practice um that you use in order to tune into your own subconscious yeah there is i let me go back when i started meditating several decades ago in retrospect i used it as escape from my problems huh i didn’t realize this at the time um but later i i began to notice that when i came back from meditation

(50:06) meditating today i was almost numb and i think actually it was i was disassociated and i would go into this blissful state but um i don’t think it was very useful and but i thought of meditation as being primary like that it’s a way to get away from my stress and i think it’s often how meditation is taught and done it’s a way to the stress reliever today i do almost the opposite oh i when i start meditation i first start with a calming breath but only so that my mind is clearer to observe how i’m feeling in my body

(51:05) and i want to see if i feel tension anywhere and then i want to understand what is this tension about in my body what emotion is it related to yeah so if there’s anxiety if i’m anxious about something i want to know what the danger is what things or trying to alert me to yeah if i feel heavy and tired and it’s like depressiveness i want to know what are the situations of my life that are depressing that are in need of attention make an apology to how is it that i’ve not been true to

(52:08) myself you see that’s a purpose of shame we usually think of it in our culture as the foundation of low self-esteem but in terms of evolution we’ve evolved the capacity of shame so that it keeps us humble and in relationship with others stops us from being exploited you see each of these difficult emotions for instance like anger serves the purpose of helping us be adapting anger alerts us to some unfairness yeah so i go into a meditation and i find that i’m irritable i want to listen in and ask okay i’m angry about what unfair situation

(53:04) you see and i want to use that anger to help me listen and to see oh lynn you need to advocate for yourself better here you need to go back and speak up about this situation where you uh allowed yourself to be taken yeah so i listen to see what’s disturbing first of all i want to know rather than transcend above them and get away because in doing so we miss a huge source of guidance you just turned meditation into a serious work day it sounds yeah but at the same time i think that makes a ton of sense that yeah you can’t

(53:57) really rise above any of the crud if you don’t get through the crud first right you have to you have to do yeah i didn’t think of it as an escape that’s true i i know for me i do it to clear my head so that i can be more present with my kids um [Music] i almost think though jade to that point like when i’m doing it to to clear my head it’s more just giving myself a moment to consciously breathe than almost anything else and and think about like actually focus on one thing whether it be space or you know some something that

(54:32) calms you um which is just focusing your brain it’s i mean to say to to ask yourself to actually think nothing i think is not necessarily possible but so that you’re not scattered on thinking a million different things and worried about you know if are the dishes done and is your husband taking care of it and where your kids at and what’s the you know on the docket for work today and instead of just saying okay focus on one thing for a moment and take a few deep breaths and that’s the space yeah it’s interesting how many different

(55:04) directions meditation can go i attend boulder psychic institute and through meditation they’ve taught us to look at our chakras to go into past lives and see how we passed away um they’ve taught us to um you know do so many things healing things with our parents even though of course we’re not present so many different things and it’s so interesting to me how strong of a tool it is depending on how you use it but i didn’t you know i hadn’t thought of it as a as a means of escape but that is interesting

(55:46) or a simply missing instinctual wisdom if if one goes into a meditative palm while ignoring tension in the body yeah one may be missing out on their internal gps system this morning about um let’s see the danger of continuing to work on a deadline at work that is impossible to meet unless you ask more people to help you you know it’s so funny i’m making a connection now that whenever i get a massage that 90 minutes or whatever time i’m laying there is when some of my most like extraordinary ideas come up you know

(56:33) some of the things that i connect the dots on is that’s when it’s happening and i’m wondering too i always attributed that to it’s you’re kind of in a meditative state you’re calmed down you’re kind of like you know slowed down and calm enough to see and hear your thoughts and to to go through some of that stuff that you have been putting aside but also maybe because they’re physically whoever’s massaging you is physically triggering parts of your body that are holding tension it’s like a

(56:59) physical reminder almost of like why am i holding so much like why is that so sore and why am i holding in there and then triggering this conscious thought of you know oh well that’s because i’ve been you know stressed out about this thing and out of the other and i need to go into that and really think more about them so you get you you get a useful insight about things when you get a massage yeah okay i gotta tell you a dream okay [Laughter] last week and in the dream i was walking into a school and i knew

(57:40) that it would be my task to teach meditation to elementary age school children yeah that the challenge was how do i explain this in a way that will be relevant and intriguing to them [Music] and then it came to me oh here’s how you tell them and these are the words if you get quiet inside and i mean really quiet and you wait long enough there is an intelligence deeper and stronger and smarter than you come online inside your mind and begin to solve problems for you [Music] i love that so but that’s like

(58:44) you’re not gonna get there doing a five you’re probably not going to get there doing a five or ten minute quick app meditation that’s only getting you maybe inside the front door once you go 15 20 yeah that’s when this other deeper intelligence which is i think is happening that’s when this other yeah i like that i like that for kids too like there’s superman in all of us and the world is the kryptonite we have to sort through we just listen long enough he’s in there yeah he or she is so interesting

(59:33) um and i’m aware also that you teach a workshop specifically for after doing um an ayahuasca ceremony and since i’m a student of plant medicine myself i was curious if you could touch on what that workshop involves i’m also super curious how it relates to dreams since it’s we’re pretty much kind of seems like we’re dreaming the entire time just in a way different way yeah exactly well the reason i uh this is a workshop a day long that i did about three weeks ago the reason i i did it is because i hear

(1:00:13) about a lot of journeys i’m a body worker i do rolfing which is deeper than massage but still body work so in this state it’s at times it’s kind of like the priestly confessional life for a lot of teams but people will tell me about especially here in austin about journeys like that ayahuasca be the at the moment a very common one and so i hear people talk about your experiences and i know two things either they’ve had a difficult bad experience and they’ve not made use of it they’ve not understood

(1:00:59) understood why their unconscious was giving them a difficult journey and so they write it off as a bad trip or i don’t want the medicine or yeah no integration whatever it was yeah and it remains a compartmentalized experience but the other thing i noticed is that people can have terribly blissful experiences in it not translate into how they’re living their life day-to-day yes yeah integration is really about i i would prefer to say a simulation it’s how to take these extraordinary experiences let’s say positive

(1:01:49) experiences and make and change your life with it yeah the homework is hard so um oh wow where to go there and i see these experiences really in the same way that i see dreams it’s in a journey experience through the medicine you’re softening your typical ego and as a result a deeper wisdom intelligence can begin to communicate through imagery and impressions right the same thing happens in in dreaming is essentially the ego offenses are taken offline and then consciousness has access to much more that’s actually going on

(1:02:49) what are your thoughts on um using plant medicines as that type of therapeutic tool to to explore these things that maybe we’re already dreaming about we’re just not focusing on in our dreams do you think do you think that if we were just able to use the things that we already are uh we have access to like our dreams if we were able to use them properly as therapeutic tools like we were discussing today would that make it so that we we don’t even need to look for these external sources to really push us into that like ayahuasca

(1:03:23) or any of the other plant medicine experiences that do other things yeah i’m not sure i got your question but let me give you this answer and see if i did nothing most of us that do or have used medicines do so because it increases our capacity for feeling fullness because we live so rapidly and we’re so internalized and plugged into something outside of herself most of our daytime we’re not oriented to the rich world of our senses and pleasure just the pleasure of sunshine and wind and the pleasure of that we’re cut off

(1:04:18) really our erotic nature unless we have a highly sexual movement but yeah most part we’re lacking feeling from this especially the darker field that we’re often afraid to go into like grief for do i think medicines enable us to feel things more deeply you can’t run from it either you’re stuck with that for a certain amount of time at least for me the um this weekend is i think my 12th ceremony and for me in that one night i feel like i’ve gone through about a year worth of therapy um i go in with three different

(1:05:02) intentions and i not only experience in a way that i’ll never forget um the theme of that intention and what the medicine the mother is trying to teach me um but the ant the thing for me that’s different than dreams is like you actually get the answer in the journey instead of you know later on but the integration like you’re saying that’s the hard part because it can my whole theme can be motherhood and then the journey tell me let me i will end up being my son throughout the entire journey i’m him

(1:05:36) i’m feeling all his feelings and i’m seeing why he wants so much attention at times and what it feels like when i’m too busy how painful that is for him and it’s not a snap it’s not a snap of the fingers after the ceremony i don’t automatically just become this more present mother but i’m at least conscious i think more conscious of his feelings and more conscious of whether or not i am being as present as i’d like to be so it’s really hard to just instantly change into what the medicine

(1:06:06) is showing me i need to gravitate towards but i’m at least conscious of what where i’m at in it i think um do you spend time in the days that follow meditating on the journey and re-accessing it by going into those states of course in a more subtle way i do but i will say uh i was more serious with it at in the beginning i think that because it’s such a sacred medicine there’s no way you can ever take it lightly you’re never like okay i’ll go do this and then when it’s done you just forget about it

(1:06:44) it’s such a sacred medicine you still feel that nervousness like oh my god should i really be doing this and what if it’s dark i’ve had one dark ceremony and since then i’m like what if it goes there again um and then after um i usually write it out and journal it and then i discuss it with a few people that way it’s more i guess in my mind you know once you discuss something um well let me give you an example let’s let’s take the dream of the storm and the grandparents okay let’s say that that happens in a journey

(1:07:25) yeah now the question is how could you to actualize that daily life well if i realized the the connection there of me feeling um worried about not having that type of soulmate relationship or a ban you know having abandonment issues if i can realize that connection then i can figure out how to integrate it i suppose and in meditation let’s say i’m with you there you could actually go back and remember the sweetness of that encounter you could see that the stability of their relationship and you can breathe it in through a

(1:08:08) meditative breath and imagining it going to every cell of your body and notice any place inside of you that lacked faith that maybe had become shaded or that it was not holding that dream of possibility and you breathe the essence of those grandparents right into those fearful places the more we do you do that day after day after the day you create you as we know now euro circuit right that can become increasingly established and more part of your dominant personality yeah but it takes repetition it’s the same with journeys it’s the

(1:09:00) same with dreams it’s one thing to have an interpretation a meaning but integration comes through repeated remembering breathing in you see so embodying this vibration and this this feeling until it becomes a muscle memory essentially are happening there you go or with your son of a lion what for instance the question to him would be if you were going to be like a lion with your he’s well he’s he’s only three mm-hmm yeah well he may be a little young for this but let me let me say the idea is to get him to practice being like a lion

(1:09:50) yeah and the more he he practices the more that’s going to integrate into the personality so yeah my thing within with integration is people are leaving these these extraordinary experiences they’re leaving them with a shaman and they spend very little time recalling or living in it and that’s where things will change yeah i am i want to tell a quick story about that um this guy my very first ceremony and i’m glad it was my first ceremony because it made it stuck with me because of it but he did

(1:10:31) it was like his 40th ceremony and he said that he went into his journey and mother ayahuasca showed him seven cards and it was his last seven ceremonies when she turned him over and she showed him the seven cards and then she slapped him in the face and she said don’t come back here until you deal with these seven cards because he hadn’t integrated any of them and then his literally his journey ended like that and he didn’t have anything else the rest of the night and i’m glad i heard that story on my first ceremony because

(1:11:00) it stuck with me because i was like i don’t ever want to have that experience i want to you know definitely integrate but what um do you think when we are having those journeys do you think that it’s what do you think is going on is it like our higher consciousness is it just our deepest desires showing their faces or like what is it it feels like truth um [Music] but you’re asking what is it or who what is this information that we’re getting yeah do you know well i could i i really don’t but i i know when in

(1:11:40) the psychology that i uh use which is union psychology carl jung’s psychology it’s understood that the self is very complex but one essential piece of itself is called the ego self it’s all right it’s our ability it’s not necessarily bad if we’re egotistical and too full of herself we get into trouble right or terribly ego less and shameful and humiliated that we don’t have the power to do things so but a good flexible ego can make decisions can be disciplined it can concentrate on something and accomplish

(1:12:27) tasks but this is not the only intelligence there is another intelligence it’s much wiser bigger sometimes that is spelled with a capital s for self where ego itself is spelled with a lower case yeah it seems to me that there is something much larger than the ego self that is orchestrating journey experiences and certainly dreams yeah and it seems to know more than us and it seems to have as its purpose to evolve us to make us more adaptive to the ever-changing world that we live in and one of the ways that it does this is

(1:13:20) by bringing us into contact with potentials that we’re unfamiliar with like the lion or and by doing or it may be uh by bringing us into contact like this journey or with a separate card with um a side of herself that’s not responsible and so it tells us the truth that’s humbling to sober us yeah and we want to externalize it because it’s it’s hard to deal with yeah i’ve just always wondered like is everything i’m receiving here completely true like i remember one time um in a ceremony years ago or right

(1:14:04) before trump won i had a a journey where he he won and i remember the next day after my ceremony saying well now i’m really doubting ayahuasca because there’s no way this guy’s going to win and he did win a couple weeks later and everything that was in the ceremony played out so true and so then i was like oh wow and um there was one time where i went to a past life where i was a child sex slave and then i saw in another ceremony my partner was my ancestor on my mom’s side reincarnated as my partner and um

(1:14:33) basically the med and sudden was saying that all of our partners are basically our reincarnated ancestors so whenever i get things like that i’m always like is this do i accept this as true or is this like a metaphor so i just was interested on your take on that so thank you yeah well well which one of those oh no not not your take on all of that just on my question that you already answered yeah and and i wanted to also maybe bring the the lion thing full circle because as you were talking about it um uh as answering that last question

(1:15:14) i remembered that last time i was in austin i was wearing this jacket um oh yeah over to jade’s house and it had a fur collar you know it was cold over there so i had this big fur caller and soul herself great son yeah uh i i came in and he was like he’s very quiet and he’s really like he kind of like you know sits back and and observes and it’s an observer yeah and later when i left jade texts and he goes soul is obsessed with your jacket he says it’s a it’s a lions jacket you know and he wants a jacket

(1:15:43) like that because he wants to be a lion and so isn’t that funny that we’re having this whole conversation all these little things tied together that’s so crazy i brought a smile to my face that there’s some something there so much lion talk yeah all right so we have a question from the magic mob that’s going to take us in a slightly different direction here from the dream world raquel on instagram asks what kind of role do you think a person’s spirituality or religious beliefs can play in their own personal

(1:16:17) growth and healing or in their regression and stagnancy oh boy yeah the quality of religion well i can use myself as an example um when i when i was a boy my mother went into the pentecostal church from a very uh button-down conservative baptist church i was 13 and i was frightened by all that i would see go on there was speaking in other times dancing in the in the aisles and it was it was frightening but eventually i had one of those experiences

(1:17:20) at age 13 and it had a profound effect on me because it required that i learned to let go and uh when i did in this ecstatic experience um it ridded me of shyness for several months thereafter but at the same time in the years it followed because it was fundamentalism and rigid it also induced me the fear of the divine uh a rigidity about sexuality uh a fear of trusting my own inner voice versus the bible that someone else wrote so religion was both good and bad and sad it gave me great comfort in my early life to feel that there was

(1:18:23) something bigger than me that i could turn to and pray to but at the same time had i continued living in that child-like way i would have never come to trust the inner voice inside so i i think religion is very mixed you know uh like like any great thing we have to be very um observant about the good and the bad in it for sure and i don’t know why this came to mind exactly while you’re saying that but because you said you you had all those dreams that pointed to you wanting to embody this masculine energy that you felt you

(1:19:13) hadn’t embodied when you were younger or [Music] or all the way up to your 40 i think you said um do you think that religion in any way whenever because it has this this structured way about it and because it’s uh a lot of the time fear-based uh and and you know it’s this thing that we’re kind of looking up to and holding over our heads and god is all-powerful and that is there um maybe an attraction to that whenever you’re more embodying a feminine energy that that we look for as humans i mean i

(1:19:51) that just came up while you’re you’re you’re talking about it so i don’t understand your question is there something to religion that am that the religion itself is already holding this like more masculine energy um that we’re attracted to as as humans maybe who are embodying more of the feminine energy at the time that we find it in your opinion well you’re you’re speaking of patriarchal religions yes i’m not saying all religions for sure but you’re talking about the baptist church and um

(1:20:33) where you’re looking at a male figure firstly of course but even more than that just the energy that um the fear of god you know fearing god being this like overbearing lion like we were talking about before being this overbearing figure that can punish you and can um bring some sort of uh damage to your life if you don’t follow his or you know whatever the rules are that type of energy do you think that we seek that out when we especially are young because we’re not embodying that masculine energy yet

(1:21:10) does that make sense yeah we’re wanting something to protect us yeah for sure yeah so so we’re well just like we turn to our mother and father because we are we’re in need of guidance and protection and i i think in the early stage of spiritual development we look outside of ourselves in a similar way and our images are of some kind of god the father creator that is bigger than us but as we i think as we develop emotionally that god increasingly becomes uh an aspect of our self our divinity and maybe more balance

(1:22:01) too in those energies that i’m talking about and maybe it’s just coming you know i’m sure it’s just coming from my own personal perspective but so let’s see here we have another question here from the magic mob it’s a pick your poison which is always a difficult they’re always a little difficult these questions um zero on instagram says would you rather live your entire life in a virtual reality where all your wishes are granted or in the real world me yeah we’re gonna all yeah let’s start with you we always uh

(1:22:38) we always have a pick your poison for every guest give me the real world i think it could be one of the uh most seductive uh poisons of ever to have everything you want given to you definitely not a way to uh to develop and mature much of my experience of maturities has come through grief and being humiliated and facing limitation and suffering and learning what to do with desires that could not be left so yeah i have the same answer as you but i probably wouldn’t have been able to say it as eloquently i agree as well but i’m kind of worried

(1:23:39) i don’t know if it worry is the right word i’m just interested to see where we’re going with all the the virtual reality video games and the direction that we’re um creating these experiences um you know that take us maybe as an escape out of the real world or maybe it’s going to somehow integrate into our lives as well i’m not sure but yeah it’s going to be interesting i’m sure um so we like to end every show with a few short questions uh the first one is what advice would you give to your 25

(1:24:11) year old self forgive yourself much sooner [Music] forgive yourself much sooner i like that when do you feel like you did when did i start forgiving myself that was so gradual i don’t know how to say this [Music] well the thing that makes us to forgiveness i i think is wreck is seeing how inexhaustible shame can be in guilt and that striving for for goodness who is that it’s

(1:25:16) striving and ultimately we have to accept you know both sides of our nature that we need to be forgiven and forgive the sooner the better i like that yeah all right um so if you could have the whole world read one book which would it be oh i love that well it would be one author it would be alex miller actually many years ago after discovering this uh a swiss writer psychologist alice miller she wrote for you around good drama of the gift to child and about ten others she helped me understand and see the innocence of

(1:26:13) childhood like no other and help me tell the truth about what i had suffered as a child and to feel the legitimate uh pain and grief of it and it was more grounding than anything i had ever read and it affected me so deeply i was already a psychologist there at the time that i had never found the depth of a sense of connection to the child as when i read her work and um i said if i could have every person in the u.

(1:26:59) s read this woman’s work i would be willing to die at any time oh wow yeah so all right glad we asked we’re writing uh as much as anyone else and i’ll give you an example of this okay yeah she grew up during the holocaust and in trying to make sense of what happened she investigated the life of hitler and she did it she said as a psychotherapist should using empathy to answer the question how could a child born innocent as anyone else become hitler [Music] and what she uncovered was hitler’s childhood and

(1:28:01) the forces that shaped him to become what he was and one of the primary things she uncovered is how much she lacked what she called an enlightened witness someone who could witness the abuse that he suffered especially from his cruel father and help him realize that what was happening to him was not his fault and lacking that he had to compartmentalize and hate the parts of him itself especially his vulnerability he’s beaten a lot but in reading this chapter suddenly you you can you realize that if you use empathy

(1:28:57) you can understand everything even even the worst um that’s good news in understanding ourselves yeah yeah making the case for the other side it gives you some sort of that’s the next book i’m going to read i think i have it on my shelf right now actually oh you do pick it up yeah i’m excited um thank you for sharing that lin that’s a a really good answer um if you could whisper one phrase everyone on the planet what would it be [Music] i heard a story about piknoton the great vietnamese meditation teacher

(1:29:48) who uh had to leave vietnam during the war i heard that he did a pres presentation up at omega years ago or somewhere in the northeast and the room was filled with hundreds of people and he eventually came in walks very slow an elderly man now and then he sat in front of the room and he simply looked at people and they looked at him waiting for his words of wisdom and he evidently waited an excessively long time before he said anything just looking at people and then he said there’s no need to rush [Music] beautiful i need to put that on my

(1:30:49) kitchen stove i need it on my phone every time i that’s where i’m looking all the time i love that my uh cell phone batteries uh about to go oh good because we have the last question it’s our last one so where is the best place for our listeners to get in touch with you len and where can they find you and your work yeah my website uh len worley lynnworleyphd.

(1:31:17) com and you have a workshop uh this saturday in austin yes um uh the first saturday in january just listening to dottie listening to depression okay they can find that information on your site yeah we’re going to be looking at ways that anxiety and depression or evolutionary intelligences that come to help us not as um pathologies that are in need of being cured ah i like great change of perspective something amazing yeah thank you for the conversation oh thank you so much this one’s cute really eye opening i know i need to do a lot of

(1:32:02) work even on just the dream i talked to you about today but generally yeah i’m going to start using some of these tricks and tools you get yeah thank you so much yeah um so if you don’t mind just hitting stop on audacity and um you can uh if you just follow the instructions you know that our producer sent you he’ll get your audio and we’ll get this up on uh wednesday morning thank you so much for the work you do thank you thank you same to you okay bye see you mercedes um okay okay seemed like he wanted to get

(1:32:41) off so i know that his phone was dying too yeah that was really good yeah i know the whole time i was like this is better than i know it’s just like this is really good there’s a couple like where i asked some off some rogue questions we might want to yeah we’ll clip those just to save time since he doesn’t have an answer really for it but yeah if it’s not good it’s not good yeah and sometimes i just go rogue and see what happens sometimes it’s good yeah you never know but i feel like we

(1:33:08) can flip them in and out easily so yeah um what do you want to do you want to just act like you just got off yeah yeah wow no i don’t say well hold on i think i did that on my last one or you actually just got off because i think i did the last few okay that was good i feel like that whole uh interview was just a a box of magic tricks literally i’m writing them down as he’s saying them like okay i gotta implement this i gotta implement this i know but so much information i i feel like i’m gonna have

(1:33:46) to listen to it you know during editing and then once we post it it’s like that’s when i’ll finally absorb it all i think that’s the nicest thing about doing this podcast is that we have i know we get to have it three times yeah before you get posted so we really are using this stuff we’re integrating as much as we can uh well except for how busy we are but yeah with doing the next one getting ready for the next one and doing it all over again but uh when i was talking to him about that dream of

(1:34:14) my grandparents i was like not prepared for how all the emotions of that dream because like i said falling from that dream when it happened you know of course um to come to come back up and resurface and then trying to work through it it was like a full-blown therapy session so i cannot imagine like at one of his seminars where you go through you know he he has you go out of his dreams when he does these dream seminars um you go through uh several of your dreams you literally do therapies with it you you know you

(1:34:47) journal with his guidance and all kinds of stuff so i think next time in austin i need to set that up get some extra yes let’s definitely look at since we’re having a live south by show let’s definitely look at what he may have going on then good idea that’s a really good idea yeah cool we’ll take you guys with us don’t worry oh all right so let’s get into today’s magic tricks yeah what do you have mercedes my magic trick is focused on contrast and the way contrast has been the theme of so much of my own personal

(1:35:22) growth in the most recent chapter you know this current chapter of my life recognizing how and why to be grateful for the darkness in my life um i don’t know i’ve just been noticing that it seems like us humans we creatures of comfort spend the better part of our lives trying to avoid conflict we are always attempting to escape pain and hoping to live with as little stress as possible like we talked about a lot in today’s interview with these goals in mind we i know i tiptoe around major issues with my loved ones we um

(1:36:02) yeah we use addictions to mask our feelings for sure whether that’s even you know it can be anything from from shopping to drugs and alcohol of course yeah whatever your vice is and we keep our standards low so that we don’t have to feel let down after not reaching high you know after not reaching some higher goal that we might have set instead if that makes sense um so yeah contrast like yeah i love that darkness whenever you have sorry good we train ourselves to be adverse to contrast because of the confrontational nature that comes

(1:36:44) with it but the reality is that all of the beauty we ever experience only exists because of the contradictory ugliness that keeps us for from taking it for granted so i guess in short without this whole yin and yang balance our most blissful moments would be you know mundane at best and our biggest accomplishments would pale without the challenge um or the challenges we’d had to face in order to achieve them so you’re poison yeah exactly like to pick your poison today so today instead of um expending your energy trying to

(1:37:25) likely unsuccessfully remove the darkness from your life my magic trick is to try noticing how you’ve been able to shine in spite of those darknesses notice where the discomfort and pain in your life has propelled you in a positive direction and maybe even attempt to be thankful for the places that this type of contrast has played a critical role in your life i know this type of perspective swap has quickly and dangerously changed my life for the better so i know you guys will have the same results if you attempt it

(1:38:00) yeah i love that i know that with me whenever i have a big blowout with someone it typically causes us to take some take some you know damaging thing out of the habit or whatever out of the practice of the relationship you know so conflict can be really beneficial um i love that um [Music] yeah so what’s your name my magic trick i know so um [Music] i was going to do one but because of yours another one came to mind so i’m gonna go with that and it’s um on the floor take out okay now let’s see what happens

(1:38:47) um take out a piece of paper and on the left side write down another list write down um dark experiences that you’ve gone through you know tough things throughout your life and on the right side write down how they made you stronger um [Music] which is it goes hand in hand with yours because it’s contrast right so um you know you can look at that list and think man i’m freaking strong and what would i be without these dark experiences not that you enjoyed them not that you would want to relive them but they made you who you are

(1:39:27) and it’ll maybe putting this out on paper and looking at it will help you in your future situations that feel like they suck to think well what am i going to put on the right side of this paper um you know so yeah so i’m gonna i’m gonna go with that as my magic chicken said i really like that um compound wasn’t rehearsed or anything and it just popped in my head so nothing i’ve done yet but i’m gonna do it i love that you kind of did do that though i remember a story you told in the previous episode i think about an

(1:39:57) action function yeah he didn’t have me write anything down on the right side he just had me write down like my life story chronologically yeah to see how strong and powerful and the proof of what you’d gone to i didn’t know that that’s what he was doing yeah but but i want yeah i want y’all to write it down with the intention of on the right side yeah right that outweighs yeah i love it magic yeah all right you guys thanks so much for listening we hope that you enjoyed lynn worley uh he’s like a dream wizard and i love that

(1:40:34) i found it super interesting um so yeah if you liked it please share this episode with your friends and family this would mean so much to us and remember that if you have a question for any of our future guests you can go to our instagram page at the magic hour to ask any of our guests find out who we’re having on or to ask us a question um yeah we love you guys talk to you all next week until then be a light thank you to dr len worley for being so awesome on today’s show i really feel like this was powerful and

(1:41:08) people will find a lot of value in it and of course thank you to at rayton royal for our intro jam and adam at red fox audio for producing the show and putting up with jade and i and all our craziness we love you stay magical friends all right cool well we did a couple options of the intro so i think we’re good on this one you think my magic trick is all right i don’t need to redo it no i liked it okay um i liked how natural natural both of ours were um