Duncan Trussell Family Hour - 483: Trudy Goodman

Episode Date: December 22, 2021

Trudy Goodman, founding teacher of insightLA and incredible spiritual leader, re-joins the DTFH! You can learn more about Trudy on her website, TrudyGoodman.com, and you can follow her on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter! Trudy's nonprofit meditation/mindfulness practice, insightLA, is offering a special Christmas Eve meditation session for people having a rough time this season. Check out “To All A Goodnight” A Christmas Eve Meditation featuring Performances from Broadway. And if you find yourself needing a little more help on Christmas day, Trudy is hosting another session! Join "H.O.P.E. Practice Group (Healing Ourselves through the Present Experience)" from 11am-12:30pm PT. Original music by Aaron Michael Goldberg. This episode is brought to you by: BetterHelp - Visit betterhealth.com/duncan to find a great counselor and get 10% off of your first month of counseling! BLUECHEW - Use offer code: DUNCAN at checkout and get your first shipment FREE with just $5 shipping. Squarespace - Use offer code: DUNCAN to save 10% on your first site.

Office Depot OfficeMax has great deals on everything you need to succeed. Like stylish furniture and chairs to keep you working comfortably, the latest tech to keep you organized and productive, calendars and planners to keep you on schedule, and cleaning supplies to keep your space spotless. It's the perfect time to stock up on the supplies you need to succeed from the office to your home and everywhere in between. Need it fast? No problem.

Place your order at officedepot.com and pick it up in just 20 minutes at your nearest Office Depot or OfficeMax store. I know that you're from uptown and you used to expensive things, said the hot dog vendor as he dropped down to one knee. Babe, as she said, as she stretched out her hand, there's more to the laugh than just having fun. So, upon her finger, he placed a hot dog bun. Heated hot dog bun.

Heated hot dog bun. 30 years later, 24th of December, he looks like a stranger. Just can't remember until in his hand, she laces a hot dog bun. Heated hot dog bun. Heated hot dog bun. His eyes lit up like a rising sun. He said, I love you, you're my wife. We had two daughters and a son.

Did he breathe his last breath? Now every day on his grave, she leaves a hot dog bun. Heated hot dog bun. Heated hot dog bun. Heated hot dog bun. That's Heated Hot Dog Bun. And that's off the soundtrack of the new Wes Anderson film, The Cupcake Transmission Protocol.

My name is Duncan Trussell. This is the Duncan Trussell Family Hour podcast. We welcome you by we, I mean the hive of personalities that exist within me and also my wonderful editor, Aaron Goldberg. Hello, welcome. We're so glad you're here. Hope you're doing great. Here's a little personal update.

Personal update. I want to talk about myself, personal update. It's time to talk about myself. My smell's coming back. Thank God. And the way it's coming back is really strange. At first I wasn't sure what was happening because every once in a while I'd catch this bizarre smell,

kind of like a mixture of peat moss and like LeFrogue, like maybe the smell of a 15th century grape stompers boot, just alkaline and weird and musty. And I didn't know what it was. I knew people who lost their smell because of COVID were having various phantom smells, but I figured I didn't realize it was being triggered by something. For example, one night I was sitting on the couch

and there's this bizarre smell out of nowhere. I don't know what it is. My wife comes downstairs and she's like, what the fuck? Don't you smell that? That the dog's shit on the floor. And because my brain was translating the smell of dog's shit into a kind of like pungent, fungal stink,

I didn't know that's what had happened. In fact, I thought I was just having some kind of smell hallucination. As it turns out, that was the beginning of my smell coming back. Now oatmeal, coffee, shit, piss, and diapers, and my own BO all smell exactly the same. And it's that smell I experienced initially. It's, I've done some research into this and apparently it's like your nose has amnesia.

And so it can detect a kind of chemical in the air, but it doesn't know what it is. So it's trying to send you just a warning like, hey, there's some kind of fucked up smell here. So I guess my nose, for whatever reason, thinks oatmeal is as polluted or dangerous or toxic as shit. And so, and coffee too. My nose is like, yeah, coffee, it's whatever that is.

I don't know what it is, the smell, the fireplace. It's all kind of the same smell. But as time passes, like the smell of my BO is starting to smell more like, oh yeah, that's like my own BO. My poor wife, at one point I had to add, I was like, Aaron, do my armpits smell like some kind of mulch-y, like fungal rot? And she's like, no, they just stink like you. So, but to me, for a second, I thought, oh my God,

like I'm excreting, excreting, is this the same thing? I'm oozing some kind of new stink. But no, it's just my brain is having to relearn how to smell things. So for all my COVID friends out there, don't worry. If you're getting phantom smells, it actually might be a good sign. It might mean that your smell is beginning to return. Personal update. I just talked about myself, personal update.

My smell's coming back. Friends, if you're feeling the holiday blues, I've got something for you today. You probably know Trudy if you live in LA and you are into meditation because you know her from her incredible community, Insight LA. If you're someone who happened to have watched the midnight gospel on Netflix, then you know her as Trudy, the love barbarian. She's an amazing person and I feel so lucky to get to have conversations like the one you're about to listen to with such an incredible spiritual leader.

We're going to jump right into this episode. But first, this. This podcast is sponsored by BetterHelp. Is there something interfering with your happiness or is preventing you from achieving your goals like maybe you're having a recurring dream where your dad appears and tells you you didn't really die and then tries to sit down with you and open up weird mail that you're completely disinterested in.

But you're beginning to feel a rising kind of fear, not because your dad is a ghost, but because you've always mildly been afraid of him. BetterHelp will assess your needs and match you with your own licensed professional therapist. You'll be matched with a therapist in under 48 hours. It's not a crisis line. It's not self-help.

It is professional therapy done securely online. And there's a broad range of expertise available, which may not be locally available in many areas. The service is available for clients worldwide. You can log into your account any time and send a message to your therapist. You'll get timely and thoughtful responses. Plus, you can schedule weekly video or phone sessions so you won't ever have to sit in an uncomfortable waiting room

as with traditional therapy. BetterHelp, that's AGLP, is committed to facilitating great therapeutic matches so they make it easy and free to change therapists if needed. It's more affordable than traditional offline therapy and financial aid is available. BetterHelp, once you start living a happier life today, visit their website and read their testimonials

that are posted daily. That's betterhelp.com forward slash reviews. Right now, we've got a wonderful offer for our listeners. You can get 10% off your first month at betterhelp.com forward slash Duncan. Visit betterhelp.com forward slash Duncan. That's better AGLP and join the over 2 million people who have taken charge of their mental health with the help of an experienced professional.

And we're back. If you love the DTFH, I'd like to invite you to dive in to our Patreon. It's at patreon.com forward slash DTFH. Every week we get together. We have a weekly meditation group, our journey into boredom. We have a Friday family gathering. We all just sort of hang out online. And also you'll get access to commercial free episodes

of this podcast that usually come out earlier than they hit the main feed. Now, folks, with us here today, you saw her on the Midnight Gospel, Trudy the Love Barbarian. She is a Harvard graduate and the founding teacher of Insight LA. I got to meet her at the Ram Dass retreats where Ram Dass would have her and Jack Cornfield give incredible talks that have changed my life

and not changed my life in some kind of like unquantifiable, like hippie-dippy woo-woo. Like I feel sort of happier from listening to this person's talks. But as in many of the things that she has shared with me, both on my podcast and the times I've gotten to see her talk, have given me real tools and real powerful, yet incredibly simple ways for dealing with my own madness and insanity. And I think maybe you'll hear a little bit of that now.

And before we jump in, if you're having a weird Christmas, I want to invite you to a couple of events that Trudy is associated with. The first being to All a Good Night. It's a Christmas Eve meditation and on Christmas Day, Trudy is going to be present at an online gathering for folks having a rough time during Christmas. All the links you need to find that will be at dunkintrustle.com or you can go to InsightLA.org.

Now, everybody, please welcome back to the DTFH Trudy Goodman. Trudy, welcome back to the DTFH. As I've been looking forward to this conversation, and I realize things that you have told me and things that Jack have told me, these are the things I seem to refer to the most. Just when I'm sitting back thinking not just about Buddhism, but in general, I just want to say thank you for that

and for what you give so many people in your community. Well, you're welcome, Duncan. I mean, this is what we do, so it's kind of nice to know it actually helps. Yes, I think. You give your wish to something and there are people who toil away at obscurity and never get any feedback and they still are dedicated

and have passion for what they do. And I'm sure that would be both of us because we love these teachings and sharing them. But the sharing them part is really a blessing to be able to do that and hear that from you, so thanks. Oh, my God. Yeah, well, thank you. You know, Aaron and I, it's an interesting thing these days

because we all are like at least physically disconnected, but somehow almost more connected or at least the possibility of connecting with spiritual communities is easier for people all over the place because spiritual communities have had to evolve. To create this sort of online space. And so I thought maybe we could just start off by talking about Insight LA.

Like, what exactly is it? You know, and the reason I never came when I was living in LA was just because I was on the east side and that drive to the west side is such a long arduous drive. Yeah, Duncan, look, we also hold an anchor on the east side on Melrose, but forget about that. You may not have even known that we had that. Didn't know that.

Yeah, we had a center on the east side too. And it's sad to me that we had to give up our physical centers, but we do have one place still that we can use in Bennett to Canyon that actually is ours. So that's good. Insight LA, first of all, I just have to say, I feel these days like inside LA is like the Hanukkah miracle. You know how the lamp ran out of oil?

It only had oil for one day and it lasted eight days. I mean, the pandemic, not meeting in person, you know, needing more support. I feel like the fact that Insight LA is still continuing and thriving is like the Hanukkah miracle. The oil ran out a couple of years ago, but somehow the light keeps shining. And it's great.

It's a beautiful thing. And I guess the main thing I would love to say about it is that it is actually the fulfillment of the dream I had when I came to LA. I came for family reasons. I didn't know anybody. I knew my daughter and my mother, both of whom needed my help at that time.

My daughter was about to give birth. My mom, you know, my dad had died. She was alone and they had moved to LA from where they had lived for over 40 years overseas. So she was alone and not having support of a community. Anyway, so I didn't really know. I just came dunking without the things that you usually want to have in LA,

like youth or beauty or money or connections, you know, the currency of LA belonging, shall we say. Right. Yeah. Right. And somehow I really, I look back at, somebody asked me the other day, how did you do it? And I was like, I have no idea.

Out of thin air, you know, came this center that has become one of the premier meditation and mindfulness centers in the city. And I feel like it happened out of love. It happened because I did what I loved, which was do these practices of mindfulness and meditation and retreats. And I just had this trust that if I did what I loved,

and which brought me so much joy, that I would be joined by people because who doesn't want that? And also in LA, I really came to realize that people were more isolated than I would have dreamed coming from Boston, which is like a small town compared to LA. Right.

You know, I would meet a colleague, a psychotherapy colleague and say, well, I'd love to connect with some of your community. And she'd say, what community? Huh? You've lived here 30 years and you don't have a community of colleagues that you, you know, are connected to

and that you meet with. And so inside LA became my company that I needed. I don't mean company, like corporate company. I mean, companionship that I needed at that time in my life. And I just figured, hey, I've been practicing long enough to know that if I need something, this is a human need. It's not my particular neurotic thing, right? It's like, this is what people need.

We need connection with each other. And so inside LA grew out of that. And at first, just my vision was very simple. At first it was to have a center that would be both a Buddhist class, retreat program, way to enter and develop and cultivate a Buddhist practice. But also because I had trained in the early years,

helped John Kabat-Zinn when he established what used to be called the stress reduction and relaxation clinic. It became MBSR, Mindful Space Stress Reduction. But I was there in the early days and I knew there was also a lot of joy from having classes with people who would never walk through the doors

of a Buddhist meditation center. Just people who worked at the market, who drove trucks, these were all the people who came to the clinic in Mr. Massachusetts at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, people from all walks of life. So from the beginning inside LA had the mindfulness, I don't like to use the word secular

because it means that which is not sacred. And I think the more you wake up, the more everything is magical and sacred in a way. But you know what I'm saying, the non, not connected to any religion branch. And so we've had those two from the start, which makes me happy because I also realized, I don't know anybody here.

How am I going to get connected to the community? I won't be able to go into clinics and schools. Well, prisons actually are desperate. You could go even if you're a church person or it doesn't matter. In most of the other kinds of settings where I would have loved for us to share these teachings, you need to be, you can't walk in with a certain hat on,

just to be somebody who has something to offer to everybody from which nobody's going to recoil really. I've noticed that in, when I was studying psychology, ages ago in college, I've noticed that, oh, they've come up with ways to say spiritual things. In a scientific way, because they don't want to lose funding. Like, I think what is it? Carl Rogers came up with the term unconditional positive regard.

Was that the word? You know what I'm saying? Because you couldn't say love. So he was saying, oh, this unconditional positive regard heals people. Because if you'd said unconditional love seems to heal people, no one in the scientific community would want to hear it. Positive regard?

Oh, that's interesting. What is this positive regard? Unless I'm misinterpreting it. But it's so inside LA, it sounds, I wouldn't think when I heard that term, I wouldn't think, oh, that's a Buddhist center. I wouldn't know what it was, actually. So that's interesting that you did that.

Well, I think I told you too that I picked the name because most people want to be on the inside. Nobody wants to be left out. So when you say inside LA, it kind of sounds like inside LA. And the last thing I want to say about LA is, right? That's cool. That's so smart. When you're inside, I want to be in your inner circle, Duncan.

You are. Likewise. Yeah, you are. So the other thing was, I realized that since I didn't really know anybody, that the way to get connected in the community was through service. And I really felt like this was really important because work that I had done elsewhere and I felt like

for us to support the people who are on the front lines of suffering in our society, this is important. Because you get a salary if you're a nurse, but your salary cannot compensate you for the exhaustion. And sometimes the moral distress of the decisions you have to make, a doctor, a respiratory, I mean, any healthcare professional, right? And I realized people don't know how to sustain themselves

in these lines of work when you're face to face, looking into the eyes of people who are experiencing houselessness every single day. This is stressful. And how do we recharge? Usually write, have something to eat, have something to drink, have something we won't mention, have something, really people needed tools for self-care.

So this became a big motivator for our, we call it insight in action, off the, get off the cushion, out into action. Because that's where hope lies, I think, for our country and our society. So now working in schools and hospitals and all kinds of prisons and connected with some absolutely wonderful non-profit work and for-profit people too,

who are compassion-based. So that's all I just wanted to add that piece, because it feels essential that it's not, we are a place to learn the tools of self-care and meditation and so forth, but also with an emphasis on compassionate action, because that's our hope. Love that.

Thank you, Blue Chew, for supporting this episode of the DTFH. Look, I don't know about you, but if I had to describe the last couple of years, I wouldn't say, oh, it was a real sexy time in human history. Blue Chew is a unique online service that delivers the same active ingredients as Viagra and Sealis, but chewable tablets and a fraction of the cost. You can take them any time, day or night,

so you can plan ahead or be ready whenever an opportunity arises. The process is simple. Sign up at bluechew.com, consult with one of their licensed medical providers, and once you're approved, you'll receive your prescription within days. The best part, it's all done online,

so no visits to the doctor's office, no awkward conversations, and no waiting in line at the pharmacy. Blue Chew's tablets are made in the USA and prepared and shipped direct to your door in a discreet package. I'm a 47-year-old man with asymmetrical love handles and scoliosis living through a pandemic.

I'm not ashamed to say that from time to time, I like to use Blue Chew tablets, and most importantly, they work, but I wouldn't be doing these ads for them. So if you could benefit from extra confidence when it's time to perform, Blue Chew can help. We've got a special deal for our listeners. Try Blue Chew free.

When you use our promo code Duncan at checkout, you just pay $5 shipping. That's bluechew.com, promo code Duncan, to receive your first month free. Visit bluechew.com for more details and important safety information, and we thank Blue Chew for sponsoring the podcast. Thanks, Blue Chew.

This brings me to a question I have for you. It's maybe a little too philosophical, but it has within it the spirit of inciting people into this kind of action that you're talking about. So I think some people listening to this are nurses and servants and helpers, but some people listening to it, they are not. They're like me.

They have some kind of job, but they don't go out into their community and help so much. Okay. I love this question. I love this question. I have to tell this very short story, and it's an embarrassing story

because it's a story about me helping somebody so that I don't seem like I'm doing some kind of nauseating virtue signaling or something. Let me just preface the story by saying, I don't generally do this to a point where it's like, I feel like incredibly guilty and lacking and dumb. So I'm driving to do a podcast, interviewing someone who is going to be

a very spiritual podcast, and I pass someone who's begging on the street, and I drove by and they recognize me, and they go, Duncan, so this broke me out of the thing I do, which I think a lot of us do, which is when we're driving by, people who are asking for money, we ignore them. Just don't look at them, turn up the radio and drive by,

and then to be purely honest, assign to them a set of characteristics that make it easier to deal with the fact that they are them and you are you, and those characteristics usually involve some kind of really old testament just, justices to where it's like, they're getting what they deserve.

So I'm driving and I'm thinking like, oh my God, you're just going to drive, you're going to drive by? You can't just drive by, you're about to interview someone who is going to teach you about spirituality, and you're just going to drive by. So I turned around and then I parked,

and you know, I happen to have a bunch of stuff in my car that I was already going to give away, like clothes I'm not wearing anymore. Again, all this stuff is just bare bones, compassion, nothing special in this at all. He comes over to my car, we start talking, and I'm looking at him, and you know, all of a sudden all the poison,

you know, all the poison is, all the poison, it was like just evaporated by two seconds looking in someone's eyes and realizing, what's wrong, what the fuck? Why was I thinking that this was number one, something that I was too busy for, but number two, assigning to this person so many things that aren't there at all.

This is a lucid, clear-eyed person, something in the way he was moving, kind of reminded me of one of my kids, you know, and so in that moment, it was, I can't explain, it was like I got air or something, or I can't explain it, or I reinflated, or I don't know, like in a good way. Anyway, what is the thing that is keeping us

from that experience, what is, if you had to define, or if you could please talk about, the space between the you that is not in action, is not compassion in action, and the you that pushes past whatever that barrier is, what is that barrier made of, and why is it so hard to cross in a life? What a great question, first of all.

That's a beautiful question, Duncan, because every single one of us, spiritual teacher, student, or person who never even thought about it, has driven past someone at an intersection and had maybe not all of the assumptions and judgments you're describing, but some of them as a justification for not slowing down, making the cars behind you wait for, you know,

10 seconds while you support that person. And I think, you know, that, I think you answered it in that story quite beautifully when you said it was that moment when you looked into their eyes and you saw, this is not somebody other than me or my kid. Yes. This is like my brother, my sister,

my, this is, we're the same, not like we're the same in circumstances, obviously, but our humanity is the same, and our, the brightness and intelligence and spirit of just consciousness, we're conscious beings here, together on this earth, and I mean, what is it that allows us to have that moment? I mean, your heart was open enough

that you actually turned around and went back. In a sense, he almost shamed you by recognizing you. He did. My heart was an open PSA. My heart, it was closed all the way back. It was, I was more like, oh my God, I'm annoyed. I was almost putting on some kind of show up until like I actually was talking to him.

I'm just trying to be completely honest. This is the operating system you're talking to right now. I would love to say, as I'm driving there, a deer was rolling down and I'm like, oh, this being who is suffering, but it was more like, oh, who are you if you don't go back to this person? And, but then when I, when direct contact was made,

and like, I just, that was when the thing that you're talking about happened. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, you know, your honesty and the way that you describe what you've gone through, no matter what it is, often telling stories about your own lapses in compassion or wisdom, right? Yeah.

That's why we love you, Duncan, because you're speaking what everybody goes through and you're doing it fearlessly. You're not trying to pretend to be, you know, holier than you are. All right. And that's the best thing, because that really gives us a chance to actually connect

and relate to each other and not imagine, oh, she's somebody other. She's a spiritual teacher. She doesn't go through yesterday. I was talking with my group about how we had gotten some news about Omicron, this variant, and we're supposed to be traveling to teach in January to Costa Rica and visiting my disabled brother,

whom I haven't seen for four years, and the back of Beyond and the mountains of Southern Ecuador. And, you know, and suddenly we said, we got this news. My mind just spun out, Duncan. Me, who knows how to work with my mind, who knows how to work with my consciousness, it just spun out.

My grandson's not going to have his senior year. My granddaughter already missed her spring of senior year, and colleges are going to shut down, and worse, you know, people are going to die, of course. I'm only thinking about my grandchildren. My little one, who's three, I'm thinking, this is the life he's known. He's never known in non-pandemic life.

You have little ones in the same situation. So what allows us to rein that in, you know, to just take that contraction into fear or into shame or into, you are bothering me. I'm on my way somewhere, and I need to get there, and you're in my way. You know, that contracted view of life and self and world. What allows that to loosen and soften and expand

into something that's just a little more inclusive and compassionate and kind? You know, in your case, it was, it was like, it could have been the voice of God or Buddha or saying, hey, Duncan, you're going to drive right by me and not give me another glance, you know? Right, right. Felt like that. Yeah, and I think that the other thing you're bringing up

that's really important is you don't have to go all over the world doing heroic work, like my beloved friends who, you know, just died recently in a car accident, so tragically, who were all, you know, all over the world working with refugees and displaced people and just so courageous and compassionate and so forth.

Well, we aren't all going to be heroes like that, but let's start right where we are on the curb or in the grocery store. Or, you know, you can, we can do what we can, and I think anything that leaves a situation, excuse me, I think I'm going to sneeze, anything that leaves a situation better than we found it, even picking up a piece of trash, it matters

because everything, everything actually rests on the tip of our intention. It's the intention, the motivation that matters. You know, sometimes you can do some good thing and it's not received and or nobody sees it. Yeah, God forbid. You don't get any credit or merit badges for it, right? Yeah, right.

But the intention of leaving things or people just a little better than you found them, that is actually opening for the heart. That is part of what dissolves those barriers that you're talking about that we all have between each other, barriers of fear and judgment and conditioning and whatnot. So, I don't know, that's just one,

one kind of answer. And I think, you know, we both love Ram Dass, the teacher that we recently were at that retreat. You were there virtually, I was there actually, you know, for his celebrating his legacy. And I mean, look at, nobody would choose to be in a situation that Ram Dass found himself in, which is that he had a stroke and was paralyzed

in sitting in a wheelchair for 20 years in pain. I mean, none of us would want to go into those circumstances. But he got so deep and so loving by just, well, it was the choicelessness of no escape, right? But he would have done all kinds of things to numb himself or, but he didn't, you know, he had the training and the wisdom to go right deep into it. And he turned it all into wisdom and compassion,

so much so that we're inspired by just being in his presence or the love that still radiates from who he was. And, you know, I think that just comes from conscious embodied, embrace sounds too strong, but acceptance sounds too wishy-washy or something or preachy or something. But how the full embrace of your actual lived life and circumstances, even the ones that limit your activity,

right, they're going to open new doors. Well, yeah, okay. So, yes, I love that. It's like surrendering to the business of where you're at. You know, this is where you're at. And these days, some of my most paranoid friends, there's a sense of our freedom has been so taken away. And there's a kind of paralysis that sets in,

a real legitimate paralysis where I always say, these people, me, I get paralyzed. And so I'm doom-scrolling, trauma, watching like trauma porn, you know, like forensic files, date line, the worst news I can possibly find trauma porn. And then from that, getting increasingly freaked out, increasingly shut down, increasingly paranoid. And then I start thinking, oh my God, yeah,

like our freedoms are so limited these days. And when the reality is no freedom, there is, you have just as much freedom as you had before to go and help somebody, to go, you know, that's, like there's no, that thing, whatever that is, it isn't, that is something that is seemingly unlimited. I mean, resources might determine what that looks like for you, the individual, but that intention, as you're putting it,

which I love, because it even lightens it even more, that can't be stolen, taken, cut up. So to me, in this way of thinking there, it feels somehow revolutionary, because it feels so weird, strangely frustrating or something that not only that I can't seem to continue to do this more and more, but neither can anybody else. Because if this, what we're a way of being,

naturally, for all of us, the world as we know it would cease to exist. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, I think that question of feeling the freedoms are being taken away, it's actually a lack of imagination that people have. Wow. You know, they don't have enough imagination.

Let's face it, if you have imagination, I talked to a woman yesterday who is kind of, she's shut in, and she doesn't see any way that she can be of help. But she has a place to live, she's not houseless. And I said, do you have like a pad of paper? Do you have a way of getting an envelope and a stamp? I mean, you could write some letters. There's people in prison who would love to get a letter from you.

Anybody, you know, there's something, there's always something that you can do. It's just, you might need some help with imagining what that could be. Because when you're down, or when you're, when you're wearing those blinders of complaint, or reactivity, then you, it actually stifles the imagination. It stifles your creativity. How creative are you, Duncan, and you're a creative guy?

How creative are you when you're bummed and, you know, complaining and watching Trauma porn, right? Not at all. Is that force your creativity? It's the opposite of creativity. It's literally, if you had to name a polar opposite of creativity, it's, I never thought of that, by the way. I've never thought what's the opposite of this.

It's sitting on a paralyzed, watching stories of other people's catastrophes and imagining that you, there's nothing that could be done other than just watch it. Yeah, or getting all worked up, because you're certain that everything is fraudulent, and somebody stole the election and, you know, COVID is a hoax. And these people are dying of other causes that aren't being recorded. And they're old people mostly anyway and blah, I mean, all, all of that getting and stewing, I think just stewing and getting caught in loops, obsessional thinking, looping around and around. It doesn't even matter what the content of the thinking is.

It doesn't even matter if it's misinformation or true information. That kind of mental obsessing and looping that happens a lot during the day, we don't even notice I really think that's part of what is a contraction from the actual vastness of who we are and of our being. I read something recently that was a different take on what's happening in our country right now. So many overlapping crises and not really sure if we're going to get to solve them the way that they need to be solved. And it was from Valerie Carr and she said, breathe, labor, push, what if this darkness and it's, and I wanted to say something about the word dark, because it's, it's got negative connotations that don't belong to it, like

in many parts of the world, but in our country, especially like the darker your skin, the more sort of negativity there can be associated with that kind of racism. So just being, but this is also the day before the winter solstice, which happens to be the darkest day of the year, right? And we're in a time that feels a little dark right now as we head into the light of the holidays, right? And she says, what if this darkness is not the darkness of the tomb, but the darkness of the womb? What if our America is not dead, but a country waiting to be born? What if the story of America is one long labor? What if all our grandmothers and grandfathers are standing behind us now, those who survived occupation and genocide, slavery and Jim Crow,

detentions and political assault? What if they're whispering in our ear tonight, your brain? What if this is our nation's great transition, breathe, labor, push? Well, you've probably never experienced transition in labor. I mean, no, I've watched it. I haven't experienced. Watch it. So you, it's a time when you actually go kind of crazy, like your mind just separates from your body because what's happening is so intense. And in my case, I kept having this thought of, if I hadn't moved to Buffalo, New York, this wouldn't have happened. Like these crazy thoughts. And you just forget for, at least I did. I mean, maybe other women are more enlightened, but I forgot that I was there having a baby. And all I was was writing in pain in that moment.

And I actually did have a big, big spiritual experience earlier in my labor, but not during the transition. During the transition, by definition, it's kind of like the winter solstice. You don't see the light, you know, it's just, it's that, it's that interim phase. They call it the bardo in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, but that transition and it feels like, you know, in the solstice, there's this moment where the sun actually stops for a minute. Now in the northern hemisphere, it's, it's the winter solstice. But it actually, it actually stops for, I don't know, how many seconds I didn't read about it. I just, wait, may I clarify? You mean the period from where you are not in labor to when you are in labor, you're talking about the time in between

those. No, no, no, I'm talking about the period when you're, you've been in labor and you're about transition to pushing, pushing. Okay, okay, okay, I got you. Okay, thank you. Thank you. I just made this assumption that everybody's been in labor and everybody's had a baby and obviously that's not true. So yeah, transition is when you're transitioning from like active labor to pushing. Okay, got it. Okay, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that, that transition time, like when you're in active labor, okay, your body is doing it, you're not doing it. For me, that was my first huge insight into no self, watching my uterus contract when I did not contract it, nor could I. And I was like, oh my God, what is this? I remember looking at my belly and just feeling like,

like I'm on the roller coaster and it's clicking up, click, click, click, click, click, and you know it's going to go down. Yeah. You're going to have a baby. There's no way out. Wow. I mean, whatever kind of baby emerges, you aren't, anyway, you understand what I'm saying. Yes, I understand from the outside for sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I think if we look at this time a little bit like that, that we don't know what's going to be born from it, but we do know always something will be born. And you know, it's, it's, it's really, it's hard to keep this more vast perspective when things are tough. It's hard to realize that nobody can actually take your freedom away from you. Right. Except you. Right. There's a beautiful little book that the Vietnamese

Zen master, Thich Nhat Hanh, Zen teacher, we say now, called Be Free Where You Are. And it's really written for incarcerated folks and really showing them how even in that literally imprisoned life they can create a sense of inner freedom. And I feel like I don't mean if people who are incarcerated can do it. I can do it. Yeah. I want to thank Squarespace for supporting this episode of the DTFH. Squarespace gives you everything you need to create an incredible website. I'm going to go on and on in detail about that, what, what that is. But if you really want to see the power of Squarespace, just go to DuncanTrussell.com. Your eyes will cliv, cliver, which means they'll quiver with

orgasmic joy when you look at the beauty of DuncanTrussell.com. Squarespace empowers you by providing you with the tools you need to bring your creative ideas to life. Whatever it is that you're interested in doing online, Squarespace can help you do it better. It's an all in one platform form. They've got e-commerce. They help you buy the domain names. They've got awesome marketing tools, incredible analytics. They're most importantly, very easy to use and world class design. And listen, the website is an awesome gift. It really is. I don't, I know lots of people who are constantly putting off creating a website because they're worried that it's going to be complex, difficult, frustrating. And that was true. It used to be like that when you tried to

build a website back in the nineties or early 2000s, it would be easier to fly to some dangerous jungle and search for a hidden city than it would be to make a website back then. But now, thanks to Squarespace, you can manifest a beautiful website in moments and then gift that website to someone you love or give yourself the gift of an amazing website. No matter what it is right now, head over to squarespace.com, Ford slash Duncan. You can try them out for free. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code Duncan and you'll get 10% off your first order of a website worry domain. Again, that's squarespace.com, Ford slash Duncan for a free trial. When you're ready to launch, use offer code Duncan to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or a domain. Thank you,

Squarespace. I mean, if people who are incarcerated can do it, I can do it. Yeah, I have the freedom to my car and drive wherever I want, walk wherever I want to go, etc. Well, you know, I have a few thoughts from what you just say that again, please. I said, I'm sorry, that was just coming back to what you said. Oh, thank you are sorry. It's beautiful. What you're saying is beautiful. It's it's that restructuring. Is that what you mean by freedom? The ability to in whatever situation you may be in to reassess it in a way that doesn't make it as a prison, you could like what you just did is freedom you you converted what the experience a lot of us are having

from you know, being locked in locked down or if we're not locked in or locked down, scared, annoyed, bitter, inconvenienced in the most maximum way, frustrated for our kids, scared for our kids, you just didn't what you just said, you transformed it into a possibility of something that's that it isn't so dire. Is that what you mean by freedom, the human ability to reassess? Yeah, reassess or reframe. You know, I sometimes I think of it the way we talk about it in psychotherapy is a reframe, but a reframe doesn't work. You can't just paste a smiley face on something shitty. It doesn't work. A reframe only works if it has truth and possibility in it, real truth and you know what I'm saying. So all the things that you're mentioning that fear,

the frustration, the I mean, I feel all of that too. It's just a question of what do we do with those feelings? You know, and how do we hold those feelings and where do they take us? You know, and I mean, one of the practices that I did yesterday with folks that I find actually really helpful, I think it's just imagine you're sitting way up in the sky up on a up on a star and you're sitting on a star and you know, you're swinging your legs and you're looking down with nothing but compassion in your heart, nothing but love in your heart and you're looking at yourself in your life today. You know, you're looking at all, you're just looking at just the places where whatever you're doing, you know, maybe engaging in activities or relationships that actually

don't nourish your spirit or serve you in any way, you know, but also it gives me a way to remember that I can expand beyond this sense of separate self encapsulated in my own thought world and really access something bigger and look at my life with a kind eye, like, okay, you know, where could I maybe be creating some more sense of groundedness or balance or harmony or, you know, these good things that make us feel good. Right. Yes. This is, see, to me, it's something like the dark, you know, the in terms of like lack of light, not the photon reflectivity of your skin. The dark part or the terrifying darkness is that place of complete forgetfulness of this, of this very simple reality, which, which is

incredibly liberating to me. It's that moment you realize I can at the very least make some effort to transform my community as micro community is that may be even if it's my dogs or, you know, my whatever it is, I can, I can start trying to make this better instead of keeping the status quo or even worse, sliding into some awful spiral of just depression or whatever that to me the scary darkness is when is the possibility that you can just stay asleep to that possibility. I had this thought the other day. Sometimes I have woken up, gone about my day and gone back to sleep without waking up. I'm not sleepwalking, but I'm so reactive and so in a set pattern that I don't wake up. I so for 24 hours, I'm dead asleep to the world. I'm seeing my own projections

until I close my eyes and see my own projections in the form of dreams. That's scary to me. That's the void or the abyss or the or that pot. That's scary to me. So what you're saying, correct me if I'm wrong, seems to be that in any given moment, you can turn on a light. It's in that light is the intent this in this ability to help. Am I over reducing things? No, I think that's right. I mean, for one thing, you know, walking around asleep. Yeah, I mean, that's, we all know that state Duncan. And again, I always thank you for your honesty and just sharing what it's like to be you because what it's like to be you is what it's like to be a human being in this particular moment in all eternity, right? This particular

historical and geographical and everything, you know, personal moment. But to go back to the beginning of what you said, you know, even if you live alone and you don't have a pet, I you have a houseplant, your plants will respond to your advice. And I actually have a more mysterious sense of that it matters if we cultivate joy, if it matters if we brighten our hearts, even if no one else sees us, we don't see anybody else. Because I'm speaking to the people who are looking at the possibility of lockdown and feeling suicidal, frankly, you know, just really who maybe we're living alone and feeling kind of lonesome anyway, before being prohibited from going out and doing stuff with other people. But yeah, I

and I think I sometimes think of what it must have been like for if there were, I mean, if there were beings who experienced, say, the days growing shorter and shorter and the nights growing longer and longer, and they didn't know about the solstice, you know, they didn't know that, oh, the days are going to start to lengthen again as of tomorrow, you know, little by little get brighter and oh, this is a cycle of whatever you want to call it, you know, brightening, darkening, expansion, contraction, withdrawal of light, return of the light, lots of ways to look at this rhythm of life. But one of the things I learned from doing long, silent meditation retreats, I'm talking like 100 days, three months, is that

what I, it wasn't like so many hugely different insights came up after three months. Yes, you can go into all different kinds of meditative states and and learn stuff that way about dimensions of your consciousness. But in terms of sort of psychological, emotional, personal insights, what I did see from spending those kinds of long periods of time is something that I can tell you and everybody, all our listeners here, you don't have to go and be silent and meditate intensively day and night for three months to learn about the cycles of everything, you know, it's cycles of moods, the cycles of experiences that you go through, they do repeat themselves in different, maybe different configurations, but beginning to have some trust in this cyclical

nature of expansion and contraction and that after contravention, there will be opening again, and after the shortening days, there will be light again. And after, do you know what I mean, just really seeing these cycles of life. I think maybe maybe it's easier for women from a younger age, because you have your monthly cycles, your moon cycles that you know, I don't know, it's a certain kind of rhythm. But anybody who breathes in and out can notice a cycle of expansion and contraction. Do you mean it's like if we don't, if I don't see these cycles, then I'm perpetually letting myself get terrified by the reappearance of what appears to be like the end of the world or my own, you know, the thing that everyone says like, Oh my God, there it is again. I knew things

would go bad. And what do you know? Here it is, it's going bad. If you don't see that this is some loop in your own life, because you haven't seen the less overt parts of the cycle, then yeah, then suddenly you can really start imagining the universe is attacking you instead of recognizing that what you're looking at is just one part of a continuum of energy that keeps repeating. Is that that's what you mean? Yes. Yes. Thank you. That is what I mean. I mean, we can say it a lot of different ways, but but that feeling of being asleep or being reactive all day long. I mean, that was, you know, people think there's this phrase, life is suffering that people attribute to Buddhism, right? But if you see that suffering as just the kind of reactivity that you're

describing where things just bug you, they just irritate you and you want to either push them away or you just want to grab on to things that will give you some relief and be pleasurable, you know, grab your pleasures, push away your pain. That way of living unfortunately keeps us kind of asleep. And yet it seems to be it's the way we're wired for survival, right? Nobody wants to go after pain usually unless it's linked to pleasure for some reason, like sexual or something. Yeah. But yeah, and when I think about the metaverse, for example, I think, oh my gosh, is this going to be a space where everyone's projections, they get to live now, not only in reality reality, but virtual reality in their own projections? Or is this going to be a space that

allows people to tap into something more vast and more magical and yeah, more mysterious and timeless beyond our ordinary vision, maybe more deep. I don't know. I've got some, I've got a lot of thoughts on the metaverse. And I, you know, some of them are really scary. Not scary, but just sort of like samsara, this wheel of suffering, that the mandala of suffering and, you know, maybe this is just, you know, our own version of the, you know, what do they say? Brahmin breathes out the universe and then breathes it back in, rinse and repeat, Alan Watts famously talking about, you know, what would you do if you could do anything? Eventually you would want to be limited and forget that you are God. And that's

where you're at right now. This metaverse thing makes me think, Oh, clearly we are in a simulation. We already went into the metaverse and some other alternate reality where as part of going into the metaverse, some of us decided to turn it on high, meaning we forgot that we went into the metaverse so we could fully enjoy it. And that's where we're at now in the metaverse. We're making another metaverse and the same cycle is going to repeat. We're always getting our consciousness probably infinitely being sucked siphoned into varying forms of technology, sometimes organic technology, like what we are sometimes silicon, but just never ending channeling of our tech of our consciousness forever and it's for kind of Gnostic trap. But before we get into that,

I have to ask you, Trudy, because this is another chapter of the podcast before we get into that chapter. This mindfulness practice in my own experience, it has given me the ability to identify some of the cycles that I didn't know were cycles, specifically my own aggressive nature. So sometimes days before I like have some kind of terrible reaction to my life or just to what I perceive as something that isn't right. I feel it coming down the pipes. I can feel it. I think, oh my god, there's that there's that thing. That means that at some point, I don't know when there's a high chance that I'm going to like be reactive in a really not good way. So I've come to identify this thing. I find it to be incredibly mystifying. And I don't understand, do you know what I'm talking

about? Have you heard of something like this before, where like, like a meteor impact or something like, but you identify a way out in space. That just means your mindfulness is strong, Duncan. Well, thank you. But it doesn't isn't doing anything about the meteor impact. It's just giving me more time to dread the impact. This is what I wanted to ask you. Is there a way to convert it? Is this number two parts of the question? One, is that karma that I'm stumbling upon? Is that my own karma? And two, is there a way to turn to turn the meteor into flowers, knock it off course? How much control do we have over these cycles? Yeah, yeah, no, that's that's a great question. I mean, when I said your mindfulness is strong, I mean, your awareness that you see you feel it

coming, that kind of awareness is in you. And when your mindfulness is strong, then you have a way to work with what's coming that meteor doesn't have to, you know, blow your cool to smithereens and throw you into some kind of really unpleasant state. You have the strength of awareness to see it coming. And you know, when it comes, you can't stop it. I mean, life has painful things in it. And they're going to happen. You know, I just recently lost two of my dearest friends. What were their names? To a stupid accident, Katie J. Scott and Gabriel Storing, who founded IACT, this anti genocide group, very small, but mighty in their impact. And you know, painful things are going to happen in our life. And so it's not that we,

and sometimes we're going to feel smashed by the meteor. If it's a big enough thing, it just breaks apart. But where the mindfulness comes in, I think where the mindfulness comes in is that you can make everything into consciousness and you don't necessarily want to be conscious of the super painful things you want to numb yourself. The more you can sort of stay conscious, you can call it awake, you can call it mindful, you can call it knowing what's happening. But the more you can bear the unbearable, I feel like that's ultimately what mindfulness does for us. We can bear the unbearable because unbearable is really a thought. You know what, I'm going to read you, I just want to read you one more quote. This is, let me find it.

This is from my friend Mirabaya Starr. She's a wonderful teacher. And she, I was actually with her on a day that you never want to live through, which is the day that her daughter died. And her daughter was 14, Jenny. And just briefly, she died in a car crash also. And this is what Mirabaya said in her book, which is called The Caravan of No Despair. With reticence at first, in other words, she didn't want to. And then courage, I dared to grieve my child. I practiced turning toward a feeling I didn't think I could survive. I practiced abiding with what is. I sat with that. I did it as an act of devotion for Jenny, saying yes to the mystery, expressing my ongoing love for her. Showing up for a devastating loss was an act of love. It wasn't trying to be spiritual.

I knew that it was all about love. It was all that I could do. So that's the extreme, okay? Yeah. That's the extreme. But you know what? This has to work in the extremes. Otherwise, it's kind of bullshit. Excuse me. Yeah. You know, because times in life when we're up against it, you know, hopefully none of us is going to lose a child. That's the worst. But there's times when we're up against it. We lose a parent. We lose a loved one. In times of COVID, we're losing friends. You know, and to be able to dare to feel what we feel. I love that she calls it courage. Courage to be heartbroken. Courage to be flattened. Courage to be in total despair. And then realize it's an act of love that I care so much. I care so much about life that when I see it turning

in a direction I don't want to see. I grieve. I rebel. I get angry. I mean, these are all forms of grief. Even hating is a form of grief. But how do you do that? That you're getting to the core of something I've been wondering after is like, yes, hate. And, you know, as far as the grief goes, you know, things like losing someone you love and these things where this kind of hate or this kind of these any feeling is justified. But what if you're missing that reason? What if you're missing that component for the hate? What if just sometimes hate, irascibility, selfishness, high levels of aversion and a general sort of adversarial sense of your relationship to the universe that you are part of are showing up minus some kind of reason for that? How do we show up for those

sorts of states of consciousness, Trudy? And is it inauthentic to not articulate them? Is it inauthentic to feel those things and put a smile on our face and try to be kind to those around us even though sometimes it feels like we've been suctioned up into the underbelly of some kind of lovecraftian fractal of sentient tentacles? First of all, I trust there is always a reason we just don't always know it. There is always a reason for the feelings that you're having or that I'm having. And it's so interesting because I'm writing a memoir right now. I have these two chapters where I fight off an attacker, one kind of literally and one just strategically in my mind. But each time I escape from the

danger that I was in, then I have these other chapters where I marry somebody that I don't even want to marry because my mom asked me, are you sleeping with him, honey? Now remember, this is 50 years ago, my mom asked me, are you sleeping with him, honey? And I said, yes. And she said, then you have to marry him. And I fucking did. Excuse my French. And then there's these other places where, you know, I just was like a wuss really very, very unable to stand up for myself and my own rights. And I was saying, I was looking at these chapters and I said to Jack, I think I'm just going to leave out those two chapters about the attack because they absolutely don't fit with the other person who couldn't even, you know, stand up for herself about who she's

marrying. And he said, no, that's interesting because that's interesting that you would be both ways, you know, and I bring this up because I don't know myself. I don't know those two parts of why they couldn't have connected and why they couldn't have kicked in. I don't know. I just know that we'd go into this crumpled, helpless state and say yes to things I wanted to say no to. Right? I don't need to know why. I don't, I mean, yeah, I could go back to psychoanalysis and probably have a reason, but would that even be the reason or would it just be some concoction? I don't know. This point, I don't know. Well, in my life, it was probably easier to know. But whatever, the point that I'm making is just that you can trust there's a reason for why you feel slimy tentacles

embracing you and starting or the, you know, I don't want to give snakes a bad name. I love them but or the boa that's starting to tighten around you so that, you know, each breath in, you breathe a little and then each breath out, tighten so you can't breathe in as much the next time and write that feeling. There's a reason and we don't have to know the reason, but what we do need to do, I believe, you know, that maybe maybe one way of answering your question or responding, rather, I don't have any answers of responding to your question is that when you trust that there's a good reason for the feeling you're having, even if it's not something you could name or locate, you know, no way, even if you were tortured,

you wouldn't come up with it. But just having that compassionate attitude. Oh, I'm feeling this way for a reason. I don't know why, but I know there's a good reason and that's enough of a justification to be kind to myself and to treat myself as tenderly as I would as if I had, you know, lost a friend or gotten a big, gotten rejected from my first choice of school or, you know, gotten fired from my job or didn't get the promotion or, you know, all the things that can really just disappoint us. Yeah. Yeah, because that that's one of the I hear that people say, you know, this isn't any, it's not like I fill in the blank. It's not like I lost, you know, it's I know like I'm my family still alive, but I'm feeling this way. It's like, I love what you're saying because

you're still experiencing whatever that may be if you were think you know the reason it's still suffering. Exactly, exactly. And you know, this is something we oppress ourselves with all the time that feeling of, well, I don't have any right to this feeling because I have enough to eat and I have a house and it's warm in here. And in fact, I even have a husband I adore and I get to live with him. And so what do I care if there's lockdown, I'll be okay. It's, it's irrelevant, actually, it's irrelevant. I could work with my mind. I don't want to, but I could work with my mind if I was cold on the street, right now. Yeah, you see. And I don't have to say just because I'm not cold on the street, I don't have a right to feel bereft or feel despair or feel

it's a feeling, which means like everything else in this world, it's impermanent. Yeah, you know, it's not going to last. We're going to be flooded and drowned and destroyed by our emotions. And it can feel like that, but it isn't going to happen. Right, right. It doesn't last like a little kid in the bathtub and they watch the water swirling down the drain and suddenly they get terrified. Wait a minute, wait a minute. Whoa, whoa, I wait a minute, right? Am I next? Exactly. Yeah. Or it's like, you know, yesterday I was playing with our little grandson and he he loves his train wooden train tracks and he can spend it seems like, you know, hours is probably 10 minutes where he's just quietly, you know, pushing the train around the track. And I don't know what

went on with him earlier in the day, but when we got alone together in his room with the train, and I kind of settled into what is obviously not the most stimulating activity watching him, you know, run the train around the track. He gave me a kind of calculating look like this. I'm tilting my head and looking kind of a scans. And he tentatively picked up one of his wooden train tracks and just landed across the room. And I said, well, that's okay, just don't throw it at me. And he proceeded to throw every piece of track like with huge force and including his engine and and some of the props, you know, around the tracks, he threw them all across the room. And I was watching him, I just said to him, Oh, wow, sometimes you just feel like throwing the

stuff. And you should have he broke into this huge grin. Like, you get it. You get it. I just feel like throwing stuff. Yeah, I'm just throwing shit as hard as I can. Who knows what happened earlier in the day? Maybe he wasn't allowed to have what he wanted or you know, right? Yes. Yeah. And, you know, okay, I'm a therapist so I can hold that experience for him and support him. But we could do that for ourselves too. This is just a day when I feel like throwing shit against the wall. Am I going to get down on myself for having that feeling? Am I going to throw stuff and break it? Probably not. But do you know, because I'm not three years old, but we can have some of that understanding for ourselves. Right. Yeah, it's you.

Am I just repeating myself over and over? No, this is your it's just something I've been thinking in terms of authenticity and like, when do I throw the train set? You know, when versus, you know what I mean, when do you throw the train set? Or even when do you articulate to your wife or whoever? You know, I feel like throwing fucking train sets today versus when do you just allow that feeling, you know, give yourself compassion for having the feeling, but instead. Both. I feel like throwing my fucking train set against the wall today. And I can be compassionate with myself for being in this state, which is really hard to bear. Right. Or you know, the other night, like Jack came up to me and he and I, I was kind of relaxing.

It was the end of the day. I was actually on my cheese swing. I don't know if you know what that is. It's just a really fun thing. You put your feet in it and it just waggles them back and forth. It's called a vitality swing and I love it. I don't know what it is. I'm lying there on my cheese swing and Jack comes up and says to me sort of tenderly something about my grief and my sorrow about KDJ and Gabe, but I wasn't feeling it at that moment. And I was just like, I mean, I wish I hadn't, but I think I even said thanks a lot. Like I wasn't feeling sad, but it turned out he was sad about something. Right. Right. Yeah. He was, because I was just like, I don't want to talk about it now. I'm actually on my cheese swing. I'm okay. I don't

want to talk about it, but it kept kind of, and then I realized, oh my God, he needs to talk. Duh. He needs to talk. Oh my God. I'm the king of the feet in the cheese swing. Like, what's wrong? Really? No, I'm not. I feel fine. What are you talking about? I'm doing great. I'm fine. I'm good. Don't you see my feet? Yes, I'm the king of that. They're so right. It's so, it's like, yeah, yeah, your feet are in a cheese swing. We all know you're happy. This is sometimes a person's way of saying, I feel terrible. Oh my God. That's so brilliant. I forget that all the time. And, you know, look, we're all human. I don't want to have my sad feelings all the time. I don't. And yet sometimes, you know, that's how grief works. That's probably how all the

emotions work. Sometimes you're free of them, and then they come and grab you by the ankle and pull you under. And then you are, there you are in that view. I loved your image. You know, actually, I love, I love octopus. So tentacles isn't really that sinister to me. I saw an octopus when we were at the retreat in Hawaii and it was really just so fluid and beautiful. Beautiful. And it made me think about, you know, the octopus can change its color. It's, it's beautiful. It's like a shiver that just floats over their skin and they totally change color to camouflage. And it reminds me of your question about authenticity. Like sometimes I do think we need to change color, like just shiver that the emotional coloring or tone of our experience to meet a

moment in relationship where it might not be so skillful to show that emotion. Right. Do you see that? But I think it's not so much in authenticity as another form of love and respect of realizing, okay, this is not the moment. Right. My first husband used to always tell me, your timing is terrible. Like you always bring things up at the wrong moment. And I would say, well, when would be a right moment? You know, it's like when the woman, I mean, this is gendered stereotypically, but in heteronormative couples, when the woman says we have to talk, the man usually experiences a shiver of relational dread. And it doesn't have to be gendered. It can be whoever's playing the role in a couple, in a partnership of who brings up the stuff to deal. Right. Yes. But I don't think

it's inauthentic to not display the emotion. If it's somebody you're close to, you can say, you know, actually at this moment, if you come closer to me, I might have to bite your head off. So this isn't the moment. But do you know what I mean? Like, if it's someone you're not close to and you're at work, yeah, I mean, be the octopus just for that moment. Right. I got you. Yeah, I know what you mean. I'm again, you're identified. This is one of the things Aaron and I have had fights about is, you know, she'll say, I need to talk to you about something. And I will say some version of really tired, you know, I was at was at work all day. So I don't, I can't talk about that right now. And she will generally say, okay, but I can't talk to you about it when you're at

work. And if I can't talk to you about it when you're not at work, then you mean, don't talk as essentially why you figured out to do. I don't mean to be like that. I, you know, but I do that sometimes because I'm terrible at these things, Judy, terrible. I'm like that. Well, we all are. We all are. None of us were taught Duncan, none of us were taught this kind of emotional literacy because our parents weren't taught it and they didn't know how either. And these things just cascade down the generations. And, you know, uh, yeah, I don't think, you know, I can talk a good game, but I'm not always good at it. And I'm just like, leave me alone. I'm on my cheese swing. Um, yeah, but you know, we're all yeah, we're humans and we can be compassionate

for ourselves. And I, you know, to bring it back, what I will carry with me from this conversation is that intention of making what's around you a little better. I feel like that's the, that, that is the most, to me, you know, the Dalai Lama famously said, my religion is kindness, but that is that what you were saying is the religion. Like that's the religion that takes a million different forms and a million different names. And, uh, it's, it's, uh, strangely easy to forget. You've given me too much time already. I have one last tiny question for you, a cheesy question, an obvious question. And I hope you do have time for just one what can, what's like, what's for the holidays or whatever. Can you give us some prescription

for a direct on the street, direct action, something, something, if we have the ability to get out of our houses, a direct action, or maybe we don't have to get out of our houses, what's something we can do to put us into the compassion field of helping others. A real prescription, please. Okay, so I'm going to say something a little counterintuitive, which is, um, I really feel like the only way to get into the compassion field of wanting to, you know, leave somebody else a little better than you found them is to open your heart to your own self and, you know, to the own, to stay in whatever is the light of your heart. It might be, I don't know, might be going for a walk. It might be seeing a bird. We have an owl that's

perched on a tree outside. I'll text you a picture of it. It's, it's amazing to see this owl that can swivel its head all the way around. It brings me joy. So it's like whatever brings you the tiniest flicker of light or shred of joy. Focus on that. Focus on that. Intend to turn your heart in that direction. It's not denial. It's not, you know, trying to paste a smiley face on anything that's happening. You can just turn, even in the most tumultuous times, which we're in, actually, you can just turn your heart in that direction, you know, and I don't think that we can be a light or kindness for others if we aren't having, shining some of that light and kindness on ourselves, whether it's through taking time to meditate, taking time for any kind of self-care

that you can do. And that can take just, you know, it's only limited by your imagination, you know, what you can do to help yourself feel better. And, and so the mission, really, I think for the holidays, our mission statement for all of us could be, could we be as happy and inspired as possible, just even little threads of it? Can we just mine that vein of, of gold or silver, you know, because sure, we all have the problems of everything that we have in our lives, providing for ourselves, learning how to communicate more effectively in our relationships. And but there is a real power that we have within ourselves. And that's the power to have the intention, to direct our intention, to direct our attention, excuse me,

in a positive direction. And I feel like everything we do, every opportunity that we have to take any kind of action that we can be a little conscious about or a little mindful about is an opportunity to do this. And for the holidays right now, and for this transition time into we don't even know where or what, it's a good practice. It's a practice of loving kindness and self compassion to do this. Because the brighter my heart is, and the more loving I can be, that is contagious. You feel it, I feel you. You know what I mean? We brighten our world in ways that we aren't even aware of. Right. But when you walk into a room, if somebody is miserable, you can feel, it's like a little hole in the energy where a lot of attention kind of drains into their, I guess,

like in black holes, they have that gravitational feel or something. But the same is true of the opposite. When somebody's radiating like Ram Dass did, you can have a whole field of love. And we don't need to feel like, okay, I'm not Ram Dass, I can't generate a powerful field of love that everyone's going to flock to. It's not necessary. Just a half smile. Yeah. Yeah. Just a little smile. And, you know, and it can feel like I'm smiling from the bottom of a deep well. But I'm still pooling. I've seen it all and I'm still smiling. That's you Duncan. Smiling from the bottom of a well. I love that. Yes. You could still smile. You could still smile up and whoever's up there. Oh, thank you, Trudy. You can smile with the ridiculousness of your fate that there's no

one up there. I mean, you can still smile at the absurdity of your fate. Thank you. Thank you, Trudy. Thank you, Duncan. I am so honored that I get to have these conversations with you. And just on behalf of all of us, thank you for all the work that you are doing. And we are just so grateful. Thank you. Thank you, Duncan, for brightening our world. Thank you so much. And thank you for listening, all you who are out there listening. Where can people find you, Trudy? Oh, they can find me at my outdated about to be rebuilt website. TrudyGoodman.com has my little blogs that I write. And they can find me Sunday mornings, lots of Sunday mornings at inside LA for our Sunday morning sitting group. And I just want to say I don't know when people are

going to when are people going to hear this? When is it best for you? You tell me I can release it whatever. Oh, I just want to say that having a Christmas Eve songs from Broadway, meditation, meeting, and it's going to be seven o'clock Eastern time, four o'clock Pacific time, you can find it on the inside LA website. I don't know if people will hear this. No, this answers the question. I'll put this out this week. This is perfect. And and also another thing that might be good for people on Christmas Day, I'm teaching at a group called hope. And I forget heart opening, I forget what it stands for. But it's for people who have lost a loved one who may have died by suicide, or who are considering dying by suicide themselves, because they're at the bottom of

the well and unable to smile. So we have a group on Christmas Day for people who are feeling that down. And and I'm just mentioning that, because if you want to join, just, you know, go to inside LA dot org, inside LA dot org, and you can register. Wow, that is so sweet that you do that. Thank you, Trudy. And then Sunday morning, the 26th also at the sitting group, you can find me. You got it. All those links, if you didn't write them down, are going to be at dunkintrustle.com, so that you can find them. Thank you so much, Trudy. You're the best. Thank you. That was Trudy Goodman, everybody. If you have any interest in attending any of those online events she mentioned, those are going to be at inside LA dot org or dunkintrustle.com. If you want to find

those links, a big thank you to our sponsors. And happy holidays to you, my friends. I will see you next week. Until then, Hare Krishna. A good time starts with a great wardrobe. Next stop, JC Penney. Family get togethers to fancy occasions, wedding season two. We do it all in style. Dresses, suiting and plenty of color to play with. Get fixed up with brands like Liz Claiborne, Worthington, Stafford and Jay Farrar. Oh and thereabouts for kids. Super cute and extra affordable. Check out the latest in store and we're never short on options at jcp.com. All dressed up everywhere to go. JC Penney. Meet the bedroom suite by Thuma, the foundation for the perfect staycation. Time spent at home is the ultimate luxury and Thuma makes it easy to stay in with

lifestyle enhancing pieces like the bed, the dresser and the nightstand. To get $25 towards the bed, go to Thuma.co. That's T-H-U-M-A dot C-O to receive $25 off your purchase of the bed. Shop the bed at Thuma.co.