Alanis Morissette | Healing and Leading With Empathy

0:00I'm not interested in leadership without empathy. So my eye goes toward those of us who are highly sensitive and connect with the idea of being an empath because we are the ones who are really going to process something all the way through and see the impact. Welcome to Point of Relations with Thomas Hubel, a podcast that illuminates the path to a collective healing at the intersection of science and mysticism. This is the Point of Relations. Alanna Smoreset is a widely influential singer-songwriter with 14 Canadian Juno Awards, seven Grammys, and over 75 million albums sold. He's known for her debut, Jagged Little Pill, and has released nine more acclaimed albums. Beyond music and acting, she's committed to spiritual and psychological well-being, supporting

1:01causes like recovery and female empowerment. In 2016, she launched a podcast where she shares her insights. Her multi-thaceted career highlights her impact across multiple platforms and subjects. My name is Thomas Hubel and I have the honor and the pleasure to be sitting here again with Alanna Smoreset. Alanna Smoreset, one welcome to her conference. So the great to meet you here, Sam. Thank you very much. And I enjoyed our last year's conversation a lot and I would love to continue what we started and unfolded a bit more. But I'm wondering since I want to include your situation, you just came off the tour. So how is that life coming back from that exposure to the public space, like coming back into your space? How does that feel? And you're very last year we talked about your empathic side, the sensitivity. So how does that feel when you go through these different spheres of your life?

2:03Maybe you can speak a bit to them. Yeah, coming off the tour is always an adjustment. And it's an adjustment I've been addressing since I was probably 9 or 10 years old when I started doing musicals. I noticed that there was an energetic drop after an experience, specifically after an experience that was communal and in my case nomadic. But something about speaking to the choir here, but something about community and everyone contributing their unique talents in a group on tour specifically. I know it happens on movie sets on Broadway. It happens anytime there's a project where everyone comes together with a shared mission. There's something intangible energetically about that. So the adjustment sometimes is to the energetic adjustment of wow large audiences and a lot of stimulation. So there's a responsibility there for redo adjusting accordingly. But there's also just the straight adjustment of moving from 50 people traveling around

3:04the planet together to going back to what I feel is just a microcosmic version of archetypal mother in my case, mother and vocation are usually in the front seat and then relationships and community and cultivating that. And I really think that it's an intelligence, communalism and the idea of operating gracefully and semi elegantly although still human. It's an intelligence, communal intelligence is a new one that I would add to the list. Maybe you can speak a little bit what works well when when's a group of 50 people traveling together and having a shared intention. What is the ingredients, the secret ingredient to that working well and what's the ingredient that may be having frictions for those sand in the engine? Yeah, I mean, thank you for asking that question. I think part of what creates elegance on the road is having a sense of all the different leadership styles and which ones work temporarily, which ones learn, you know, which ones work

4:08long term. So back maybe 15 years ago, there were maybe two or three styles of leadership that were bandied about. And now there's 27 styles. So I think there's a sense of style with leadership because I'm a highly sensitive, temperament trait person and an epipath. There's a hybrid tunement. What I find myself doing as a leader, really just a facilitator is I love leaning in when I'm needed and then when I'm not needed, I lean out and just support the cause. But even the details of the minutiae of how to operate functionally in community, things like if you're all living in the same house, put post-it notes on snacks, you don't want to have meat in the fridge. When you're in a shared space, it's a boundary what people are hearing. So in what people are smelling and, you know, how to tidy up. There's a distinction between tidying and cleaning and organizing and, you know, there's there's systems within systems in communal consideration.

5:11And I'm so inspired by finding a way for it to functionally operate where each person in the community is contributing their unique gift. It could be one person's the naturalist intelligence. The other person is the area, the academic contributor. The other person has a lot to say about contracting. The other person has a lot to say about cooking and culinary arts. And so for me and my sort of dynamic community, whether it's the traveling one or the home one, we're all contributing unique things and it does remind me of traveling around the planet and seeing where villagefulness really works well. And often I'll ask the kids in that community, you know, where are your parents? Where are your grandparents? You know, and in Fiji, the boys, I think they were seven and they would just say they're everywhere. You know, and that communal attachment, yes, the attachment between mom and baby is a huge deal. Alan Shorttalk is really beautifully about that. And at the same time, attachment can be corrected or healed or repaired through functional,

6:16relational, communal experiences. And especially for those of us who have really cultivated the masculine and feminine, you know, for me to make a concerted effort, like where do I lean? Where do I lie on the lap of a girlfriend who will pet my head? Where do I surrender into my feminine? Certainly in the artistic process, the feminine is tantamount. But in terms of community, you know, where do the leaders, where do the participants in this community get fed? Where do we restore? Where do, how do we rest as a community? Because all of us know how functional we are. We can produce, we're effective, you know, but can we rest together? I think that's another bag of invitation. I think that's a great invitation. It's a great topic because our culture is not as good in arresting and recuperating and digesting experience as we are in producing and being active and being out there. So that's a great point, I think also for many businesses and leaders in general, yeah. Yeah, would I came up with? Because for a while, I was subject to the same indoctrination of work addiction, really.

7:19It's a perpetuated work addiction culture born from a lot of us having been prantified as kids and we stay in this mode of action as a survival strategy, but also to help our businesses. But yeah, the idea of I used to go, I kind of set up this five step system where it's planning mode, go-a-mode, transition mode, arrest mode, reflect gratitude mode. And what was happening for me was I kept going, plan go, plan go, dead, every three months I'd have a nervous brain, plan go, dead. And then I started introducing actively, formally, conservatively introducing mandatory transition, mandatory arrest and restoration and mandatory reflection because reflection is when I get to go, wow, I want to give these bonuses to my team members, wow, I want to send a gift or some flowers or I really want to thank that person specifically for what they contributed. I can't get there to that gracious sort of communal, um, augmenting if I'm just in

8:23plan go, plan go, dead. And I think in culture, we've really supported the cycle of work addiction breakdown burnout. And so if we can extend it a little bit and self care not being sort of this luxury, but self care being the mandatory engine that keeps the community moving, you know, especially for those who are in the more feminine roles. Exactly. And also like when we talk about collective healing, I think we're also talking about how as collectives we see role models that can they can have those different cycles and now a nervous system to digest our experience is so important for reflection as you said and reflection leads to integration. Yeah. Digestion and integration are very important functions that are very underrepresented in our society in many ways. Yes. Businesses, but also in societal processes. Yeah, the restorative element is not extol. It's not extol that how how mandatory it is for sustainability of a plan of a system,

9:25all of it for it to be sustained. It has to be restorative and it has to be built in, you know, for those of us recovering for work addiction, it literally needs to be scheduled in because if it's not, it won't happen. Exactly. Exactly. No, I'm happy you're speaking to that because also when you look on the biggest on the bigger level, when you look, for example, post COVID, there was a huge pandemic. It did two years. The world was upside down. How many spaces did you find where people said, okay, let's come together. Let's look at what happened. Let's digest that pandemic and let's digest the impact on businesses, on artists, on different communities and then we continue. But we, that there is a digestion process. And that's just one example of how often it doesn't happen. Well, yeah, integration doesn't get its moment in the sudden and then we suffer for it because part of what the benefit of integrating and processing is and not everyone is sort of constitutionally built to do that, right? For those of us who are more mercurial and interiority focused, we're the ones that know

10:28how to integrate really well. And I ask a lot of people, what's your integration process look like? You know, and a lot of people just say just sitting in silence allows them to integrate, you know, for some, for some people, it's being near water. In my case, it's all of those things, but also specifically not thinking about it. Like during the transition, rest phase to the, to the degree that I can conjure my own conscious association or brain rest as I call it, stepping away from what we're thinking into an answer. Part of the restoration and integration process allowed was for new ways of looking at things and allows for certainly the reflection of this is what I'd like to do differently moving forward. This is what I can take responsibility for. These are people I would no longer like to work with. You know, when are we to come to those revelations if we don't create the space and the silence? You know, an easy, easier set than done as a parent, as a, as a, as a per the single parent who's working three jobs to put food on the table, you know, where to carve out this time. And what I've come to see is that the restoration, integration, processing period doesn't actually

11:35have to be four hours protracted. It can be four seconds. It could be four minutes. It can be sitting in the car and allowing that transition to soften and slow down and move fast. Exactly. And you're saying something else often we imagine this is too much and we don't have time and then we disregard it all together versus it's part of an art form of living. And then we will find the ways how it's possible in our life, but there is something about being aware of how important digestion is. And even if you look at trauma healing, trauma healing is in a way slowing down so that the past gradually can catch up with us that we can integrate what they were most painful and that we don't have to repeat it again and again and again. And get triggered every ten sessions. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. The process of integrating is a big deal. And some people, if they were to hear process, they integrate, some people have asked me, well, what does that mean? What does that look like? And for me, one of the big portals into that integrative process is to feel the feelings.

12:39And you said the operative mini sentence, which is the catching up. And I felt for years with my own complex PTSD party journey. I had this sense that my emotions and my experience needed to catch up to the current plebis and that they were stuck back there, understandably. But to pull everything into the present moment, and one of the many delicious definitions of trauma is to be able to, to what degree can we be present with what is? Maybe our trauma has it be such that our memory doesn't remember some of it. It's blocked it out. But to what degree can I beat you with the sensation right now and the feelings that are coming through? And we don't always have the 13 minutes to do it. But often we do. And I think that that is a really big one to get to such a familiar place of cultivating that interior, already looking muscle, that we can do it at a stoplight. We can do it in this bathroom stall when we have a three minute break.

13:40We can do it anywhere. Just that inquiry of noticing versus diagnosing or assessing just the noticing of sensation. And that grief, all these feelings, they kind of move through to us. And we either resist them and push them into our tissues. They'll wait for us as we know. Or we slowly sort of titrate and pendulate our way inside these experiences slowly over time. And then I start feeling like I'm here. I'm in 2024. I am 50 years old. I'm a 50 year old woman in 2024. I have three children. And as simple as that might sound or reminding myself of what is, it's been interesting to note how to associate it. I've been to the point where I've been assessing myself as a 26 year old person stuck in certain ways. So for me, it is about coming here, coming home, coming to this moment, and to what degree

14:42is there a lack of resistance? So for me, it's not about what's happening in the environment. It's about how resistant am I to the feelings that come up around it. And for those of us who are really sensitive and very empathic and reclares, the sensation in the body is actually quite acute. And it's not a wonder that a lot of us who are particularly sensitive go to our relief seeking measure addictions. It's like how do you abate the chronic acute sensation that courses through the body? There's not enough time in the world to process a lot of the feelings, certainly not all at once and slow for the win. So it's a series of catching up and frankly taking what I call brain rest conscious breaks and that can look different differently for everyone. So for me, it's maybe watching a TV show out, which I rarely do or reading an article about someone else's life, you know, just really removing myself from my own personal narrative

15:44for a minute has proven to be more regulating, to be honest. Hi, my name is Thomas Vivo. I invite you to my new program, Healers and Healing. I created this event in this conversations because I'm truly interested in what actually happens when healing happens. What do we experience in the moment of healing? How does the current state of the world in formal work? I'm very curious to have this in depth conversations with people in various different disciplines that can cross fertilize each other. It's amazing to hear other long-term professionals speak about the leading edge of their understanding of the healing process itself. How do we participate in the future of healing in a way that we can become an answer for this time? This conversations will help us to shine a light and speak to the resonance in all of us,

16:47how all of us are actually part of that emerging future of healing. Others on healing is a free online event taking place September 17th through 19th. Thomas will be joined by 10 leading experts and healers, including Micah Mead, Shannon Salzburg, David White, Mariel Brouquet, Julian Brave Noise Cat and more. Go to ConversationsOnHealing.com or visit the link in this episode's show notes to learn more and register for free. You're saying it, you're saying you needed to find whatever works for you and it's not for everybody the same thing, but what works for you is great for you. I want to underline something that I heard from you. There is a difference between knowing that you're a woman of a certain age or you feel it and you are present, you're sitting in the room and when you spoke, then I could feel your embodiment.

17:50That's something because we say, okay, of course, I know how old I am, but it's not. It's like it's here or if it's here makes a huge difference in how present we are literally in our life. There's so much intellectual knowing, but there's a lack of embodiment underneath and that creates this dissonance in our life. It has it. Yeah, right. I'll be leading a workshop in November and then co-leading in March with Richard Schwartz. Basically, just allowing or inviting, in my case, slowly to be sure, embodiment. So sadness, anger, fear are the top three that we're not allowed to feel, certainly as women in North American culture, but in culture in general. Those three are the scary ones and I think anger gets a bad rep because of the destructing acting out that often sort of our dictionary definitions of anger when really the life force

18:52of anger is quite gorgeous and it can be the fuel for activism. It's the fuel for me showing up today. Seeing needless suffering is not okay with me and I do feel a little bit angry about that and part of that feels me to be here talking with you. So allowing these feelings of sadness and fear even for a long time, I've encountered a phobic my whole life and what I like to metaphor call myself as constitutionally this nervous system of a terrified poodle in the body and the lifestyle of a black stallion. So Ling Erno is last with me because she's just like, he said, you're a highly highly sensitive person and I took that to mean that I'm also an empath. But one of the key pieces of what orients me and what inspires me around sort of creating the curriculum for the workshops is the invitation back into the body but ever so slowly. So what, how do I know I'm excited? How do I know I'm terrified? What are the indications somatically that tell me that this is happening and familiarizing

19:57myself with desensations so that I'll know the body knows before the mind knows. So really listen to what's happening in this body and then following that thread was a noticing quality. And I think a lot of people who have parts within who are protectors trying to beat oneself up. The idea of looking within with compassionate inquiry or investigative noticing that can even feel foreign. You know, what's it like? A, a lot of people don't know what it even feels like to look within. It's terrifying. And then other people when they're in, it's overwhelming and it's too much. So so much of this is, I think ideally better done in community, in relationship where there's psychological awareness, psychological safety, trauma informed is a big deal. Why, why can't we all be trauma informed? Everyone in a position of leadership ideally would have a sense of how to address trauma in their own selves and in each other as a boss, as an attuned leader, you know, to have a sense of where people light up and what their, what their gifts are.

21:01And, but to speak to the dissociation that we brought up earlier, just the idea of thanking the part of me that was able to hold it together and check out, you know, as opposed to having that be another reason to beat myself up, to see it as the reason I'm still here. And I do see it as that. And are there some regrets around my past, around relationship disconnects based on my survival strategies? Yes. And there is guilt and there is sadness and gavore mante would wonder why I laughed when I said that because I'm still in my terrified people, please remote sometimes. But yeah, so the idea of being able to jump out and check out is often viewed as a negative whereas I see it, you know, as a tool, you know, it's a tool to keep us here. There's a reason it exists. And slowly coming back to life, slowly coming back into the body, slowly coming back into the reality out of the fantasy.

22:03I've been thinking so much about how a lot of my life I've lived it in fantasy, which has been the underpinnings of love addiction, sex addiction, a lot of addictions, but that idea of living in a fantasy world has been part of my dissociation, part of my survival strategy. So for me to slowly do baby steps, things like what's really happening right now? What did they really tell me? What can I take at face value? Where am I lying to myself? And so these sort of prompts or increase can kickstart it, but a lot of it for me is supporting people around turning the lens inside. There's the connection with all of life, the drop in the ocean and the ocean experience, felt sense experience, the relationality between us humans. And then this relationality here, and I'm not sure if I share this story with you, Thomas, but when my son was my son who's 13 now, when he was quite little, he said that he wanted

23:03to go within and that he was scared. He said, it's scary in there, Mommy. And I said, it is scary in there sometimes, but you don't have to go in alone. I'll come in with you. Can we go in together? He said, yeah. So we spent all of two minutes. I didn't want to overwhelm him. But we just kind of touched on what it was like to go inside, but not to have to go inside alone, because, A, I think chronologically when kids are young, they need us there to guide them and affirm them and orient them. But that really struck me. His fear of going within really, I resonated with that idea of how scary it can be to go within if we don't know what to look for in there and how to be in there. And if there is a tendency towards self-recrimination and self-flagulation, leaving someone alone in meditation, Peter Livingne talks about the meditation and do stangxiety. So leaving some of us alone in meditation might not be the way to go or rushing something,

24:06might not be the way to go. So that tender cultivating, that tender quality, and for me, the tender inquiry muscle has really just cultivated more and more and more through being a parent. And I know it's lovingly, not always. I have the best parent award and the worst parent award on my mental piece. Both of them dream. But watching how I am with my children has shown me how to be with my own inner parks, just bringing more presence and the noticing that delicious gentle noticing. It's beautiful to listen to you. You said so many gems, like so many beautiful things that are all worth expanding. I just want to highlight a few things. So what I heard is that blowing down and softening is a way to feel more because speeding up and getting tighter or harder is a way to reduce our experience.

25:11So if you want to reverse the process, so slowing down, making more space and softening helps us to get more in touch with what's in us. So that's a beautiful thing. That you said, amongst many things, and then one other part that you said that I think is highly important, there is such a self-atologizing going on that the parts of me that are not functional in the way they should be, or we expect us, each other's ourselves to be, is very strong. And so seeing that the trauma response always has an intelligence in the traumatic situation. So we are not dealing with it. This function, we are dealing with something that supported us and you said that beautifully. I want to highlight that because that's where many people try to get rid of all of that stuff versus bring it more in because getting rid means a testimony of what I got rid of already as a child or somewhere in my development. So if I want to get rid of my fears, I want to get rid of them already and it doesn't

26:16work because they're coming back all the time. So really, I want to get rid of something because it doesn't ever work, not even one time. Yeah, exactly, exactly. And chaselessly it's down, right? It chases us down in various forms, you know, through illness, pain or relationship challenges. It just keeps showing up and wanting our attention until we really integrated and understand it. And for me, a lot of times, it's until we cry about it, you know, or until we rage about it. So we need to take really take it to come back to that predynamio in the predictive stage. We can carry on thinking about it in empathy, to time. Yes. Yes. Thank you for jumping over to us, thank you for coming. Thank you very much. Thank you. Good night. Talk about this. Bye, go ahead. independence and even some of the painful parts of the feminist movement has been we don't

27:16need you, you know, cypher will relationally as as the human field we do actually need each other. That's the in Miracle and the bummer. If anyone how many challenges we have to push through to actually show up, you know, because if intimacy is defined as us, you know, sharing your own self with a non-judgmental other, you know, if that's if that's one of the definitions of intimacy, then it would say that that accruing and developing a sense of self and for those of us who are raised in any kind of narcissistic environment, it's a challenge to have a sense of self because our entire survival strategy in self was around being supply for a narcissist or being the generosity one or being the one who read the room with hyper-visualance to see whose eyebrow was raised and who was about to lose their, always their marbles in front of us and act out destructively. You know, so so many of us have these cultivated survival strategies that have been on 11 and with a little love and

28:22a little attention and a little noticing, maybe they'll the volume can be turned down to five and we have it in our back pocket and we can use it when we want to and it's these parts are returning to their original purpose, their original purpose for being here, but they were co-opted beautifully to create a survival strategy that kept us here, but it's pause button, you know, and as soon as I enter into any addictions, I'm basically pressing a pause button and sometimes that pause button is merciful and sometimes it creates an object developmental arrest that makes relationships really tough to navigate. So, you know, is there a fine line between zero and and revving in the red at 11? Yes. Right, right, and it's also beautiful to hear you speak about all of that and also your own stories so freely, like there's something about the fluidity and I think of course that's also part of the work, like the how the work that you did on yourself allows you to speak because often,

29:23you know, there's this I need to hide this part and that part and in order to fit in into a social belonging, but like when I listen to you, there's also in the way you speak about things, there's already the freedom of your own inquiry and reflection process and integration process. That's beautiful. Thank you. And I also think it's a really amazing time turning 50 in Perry, menopause. It's like, my whole life, you know, I've cut off both my arms to survive. And at 50, it's like, my arms! You know, so it's, you know, it sounds cliche, but the whole idea of coming back to the authentic self, that always sounded conceptually great on paper, but I really didn't really know what that meant. What is life outside of being mired and a survival strategy? You know, and so I'm walking my way into this through this portal of of the second puberty on the way out, you know, the procreative

30:26imperative is going away. And then the and then the big question for women of my age is, you know, what's the new imperative? You know, and for me, the new imperative is just coming back here and supporting other people and coming back into the body and being okay on some level with being here. And you know, there's a lot of speak about mental health and while I love the whole mental health community, I feel as though I was born to contribute to it, spiritual health, somatic health, wholeness, health, wholeness versus wellness, you know, for a while there, the trend was this wellness idea. But what about when you're angry? What about when you're suicidal? What about when a part wants to shake my own ass? The wellness, candle burning, lavender smelling room isn't going to really help me when I don't want to be here in this body. You know, so it depends on what's going on in front of us, but yeah, it also sounds when you say this, then there is a kind of a realness to the process, that the process is not just a romantic process coming back to ourselves and everything will be fine,

31:30but it's really work and I think it's also great for everybody who works in this field to to set realistic expectations, like that it's a journey and it's a journey that we are on all our life. I mean, it's like it's progressing and it has fruits, but it also has its challenges. When you become more aware of stuff, you become more aware of stuff and it's pleasant. But it also makes it real and it also allows us to be together, when other people go through that discomfort and that's what you're saying. And I think you also mentioned that meant that the term mental health was very important, of course, in the journey of making it more like a thing in society, but mental health also induces the idea that did something in my mind versus mental health is a physical condition that has symptoms in my mind, but it's very somatic, like very well-renewed about trauma is very somatic. It's so somatic and neurochemical and I mean, it's all the elements, you know, and part of what I enjoy sharing during workshops in the Q&A

32:34and the experiential and the embodiment practices and the presence practices is really looking at all these angles, all these entry points, you know, 8.1 saw a billion people. There's no one-liner panacea that everyone can adhere to. Everyone's at a different juncture, so everyone has a different growth edge and some people, it might be to come more into the body, some people that might be, you know, maybe employ the mind a little bit more of the brain, maybe understand your nervous system and your constitution. All these self-knowledge accruing processes, whether it's the anemogram or Myers-Briggs or anytime someone can define themselves through art, through movement, through embodiment practices, through conversations, through journaling. There's so many ways in and again, I just keep coming back to the idea of taking it as slowly as possible because it can really overwhelm the system for those of us who've been dissociated for very point and reasons, coming back into the body even when you

33:37said that sentence earlier, I had this whole wave of terror because I know what that means for me personally as a sensitive person coming out of trauma back into the body. You know, the body was the danger, you know, the body was the acute, intolerable sensations, you know, so in some ways I'm being invited back into the dungeon, and I'm being back, I'm invited back into this body that has created what I felt was overwhelming sensation that would shut down the system. So I can't say how much slow is clutch because then it's tolerable and also other who has some wisdom and some experience and you said something earlier about this, maybe use the word space. Part of what I'm loving about this deep work that I've done on an off-throw of my whole life is how much space is made available for anyone who my love sitting across from me. You know, the I am that element where no matter what they're saying, you know, have I murdered someone? No. Do I

34:42relate to murderous rage? Yes. Do I relate to having impulse control issues? Sure. So when someone's experiencing something across from me, even if it's an event that I myself may never relate to environmental or circumstantially, I relate to the place or the state or the feeling or the sensation or the challenge. So there is so much more space held for those around us, communally certainly as a boss, as a friend, as a spouse, as a mom, as as someone who's kind of dipping my toe pretty actively into the educative process. You know, how do we make a whole educative system cultivating and nurturing all the multiple intelligences and adding? That's beautiful. And because you said it not multiple times, you spoke about the like heightened sensitivity. Maybe if you for our listeners, maybe other people wonder if they are empaths or highly sensitive in their experience. So how would

35:46one know and how what works for you once you realize that that's also part of your experience? What what kind of changes in your life or what was needed in your life to learn to live with that in a good way, like to adjust your lifestyle to your sensitivity. And maybe for people that are also out there a lot, they might be out there a lot as a business leader or as an artist or as somehow in the public sphere. Like when you're highly sensitive, how do you manage the impact? Like when you give a concert and you play in front of many people, when you travel with your team and maybe there's friction on the team sometimes. So you get that. So maybe you can speak a little bit to first the highly sensitive and then apply it to a life that is exposed and not just somewhere hidden. So how do we live that in a good way? I mean, how do you live it in a good way? And what would

36:47you say to other people? Yeah, thanks for asking that question. It's concurrent. So while I'm navigating how to be responsible for this trait in this constitution, I'm also noticing all the different constitutions in the team around me that I'm facilitating or leading or walking alongside really. So in terms of the sensitivity, there's tests that Elaine Erin has on her website that could indicate pretty quickly if you relate to or identify with being that trait of high sensitivity. And in theory, 20% of people, small part of the bell shaped curve over here, have this trait and of the 20% 4% are also empaths. And inside that empath, under that I'm empath umbrella, are all the Claire, Claire sentient, Claire, boostient, all the Claire audience. So

37:48part of what the gifts of this type of temperament, one of my many missions is to support people with this temperament, even those who are introverts, into supporting them to be in positions of leadership, because there is a, there is an inquiry, there is a philosophy, there is a leading edge of evolution quality to those who are deeply thinking, deeply feeling, deeply processing humans. And and drench empathy if they're empaths. So for me, I don't want a narcissist or a sociopath or a psychopath in a position of leadership political or otherwise. I'm not following these people into a towering inferno, I'm just not because they are, they don't have access to empathy and I'm not interested in leadership without empathy. So my eye goes toward those of us who are highly sensitive and connect with the idea of being an empath, because we are the ones who are really going to process something all the way through and see the impact of different political choices or leadership choices

38:51in a system. And I laugh when I think about the women's march, there was a placard there and it just said, things have gotten so bad, even the introverser here. Just think about the first show of uniform control. So much resistance. So for me, it's about, you know, and it speaks to your question, which is how do you navigate leadership with the sensitive empath temperament? And and a lot of it is being responsible for the fact that the acronym that really comes into play is does. So the depth of processing, that's how we notice we're sensitive. The easy overstimulation, because in theory, a highly sensitive person, well, a non-holly sensitive person, not to say they're not sensitive, but the trade itself, if they don't have the trade of high sensitivity, they'll walk into the room and they'll pick up on 50 pieces of information. A highly sensitive temperament walks into a room and picks up on 500 pieces of information. So it goes without saying that the overstimulation factor,

39:53it's pretty instant, you know, because we're picking up on smells, visual, who's dangerous, where the same or two tiger is, we're picking up on everything. Sometimes within five minutes of waking, I will be flooded by too much information. So that's my responsibility to just say, okay, I'm flooded. And I have ways of communicating with my husband or my team members, producers, you know, and a lot of what I request is a room with a door where I could click it shut even if I have to hide in the bathroom, because six minutes of silence is so restorative for me. And that's one of the breaks that I loot too when I talk about how important taking breaks are. And being outside is huge for me ocean, anything water is massive. Nature is instantly restorative for me. Having a journal nearby, ideally having enough community around where I can vent and process, we hold the bucket for each other as we like to call it, because I think venting and moving

40:55energy in a safe environment, not triangulating against, but being in a safe environment processing and venting is huge. There has to be a place where we're unmeasured. And we feel safe, you know, so that could be psychotherapeutically, it could be with a friend, it could be with a guide, it could be with a journal or a combination thereof. So taking breaks is part of what I mean when I say being responsible for this trait. And so Elaine does talk about those of us who have high novelty seeking needs. So there's different versions, a beautiful book called the highly sensitive person in love. And it really does kind of flesh out the quadrant that I'm alluding to here. But it speaks to the idea of being able to seek novelty and yet seek regulation and easily overstimulated. So I feel as though my foot is on the break and the pedal all the time. And the artfulness of the pedal and the break is really on me. And sometimes I navigate it quite

41:56functionally. And I'm energetic after something happens. And other times I don't navigate it as well. And I'm taking shallow breaths the whole time. And I'm in fight flight freeze farm, collapse, all of the all of the juicy responses that the nervous system does geniusly. You know, so if I'm stuck in those taking taking breaks and leaning, you know, and it's hard to lean sometimes when our survival strategy was autonomy and needlessness. So all these baby steps are our massive move of boost in the repair of the broken heart for the indoctrination. Beautiful. And it's also great to hear it from you. And also from you as somebody that explored it for a long time. And I think because I believe all of us that heal something and that that learn how to navigate certain rates or certain in a state also become a remedy for our environment. So the fact that you dealt with that and that you found your resource

42:59saying and you found all the parts that really help you to resource and design a lifestyle that helps you to regulate your heightened sensitivity. It's a great role model and it deep pathologizes it for other people. So to say, well, actually, there's nothing's wrong here. It just needs to be adjusted in a different way, like a highly sensitive instrument that needs and get overloaded fast. We are we are a oboe not a not a guitar. What a rose, right? It's nuance and salty and the boon of having this trait is that as artists and as those of us who are in the healing arts or the psychotherapy community, we can look at the subtle nuance shifts. You I mean, I see this in you too if I can project it onto you just the attunement to super subtle shifts. What a great gift as an artist, as a chef, as a designer, you know, I mean, these are mandatory gifts and capacities and qualities that have us show up as artists and have us show up

44:06on this, you know, virgin snow leading edge that, you know, pros and cons on the leading edge too. It's it's windy in the front. It's windy and you get your head chopped off, you know, but yet somehow we still walk and one of the things I definitely want to touch on is the idea of dysregulation and being able to still show up when I'm dysregulated, you know, so people off it say like, are you nervous at this point? You've done thousands and thousands of shows, are you nervous still? And my answer is yes, I'm always nervous. You've never a moment I'm not nervous, you know, and maybe that's not true. I, you know, certain moments on my hot matter, you know, certain environments. I can actually say that I'm legitimately regulated, but the idea, again, with the wellness, credo, and imperative, this idea that we're supposed to just stay regulated. I'm like, you know, for those of us who are extra sensitive, is that even possible? And yes,

45:07there's a certain amount of medication that I brought into my life to make it tolerable to be here, and I have zero shame around that because it actually makes it okay to be here, and I love it, and it's been really helpful for me with postpartum experiences and just general molasses, quick sand dwelling in a way that my constitution naturally goes to our melancholic, but also very positive somehow. So a lot of dichotomies and dualities and paradoxes going on in here, but I'm a Gemini. What are you going to do? Yeah, no, it's lovely. And I want to highlight again, because I hear this again when I listen to you and I feel you, it's because I want to highlight this also for our listeners, because the way you speak about your inner conditions is very transparent, and also it's transparent, but it's held like it's held in a way in your awareness or your presence. And I think that's a great sign that shows whatever is our pre-condition in life, wherever we started off, given our family systems, and our herds and wounds, and whatever is

46:12happening, but walking a path to step by step re-owned that, and then it gives a sense. It's not that all of that magically disappears, but it's held in a different kind of level of awareness that it's like a flower bouquet, and it's more and more held in a cup or in a vase, and that's what I had, that's a transmission that I get from you. And it also means we are not looking for perfection to come to a place where we are super regulated all the time and we are just in peace. There's not a point, but the point is that we, that this owning, this re-owning is happening and into, into like a sense of self that can be present to these different states and not reject them as good a bad or whatever. And that's what I hear from you, and I think that's a great role modeling for like sometimes these expectations that are being said, we are aspiring a perfect state, but that's not what we are talking about. I hear you talk about how you bring all of this stuff

47:16that is happening around into like a sense of yourself, and then to translate that. Yeah, like a location, yes, beautiful, thank you for marrying that. Yeah, it's interesting because the muscle of dissociation of being able to jump out is also the same muscle that allows for objective ego and objectivity and gestalt, you know, in this embodiment practice that I love teaching, and I do it myself all the time, is the ability to embody parts, you know, so, you know, not if some of them are feeling more intense feelings, you know, titrating that and going slow, but being able to really embody these elements and to allow the discharge and allow the energy to move. And I'm talking about slow versions, I'm talking about allowing the physicality of anger in our body slowly, allowing the sadness, what does the body want to do? While we're busy kind of choking it down and pushing it

48:22down and having shame around our feelings, you know, so really being able to embody each feeling, not in a dramatizing way, but more in a felt sense, I'm actually in my body feeling this feeling, and I notice I'm still here, I notice I'm still alive, but it's interesting that the dissociating muscle that helps me jump out for survival strategy is also the exact muscle that I need to use to have a sense of objectivity and to see parts of myself acting out with objectivity. And that's one of the things I think that I enjoy bringing the most to a room is stopping for a moment and really looking at how this impacts the body and the body ultimately wants to do. And that as you can imagine, you probably do it all the time in my imagination, that takes a profound amount of safety for someone to explore, especially if that was dangerous. Absolutely, absolutely. And I want to highlight again a pearl that you just said is that in trauma,

49:26in the traumatic moment, life says, here and now it's not good for me. And I think when we understand that and we see that the movement out of the body, out of the experience, out of the overwhelm, is intelligent in that moment. That's not a mistake. And so you said that beautifully, and then when we learn to work with that intelligence, like, that we don't force ourselves to be present, but that not being present is actually an intelligence that helped us, we can slowly, it can slowly come back by itself because it's respected. And that's beautiful. It's beautiful that you share this. It's so important for us to hear again and again. But that's not a malfunction. It's like, it's something important. Yeah, when we're adaptable, right? So you can only have a bed of nails, I'll figure it out. Where you throw us in environments where there's neglect or abuse or, I mean, those are the two chestnuts, right? And we're going to adapt and we're going to

50:29chop parts of ourselves off and we're going to skew other things and we're going to keep going. And then when we get into committed relationships of any kind, we see the parts that unfortunately were cut off to survive, but really don't help us in relating and being relational with each other. So there are muscles to cultivate and we can cultivate them together. But safety is tantamount. And I know that's just the greatest word in the world. And a lot of what I invite people to do often is how do you know you feel safe? And even if you haven't in your imagination, how would you know you felt safe? Like what would be happening in the body? And becoming more familiar with that to the point where even if I feel 3% safe, that discernment comes out and that ability to say, maybe stop talking. This isn't the person to speak with if I want to process something really vulnerable. So by the way, thank you for being the person who is safe to process

51:29smaller, vulnerable things with top. I appreciate it with with all of my bonds. Thank you. And likewise, it's lovely to feel the flow, the back and forth. It's beautiful. The endlings. And I see a time, it's like it's almost like an hour past and it was such a lovely ride. Is there anything that you want to leave our listeners with given all the journey? It was a beautiful journey throughout this conversation. But if there is anything that you want to leave our listeners with. Well, thank you, Thomas, so much for having me. I just, I love the quality of your spaciousness and inquiry and curiosity and deep tenderness and kindness that were tender kept coming up today when listening to you. So thank you so much for your bigness and for having me. Thank you so much. I deeply enjoy our conversations. I hope you'll meet soon again and it's lovely to have and it's a great contribution. And thank you for your honesty with yourself.

52:30I think that's just a great role modeling of all the work that you've done. So thank you. Thanks for listening to Point of Relation with Thomas Hubel. Stay connected and get updates about new episodes by visiting a website. Point of Relation Podcast.com. And by subscribing to the Thomas Hubel YouTube channel. If you enjoyed this video, please like it and share about us with your community on social media. Thank you. We appreciate your support.