SPEAKER_00 0:01

Hello and welcome to Soul Portals, exploring psychospiritual horizons with your hosts Cedric Speyer and Deanna Nagel. Cedric is an author and therapist who developed the interview guidance model and is a pathfinder in the psycho-spiritual realm. Deanna created the Essential Soul Care Model, a model suitable for therapists, coaches, and healers. The monthly episodes of Soul Portals feature guests sharing insights on their personal paths and professional practices. Thank you for tuning in for the Soul Talk with all kinds of trailblazing teachers and guides as Cedric, Deanna, and guests explore new evolutionary landscapes.

SPEAKER_03 1:26

And we have, of course, Emmy Van Dersen, who's well known to many of you, a pioneer of existential therapy, author of countless books, and director of organizations uh worldwide for practice promotion of existential counseling and therapy. Um and uh in preparation for this, I read this book of hers. Very fascinating. I recommended like for well, not all the others, but for an introduction to her her thought, her work. So uh for the opening quote, I always do an opening quote. I tried to find something that would be a nutshell version of your theme's in me. So this one uh goes like this. Living is about negotiating conflict, facing contradiction, dealing with dilemmas, tolerating paradox. We are always somewhere in between. No more and not yet, between birth and death, freedom and necessity, isolation and belonging, faith and doubt. Embracing life means daring to greet the inevitable suffering, anxiety, and guilt, as well as the joys and the peace and the pleasure. The more we can manage to do both, the wider our horizons and possibilities will become.

SPEAKER_01 3:02

Thank you. It just reminds me of, you know, what we're talking about today. Very good.

SPEAKER_03 3:10

Yeah. And we were talking, we were just before we started, we were talking about Rolame. Just a brief line from him. The human dilemma is that which arises out of a man's capacity to experience himself as both subject and object at the same time.

SPEAKER_01 3:27

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_03 3:28

And I really appreciated your case studies at the end of this book.

SPEAKER_01 3:32

Ah, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 3:33

Very well written very refreshing way of of uh doing a case study.

SPEAKER_01 3:39

Looking at the mistakes, you mean.

SPEAKER_03 3:43

No, and keeping it in the present hands as if we were there with you and the client and telling the story. Okay, over to you, Diana, for I can open her question.

SPEAKER_02 3:57

Hi Um So I'm curious your answer to this because as somebody who um tries to model and teach and supervise around concepts of psycho-spiritual elements. Um I often deal with the concept of existentialism, and a lot of my students see that as a separate thing. And so I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about the spirit behind your work.

SPEAKER_01 4:31

Ah, well, that is indeed a can opener, and that's that's a good good one to start with. So let's get this clearly out of the way. There are many, many different forms of existential therapy, and all existential therapists interpret what existential means in a different way. And I think what I have brought to not just existential therapy but to existential philosophy is to break through the taboo in a lot of existential therapy about having anything to do with spirituality. So there are a lot of existential therapists who are very secular and clearly atheistic and pragmatic and um I would say materialist in their outlook, and I have never been in that camp. It is why I had disagreements with you know the main existentialist, Jean-Paul Sartre in France and Simon de Beauvoir, because they were very much of that secular ilk, and while I studied them very carefully, it was always with a certain reluctance, and of course Heidegger is much more spiritual, especially in his later work, so that was an easier fit, but there were other problems with that as well. So, really, for me to find my philosophical base, I couldn't lean in to French existentialism, which is where I started from, and I couldn't really lean into Heidegger either for various other reasons. So I had to go right back to the what I think are the starters for existential ideas, which are people like Socrates, Marcus Aurelius, and then later people like Spinoza, and very much in the 19th century Seren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche. And then you might well say Nietzsche, he is the most secular of them all. He is the one who is the nihilist and who said, you know, there is no God, we have killed him. Yes, but Nietzsche said those things in order to point out to us how absurd and bizarre that is, and how impossible it is, as he put it, to wipe away the horizon. And that is my perspective on what spirituality is. It is that which ties us to the wider horizon, and while it has been very good, I think, for humankind to focus on material things and come to terms with how things work and figure things out, we have definitely, as Nietzsche said, tried to wipe away the horizon. And I think that is now changing. I mean, it began changing a little bit in the 60s and 70s, but then we went into the 80s and 90s, which were full out materialism, and in philosophy, materialism is still very dominant. But I think with the way things are going in the world, we are reaching the limit of that secularism, and the time for a spiritual existentialism is upon us, in my view, and I do my best to show how we can connect between a more material and scientific way of looking at things and a more in-depth questioning, opening up more spiritual, transcending way of connecting that up to a spiritual way of thinking about life.

SPEAKER_03 9:34

Yeah, they some people call that integral, like the integral Yeah, you could you could call it that.

SPEAKER_01 9:40

Yes, I I call it dimensionalism because it is about recognizing that life happens at many different dimensions, and that we're just not accounting for some of those at all anymore.

SPEAKER_03 9:54

Was there a point something you can point to about your own what they call spiritual awakening in your own journey?

SPEAKER_01 10:03

Oh gosh, my spiritual awakening happened at birth, my friend. I was I was I was generated and conceived quite deliberately to um to incarnate um higher spirits. My parents were theosophers, and you may be aware how the theosophist had um done a similar thing with Krishna Murti, who they was a boy they found in India and they thought was you know especially wonderful, and they wanted to educate him and make him into this very special person. And he, as soon as he was um grown up, he moved away from all of that, and he went his own way, and it was very interesting indeed that whole story. But but anyway, my my my parents did believe in reincarnation, and they did believe that they wanted well, they're very good people, and they wanted to make a difference to the world, and they took it very seriously, and they they believed that they had to raise us to to do that, to to work for the world, and to well, you know, mend some of the pain in the world because they went through the second world war and they were very um traumatized by that, and that had a huge impact on me. So from a very early age I had conversations with especially my mother rather than my father about what life is and what death is, and um I remember saying to my mother that it couldn't be circular, that people couldn't just go back and back and you know repeat the same things, that it had to be a spiral, and this is when my my mother said, Yes, that is exactly what Madame Blavatsky said, and she believed for a long time that I was the reincarnation of Madame Blavatsky, and as you can imagine, I had to rebel against this kind of thing quite a bit in my life and and get away from all of that, and what that had done to me as well as a person, you know, having these beliefs which were quite far out compared to the other kids in the Netherlands, you know, in the 50s that I grew up with. Um, they didn't like me being different, I can tell you that for free. Um, you know, I was the only one who didn't go to Sunday school and all of that, but in a good way, it left me free to have my own experiences because I was searching for what it was all about, you know, and and I reinvented paganism all by myself, really. I became um I had some very intense experiences in relation to the sun and the moon and special moments where I felt uplifted and really cold to to do certain things in the world, and and I was very serious about that, even from the age of eight or nine, you know. And this this all became more so when I had this um terrible traffic accident at the age of ten, and I had to be in hospital for several weeks with head injury that was quite serious, and I couldn't see anybody, and I had to be in the dark, and I had to be flat on a bed and constrained, and it it was scary, but it was also a time when I had to think about life, and I had to be on my own, and I had to work some very simple things out about how not to panic and how not to disappear, and all sorts of things. I've I've written about this in my book Rising from Existential Crisis, because I do think that I learned an enormous amount on that hospital bed, and furthermore, after I came back to my school, having been away from school from May to September, and starting in a new class, and my friends having moved on to new friends and basically not belonging anymore. So, you know, I thought I had it all behind me, but then a whole other thing started that made things quite hard. So, with all my new ideas and all my kind of good things that that were happening in my mind, I then had to struggle quite a bit with reinserting myself into the world that got quite serious at some point. For instance, when we had to do IQ tests in school, I'll tell you this one. And um, I just sat and watched everybody because I'd become very contemplative, you know, in hospital, and I watched everybody. To cut a long story short, I came out with an IQ of 76, and my parents were told that I had to go to a special school for um people who couldn't learn. And my father said nonsense, she's a very bright girl, no way, and they just left me in school, and a year later it was all turned around, and they in school said, Oh, they made a terrible mistake, but that took a year, you know, to turn that around. So those are quite difficult experiences that were kind of linked with that sort of aspirational stuff of wanting to be connected to higher powers and all of that. The realities of life were quite harsh by contrast to that. There was always that contrast, that tension.

SPEAKER_04 16:42

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 16:43

But it seems like the experience you had, even though it was different than your your peers at the time, you the experience you had with your parents gave you a wider lens. Yeah to oh yeah, oh yeah, absolutely. Without the harsh, sometimes harsh, rigid rules.

SPEAKER_01 17:06

Very much so, Diana. Yes, absolutely right. Yes, I'm very grateful to my parents that they did that. And you know, for instance, my mother, this is you know, early 50s, took me to yoga classes when I was like one and two years old, but it wasn't done in the 50s, nobody even knew what yoga was, and it seemed bizarre to other people when I told them about it. But with hindsight, it set me on that path too. And I've done sort of yoga on and off all my life, and it has given me something about embodiment that I would never have discovered so early on if that if they hadn't done that. Yes, it was called the Lotus Circle, and we we did yoga, but we also did other things. We we colored in lotus flowers and we heard stories from the Bhagavad Gita because that's the that's the sort of text in this in theosophy, you know, it's it's very Hindu-based. And uh, and yeah, I I took things from that, even at a very, very young age, so that that was amazing. And also they took us traveling, that was the other thing. They felt compelled to take us around the whole of Europe in at first hire cars, and then when they finally could afford a little car of their own in our little Volkswagen, with two little tents, tiny little tents, you know, and we went to a different place every night and had to start the tent up again in the evening and pick it up in the morning. We each had our jobs, we were all, you know, gainfully employed, doing the cooking and going into the shops and uh pumping up the airbeds, and we all knew what we had to do. But that meant I was confronted and exposed to people in different countries my whole childhood and teenage years, and took it completely for granted that I was not just Dutch. I had to learn a little bit of German and I had to learn a little bit of Danish and Norwegian and Swedish and uh French and Spanish and Portuguese, it it and English. It it was interesting, you know. Languages became a way of being able to communicate with the kids in campsites in all these far-flung places that you could otherwise not talk to. And it just became part of who I was, really, to be aware how difficult communication is when you speak different languages, and and to be aware how important it is to make an effort and to have the patience to for somebody to explain to you what they mean. I think all those things had a vast impact on me in your daily life today.

SPEAKER_03 20:24

Do you have a spiritual practice aside from yoga, or is that your main one? Is there anything else you do on a daily basis?

SPEAKER_01 20:32

Yeah, I I do yoga and Pilates every morning for about 20 minutes. I have a dog who you might see in a moment because it's been a long day in the finance meeting already. Um and so I commune with the skies and the clouds and especially with the trees. I have a deep connection to trees and to woods, and also to the um the cosmos, really. My mother took me to her um classes in astronomy in The Hague, and um I learned at a very early age about um you know the skies, and I am a very keen observer of the skies at night and of the moon and that sort of thing, and all of that is deeply meaningful to me. I have a very deep relationship to the sun from, as I said, very early on in my life, and I have written about that for my new book, which will come out at the end of this year, about all of that.

SPEAKER_03 21:49

Does it have a title?

SPEAKER_01 21:52

No, that's a very it has a subtitle, but we haven't agreed the title. I thought we had. The title was going to be. Um the art of existential freedom, but that is now the subtitle, and we are still arguing about the main title.

SPEAKER_03 22:11

You know, there's a Sufi teaching that when you're observing the sky, the sky is observing you and reversing the space.

SPEAKER_01 22:21

And that's what it feels like, isn't it? It doesn't feel like an observation, it feels like reminding yourself who you are, i.e. a tiny little part of all of that, and and where you are and what you belong to, and and that's very real to me. You know, I I am not terrifically identified with this Emmy van Dersen character. I've always been a little bit out of that, you know. I've always been a little bit detached from myself in that way. I think probably from about 10 from the accident onwards, because I had really weird experiences when I was in the coma, you know, of being out of the body. And that sort of changed me, that sort of made me aware that that's not really it. The body isn't really it, that's not really who I am at all.

SPEAKER_02 23:26

So, would you equate that experience as some people ND NDE near-death experience? How do you mean? When you were in the coma as a child.

SPEAKER_01 23:38

Yeah, well, I I I didn't I didn't die at any point, so I didn't have technically that kind of near-death experience, but I was in a coma for about four and a half hours.

SPEAKER_02 23:52

Right.

SPEAKER_01 23:53

So that is pretty close to that, and I have lots of memories about being in the coma, including of uh a conversation between my mother and my sister about the bike that I had destroyed in the accident, which happened to be my sister's bike, which she was very cross about, understandably. And that turned out to be totally accurate. So my when I said to my mother, this is what I dreamt, and she said, What? And she said, That's word for word what we said to each other. Which would have happened while I was in the coma.

SPEAKER_03 24:39

It's when the police came to their door, you know, we still since then you've had a lot to teach about the meaning of suffering.

SPEAKER_01 24:50

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 24:51

Right. How important it is, and that that happiness, continuous happiness is not the goal.

SPEAKER_01 25:01

Definitely happiness is not the goal. Definitely it's much more fluid than that. It's the ability to experience that is the goal, and that includes negatives and positives and the whole spectrum in between. So it's it's about lending yourself to being open to those experiences. That is the goal.

SPEAKER_03 25:32

Yeah, the best definition?

SPEAKER_01 25:35

No, I'll just repeat. No, it's not about happiness. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 25:40

The best definition I heard of therapy, the simplest one, is it's not about helping someone feel better, it's helping someone get better at feeling.

SPEAKER_01 25:50

Yeah. Who said that?

SPEAKER_03 25:53

I don't know. So it's in the public domain now.

SPEAKER_02 25:58

Yeah. I also really appreciated your your words about therapists really not being able to be unbiased, that we come into the relation, the therapeutic relationship with our own array of experiences and feelings. And it and I like that you say it is possible to be professional and at the same time engaged and caring. So I appreciated that. And because that's how that's how I work. It's not how I was taught though.

SPEAKER_01 26:41

But I was taught that because you know, my my first first degree and my first master's degree were in philosophy, and I specialized in phenomenology, and I was taught by a very well-known, well, for in France, uh phenomenologist called Michel Henri, and phenomenology is all about that, it is about coming up with an alternative to science that brings subjectivity and objectivity together, and one of the ways in which you start doing phenomenology is by becoming aware that everything we perceive and everything we connect with, we connect with through a filter, through a lens, through a bias. So our bias is part of the way in which we perceive, and in some ways, it gives us an edge, it gives us a take on things, and without having a take on things, we cannot make sense of things. So it can be very important to have that, but also it gets in the way, it both both are true, it it helps and it hinders, and so we need to be aware of it and we need to clear the lenses when they hinder us seeing what is actually going on, and sometimes we need to just allow ourselves to trust our perceptions, even though they are biased always, and to offer our bias to the other to push against or to take it as the first, you know, bit of putting the spade into the ground, which can then be followed up by different ways of looking at things. So bias is important, inevitable, but can be worked with, yeah. Yeah, and that for me that that comes from phenomenology very much so.

SPEAKER_03 28:59

By the way, anyone can jump in the chat if you have comments or questions and we'll read them. So uh therapy has its roots in philosophy, right? It's and part of your message is that therapists therefore must become philosophers.

SPEAKER_01 29:20

Yeah, I would like to think that that were possible, but that's only ever going to happen in existential psychotherapy, probably. Not in the evidence-based for me, philosophers were the first therapists, you know, when when Socrates and then Plato spoke about philosophy, which means, of course, the love of wisdom, what they were actually doing, well what Socrates' project was to speak with people, to dialogue with people about their perceptions of the world, and you know, Diana, their bias about the world. What were their assumptions about the world? How would they define the concepts they were using? And then he would argue with them, showing it to be limited or wrong or biased, and looking at it from different angles until there was a sort of dialectical progression of eliminating certain things, bringing other things together, and eventually coming to a transcending kind of place where everything falls into its place, and you can see how all of it is part of the truth in some way, as long as you organize it properly. Yeah, then it doesn't have to be a fight.

SPEAKER_03 30:52

That's very clear in your case studies that you are at the end of this book, there's four case studies, and what you just said, you show how you practice that with clients on the ground level. That dialectical process.

SPEAKER_01 31:06

Yes, absolutely right. And that is so the more important when you work with couples or families or groups, because then you are actually you have the benefit of having people coming to something from different viewpoints, and that is never about who is right and who is wrong, it is always about what can each of you contribute to all of us understanding things better. And as soon as you shift the perspective to the task being that, together we will puzzle together a bit more of what is true than any one of us on our own.

SPEAKER_03 31:52

If you were the therapist, you'd make a great mediator.

SPEAKER_01 31:56

Yeah, I've done that too. Yes. My husband and I ran uh the Center for the Study of Uh Violence and Reconciliation at the University of Sheffield for 10 years.

SPEAKER_03 32:08

Okay. We should send you to the skills are obvious, yes. We should send you to the Middle East right now.

SPEAKER_01 32:15

Yeah, well, we were obliquely involved in the Good Friday Agreement in Ireland. And um, our colleague who worked with us, John Alderdice, is a psychotherapist, and and he made some very, very important interventions as part of that process, which I'm sure helped that to come to fruition.

SPEAKER_03 32:42

And do you know Marshall Rosenberg and NVC? Because he did a lot of that kind of work.

SPEAKER_01 32:48

Yeah. It's very important work for us to use our psychotherapeutic abilities and our insights to work at the political level. I believe this is what the world is crying out for. Diplomacy doesn't work anymore, and certainly wars are not the solution, and it needs something more.

SPEAKER_03 33:12

And and I mean, we'd not enough time to go deeply into this, but what would you do in extremely polarized situations like we have now? Like how would you intervene?

SPEAKER_01 33:25

Exactly what they did in Northern Ireland. Do you know what they did for two years? They didn't try to resolve anything for two years, they just brought people together, and then they had lots of individual meet meetings with all the protagonists who were all, you know, literally killing each other, to listen to them, not to argue with them, not to correct them, not to try to get them to get on with each other. Each got to be listened to, and that is what I teach my students when I teach existential couple work. I teach them to do individual therapy in the room with the other partner there, so one person witnesses their partner just being listened to and understood and being facilitated to express what really concerns them. And so they basically pick up counseling skills, they pick up listening skills themselves, and they change and they start listening to each other, and you don't have to do anything anymore. So you don't actually mediate, you just teach people to stop, to look and to listen.

SPEAKER_02 35:01

And then figure it out. Listen to hear, not listen to respond. Precisely. Precisely. Which is an art. Not not not all of us were taught that as we came up in the world. It's one of the biggest things that comes up in supervision for me with my supervisees. It's like I can tell that they're listening to their clients to respond and they're not hearing the whole story.

SPEAKER_01 35:35

Very true too. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 35:41

And the other thing, when I did supervision, the thing that came up was what you write about is counselors and therapists using all kinds of methods and techniques, but then not having like the vision and the purpose as the foundation for it all.

SPEAKER_01 35:58

It's the same problem. It's really human beings trying too hard to meddle with other human beings and to apply technology to it, instead of realizing that we are all human together, and that if we just allow ourselves to be more aware as human beings, everything starts unfolding and opening up and looking quite different, no longer so controversial or different or you know, aggressive or violent, or no, we're actually all very much similarly engaged with trying to live, and feeling a lot of the time that that's pretty hard, and that we're probably failing in lots of ways, and because we're failing, we must try harder, so we must have more techniques or more interventions or more cleverness, and we just add layers and layers upon layers instead of undoing it and opening it and letting it be, letting it be.

SPEAKER_02 37:22

Because that's where the attunement happens, yes, and the resonance, right?

SPEAKER_03 37:28

Keywords, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 37:30

And the numinous moments, that's where they are born, yes, and the and the third alternatives, right?

SPEAKER_03 37:37

That's where your dialectical it sounds.

SPEAKER_01 37:40

Absolutely, that's where the transcendence happens, yeah, that's where the transformation happens, that's where we discover that actually there were no oppositions, there were just misunderstandings, misinterpretations, and different sides because we were afraid that where we were coming from was not going to be recognized. Whereas we would quite like to be also where the other is, but we didn't think that was an option.

SPEAKER_03 38:13

Right. Yeah, like I always heard about couple counseling. I always heard that one person is just the spokesperson for the position, which is shared by both of them.

SPEAKER_01 38:25

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 38:25

And they just, you know, polarize the spokespeople with the position.

SPEAKER_01 38:30

That's right. Well, it's a bit like when I say to you, I don't actually identify very much with this Emmy van derzen character, because if I do identify, sometimes I do, you know, identify with this character or with the business I run or with, you know, a position I hold of chair of something or other, then I can become very narrow-minded suddenly, and I can get very um stubbornly um kind of embattled about things, wanting other people to see my perspective or the perspective of this existential way or this approach or that approach. But when I can be loose from that, gently kind of in and out of it, then I can actually allow myself to imagine, Cedric, what it is like to be you and sit there where you're sitting rather than where I'm sitting, or Diana with her lovely flamingos behind her. And you know, I can dream away into that quite easily and picture myself sitting in your chair and what it what I would see out of your window if I went to look out of my Floridian window. I I find that amazing. It's a bit like what we do here, you know, we come together and very briefly we connect, and something happens, we get taken out of our usual perspective, don't we?

SPEAKER_03 40:15

Yeah, I love the synergy, the emerging properties.

SPEAKER_02 40:22

Well, and I remember I remember at some point in graduate school, this was a very, very long time ago, being told to, and this this was way before Zoom, so being told to have a blank slate as your office. Yes, definitely. Oh gosh. Have a personality and don't bring your personality into your office space. Oh, yes. That was that was an expectation. It was it's like it is what it is. That's it's just the way we do it.

SPEAKER_01 40:55

I was told off by my supervisor in the early 70s, who was psycho a psychoanalyst, for even having a picture in my office.

SPEAKER_04 41:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 41:06

Because that was bad. That didn't spin, you know, my life, and you're not allowed to do that.

SPEAKER_02 41:14

Then given what we just talked about, when especially with Zoom, as we're able to have a view of our client's space and they have a view of our space, that just seems so much more, as you would say, dimensional. Like it's I agree.

SPEAKER_01 41:33

I agree. I think that's one of the big advantages of online work that you actually get to see the client in their environment rather than them coming to your artificial office where they're you know like a fish out of water, quite frankly, and on the back foot a lot of the time at first. They settle in later, but you know what I mean. Yes, and I I quite enjoy, you know, putting little bits into the the mix, and um people will ask me about it, you know. Is is that one of your pictures? Yeah, it's one of my paintings, yes. Um, I'm very happy to talk about that. I have a copy of my new book still behind me from the book launch, John. So I leave it there for a bit because that's quite nice sometimes to have it there. And and all of that is crest for the mill.

SPEAKER_03 42:32

Yeah, the therapist that I saw had this huge anchor, like a ship's anchor, in the his office, and that was you know one of the best things about the therapy. That like the going in there and seeing that anchor.

SPEAKER_01 42:46

Wow, speak of anchoring, yeah, amazing.

SPEAKER_03 42:50

Yeah. You you remember the uh Marishi in the 70s?

SPEAKER_01 42:55

Yes, do I just okay?

SPEAKER_03 42:57

So I have a great story getting back to happiness as the goal, right? I mean, um, so there's a famous uh at the time, uh Jewish journalist works for the CBC, and she was doing an interview with the Marishi, and you know, he was beaming and glowing and giggling like he always did, and he tells her, Life is bliss, life is bliss, you know. So she had the best comeback. She said, She looked in straight in the eye and she said, Not in my experience.

SPEAKER_02 43:33

Good for her, yeah, good for her, good for her, and that doesn't necessarily mean there's pathology behind that, that she said that.

SPEAKER_03 43:43

No, certainly not. She was just being certainly not human, Jewish, grounded, you know, with the whole picture that Amy Amy's always talking about.

SPEAKER_01 43:55

Goodness me. Well, think of some parts of the world. At the moment, they would certainly not think that life was bliss, and they might never think it again.

SPEAKER_03 44:07

Yeah. Well, he was trying to say he was trying to say that background experience where you're not attached to either you know the good or the evil, right? Or the happiness or the sadness. I think that's what he's referring to. That means it's bliss, right?

SPEAKER_01 44:23

Yes.

SPEAKER_03 44:24

So but what would you say about that in in relation to what you told us about your background awareness?

SPEAKER_01 44:30

Like things it's perspectivism again, isn't it? So, yes, you you can go into a space where you can rise yourself above everything and kind of feel blissed out, if you like, and without taking any drugs, it's not difficult to do if you get into that modality of operating. And it can be a very good thing, you know, when I'm out in nature, and at the moment, gosh, I look at all the blossoms that are coming out, and I can stand looking at these blossoms, and it does feel blissful sometimes, but I know it's a temporary thing, and that if I'm going to be of any use to the world rather than just have my bliss, then I have to be prepared to be more grounded than that as well, and I have to face up to my own shortcomings, and I have to face up to the shortcomings in the village around me, and I have to face up to the shortcomings of all the people around me, and I have to be prepared for catastrophes to happen and to do something about it instead of to think, oh well, I'm above it, and I can still be in bliss. There are practical requirements in the world that I feel not just obliged, but just as motivated to do something about as I feel motivated to experience these other things too. It's not either or, it's both things and end. Yes.

SPEAKER_03 46:15

And you have to go to financial meetings, which is good therapy for you because you can retain your bliss in a financial meeting.

SPEAKER_01 46:24

Yeah, kind of, kind of. It's hard not to get upset when you hear certain things, isn't it?

SPEAKER_03 46:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 46:34

But you said early on in in our talk that you you even as a child, you you were raised with this sense of giving back, of with purpose. And so in the woo community, we call that being a light worker. And that's what you're that's what you are exemplifying, is that yes, we we're here and we can have bliss, but we also have, as you said, responsibilities.

SPEAKER_01 47:01

There's work to be done. Yes. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 47:04

Isn't it basic like figure-ground reality? That reality is both figure and ground, is like that.

SPEAKER_01 47:11

Yeah, if you like, if you like, I think it's much more complicated than figure and ground. I think it's multidimensional, and you know, you can look at it on one dimension or two dimensions or three dimensions, you know, three-dimensional thinking is already quite hard to do. But four-dimensional thinking gets interesting if you add the process of time to it, and you start thinking about your own movement in time over your lifetime and what you've learned and how you've changed and what that tells you, and going back to it and projecting forward into what will happen, you know, not so long for from now, when when you become more incapacitated, and all of that, you know, comes into it as well. And it's not just a simple figure ground thing, it's about lending yourself to many different perspectives, right? Many different patterns, many different angles, many different ways of looking at things and experiencing things.

SPEAKER_03 48:24

Yeah, that reminds me of what Ramdas said about insanity. It's clinging to one level and pushing away the others.

SPEAKER_01 48:31

Yeah, well, he discovered that very much himself when he went through his training, didn't he? Because he was quite um extreme, you know, as a as a young man, and he he really had to be broken. That's that's how he always spoke about it, isn't it? He had to break through his own arrogance and his own uh determined attempt to achieve things and to just to learn to let it be and to see all the different aspects of what is, and he just couldn't do it at first, and I think his journey is so very interesting in that respect, and I recognize a lot of that too, but for me it went a bit the other way around. I think I had to first teach myself to be more determined and to be more materialistic because I started out being quite kind of you know airy, and when I had acquired that capacity to earn my own keep and to keep you know looking after other people and doing things in the world, then it felt like now I've come full circle, now I can allow myself to bring all the bits together and to be more whole in it and to do all these things, all these different things. Like when I paint, I bring lots of different colors in and I bring lots of different perspectives in. So life can be more like that.

SPEAKER_03 50:10

Danny, do you want to read a few of the comments? There's been a few comments there. Right.

SPEAKER_02 50:15

I want to get to the question, which is I can lean into Edith Stein more easily than Heidegger when considering the meaning value of empathy. Who would you lean into for contemplating the role of empathy?

SPEAKER_01 50:29

Oh, always, always. The first one who really hit it off for me was Carl Jaspers. And Carl Jaspers really is brilliant about it, and he lived it as well in his own life. He lived that empathy. And for Jaspers, um, empathy is really about participating in the other's life. It isn't just about understanding, it isn't just about Einfüllung, you know, the feeling into somebody's life, but it is to make it your own. To make it your own, to let the other's experience course through your veins, and that is what I do with my clients. I allow their distress. I know you can't teach students this. This is for you know, level I don't know, three, four, five. In the beginning, of course, you can do these things, but what I learned to do was to allow myself to be affected and then infected by the troubles of another person, and to allow myself to find the inner struggle that I would have to feel and endure to find solutions. Not that I do it in order to find the solution for the client, but only if I am in that place where it matters, do I find in my heart the right way to speak to them to trigger that desire in them to find their way out of it.

SPEAKER_03 52:34

Very, very well said. Someone has a question while in the three dots after their statement. I love couple work, but some partners are not ready for learning how to listen. Whatever our best intentions to model that dot.

SPEAKER_01 52:50

You'd think so, wouldn't you? With people like that, I have a different remedy. I s I just separate them and I just do individual therapy wisdom for a bit separately, and then gradually I bring them back together in the room, and I don't allow them to argue with each other at all. And of course, not everybody is going to go deeply into understanding themselves, but everybody in every couple is always full of pain and full of disappointment and full of grudges and full of resentments. And when we start to work on those, and we begin to see where those come from, what they are really about. You know, what is it really that your partner is taking away from you? What is the real threat here? What is the real danger here that you are exposed to? Because you know, they're at war and that's how they experience it. They're threatened by the other. When they start to do that and they start to penetrate a little bit deeper into their own heart and mind, I think they learn to be capable of doing it. It'll take longer, but they can listen to themselves like we all can. We have that innate capacity to hear ourselves, we hear our feelings, we know when it's wrong, we know when somebody isn't, you know, good enough with us, and to just connect to that point with patience and forbearance. I think at that point, I don't need empathy because I can't have empathy, but I need forbearance for the person in their pain, and they're always in pain. They're always in pain. If they cannot listen, it is because the barrier of pain is so great that they're behind this pain wall.

SPEAKER_02 55:07

Agree absolutely. That was that was very beautifully put.

SPEAKER_03 55:13

Yeah, so we're at the time, 159. Someone, I'm sure, speaks for the group when she says or yeah, when she says, thank you, Emmy, for an incredibly inspiring conversation.

SPEAKER_01 55:25

Good. I'm glad. I'm glad. It was very it was very nice, it went very fast, you guys. It made it very, very interesting. Thank you so much. And thank you, John, as always, and your team.

SPEAKER_04 55:42

I have an existential closing blessing. Oh, which is may we kindle the light in the darkness of mere beings.

SPEAKER_01 55:55

I um stand with that. I bow to that. Thank you. Thank you so much.