CIIS Public Programs Podcast

Transcript

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[Cheerful theme music begins] 

This is the CIIS Public Programs Podcast, featuring talks and conversations recorded live by the Public Programs department of California Institute of Integral Studies, a non-profit university located in San Francisco on unceded Ramaytush Ohlone Land. 

As a New York Times bestselling author and renowned clinical psychologist, Dr. Shefali’s work teaches women how to transcend their fears and illusions, break free from societal expectations, and rediscover the person they were always meant to be: fully present, conscious, and fulfilled. In this episode, Enneagram expert and life coach Lara Heller talks with Dr. Shefali about her latest book, A Radical Awakening, and how to uncover our inner truth and powers to help heal ourselves and our planet.  

This episode was recorded during a live online event on August 4th, 2022. To find out more about CIIS and public programs like this one, visit our website and connect with us on social media @ciispubprograms. 

[Theme music concludes] 

Lara Heller: Hi Dr. Shefali, such an honor to be here with you.  

Dr. Shefali: Hi! Thank you.  

Lara: I just finished listening to this incredible book, that is read in your voice. If you haven't read this book, read it and buy it and give it to all your friends. When I read your book and listened to it, I had this vision of circles all over the globe of groups studying and reading your book. It really is revolutionary. As I listened to your book, it's riveting, it’s deeply moving, it's challenging, and you named that right at the beginning. It's triggering in a lot of ways. It's written concisely, and it's incredibly poetic. Every chapter starts with poetry, which I love, and I felt like every chapter should be a book. That just every chapter you wrote should be a book. One of the things that is so profound about this book, is it really is strongly founded in Buddhist thinking and teaching, it's so grounded in not just in modern psychology, but in our wisdom traditions.  

Buddhists teach that the first tenant of life is that life is suffering, and they give us an eightfold path to liberation. [Dr. Shefali: Mhm.] I felt that your book was that eightfold path, it wasn't eightfold, it was- our life is much more complicated than when the eightfold path came to be, but it is a path of liberation. And I’d like to start- and the beginning of your book starts with a love note to your sisters and the last few lines, I just want to read them, and I would love to hear you speak to that. You say, “So let's begin. We've got this. Let's enter the ocean together. There is a new horizon on the other side. It's called freedom.” So, can you speak to this freedom? This path to freedom and liberation in this modern time. 

Dr. Shefali: So, you know, we come into this world innocent, naïve, and unconditioned. We certainly come with a temperament and a genetic blueprint that is undeniable. Every parent of many siblings will say, no, this kid was that, and that kid was that. So, there's this beautiful unquestionable temperament that we come into the world with. So that's the basic and then, you know, we come hoping I think if I could project onto that infant, to be met, validated, understood, seen for who it is we are, as we are in our being, in our presence. But tragically, you know, we haven't even left the womb and our traditions are decided for us. The god we have to believe in, our last name, our family values, how to be a girl, how to be a boy, how to be pretty, beautiful, successful, and happy. So, you know day two and we are already the receivers of heavy projection, conditioning, bias, institutionalization.  

So, this inherent capacity and potential to be free, to manifest and embody our immediate and spontaneous essence is dampened, it's rotted, it's abducted right away. And onto the us is this influx of a lot of cultural bullshit. But also, a heavy dose of our parents' unconscious legacies because they haven't unconditioned themselves, they haven't healed themselves. So on to us and that's why I do a lot of work on conscious parenting, there is a lot of unconscious garbage from their childhood that they never looked at. So, by the time we’re pre-kindergarten, we're in the toaster, in the oven burnt and seared and already wretched with all this conditioning of how to be and what to be and how to do life and there begins the end of freedom.  

So, to then radically awaken right, I called it a radical awakening to radically awaken and none of us will do it until we are much older and wiser, and pain has shredded us to many pieces and the ego is now on the wayside. Which radically awakening is to un-condition yourself now, then to deconstruct all the layers of that heavy metallic dense indoctrination that we received and to unpeel, unpeel, unpeel each layer and come back to our authentic core and that is the path to freedom.  

So, this book literally takes you on this journey from your personal, historical childhood and its projections onto you, to culture’s projections onto you and then to the Buddhist arrival at your essential emptiness. So, it's this path to your liberation, but you have to read every damn word and it's triggering, it's going to, you know, pop all your fantasy bubbles, it's going to kill you. So, I only recommend it for those who are true seekers and brave and I know everyone at CIIS is exactly that.  

Lara: [Laughing gently] It is radical, it is challenging. You say to wake up, we need to go beyond desire to be happy, motivated, or positive. And that is such a paradigm shift in our culture, where there's so much about how to be joyous, how to be happy. Take this class that will show you how to get inspired, how to have meaning in life. So, what do you mean when you say that you have to go beyond that?  

Dr. Shefali: Yeah, you know, Western pop psychology is full of, you know, positivity and affirmations. I have nothing against them, but we have to kind of go beyond that to get really deep. Because when you superficially crave for something, you are working and operating from a place of voidness and the corollary of that is to be deeply connected to your present moment, right here, right now. When you're deeply connected to your right here, right now you don't need to be joyous. You don't need to be motivated, you don't need to be positive, you just are filled with presence. Presence has imbued in it acceptance, radical acceptance and when you have radical acceptance in that you have you know, something even more transcendent than joy, if that's possible. It's just this lightness of being.  

So, when you tell people, when one tells people, you know, let's go look for happiness, let's take this class on happiness, let's take this class on purpose and meaning. What it's missing is connection to the here and now. Meaning, purpose, eternal abundance, and joy will only come from connection to your authentic self, which means that you've deconstructed what culture has put on you, and you've let go of all those layers. So, happiness isn't something you get, or you attain. It is a wellspring of a state of being. It emanates from a deep-rooted sense of connection.  

So, if you tell people, you know, this class is about how to deconstruct all your cultural layers and to let go of all your conditioning, people won't go to that class, but if you tell them, let's go get skinny and happy, they'll be like, let's go for that class, but that class will not last because happiness is something you can never attain, right? It's so transient, it's meaningless, superficial. Who wants to be happy? you want to be present, you want to be here and now, and if you're sad, you're sad and if you're angry you're angry and like Rumi said, you take visits from all the visitors with homage and you allow all the visitors of your emotions to show up but you don't attach to any of them. So, in the same way you don't attach to happiness, and you don't look for meaning, meaning is in your being state, right here, right now it's not something you have to become to find.  

Lara: I love that in your book, when you speak at the end about meaning and that it is not something to go get, but it's something to connect with, it's already there. It's the loss of our connection to ourselves that throws us into a place where we don't know what we're meant to be doing or what we're even doing here. 

Dr. Shefali: Right. I mean we’re so off the beaten path, we're looking for meaning because we're thinking we have to become something to then be meaningful because who we are, as we are, was never validated as good enough. So, we are on this quest for purpose and meaning, the purpose is to be here right now.  

Lara: I have so many quotes from your book because there's so many things that just stopped me in my tracks and I would read again and again and take in. But one of them is what you speak to now. “Now, I see that purpose is not in how things look, but in how I look at things.” So powerful, right? It is so small yet so huge. It's everything, it's changing everything. 

Dr. Shefali: Right. It is your relationship to your own experience that shapes the experience, right? So, your decision that you are a co-creator and you're going to declare accountability for your co-creation changes the game. Versus, you know, fixing to end a relationship or an experience out there, so that it can feed you, right? So, women, for example, sometimes, or men, whoever, whatever you identified as can forget that they are, they are very powerful co-creators in their life and forget that that accountability and fall into a false sense of victimhood and martyrdom about them, we women, especially because we're, you know, a little lower on the totem pole, right. We've decided that white men are right on top and then the white woman and we have this little hierarchy. So, we women gain a little bit of satisfaction in externalizing our responsibility and blame for all our own lives, but we women are anyone on the totem pole is part of that co-creation. Now of course some are more oppressed, some are more disadvantaged 1000% but we have to take ownership for how we show up in the present moment. 

Lara: You speak to accountability as the last frontier of really becoming an adult and being liberated. One of the things that is for our liberation, you know, as you described so beautifully at the beginning, is how when we're born, what happens to us and how we extract. We start constricting as we're responding to the world and what the world is wanting from us and what they're projecting on us. There's a lot of pain. There's a lot of undigested pain to get to that point of liberation, that point of being able to find that joy right there are layers and layers. What is that path for digesting the pain that is in our history as in our experience, to be able to actually meet this present moment?  

Dr. Shefali: Yeah, I mean, part of digestion is integration and then elimination, right? You have to let it go. So, we have to understand the patterns caused by that trauma, by that pain. We have to have compassion for those who caused that to us, with us. And all the ways that we participate because now we're adults and we participate in carrying the legacy of that pain into our present moments into our future generations. So, we have to own it, see it, heal it, grow from it, and release it. All those stages take courage because it's so much easier to just stay passive and stay defined by that pain. You know, pain is not a fixed entity, you know, the past is not a fixed entity, each person will recollect it differently. However, it did occur. You cannot, you know, for example, if it was a racist, incident or rape incident, sexual abuse incident in your past, while the past is malleable in your memory, it still did occur. So, we have to honor and pay homage to the fact that it did occur. But now that we're adults now what?  

Now comes our accountability for our own perpetuation of that pain. How I want to continue the legacy of this pain in my life. Do I want to be defined by it? Do I want to be passive in my dependency on it and be a victim of it? Or can I reintegrate, reimagine, rebirth a new sense of self in the now, right? But the first part of the healing is to acknowledge and to own that that was part of our narrative and it got us here and therefore it is in its painful way owed to who we are right now. So, we can't say, I wish it never happened because without that big incident or many incidents we would not be the character we are today. So, we want the character we are today, but we don't want that pain, right? But pain is part of every human's life, some to a greater degree, some to a less, but it's all subjective. If we can honor that this pain was part of my very unique narrative and I am going to celebrate it and I'm going to own it and I'm going to now reimagine it, because I won't be held in its clutches forever. That is the personal accountability and the choice we get to make in the moment yet having compassion for the tremendous influence of this pain.  

Lara: At one point you talk about hitting rock bottom and at some point, you say that in your practice, you often wait for people to hit that point. Not as a voyeuristic activity but because you know that that's the point that some shift can happen. What is that? That shifts that- and I ask you this because we, our culture really is allergic to pain, and we don't want to sit in the pain. So, we're always distracting ourselves, we're moving away from it, we're trying to figure out how to make the pain go away and you're actually saying something really different. You're saying, be in the pain, meet the paint and that is a turning point. It's a doorway. 

Dr. Shefali: Right. So, we are allergic to pain because it forces us to look in the mirror and reconcile our part in the play and we don't want to do that. So, we project the pain outside, right? We drink, we eat, we gossip, we yell, we scream, we gamble, we run away. But if we are brave, we will understand the role of pain in our life which is to awaken us to our pattern, which we can now break. But that takes courage, so when we understand the messenger that pain can be and take it for its gifts, then we can begin to transmute the pattern until now and lean into it because if we don't and in its place, create this false panacea, this addiction. The addiction now takes us down another hurtling path of self-destruction so, it's better to just finish this, you know, I used to always say when I was a young mother, you know, the reason I gave up yelling at my kid wasn't because I was a loving pious wise person but because the cleanup after the yell is like, worse, don't you think? You’re like, oh my God, now I have to be guilty for 16 days and buy her everything out of my guilt and then eat into the guilt and then like ruin her and I have to pay for that, and she'll cry for 16 hours, it's just better to just zip it, you know, just zip it. Just go through those three minutes and that's what pain is. It's difficult in the moment but just go through it because the cleanup if you don't, now you're diabetic, now you're obese, now you're addicted, now you’re divorced. You just had an affair with 10 people and you're like, how did I do that? Because you were running away, so it's just better to go through the pain and see pain as something to accept in your life and not resist.  

So, we're always resisting, right?  How do we resist pain? With a coping mechanism, which is terribly dysfunctional. Like I said you do these other things so rock bottom is the most glorious moment you have as a therapist again with compassion because you're like finally. And what are we saying that has finally occurred? What has finally occurred is that all those defense patterns of false coping don't work anymore, like you run out of money. Now you're terminally ill. Now the 10 men left you, now you're older. So, all the things that you were covering up your pain with now don't work, the pain is demanding to be seen and rock-bottom means that your ego, your egoic patterns of defense and coping, which are false have fallen apart and now the person goes, I'm ready to look in the mirror and now the real work can begin. 

Lara: Yeah, I often think of that space as a liminal space where you jumped off the shore into the water and there you are in the water and you don't know where the other shore is, you don't know how you're going to get there. You don't know what's there, but you have to do something, and you no longer have the old shore and it's a very scary place. You know, there's a lot of depression, anxiety, that can be in this place because our ego is stripped away and for certain patterns or ways of being, who we took ourselves to be or how we were and now, what? How do I do life? I don't know how to do life.  

Dr. Shefali: Right. And again, it's because we want to do life, but when the ego is stripped apart, there is a moment in time where we can just be before the next iteration appears and we have to capture that being state and finally realize, oh, I'm just a being and without my ego now, I can just be here now and if you haven't developed a practice of solitude or meditation, yes, that is scary and most people just regress back into another echoic pattern. That's why people who lose weight, go back, people who just become healthy, go back, why? Because that spaciousness that comes with the dropping of the ego is terrifying. Everyone wants to go to heaven, but when they taste it here, they're like no take me back to hell because it is terrifying to encounter your inner spaciousness. I mean, it's the most beautiful thing in the world but you free float there, you know, you're gliding, you're flying, you're soaring and for those of us who were shamed and denigrated as children, that soaring spaciousness feels very awkward. You're like I need to be in a corner feeling like shit about myself because that feels familiar, right? So, this moment is often not captured, you know, I often say parents of infants, young parents, that's the moment where the ego begins to drop, and parents are going to the gym and getting a good body back. You know, especially the moms and they're like running back to work because our culture sets the mom up that way, but there's an opportunity in infancy. Where you're endlessly breastfeeding, where you're forced to just be present, and most people miss that window.  

Lara: You’re speaking to something, and you actually just mentioned those words: alone, solitude. I know in my journey of being married and getting divorced and also in conversations with many, many women, being alone is not something that we learn how to do. And we mostly feel lonely. I mean, we often feel lonely in relationships too, maybe more lonely actually in the relationship than when we're alone. But there's a real fear and you speak in your book about fear in a lot of different ways but there is fear about how to be alone. We don't learn how to do that. How to pause, how to be silent, how to meditate, that's not part of our culture. What you're speaking to. That spaciousness, we don't learn that that is even a thing.  

Dr. Shefali: Yeah, we are conditioned to believe noise and doing, and a lot of color and pop and snares and jazz is the way to be enriched and it's just completely the opposite and alone has become synonymous with loneliness, but they're two completely different things. You are never really, really lonely. You bought into and subscribe to this idea of loneliness. There's no such thing as loneliness. It's something that you bought into, because you have been told that you by yourself are a zero proposition. Instead of being taught like you said, that you by yourself are the most amazing, treasured connection possible. We have not been taught that. So, when we are by ourselves, because we've been so ashamed and demeaned, all our lives and punished and scorned by our unconscious culture and parents that to be by ourselves, it feels like hell because we believed our parents and culture that we are not good enough. So, it's understandable that we feel not good enough when we're by ourselves. It feels not good enough, but it's a lie because we were never not good enough. We were always good enough. 

Lara: That's not a message that we get because our parents don't feel that they're good enough so they can't give us that message. 

Dr. Shefali: Correct. Consumer culture is predicated on us not feeling good enough. Otherwise, we won't be buying things and eating so much and all the sugar and imagine if we felt good enough, that's terrible for the economy, right?  

Lara: Mmm-hmm. Yeah, you have some moments, you just had me laughing out loud. It's sort of coming back full circle to this inner parent and inner healer, where you end your book, and you talk about adulting and accountability and it's so funny. You say, most of us are walking talking, toddlers. What can you say about that? The way that we haven't grown up internally and it's a real feeling.  

Dr. Shefali: Right. You know, we look at a toddler and we laugh at or get in despair of his or her emotional ability, dependency, you know, inarticulate in inability to control emotions. We're just the same, we just can drink a lot of wine, we can smoke a lot of weed, we can drive in our car and leave, we can gossip and we can watch Real Housewives, you know, we can walk, we can just zone out in adult ways and we falsely believe that we are grown up which is chronologically older, but spiritually and emotionally very, very primitive, very young, just like a three-year-old just with a different cover up. So, you know, you get to know that really well, when you are in a long-term relationship, you're like, okay, this person is acting like a two-and-a-half-year-old and you're acting like a three-year-old. So, you begin to see that. Then you begin to see that when you have children, you're like, oh my God, who's that? Who's the real toddler in that house, right? So, it just speaks to not having done the work and what is the work, and the work is to really grow up from within, which means take charge of your own inner mood and your own inner happiness and your own inner joy, your own inner feelings and respond, be responsible, because you are your own parent now. You can't keep waiting for mommy or daddy or the therapist to come. They're not coming and that is the grown-up moment where you realize, no one is coming to rescue you anymore.  

Lara: What do you say to women? You know, we do live in a very patriarchal culture in the world and there are a lot of situations where women are mistreated and you speak to male and female toxicity, which I haven't heard before and I'd love to hear more about that. How we actually co-create each other. We often speak about the patriarchy and how women are treated but you're actually saying that there's something else going on there that we need to be accountable, both men and women.  

Dr. Shefali: Yeah, there’s nothing wrong with the patriarchy, there's only something with its toxic parts. Just like if it was a matriarchy we would be like, oh, it's a matriarchy. But you know, if it was toxic, there would be a problem, but matriarchy could be the same as the patriarchy, so people think patriarchies are bad, they're not bad. It's the toxic rigidity of any system that becomes bad. 

So how is the patriarchy of today toxic? It's because only a few white men on top are able to dominate and everyone underneath falls in order. But we women raised those white men, those white men were raised by mothers. So, there's some role we gotta take, we women are not very kind to each other. We are not a sorority. We're not a sisterhood. We are the greatest competitors. You know, we know that when we're getting ready, we are not getting ready for the man and we're not getting ready for ourselves even though every woman says, “I get ready for myself.” It's not true because when no one's at home, we're not even brushing our teeth, you know, if we can help it, I know I'm not. I know every woman in Covid loved the fact that she didn't even have to wear a bra, leave alone heels. So, we're lying to ourselves, right?   

So, we get ready because we want to be desired, and we want to out-compete the other women. We know that. We know women are looking at us because men are not looking, men are looking but they're not really looking at our purses or our, you know shade of lipstick. They're looking at something far more primal. So, we have it all twisted and we suffer the most in our competitiveness, in our anti-aging zeal, in our desire to be eternally youthful, who is suffering? We are right and we are cruel to each other. We judge each other more than anyone and each time we do, we subscribe to the toxicity of the patriarchy that we’re so upset about, right? But we have to take ownership, who's buying all the makeup, who's buying the high heels. You know, every woman knows they're not comfortable, but we're acting like they are at least, we need to say, I wear it because I want to feel sexy, and I want you to tell me I'm sexy.  

Can you tell me I'm sexy? That's what we're saying, but we're acting like it's our authentic self to be tottering in high heels. This is where we lie, you know, so I've begun saying when I wear heels, I'm terribly uncomfortable, this is ridiculous, but I'm so insecure. I need you to tell me I look beautiful in these heels. That's why I'm doing this, right? So, we're not owning the insecurity. So, then we’re acting secure, the other woman who is in touch with her insecurities she goes, oh my God, there's something wrong with me and so she acts secure, then her daughter looks at her and goes, this is a load of bullshit. I don't want to wear this nonsense and cover my face and wear a mask and do 10,000 things. But everyone's looking so secure, so it must be me who's crazy, let me cover it up. So, the mask keeps going on and we're all in this emperor’s got no clothes charade, and nobody is owning up to it, right? So, we women need to take ownership for how we're not nice to ourselves. We're not lovely about our bodies, we do not accept our bodies, we are terribly insecure and judgmental, and we blame the men.  

No, we cannot blame the men for this, you know, and the men they're suffering too, because no one understands. For example, the pressures they have to be providers, right? Please, please, Dr. Shefali, right? All the women will be rolling their eyes at me. Please do not tell me my husband is working harder than me, right? And we’re so, like separatist about it, you know, I'm the first one to complain about men, but I know I'm being separatist. I'm not acting like it's reality so men and women have a huge abyss males and females and I'm just talking strictly biological male biological female, but you can identify how you like, have a huge abyss between them and they don't understand each other.  

So, we women, you know, feel victimized by them but they are suffering because of how many women go up to their men and ask them, you know. Are you having enough sex? Are you being pleased enough? Are you being stated? But very quickly we will tell the men, I'm not feeling emotionally connected. You never talk. Go read some poetry, right? But when the table has to be flipped, we have resisted, right? We were like, no, don't be a baby, right? Just the other day a client came to me saying that her husband wanted four times the sex she was giving in a month, she’s like five to six times. He's such a baby Dr. Shefali and I said see, but if you were saying that you're emotionally disconnected from your partner and he's not connected, all of us would take you seriously. So, you see in very typical ways, we put them down, we emasculate them, we don't understand their worlds and for sure they don't understand ours but we're not even honest with our sisters. We're all lying to each other, right? We have been showing off on Facebook about our amazing children and you know, lying, lying, lying because we all want the accolades, and we all want the validation. So, in these ways we perpetuate the rigid oppressiveness that surrounds this culture, and we blame the men, but we are participating in it.  

Lara: You- it's very provocative what you're suggesting here, and this is probably triggering for some people, and I really appreciate you bringing this out and talking also about the perspective of men and men's sexuality you speak about the cheater, right? That’s how we say men, you know we call them that, you know, they cheat and you make a suggestion about what would it be like to be able as a man to say, hey, I'm attracted to your friend or attracted to this other woman and is that something that you feel would change the balance, it would help men feel more heard and women more seen.  

Dr. Shefali: Well, he'll be beheaded, but if he had the courage and the woman had the courage and we're talking strictly, you know, I’m so aware that people are very sensitive about using male and female, woman and man. So, I'm just talking very prototypically and very simplistically. But of course, there's so many identifications, you can identify a way. But just strictly speaking, the prototypical male, the heterosexual male has been really and the homosexual male maybe too I don't know, has been labeled if he's a philanderer as a cheater. So, women suffer that right? When you think that your partner has cheated, you automatically don't like that person, you judge that person, you've created an abyss, you suffer. I was cheated on. I was betrayed. You wear the mantle of despair. What if we began to understand? I say this to parents with children, who say my child lies to me in the same way that no one wants to lie? This beautiful essence, that's my partner. This beautiful essence, that's my child or even you, when we've lied and every human has lied, we don't want to lie, we don't want to be sneaking like a two-year-old into somebody else's sheets and then zipping up our pants and coming back at night. But to just demean the other person as a cheater without understanding their reality is really not evolved and we don't have to be evolved, you know, many women like “f that” I don't want to be evolved, I'm throwing him out of the house. Good for you. You're at that level do it. I, you know, want to cry my tears if that happened to me but then I want to understand what's going on and what led you to feel so unsafe that you felt, you had to lie to me and how can I help you? How can I not judge you? I may not want to be with you anymore, but can I understand you? And many, many males, at least those who have a high sexual drive, feel very limited in a very rigid oppressive, taboo like environment that our current sexualities bathed in, and they suffer, they need to have an expression, but we women will not allow them to express. How could you say you found my best friend attractive? She's just pretty like you, but we will not allow it.  

I tell all my male clients, you know, wear your shades to the beach. You know, why would you not cover your eyes and then your wife is looking at your eyeballs, wear your shades and enjoy your view but we look at it as so demeaning to us. We are beautiful, aren't we beautiful? I find women beautiful and I'm straight. So, I don’t know, we have this very purist like morality about us because sex is so taboo-fied, and in the closet and we're just not okay with appreciation of our naked beauty and men suffer because they're going to look. They're highly visually stimulated as biological genetic beings, you know, they are primarily more the hunters and the providers and so the visual stimulation is on and then when they save us from the praying mantis or the eagle that's about to snatch our nose, we’re like wow, you have such good eyesight and coordination but when those eyes look at any other female form that's not ours, God forbid then we persecute them. I mean it's just so silly, but I understand females because we've been conditioned that once they get married you know you put that ring. That's it. It's the end of all appreciation of any other female form and you must only have eyes for me because now I control you, you know. So, I talk about marriage as an institution and ideas of love and…very provocative.  

Lara: Yes, very provocative and you speak about marriage or that contract as a life sentence. As a way that it could be a life sentence. 

Dr. Shefali: Well, it is a life sentence. You and I are both divorced, when we broke the life sentence everyone looked at us like we were broken, like we had failed, you know. I remember a woman came to me who was not in a good marriage, whatever that is. She said, I'm so sorry to hear you've been divorced. I'm like, who are you sorry for? So, I turned my back and my head [Lara laughs] No really! I was like, she's sorry for me? No divorced woman is ever sorry. When we make the decision and we cross to the other side, there's no sorry. But culture projects that because “good marriage” is one that is defined by longevity. Not by growth, not by matching, not by attunement, not by evolution, not by curiosity and adventure, it is defined by longevity. Doesn't it matter If you both never see each other, I know people at this moment, living in different apartments, different cities, different bedrooms, but they're married. So, to each their own, but let's not project those who “break the contract” are in any way lesser than or failures or broken.  

Lara: Yeah. What would you consider a mature love? A mature relationship, how would you define that? I think it's much more about spiritual development. I know, for myself, spending all that time and learning how to be alone, I no longer need someone to complete me or need something from someone else. I just, it's more, what would enhance my life? How do I want to be met? So, I'm wondering how would you, for anyone who's listening as they're trying to discern, are they in a mature love? Is this love, can it evolve? This relationship. What would be the signs for this is a good relationship, it's moving in a direction of liberation. It's on the eightfold path?  

Dr. Shefali: Well, the first awareness you have as you awaken is that life is lived in the moment, and you no longer need a contract. You no longer need validation by the community, you no longer need a life sentence or the promise, you give up the promise, you’re like, I don't need a promise, but you only get to this wisdom when you've been through the attachments and you realize that those attachments didn't make me happier, more joyous or more abundant, they bought me down. They were claustrophobic and I lost my authenticity. Every institution robs you of your authenticity because you are sacrificing your inner knowing to belong to the institution and follow its prescriptions. All religions are institutions. Marriage is an institution. The way we work is an institution, the way we are educated are all institutions, right? We don't see marriage and love as an institution, but it is. Sex, Sex is an institution here, right? Their taboos and their rules, and if you don't follow you will be ostracized.  

So, a mature love understands that it's only right here right now. A mature love understands that the inner landscape must be tended and bloomed by the self and the others can come and you know, sprinkle a little water once in a while and turn us toward the sun if we forget where the direction is, but they are not here to complete us, there's no such thing as completion anyway, only constant evolution. So mature love has wisdom to understand that we are mirrors of each other and we are here as allies of our growth and we can move in and out of life with fluidity and maybe out of each other's lives, and come back and move again, and mute and transmute, and press mute. 

So, it's not one for all and one this way or one that way, it's not either/or, it's very fluid. Mature love is very fluid, it’s very much about adding value, growth and if the person is not adding growth, we really don't need them to give us meaning. So, we don't identify with that relationship when it's mature, when it's immature and unconscious it's out of need. Desperation, dependency, identification and attachment. You need the other person to be there for you to feel whole, you need the other person to look at you, so you feel good. You need the other person to behave in your prescribed way so that you feel in control. Mature love begins to let all that go.  

Lara: Beautiful. I'm just taking that in right, if we could all show up in that way in this world in this way where we can account for ourselves and not be reactive and it's interesting. I know you use this word authenticity a lot, authentic self and you know in Buddhist teachings, there's no self, right, what can you describe to everyone here? What is an authentic self? How do you know you're actually showing up from an authentic self, right? I have clients come to me and say, well, you know, my feelings got really hurt and I got angry, and I let them know about it. I felt like I was being authentic because I was showing my feelings, I was saying my truth. What would you say to that in terms of authentic self and more of our reactive self?  

Dr. Shefali: Yeah, many people mistake their feelings, just because they're having feelings and their reactions just because they're having the reaction as authentic. To be really authentic takes a lot of deconstruction, because you have to understand for yourself if you are operating out of your ego mask or you are truly operating out of your inner space, right. The opposite of ego is emptiness.  

So, the authentic self is one that understands that there is nothing they really need to do, except be connected here and they don't get ensnared. When we are ensnared in a reaction, we're not in our authentic self, we are in our little child ego-self. We are never, when we are reactive ever, ever, ever. We should never ever, ever call that authentic, we need to call oh-no, fuck that was my big fat ego self. So, people mistake authenticity, “I was authentic, I gave her a piece of my mind.” No, you were just you know, vomiting your ego. Authentic self is silent, it's powerful. It's whirring on its own sovereignty, it doesn’t need the other. All the rest is ego. All the rest is ego. So authentic self is a liberated self that doesn't get tethered in the present moment, very hard to achieve, but the only way to achieve it or to taste it right, is to know the difference between that and your ego reactive self. 

Lara: What is the somatic experience of that authentic self? Like the felt sense just for our listeners. How do you identify you discern? Especially if you're not familiar with that and you think you're being authentic because you're speaking what you think is your truth. I think there's a real somatic sense to our true nature, our true self when we come from that place. 

Dr. Shefali: Yeah, so first and foremost, it's not urgent. [Lara: That’s beautiful.] You know, it’s not desperate, not I need to say it right now. You know that's not your authentic self because your authentic self is timeless. It's spacious, it's expensive. It doesn't need to be done right now. So, every time I want to react to my kid, and I think it needs to be said right now, I realize that only my anxiety needs to be contained right now, right. So, my ego wants to contain my inner anxiety, but when I'm in my authentic self, I don't have urgency because I'm whole and complete. I’m like, I'll teach her the lesson in like seven days and then I forget, right? So, oops, lesson has not been learned, but I don't care, right? Ultimately, parents especially have so much urgency, you know, if I don't teach this lesson now my kid would be a loser drug dealer and get pregnant by 12, right? I have to teach, say please right now! We're saying, say please when they're 22, can you say, please? The lesson never gets learned if it's not meant to be learned anyway, right.  But we think we have the jewels of wisdom that must be said right now. Nothing needs to be said right now and the Earth is going to keep moving even if you don't say your precious words right now, right? So, the authentic self is never urgent.  

Lara: That's really powerful. Just to feel into that because it's somatic. It is really a way that we can ask ourselves, am I really in that place? We can feel whether we feel like we have to make a movement, we have to do the thing or say the thing, or can we just be, as you were describing. That's beautiful. 

Dr. Shefali: So, you know you're in reactivity through the pacing of your through the burst of the volatility through the mirror, right? How do we pause in that moment and go I'm anxious, I'm anxious and when I'm anxious, I know do not talk when you're anxious because anxious gets converted to things, anxiety gets converted into control, right? We are anxious here but out of our mouth comes control, right? So, you know, I have learned the hard way to, to tap in and go. Wow, I'm anxious. I'm anxious. When I'm anxious, I'm unstable. I need to go take care of this being, which is me before I spew out in some sort of toxic vitriol on others right? So, it's a tapping and like you said, you have to become aware of how your body is speaking to you.  

Lara: In that urgency, it could be sort of that movement, but sometimes urgency actually is a withdrawing right, to just name that it's not always a movement that is volatile. The withdrawing is also a way that we respond and react.  

Dr. Shefali: Yeah, I like that. Yeah, very nice.  

Lara: I want to go back to something we talked about earlier and your story about the women in your life and the men in your life when you were young. So, touching, I actually teared up listening to your experience and that lesson that we learn, and you really spoke to that beautifully from women that we shouldn't compete with women, right? Or we shouldn't be better than and I know from working in corporations mainly with women that one of the most painful places for women sometimes consciously but often not is the competition with other women. It's not the patriarchy, it's not what's happening with the men. It's actually their own competition with each other.  

And I know, you know, you also speak to how women really, we need women to heal the world in this mothering nurturing way. Unless we have a community of sisterhood and break that, we won't be able to do that, because we need each other, we need the sisterhood, the support, we need to elevate each other. So, what do you recommend to women that are listening or men or anyone who's listening. How do we start undoing that between women? The competition that women suffer from each other.  

Dr. Shefali: Yeah, it's difficult. But we have to start showing up more and more as ourselves. So, either, you know, be more honest about your own experiences, don't pedestalize yourself, don't, don't put yourself on this air of superiority, come down to earth, be humble, if you’re all made-up and dolled up, you know, say it. Don't act like it's how you rolled out of bed, right? [Lara laughs] Own it, claim it, talk about your insecurities because when you do other women open up and feel relaxed, but if you, you know, have this air of perfection that is just such a turn-off, and it really sets off a domino effect in other women to feel that they have the pressure to be perfect. You know and all women who are trying to be perfect on social media, you see how this makeup transforms them and they need to say don't think I'm doing this because I'm perfect. I’m doing this because I'm insecure and if they call it what it is, then do what you want but don't pretend like you woke up like this. Say, I'm so insecure and I'm suffering from this but I'm working hard on loving myself and so till then I have to plaster myself with a lot of paint, right? Rather than just showing up as the painted doll version and everyone's going wow, how do I look like that? You know, we don't see the behind-the-scenes and it could be with your motherhood. It could be with your partnership. How many women talk about, you know, sex with my husband sucks, you know? Or I'm sick of being a mom and I'm tired and I don't know what I'm doing. So, when we begin to talk like this, we give each other permission to be real. 

Lara: Being authentic. [Dr. Shefali: Mhm.] One of the most powerful moments for me personally in the book was that you said, “the true self can't be wounded just our ego and we can heal and parent the part that hasn't been parented in the way we wanted.” I feel like that message is so powerful, that we can heal ourselves.  

Dr. Shefali: Right, the true self is untainted, untarnished, it’s unbroken. It’s the conditioned self that we have been made to believe we are that is completely fragile. The true self is immutable, eternal, limitless, melting with the cosmic self. That self, which has no border, boundary, identification, religion. It just is. The I am self, the we are self. All the rest, the- girl, I am an Indian girl, or author, or I am Jewish or Muslim. Those are the cultural identifiers that are lies and that’s why we have religious war. Because if I came to you and said, “I don’t like your religion” and you said “that’s my religion, you don’t like it, I don’t like you!” It's our conditioned self that identifies with its identifications that is fragile. The true self is never broken, the conditioned self that believes it needs to be skinny or young or Jewish or Muslim or rich that when that self is attacked it falls apart, the true self can never fall apart because it doesn't hold onto any identification. So, you can't poke it.  

Lara: The true self cannot be wounded [Dr. Shefali: Mhm.] It's so powerful if we take that in, that reality that is available to us. I'm wondering, what are your, what are your final thoughts that you would like to share with everyone?  

Dr. Shefali: Just that you know life is only lived in the now. And any of your internal talk that's based in lack and shame and fear is a lie based on your ego and culture’s ego and your parents’ ego. Therefore, you don't have to buy into it. You can literally discard all those thoughts and self-criticisms and self-loathings as soon as you wake up to your own authentic self. 

Lara: That is Dr. Shefali giving us permission to do that and inviting us to do that. Thank you so much, Dr. Shefali it was really so enlightening to listen to you and to be with you today. 

Dr. Shefali: Thank you for being a fabulous interviewer and thank you to CIIS for hosting and to all who listened. 

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Thank you for listening to the CIIS Public Programs Podcast. Our talks and conversations are presented live in San Francisco, California. We recognize that our university’s building in San Francisco occupies traditional, unceded Ramaytush Ohlone lands. If you are interested in learning more about native lands, languages, and territories, the website native-land.ca is a helpful resource for you to learn about and acknowledge the Indigenous land where you live. 
 
Podcast production is supervised by Kirstin Van Cleef at CIIS Public Programs. Audio production is supervised by Lyle Barrere at Desired Effect. The CIIS Public Programs team includes Izzy Angus, Kyle DeMedio, Alex Elliott, Emlyn Guiney, Patty Pforte, and Nikki Roda. If you liked what you heard, please subscribe wherever you find podcasts, visit our website ciis.edu, and connect with us on social media @ciispubprograms. 
 
CIIS Public Programs commits to use our in-person and online platforms to uplift the stories and teachings of Black, Indigenous, and other people of color; those in the LGBTQIA+ community; and all those whose lives emerge from the intersections of multiple identities.  

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