Matt Kahn is a spiritual teacher and empathic healer who is the author of the bestselling books Whatever Arises, Love That, and Everything is Here to Help You. His newest book, The Universe Always Has a Plan: The 10 Golden Rules of Letting Go is what we gathered together to discuss today. Currently, we are all living through a global pandemic together. Instead of a typical "book interview" instead we discuss how the new spiritual paradigm is relevant to our current challenging times. As Matt says, we have all be invited into a collective, global dark night of the soul. So what does dark night ask us to shed? What does it offer us as we are transmuted by it? And how can we use our spiritual paths for our own and the collective's greater good instead of upholding old ideas that turns us against ourselves or creates a bypass. We discuss the role of nervous system regulation, surrender, the potency of stillness, and lots of spiritual myth-busting. You can find more of Matt's work at www.mattkahn.org Show notes live at www.blissandgrit.com. We also see clients privately, and you can find more information about our practices at the website as well.

We speak a lot about trauma and healing from trauma on the show, but we've never done an episode that truly asks the question, "What is trauma?". Drawing on inspiration like Dr. Edith Eva Eger and Peter Levine we look at if PTSD should drop the "D" for disorder, what it means that trauma is a charge, and if that's true, how do we "discharge" that charge? It's a very humanizing and hopeful take on trauma and we hope it's helpful to all of you.

Today we are discussing healing that is not a part of our individual histories, but instead is carried in us- in our very dna- from our ancestors. It might seem like a not-so-cheery New Year's Eve episode, but actually we find this point of view to be surprisingly relieving. It opens up so much space to meet our experience and tempers some of the more shame-oriented points of that personal healing can sometimes take on. We discuss what ancestral trauma feels like when it arises, and some of our own experiences as we discovered that the pain we were sitting with was truly not personal. As we see this, it can open up a whole world of tenderness for ourselves and all that we are doing to clear pain, as well as so much compassion for all of humanity and the wounds that we all sit with and bring up to the light to be transmuted.

*This episode contains upcoming changes to the format of Bliss + Grit. Please tune in to stay up to date. It's different to change to get out of pain then it is to change out of an intuition or a new vision. In this weeks episode we're exploring meeting change and transformation, and most specifically, what happens when something you love changes; when rather than moving away from something painful, you're getting the internal signal to change something you love or have valued in the past. This conversation is arising out of a recent process of change we are having with Bliss + Grit, but holds so much relevance to the conversation of transformation at large since one of the primary fears that can arise in an unfolding process is the fear of losing something or someone we value. Together we explore the new change that has presented itself for Bliss+Grit, how we navigated that, how we've met other changes in our lives like divorce, and how we can hold ourselves as we go through the process of transformation. For more information on Bliss + Grit, or on hosts Brooke Thomas and Vanessa Scotto, please go to www.blissandgrit.com where you can find episode resources, information about coaching sessions and subscribe to our weekly newsletter.

This week we are answering a patron's question about something that is up for them in their life. It contains a lot of nuance about how to be with other people's emotions without feeling overwhelmed, as well as how to receive kindness and love without feeling overwhelmed by that either. The shortened version of the question is: "When I do let myself feel my emotions deeply I frequently get super overwhelmed and times that I am center of attention or receiving heartfelt love and support are still very uncomfortable for me in groups.  Why is it so difficult to feel deep emotion in myself and from others still?" In answering the question we talk about: The vulnerability of intimacy and connection Somatic approaches to receptivity and feeling safe in our bodies The energetic charge of trauma and how it makes a soma feel "too full" to be able to take in anything new How that charge can "off-gas" or burn off like clouds as we heal Conditioning around needing to be non-reactive and how to inquire about that Ability to receive joy and goodness and blocks to that How to shortcut shame at not being "farther along" in our healing process For more information on Bliss + Grit, or to get information about one-on-one coaching with Brooke Thomas or Vanessa Scotto, please go to www.blissandgrit.com. To become a supporting member and join our forum please go to www.patreon.com/blissandgrit

In this episode we both speak about limiting identities we are each up against that are related to hiding. How might our genuine values be co-opted by ego identities that keep us small? How do these identities require an unfriendly imaginary audience? And when we engage in this kind of "othering", via imagining other people as the judge and jury, how do we project an unfriendly universe onto everyone in advance of any actual friction? Once we can see that all operating, how do we untangle these subtle layers so that we can experience more and more of life without being led by the question, "Do they like it?"    In this episode we talk about:  Hiding and the fawn trauma response How the limbic brain can interpret the threat of being unliked as seriously as the threat of physical harm or even annihilation How we can quickly and unconsciously interpret others as enemies when we are caught up in making sure we are liked and/or seen as "the good one" The importance of both tenderness and anti-fragile approaches to loosen the hold these ego strategies have on us Show notes at www.blissandgrit.com/blog/imaginary-audience Support the show at www.patreon.com/blissandgrit

Today we are discussing what we could call living from truth. I had an experience not long back where a mentor of mine was asking me to say exactly what I wanted, and I noticed a freeze response. This opened up for me a new depth of experience around what it really can feel like to live from truth, as opposed to following the momentum of past conditioning and habits. Many of us say we want to be authentic or know our true nature, or the truth of reality, but what does that really mean? We're kicking it off by getting into some teachings from Adyashanti, and of course diving into our own experiences and challenges in stepping into greater alignment with our inner truth.  In this episode we talk about:  Adyashanti's teachings on truth and agency  Matt Kahn's book, Everything is Here to Help You  What it means to follow a living path and meet life as an invitation How thinking incrementally and focusing on becoming "more aligned" can be helpful  The embodied experience of choosing truth  For more information on Bliss + Grit, or one-on-one coaching with Brooke Thomas or Vanessa Scotto, please visit www.blissandgrit.com. To become a supporting member and join our forum please visit www.patreon.com/blissandgrit

[Flashback Tuesday] John J. Prendergast, PhD, is a psychotherapist, spiritual teacher, and founder and editor-in-chief of Undivided: The Online Journal of Nonduality and Psychology. John met his first teacher, Advaita master Jean Klein, in 1983 and began studying with one of our favorite teachers, Adyashanti, in 2001. For 23 years John was also a professor of psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco where Vanessa Scotto went to grad school. He is the author of an amazing book called In Touch; How to Tune In to the Inner Guidance of Your Body and Trust Yourself. We first came across John on the Buddha at the Gas Pump podcast where we were immediately drawn to his simple, yet profound, integration of Psychology and Spirituality. After Brooke Thomas sat with him on a weekend retreat a few months back we knew we needed to bring him on for a conversation we could share with all of you. In this conversation we cover so many topics including how to trust yourself and tune into your intuition, how to access genuine safety, and why the Ego is doomed to fail. This conversation is a delight and a revelation that can affect you for years to come. For more information on Bliss + Grit, or to get information about one-on-one coaching with Brooke Thomas or Vanessa Scotto, please visit www.blissandgrit.com. To become a supporting member and join our forum please visit www.patreon.com/blissandgrit

For this episode we zoomed out and explored: What is Bliss+Grit about exactly? More specifically, after nearly three years, 127 episodes and lots of personal healing, inquiry, and exposure to different teachers and practices: What is our working model of healing and transformation? How does conditioning store in us and how to we untangle that? And, importantly, if we aren't our conditioning, what are we? It's an ongoing lived inquiry more than a nailed down blueprint, and it's more about building bridges between systems that are evocative of human potential rather than of picking a team and declaring it the winner. But here you go, at this juncture, this is where we're at!  In this episode we talk about:  How conditioning stores in the body, the mind, and our energetic patterns What do we consider optional suffering?  How do we de-condition ourselves?  What the nervous system has to do with it.  What are we when we aren't our conditioning?  Our view of building bridges and connecting disciplines so that each of us can have our unique lived inquiry into our own lives, rather than a blueprint system.  For more information on Bliss + Grit, or to get information about one-on-one coaching with Brooke Thomas or Vanessa Scotto, please go to www.blissandgrit.com. To become a supporting member and join our forum please go to www.patreon.com/blissandgrit

This is one of our favorite kinds of conversations: where the nervous system, trauma responses, and the spiritual path intersect. We are looking at the four F's of trauma response: fight, flight, freeze, and fawn. We are talking about how these normal, healthy responses can become identities and therefore keep us from fully nourishing lives. And in particular we are honing in on fawn, also called please, appease, or tend and befriend, since we haven't spoken in as much detail about this particular response. But boy howdy do we know it from the inside out! If you consider yourself an empath, this one might strike a chord for you too.   In this episode we discuss:  The fawn trauma response, also known as please, appease, placate, or "tend and befriend".  How we can continue acting out "stuck" trauma responses so frequently that they become meshed with our personalities and identities.  Examples of what the 4 F's look like as identities.  How shame holds these responses in place.  How you can't put down by swinging the pendulum to the opposite extreme, which can be re-traumatizing, and ways you can instead tenderly begin to shift out of chronic states.  For more information on Bliss + Grit, or to get information about one-on-one coaching with Brooke Thomas or Vanessa Scotto, please visit www.blissandgrit.com. To become a supporting member and join our forum please visit www.patreon.com/blissandgrit