Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: So welcome to the labyrinth today. My guest is Doctor Henry Critella.
[00:00:06] Speaker B: Oh, sure. Well, one, I want to really thank you for inviting me. It's wonderful that you're doing the podcast, and if people are following us, you'll hear a lot of us, because I interviewed Lisa for my podcast, alchemical dialogues. It's part of what I do. So we're cross pollinating here. Yeah, we're getting to know each other through the podcast, too.
[00:00:29] Speaker A: Absolutely.
[00:00:30] Speaker B: So right now I'm working as a spiritual guide, and it's my major training for that was out of the tradition of Anayakan, who was an Indian who was the first person to bring an organized form of Sufism to the west. He came in the early 19 hundreds. He died in 1927. And right away, even though his background was rather diverse. We'll talk about that in a second. And he was trained in traditional sufi orders. He was also exposed to other traditions.
And when he began to teach students and initiate people into his lineage, you didn't have to be a Muslim. So you say that now, and people gasp. Still, what he taught is that Sufism, the way he meant it, is a wisdom tradition that predated Islam, just opened it up. So his first initiate as a teacher was a jewish woman, which was just unheard of.
So he developed his program that was much more universal than how a lot of people think of Sufism now. And if you look it up in Wikipedia as the mystical side of Islam, and in this tradition, it's not tied to any religion or any exoteric tradition. And in fact, in his teachings, the last thing the world needs is another religion.
Please don't turn this into a religion. So no dogma. There are thoughts, there are ideas, there's practices to help you unfold, developed, connect with the power greater than yourself.
You can pray, you can think, you can meditate, you can do all sorts of different things, but the idea that there's dogma, no, there are thoughts. There are thoughts to guide, and if they resonate with you, go with it. If they don't, just put them aside and see if they resonate later. And if they don't, they don't. So that's the lineage that I follow. And then to make it a little more complicated about me, I decided to leave any formal organization because even that was getting a little bit too narrow. I really believe in what I just said. I think a Nayat Khan was a version of a perennial philosopher who believed there's one thread of wisdom that goes through all the major, probably unknown traditions.
And our job is to catch the thread and then do it in the way that resonates best for us. But don't get tied to something as if it's the one all and be all. And to me, that's the perennial philosophy. So I decided organizations were starting to get a little too narrow, and I wanted to be more independent. So I still think my basket for how I think and how I teach and guide people. It feels like the basket that I've learned from the lineage of Anaya Khan. But we include a lot of teachings from philosophy, science, my background as a psychiatrist. So there's a lot of psychology.
My sufi teacher, who also is not part of a formal organization anymore, he taught me buddhist practices, hindu practices.
I was a mentor for dances of universal peace. So it's broader than what people would probably superficially think of as Sufism if you just look it up in the dictionary. So that's what. That's what I'm into. And I'm a retired psychiatrist. My major specialty was child and adolescent psychiatry, but I really worked. I didn't work too much with geriatrics, but I worked across the h spectrum. So already, as we're talking, I hope you get the flavor. I like to explore and integrate. That's what I feel is really important in my life right now.
[00:04:52] Speaker A: Henry, thank you so much for that beautiful introduction. The topic that we had agreed to use as our springboard beginning point is surrender in not having an organization, particularly to provide some rigid structure.
And so I thought that is a really good starting point, would be a quote from Eckhart Tolle about surrender.
When you fully accept that you don't know, you give up struggling to find answers with the limited thinking mind. And that is when a greater intelligence can operate through you.
So I chose this quote in particular because it's so rich and there's so many aspects to it that I thought that we could just start teasing apart.
And the first point is when you fully accept that you don't know. So maybe we could just start kind of talking about that a little bit.
What does it mean to you when you hear that expression that you begin to fully accept that you don't know? And you can either come at this from a clinical perspective, a personal perspective, a spiritual lens.
[00:06:15] Speaker B: I know we agreed on surrender, but I actually have trouble with that word.
[00:06:21] Speaker A: Okay, great.
[00:06:22] Speaker B: Let me start there for a second. Sure. Surrender.
The way that I think you and I mean and will get clear is correct.
My concern is that it gets misinterpreted, and it gets misinterpreted as giving up, going with the flow.
If you take it that way, going with the flow isn't too bad. But the important thing to me is it does not mean giving up your power, your agency, your sense that you have a note to play.
[00:07:00] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:07:01] Speaker B: What we're surrendering, in my view, is there's no way that I know how all the pieces of existence are going to fit together. Yes, that's what I surrender to. That's not my job. But my job is to find my note when, and we have to be careful about this, too. If you take it in the frame of the quote that you shared from Eckhart Tolle, not just with my thinking mind, but with my whole being, not taking it superficially, really working at it, when I feel with my whole being, this is my note to play in the world right now. Yes, you don't surrender.
That is what you do. That is your note.
And you find opportunities to play that note. You create opportunities to play that note. So the danger with that is you think you know your note, but you don't.
And again, using the quote that you shared, if you only depend on your thinking mind, you're probably going to get fooled.
[00:08:26] Speaker A: But if there, Henry, can I just stop you there? Because I think you're really pulling on something that's really important when you say that if you just are focusing on your thinking mind, you are prone to be fooled. Can you tease that out a little bit more for us?
[00:08:45] Speaker B: Sure. We're in a culture right now, in a stage of our evolution, where we really depend on reason and rationality. Yes, that's gotten us very far. Now, speaking, even speaking as a physician with some science background, I've always known that's not the only way to look at the world. So it's gotten us very far. But there are other ways and reason. Let me see how I can put this. So I can tease about psychiatry, because I'm a retired psychiatrist, it's my field, so I'm not insulting anybody.
I tease about psychiatry. I can explain anything. If you think about dynamics and psycho, not in medicine so much, but if you think about understanding human nature and why people may be doing certain things, if you think of it that way and you're trying to understand unconscious motivations and dynamics, I'm telling you, mental health professionals can explain anything. The problem is that doesn't mean they're right. It just makes sense, it's logical, and you have to tease it out. In some cases, it makes a huge difference that it's wrong. And you have to be able to tease that out. So, you know, I read. I read an autobiography. This is going back a long way now, from Judith Orloff, who's a psychiatrist and is into intuition and other forms. And as far as you know, she's never given up her work as a psychiatrist. But I remember a story she told that she would be getting feelings about things and she would ignore them. And she was very rational. And she saw somebody in the emergency room. I'm pretty sure she was already a fully trained psychiatrist and went down the checklist and was not acutely suicidal, was safe to go home. But she had an uncomfortable feeling, but she didn't meet any criteria. Right. This ought to be, this is even worse now in terms of where we are in 2024. So she did what she was supposed to do. She let the person go, and the person attempted suicide.
And she really was saying, I had this funny feeling, but my reason told me there's nothing here, right. So she's talking to her family and, you know, didn't divulge anything contra, but was talking about these feelings she was getting. And I think it was her mother, but I could be wrong about that. But one of the women and her family finally said to her, we never wanted to tell you this, but there's this thing that runs through the women in our family, and they have a 6th sense. That's the phrase that I'm using. I can't remember the phrase she used. And she said, oh, my goodness. That started to explain so much to her.
The takeaway that I remember her saying and that I took away from the story is you never give up your reason.
You check the boxes, but you also pay attention to your gut.
And then somehow you have to figure out how to put those two things together. So my partner had breast cancer, and it was diagnosed early.
Great prognosis. Treatment was really clear, right?
And I thought about this and I said, you know, if I had the oncologist or the radiologist, she had radiation treatment, or even the surgeon say, well, you know, the algorithms all say this is what we should do, but my gut is telling me we shouldn't do that.
Well, I would have real trouble with that. You know, real trouble with that. And that's not what happened. And it was really clear cut, so you can't get away from being careful. But there are things that we think we know now in medicine, that if you go back a few generations, we thought we knew the exact opposite.
So, remember, people made fun of washing your hands before you went from patient to patient?
[00:13:28] Speaker A: Absolutely.
[00:13:29] Speaker B: They didn't know about the bacterial idea of disease. But the doctor who discovered, for some reason, if I wash my hands between patients, they do better.
He was left out of town.
And then you discover, hey, wait a minute. Or even the new thing. There's a lot of work being done in genetics. So there's this exciting field of epigenetics.
[00:13:55] Speaker A: Oh, yes, we could do a whole nother show on epigenetics.
[00:13:59] Speaker B: But it's the same point that prior to this, the idea that something that you learn in the environment could be transmitted from one generation to the other.
[00:14:12] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:14:14] Speaker B: Not by learning, but in transmission somehow in the generations, was absolutely scoffed at in America, not in Russia. Russia got it, but we didn't all of a sudden. Oh, wait a minute. There's non genetic transmission on chromosomes, that chromosomes have genes, but these things on chromosomes that we thought were just inert, they were just part of the structure to hold the chromosome together. Oh, my goodness. They're affected by what happens in the environment, and they're in charge of turning genes on and off. And the genes don't change, but those get transmitted, not genetically. They get transmitted to generations. So a family, a person learns something in their life, or they have an experience or trauma.
We don't know this for sure in humans because the work has been done in animals, but the possibility is it's changed. That part of the chromosome, not the gene, but it gets transmitted to their progeny. And that function of turning the gene on and off, that was affected by whatever trauma happened in the environment, that gets transmitted.
That's absolutely fascinating to me.
[00:15:36] Speaker A: Me, too.
[00:15:37] Speaker B: Just fascinating.
[00:15:39] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:15:39] Speaker B: And so I like to tease and say, you know, the mystics knew this a long time ago, and probably my grandmother knew this, but we didn't have the. Our reason, wasn't able to explain why it was happening.
And then, oh, well, now I can kick my reason in and say, well, wait a minute. If it's happening in animals and it's using this mechanism, here's something to explore. Absolutely.
But you never should have ignored the fact that something was happening in the first place just because you couldn't understand it.
[00:16:19] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:16:20] Speaker B: I love that. That's part of what I think that. That I'm getting to.
[00:16:24] Speaker A: I think that I would like to circle back to what you were talking about with intuition, which is basically just what you were talking about with, like, an epigenetic, you know, using epigenetics as an example. But certainly there's so many examples of that. Right. In medical, in, you know, in many, many fields, we understand that there's sort of some ancient wisdom that we're returning back to.
But the particular thread that I want to pull back on is the relationship between intuition and surrender. And so.
And I want to tie that back into the first part of the quote that we're analyzing, which is that when you fully accept that, you don't know something. Right. So when we talk about knowing something, what is that? And I think that that's the piece that we're. That we're teasing out right now. There's a rational knowing. Right. We use our reasoned mind. We use logic, we use socratic method, we use scientific inquiry, whatever that is. Right. That's a certain kind of knowing. But we're also talking about another kind of knowing. And so what I'm interested in hearing your thoughts about is this relationship between intuition and surrender. And maybe we can use this as, like, another leaping off point to move us into that second half of the quote where Eckhart Tolle talks about that.
We give up the struggle to find answers with the limited thinking mind. And so if there's a way that we can weave these ideas together, I'd be really interested to hear your thoughts on that.
[00:18:19] Speaker B: Okay. So, first of all, I don't agree. You don't stop using your thinking mind. You just get it under control so you don't stop using it. It's a. If you believe in God, it's a God given gift. Why in the world do I want to not use a gift?
[00:18:36] Speaker A: Well, I just want to clear. I just want to clarify that in my understanding of Tolle's quote here, he's not saying that you give up the knowing mind. He says you give up struggling to find the answers only with the limited thinking mind. Yeah. Yeah. So I just want to bring that point of clarity. Yeah.
[00:18:56] Speaker B: Only is the operative word.
[00:18:58] Speaker A: Exactly. Correct. And with our limited thinking mind. So I think he's. He's bringing us to this idea of this more expanded sense of knowing, which I think you touched on when you were talking about intuition and. And how intuition is a more expanded kind of knowing. So.
[00:19:18] Speaker B: Right, so I heard you and me on the same page.
[00:19:22] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah, definitely.
[00:19:23] Speaker B: Only. Only part that is critical. Yeah, that's critical.
[00:19:27] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:19:27] Speaker B: So, yeah, I mean, there. There are. So, you know, you have to. You can train your intuition just like you can train anything else. There's a phenomena that right now we call intuition, which is a sense of knowing without depending on reason.
It's important to recognize that that exists and that it typically manifests itself in you as a particular person in particular ways.
It might not be only one way, there might be a menu, but generally speaking, every person experiences their intuition in more ways than others. So some people might get the literal gut feeling, literally in their gut. Other people might get it in their heart area. Other people, like me, tend to get it. Their whole body feels. I can't localize it.
[00:20:33] Speaker A: Mm hmm.
[00:20:34] Speaker B: That being said, sometimes it comes another way.
[00:20:37] Speaker A: So this is so beautiful because this also ties into what you said earlier about playing our note. And I love the distinction that you just made, because you're like, intuition is something that's unique to me, and that ties in so beautifully with this idea of what is my note to play. I just think that that's such a stunning parallel that you just drew. It's beautiful.
[00:21:02] Speaker B: Thank you.
So I've done some explorations in shamanism. I'm not a trained shaman, and it was really helpful because when I first explored shamanism, I was trying to visualize, and it's really hard for me to visualize going through a hole in the ground. I had a little better luck flying off the top of a cliff to go to the upper world. But anyways, visualizing wasn't my strength. And then I was reading, and a modern shaman said, I've been doing shamanic work for decades that I can never visualize.
I'm clairsentient. I feel, and I realized that's me.
I can feel, but I don't always. And as I've been doing more journeying. Yeah, I visualize a little more than I used to, but I tend to be more clairsentient. I tend to get feelings in my body.
So I'll tell you a story.
I'm not sure if we want to define this as intuition, but for our purposes, for now, that's close enough. So I got involved with my Sufi guide, and I took a trip to Israel soon after I met him. So this was 2001. I remember that. And I actually initiated into Sufism on the Temple mount. So right away, I mean, you know, you're.
I'm initiating as a Sufi on the Temple mount in. In the city of Jerusalem. But anyways, so that, that was cool. And it was the intifada. And we, believe it or not, we were almost the only tourists there. So we had the entire old city to ourselves.
I mean, it must be hard for people to imagine that shopkeepers just were thrilled to see us because there was nobody there. We did dances of universal peace. At the site of the last supper, we visited the tomb of Moses.
Nobody. Nobody was around. We went to the Mount of Olives. So pretty eerie when you think about that. So anyways, so we did that and we went to a peace concert. So there was a concert and somebody in our group knew the band and they had a peace song that really grabbed us. Part of it was in Hebrew, which I don't understand, and part of it was in English. And we spent a day with them and they were talking about the kabbalah and we were talking about our things.
And as a favor to them, we bought their cd because that's what you do, right? And it did have this peace song on it, which is the only one I understood and the only one that I really liked. So I get back home and I'm traveling to work. I was on the highway because I had had a long way to go back and forth to work. And I'm listening to the CD and I'm probably listening to that psalm.
And now you got to remember, I'm a psychiatrist, okay?
I hear a voice in my head because it would have really freaked me out if it was outside of my head. It was clearly inside my head. But I'm telling you, it was a voice. It wasn't just a thought. I heard the words, and the words said, go home and pick up your guitar.
So I tell people, like I'm going to tell you all now.
I'm a psychiatrist. I ignored it and I didn't tell anyone.
Next day, I'm driving in my car again because I have a long way to go.
And I think I'm listening to the CD again, but I can't be sure about that one. And I hear the voice again. So this time I go home and I picked up my wife's guitar. It's pretty cool. It was the Yamaha folk guitar. And within ten, I think it was ten minutes, maybe 20 minutes at the most, a song came through. I had the chord structure, the melody came out of my mouth and the lyrics came. No, I'm telling you, no effort.
And I'm not a professional musician. I'm an self trained folk guitar. Whatever. Kathleen, my partner, has a wonderful singing voice. So I wanted her to sing it because it sounds good when she sings it. And she changed one word in the lyrics and good for her because it needed to be changed. That was the only thing that happened, right? That started. And outpouring of songs that went on for probably two years.
[00:26:02] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:26:02] Speaker B: One after another, I couldn't stop it. And we recorded some of them. We came out with a CD, you know, not professional, but we have some professional musicians who were friends who did the backups for us and found people who would. They mixed it and organized it. And so we actually have two cds out. At some point, I started to do chanting. So sufis call it Zikr.
And when the Zikr started, the song stopped.
The zickers have never stopped, and I don't record them. We have one CD with a lot of zickers on it, and I used to try to write them all down and remember, I don't do that anymore. They're all. Most of them are improvised. They come really fast and then they're gone. I remember a few of them, but I don't bother to record or to write them down anymore like I used to try.
What was that voice I heard?
So the psychiatrist in me says it was your own subconscious thoughts because you got juiced up by this group that you liked, right?
To tell you the truth, I don't think so. I don't think so. So the Sufis call something. They call it the spirit of guidance.
It's probably, if you're in the christian tradition, you might call it the Holy Spirit. If you're a materialist, it's your own thoughts.
But they were so clear.
It was not like my. You. You know, I know how I usually think.
I know what a thought feels like. Does that make sense? Know, the experience of having a thought? This was way too clear.
Go home and pick up your guitar. No thinking with it. I knew that Kathleen, my partner, had a wonderful voice, but we weren't planning on doing anything together. I don't have a great musical background. I'm not a great guitar player. Right. This had nothing to do with my reason.
I'm so glad I didn't ignore that. That just unfolded. Something in me was a benefit, I hope, I think, for many people exposed me to things I had never been exposed to before. Opened up a part of me that I didn't know was there, helped bond me and Kathleen together in this experience of doing this. And then it more. So talk about surrender that I can't get a song to come through me, Lisa. It just won't come.
The chants come, the zickers come, songs don't come. I miss them. I would like them to come again. It just won't come. Right. But I can't stop the zickers. And now it's like I trusted so much without really thinking ahead of time. Well, what am I going to do, I just pick up my guitar, and cords come. When the cords come, the Zikr comes, and that's what I share. And I can trust it now because it's happened for years. So that's not my reasoning. I know it's not my reasoning. There's no thinking in it. It just.
I'm following my intuition. Is that the word we should use.
[00:29:35] Speaker A: In this beautiful description that you gave, which I just think is so representative of how we experience intuition and what we do with it is almost this order of events. It's like we get an intuition, and we have a choice, as you said, which you. The first time this intuition arose, you decided to ignore it.
[00:30:03] Speaker B: Right.
[00:30:03] Speaker A: And would you say that the second time that it arose that you surrendered to it? So could we talk in some way about that relationship between, oh, we have an intuition, and we are making a choice to surrender to it, or we're making a choice not to surrender to it. So I'm curious about this kind of, like, middle ground of are we choosing to surrender? Does it move through us in such a way that we feel we don't have a choice?
I'm very curious about what that experience around choice was for you and how that could also perhaps help other folks who are listening to this to understand the relationship between intuition, choice, surrender, those. The interplay of those dynamics.
[00:31:06] Speaker B: So we always have a choice. As far as I'm concerned, I don't have to follow my intuition.
And especially in the beginning, if you're training your intuition, your intuition isn't always right. What you think is your intuition. I mean, let me rephrase that, because Sufis would say, if you've really trained yourself, intuition is never wrong. The issue is, when do you know you've trained yourself enough that you can trust it?
[00:31:32] Speaker A: Yes, that's.
[00:31:33] Speaker B: That's a tough one.
[00:31:35] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:31:35] Speaker B: So, for most of us, in the scheme of things, what we think of as intuition is. Doesn't always have to be right, which is why, going off on a little bit of a tangent, it's really important not to give up your thinking mind.
You need to figure out how to have them working together and then when to give one more weight than the other. So that's why.
[00:32:02] Speaker A: And what if you have a situation where your intuition is pointing you in a direction that seems utterly irrational?
[00:32:10] Speaker B: So it depends on where you are with your evolution.
If you've had experiences like that before and you know what your intuition feels like, and it's intense, you'll recognize it and say, I think this is something I should listen to.
You can also assuming you don't have to do something right away, like it's not an emergency or you're not driving your car, and your intuition says, take a right right now at the next street, you know, you have to decide, right then you have some time. Like, with me, it comes back or it doesn't. So that's data that you can use. Like, so, for me, the reason I listened to it the second time, and by the way, I want to give myself credit that I didn't like senior out. It only took me twice, which I think is for a psychiatrist, you know. So one of the reasons I chose to listen to it was, number one, it wasn't dangerous, it wasn't telling me to make. It wasn't something about a health decision I had to make or, you know, it wasn't life threatening. It was like curiosity. What the heck is this? Right? That made it a little easier. The second thing is, and this goes back to what we were talking about a few minutes ago, that's not the way I usually experience my intuition. I don't usually hear voices in my head. I usually get feelings in my body.
The reason I listened to it is it was so unusual but so clear that helped me not ignore it.
So is that funny? It's like, most of the time, we're saying, get used to how it usually works in you so you recognize it when it happens. Sometimes it's like, whoa, this doesn't usually happen to me. That gets my attention even more. Yeah, it can work either way. And the other thing is, maybe it helped that I was a shrink. I knew I wasn't hallucinating.
I knew that it was, thank goodness, inside my head and not outside, because I don't know what I would have thought. I mean, I got to admit, it came from the right side of my head. So it might have been in the passenger seat. But, you know, if I had looked around to say, who's talking to me in the passenger seat? Nobody's supposed to. I don't know what I would have done. Done with that.
You can get an irresistible urge, and it could be. It's so irresistible, I just have to surrender to this and follow it. So I did a little bit of training with Tom Brown Junior, who's an american tracker, and he gave an interesting.
As part of his work, he was talking about using your intuition, beginning to learn how to use plants. So there would be plants that you would find in the forest.
What it is, and you don't know what the use is. You would learn to communicate with the plant. It would tell you what its use was. Okay.
[00:35:23] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:35:24] Speaker B: So that sounds. That was pretty freaky to me. And so he looked at us and he said, I'm paraphrasing now because I can't remember the exact thing, but he basically came on very strongly and he said, I've been doing this for over 20 years, and just recently, I don't check in a book anymore. Don't you dare trust your intuition on this.
Now you get your intuition and you go check it in as many books as you can find.
Do not just trust your intuition until you have enough experience. And it took me decades before I could trust myself.
That's a really interesting piece of information that he gave from his experience.
Psychiatry was a good career for me. That was a good career choice retrospectively. I was a high school junior, and I was on a debate team, and I loved my high school english teacher. He was my role model. I was good in all subjects, but I really liked literature and the humanities. That was me. Okay, I'm in a. I'm in a chemistry class, and I can't believe how well I can remember this.
It's the end of the class.
I get out of my seat and I start thinking to myself, I'm a junior.
I wonder what I want to do in life. And I start to walk toward the door, and I'm saying to myself, and this is me talking to myself. It's not a voice, like I just said about the guitar. It's me talking to myself, saying, well, you really like literature, but, you know, you can read all the time. And then I get to the door, this is how well I can remember this. And I say, if you want to have a career, it should be in the sciences.
I get into the hall, and in my mind I say, but you don't like science, so what? Science is the most likely that you would like. And I get to my next class and I say, biology. And then I decide I have one elective in my senior year. I'll take biology as an elective.
I really do this. I take biology as an elective. This was in my high school at least. They probably never even heard of molecular biology. So it was all the other type of biology.
And I didn't like it, but I told myself that I did okay.
So I applied to college, and I get into a college. It's another long story. I go to this. It was a commuter college. I didn't leave home.
I needed financial aid. I thought I wound up getting a full scholarship. Before I knew that, I went to the financial aid department, and the person said, if you tell me that you are willing to consider yourself, you don't have to promise just to think that you might want to go into medicine. I can give you this partial scholarship. You know what I said?
I said, no, I can't do that. I know I don't want to be in medicine. It would be unethical for me to do that.
I get a full scholarship. Another way I go, I declare as a biology major in my freshman year, right? I learned very quickly that it's molecular biology, but I'm a good student and I go through it. The chairman of the department happens to be teaching. It's a small school. So he was teaching this class, and I'm a good student. He caught on to me right away, right in my freshman year, he starts saying, do you ever think of going into medicine?
And I say, no.
Sophomore year, you ever think of going into medicine? And I say, no.
Junior year, I start thinking, what the hell am I going to do with my life? So I take a research course and I'm terrible, right?
They graciously gave me a b because I'm a good student. But I started to say, uh oh, what am I going to do? Because if I go to grad school, I'm going to have to do research. What can I do without going to grad school? I could be a biology teacher in high school. I don't want to do that. So all of a sudden, I go to the chairman and say, tell me about medicine.
And I apply to med school.
I get into med school convincing myself that I'm going to be, get this, a pathologist.
I had taken a job in high school, in college, at a local hospital. I got to know the pathologist. He let me sit in on autopsies. I'm terrible at anatomy, absolutely horrible. I'm going in thinking I'm going to be a pathologist.
There's this basically rinky dink introduction to psychiatry course taught by a child analyst that was basically an overview of freudian dynamics.
And I fell in love with it.
And all of a sudden, I'm on the road to being a psychiatrist. So I looked, this is a long story, but I look back on this and I say, what in the world was going on with me now? What I think now, okay, is that was my intuition, or it was the spirit of guidance, or it was my subconscious, or it was the Holy Spirit. Take your pick. Right? And I wasn't I had, you know, I went to a catholic high school and I was grew up a Roman Catholic. I had already given up following Catholicism. Okay, so I wasn't a really religious person anymore. Right. So it wasn't like God was talking to me, was it? My reason saying, well, you know, you need to have a career and, you know, the stem. Stem is the way to go, science is the way to go. Yeah, a little bit of that. But what makes me think it was more than that is the way it happened. Now, I know I might be distorting my memory because it's been decades, but I'm telling you, it was starting in a chemistry class. And the sequence, this is no joke, I would bet hundreds of dollars on this. At least it was the sequence of getting out of my seat, going to the door, into the hall, into the next class. Right. It's not reasoning. Give me a break. That's not how I think about things. Right. Something was guiding me and saying, the only way you're going to get. Where.
This is going to sound a little mystical now. Where the only way you're going to find your note.
[00:42:56] Speaker A: I was just going to say, yep, find your note.
[00:42:58] Speaker B: You're going to have to do it this way.
[00:43:00] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:43:01] Speaker B: We're not going to get through to you any other way.
[00:43:03] Speaker A: Yes. Yes.
[00:43:05] Speaker B: So I think my note is actually what I'm doing now. I think my note is a spiritual guide and teacher who's into integrating, finding, helping, empowering people, including myself, by the way, to find their meaning in life and their own unique path, whatever that is. If it's part of an organization, go for it. But really it's finding your note, how to play it, how to bring in whatever the new era that's coming.
And how did I get here?
I had to get into, this is retrospective now, because of who I was as a kid, think psychiatry saved me. It was loose enough that I could be a mini scientist and use my intuition at the same time, which is what I loved about psychiatry of that day. I thought I was going to be doing psychotherapy for the rest of my life, and I turned out I used a lot of medicines, including with kids. Why did I think it was going to be psychotherapy? Because I love stories and I love that it's an art.
There is reason behind it, there's a science behind it, but there's an art to it relating to a person.
It didn't take long for me to catch on. Oh, this is all about how I relate to somebody and how they relate to me.
And that's the art in it. And I love that combination of being reasoning and artistic at the same time.
I think that was my experience even as a kid. When I look back on it, that was more than my reasoning. Did I surrender to it? Yes, I did.
It was like pulling teeth.
It took me high school to college. No, no, no. I don't want to be a doctor. And then it was more like, what the hell else am I going to do? I put myself in a box, right?
I could have changed majors, right? Nobody's. You know, I had a full scholarship. I could have gone. I could have said, well, big mistake. I'm going to go to college. I'm going to change my major and extend my. I didn't even think of that. This was like. So that was a. That was a difficult surrender. I didn't go, oh, boy, I can't wait to do this. I'm just going to surrender. It was more like. I don't know. I think it's different than the experience you had about going to California.
[00:45:45] Speaker A: I think I've shared this with you before, but it feels apropos for discussion, but.
And I believe I talked about this in the podcast that you interviewed me for. But in the spring of 2022, I had a major depressive episode that was extremely severe and basically made me bedridden, like about six months. And I was working with a psychiatrist. We were trying all kinds of different meds. I was in therapy, and there was no shifting. There was just no shifting out of it.
I got a call from a friend of a friend. So this was an acquaintance, and this was in late August. And he said, I moved to Seattle, and I don't have a lot of friends. Would you be willing to come out and spend some time with me? Any rational person would have said, that's ridiculous. I was barely eating. I was about a week and a half, two weeks from being hospitalized.
The psychiatrist was becoming very concerned.
And I received this phone call, and he says, hey, you want to come out to the west coast? And of course, I was living in New York and he was in Seattle. I just knew that this is what I had to do. Now my closest friends in Rochester would be trying to get me to go out of the house for a walk.
I could not.
I just could not. And for some reason, this invitation provoked something very deep in me, and I felt, I have to do this.
And so, again, sort of defying the rational mind, the following week, I packed up my car. I didn't fly across the country. I packed up my car, and I drove across the country.
[00:48:16] Speaker B: Oh, my goodness. I didn't know that part.
[00:48:18] Speaker A: And I get to Seattle and it's fine, and, you know, nothing. I feel fine. The drive across the country was actually really beautiful for me.
I felt very safe. I felt like I had some serenity in the journey, being out, but being out in the world, but being also in the safety of my car. It felt like just such a nice bridge. So I get to Seattle. Everything is fine. I have a lovely time with my friend, and the next I get another intuition. And the intuition is, oh, well, you know, you're only 10 hours from California.
So I went to graduate school in California. My friends still live in California. And I was like, oh, sure, that seems perfectly reasonable, like, it's only 10 hours away. Let's drive to California. So instead of driving back to New York at the end of my visit with my friend in Seattle, I proceeded to drive south to California. And I'm in Sacramento, and I pull over and I call one of my dearest friends, Suzanne, and I say, hey, what are you doing? It was a Sunday. What are you doing? Oh, well, as a matter of fact, I have today off. I work six days a week, and, you know, I happen to have today off. And, yes, so this would be, it would be great for us to talk on the phone. And I was like, oh, no, no, no. She thought that it was going to be a phone conversation. I was like, oh, no, no, I'm in Sacramento. And she lives in, just outside San Francisco, in Alameda. And so I say, can I come and visit? She said, oh, that would be lovely. So I come to Alameda, and I am posting, you know, the, the trip along the way, and another very, very close friend of mine who also lives in Alameda, who rarely checks Facebook, she happened to check Facebook and saw that I was in Alameda, and she said, oh, my goodness, you're in Alameda. Like, please come and have lunch with me. And so I go and have lunch with Heather, and she tells me, oh, we have, like, you know, we have this lovely afternoon together. And the more that I'm in back in California, there's this feeling of utter peace that just comes over me, and it's like all of that dis ease that I was feeling back in New York, it just evaporated. The weather was beautiful. I felt so happy to be back with my friends again. And I had told my friends what I had been going through, and my friend Heather said, well, maybe it's time for a change.
And I said, a change? What do you mean? And she said, well, she's like, we have an opening at the school that I teach at. We have someone who's going on maternity leave. And so we have a long term sub position open. And so maybe that would be something you'd be open to trying.
And so I ended up, like, going through the interview and doing all of that. And six months later, I moved. I, of course, drove back to New York, discussed it with my family, and six months later, I moved back to California. And so for me, when I think of surrender, this idea of surrender, it has been.
And again, I really like how you brought up this idea of kind of having experience with your intuition. And I've had enough experience in my life with my intuition to really trust it. And so even in the face of this, which on the surface of it is absolutely irrational, you know that someone who's just in the throes of a major depressive disorder should or episode, I mean, a major depressive episode would be like, oh, yes, I think that's the absolutely perfect.
[00:52:51] Speaker B: I just was thinking, you must have given your psychiatrist a heart attack.
[00:52:55] Speaker A: So the psychiatrist was, I would say, probably, perhaps not so much in support of it. However, my therapist, who I'd worked with for three years at that point, when I spoke with her about it, she, and she is a person who really helped me to cultivate my intuition. And in fact, a lot of what we had talked about was how me not following my intuition would be at the root of a lot of the dis ease that I was experiencing.
So she was the one who said, I feel that if this. If you are feeling that you are called to do this, then this is what you ought to do.
And so it wasn't just a wild abandon. I did discuss it with my therapist. I did discuss it with the psychiatrist. And even though in some context this was an utterly irrational thing to do and could have also been potentially dangerous, I knew that it was exactly what I needed to do. And going to California was an absolute turning point in my life on so many levels. It was an absolute turning point. And all of that, the challenge that I had faced, the depth of the despair that I had experienced, it was lifted.
And I don't think I honestly, to this day, believe that if I had not gotten that phone call, that I don't know what would have happened if I would have been able to get out of that depressive episode.
[00:54:49] Speaker B: Right.
What a great story.
[00:54:54] Speaker A: So I love this idea of.
Which is also why I wanted to talk about surrender today, because it's something that is a very.
It's a very personal topic for me. It's something that I've wrestled with, that I've experienced directly, that I have had beautiful things arise from allowing myself to surrender.
And again, it's this idea of giving up the struggle, because I know that in this place that I was in, in Rochester, I was just in this constant struggle with myself. The battle was just extraordinary. And there was. I was exhausted. I was just exhausted. And so I think that it was partly that exhaustion and a submission to something. And for me, also very similar to you, where you talked about where you had these people, like, oh, did you think about medical school? Oh, did you think about medical school? Oh, did you think about medical school? For me, often this quote, unquote, intuition often comes from external stimuli. It's people that come to me and say something, or it's an external trigger. I see something, and that's often how that something within me gets stimulated.
To then be in this position of making the choice to surrender, that's almost.
[00:56:43] Speaker B: Like a synchronicity, the way you're talking about.
[00:56:45] Speaker A: Yes, absolutely. Absolutely.
[00:56:48] Speaker B: So we were also talking about moving into a new era.
[00:56:53] Speaker A: Yes, yes.
[00:56:54] Speaker B: And playing your note, but not knowing what that new era is going to be, just knowing what your note is.
[00:57:01] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:57:01] Speaker B: And surrendering to whatever you want to call the greater power to put it all together.
[00:57:07] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:57:08] Speaker B: So there's one of the things that I've liked that helps with the surrender part is some teachings from Anaya Khan that have been collated and called mastery through accomplishment. And the best explanation I really have of that is from a refrigerator magnet. I used to have a quote from Thomas Edison saying, I have successfully discovered 10,000 things that don't work.
So the idea with mastery from an icons perspective is you never impress yourself with failure.
Everything is a stepping stone towards your goal.
Whatever happens becomes a stepping stone towards your goal.
So that's like Edison's quote. It's not that I didn't find the invention. I actually found what didn't work. So now I can go on to something else.
[00:58:11] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:58:12] Speaker B: So, in. So I've been reading a little bit in process theology and process philosophy, and this is my conceptualization, from what I've read, that has really meant a lot to me. So even if it isn't exactly what they're saying, it's what I'm saying.
There's.
There's a universe, there's a power in the universe. So I don't know, whatever you want to call that. I call it the ground of being.
[00:58:44] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:58:45] Speaker B: People call it God. I make a distinction. But there's some power and it has an intention. There's an intention to the universe.
[00:58:55] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:58:56] Speaker B: It isn't predetermined. The details are not predetermined. So to use the Sufi lingo from Anayat Khan, the intention is love, harmony and beauty. That there will be an evolution toward more love, more harmony and more beauty.
What form that takes, nobody knows. And that's not predetermined.
It becomes a relationship between creation. So let's say us and this divine intelligence. Yeah, but like the shamans say, everything is relationship.
You can't have movement without a reaction.
And if there is a divine intelligence, it's.
I used to think of it as just energy. And Anayakhan, actually, this was so funny when I read this. He's saying, of course, you know, this God or whatever, the absolute is energy. And then the next sentence. But it also has a personality, which just makes the scientist in me go nuts.
So you have, let's say you have a divine intelligence, not thinking or reasoning or intelligence like you. And I think of it, there's something that we don't understand.
The Sufis say, you can't understand it, but you can intuit it. You can experience the connection, but you can't put it into words or understand it. So that part is limited because we're limited in that way.
[01:00:44] Speaker A: And this brings us such full circle to the end of Eckhart Tolle's quote, where he says that we give up the struggle to find the answers with our limited thinking mind. And that is when a greater intelligence can operate through you.
[01:01:05] Speaker B: Right.
[01:01:05] Speaker A: It is just exactly what you're talking about. So beautiful. Yes.
[01:01:11] Speaker B: The other part with that, though, is there's an intention in the universe.
[01:01:16] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:01:17] Speaker B: And then there's. And there's us. And there's a relationship, right?
[01:01:22] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:01:25] Speaker B: We. We have agency, we have free choice. We have.
Even if we think your free choice is based on unconscious factors, I'm pretty sure things are not predetermined.
So we have agency and choice. So put it this way, we can resonate with the intention of that universal power, get in a zone with it and go.
Or we can not.
We can say, well, you may want love, harmony and beauty, but I don't. And we have a choice.
Just because there's a relationship doesn't mean that it's equal.
So I don't have any trouble imagining that this universal power is like a freaking Star Trek tractor beam.
And when I don't resonate with it, it's gonna pull me along because it has more power than I do. I can put on my thrusters and I can struggle, and it'll just make me suffer.
I might blow myself up.
[01:02:43] Speaker A: Yes.
[01:02:43] Speaker B: As I'm fighting so much.
[01:02:45] Speaker A: Yes.
[01:02:46] Speaker B: That I'll just blow myself up.
[01:02:48] Speaker A: Yes.
[01:02:48] Speaker B: And then the universe will just go create another me.
Okay. I don't destroy the intention of the universe, but I can go with it or not.
When I go with it, I get in a zone.
When I don't go with it, I can suffer more. But the universe, being the tractor beam that it is, will always do something to try to pull me back into resonance.
[01:03:19] Speaker A: Yes. Yes. I've had the same experience. Yes.
[01:03:21] Speaker B: So you can call that surrender, but it's a funny sort of surrender. It's like saying I have agency, and I can decide that agency allows us as a kind of creation that, as far as I can tell, can clearly affect the direction of evolution. We could drive ourselves into extinction or we could not.
[01:03:50] Speaker A: Right.
[01:03:52] Speaker B: So we have that amount of agency and power that we've been gifted. So we have a lot to say about the form that this love, harmony, and beauty might take that is not predetermined. So if we want to go in a certain direction, as long as the universe, I have to personalize this somehow, personify it, sees that. Oh, yeah, that'll work. It'll go like a dance.
[01:04:23] Speaker A: I love that.
[01:04:25] Speaker B: It isn't surrender in the sense of whatever happens, I go with it.
[01:04:31] Speaker A: Right?
[01:04:31] Speaker B: No. If I think I want to be a spiritual guide, I will be a spiritual guide. Okay. I will do that because. And icon talks about this, too. He says, you got to be really careful about how you talk about karma. He says there is cause and effect, but human beings have every right to be happy. They don't have to give in to what's happened in the past.
The universe, God, whatever you want to call it, grace, the Holy spirit can change anything.
So you don't just surrender to your karma and do nothing. Oh, I have to let this play out and suffer because I have no choice.
You don't surrender that way. The way you surrender, I think, is these are the cards have been dealt right now, but I can use this as a stepping stone to get someplace.
[01:05:38] Speaker A: So when I was in therapy, my therapist would always say to me that. She said, there are some people who operate really beautifully by standing on the side of the riverbank and looking across and being able to see all the stones that are sticking up along the way and they can map their path across that river. And she said, lisa, you are not one of those people. And she said, for you, your life path has been that you see one rock and you step on it and you look around you and you don't see anything else, and the water's rushing around you and you feel a lot of confusion and uncertainty, and then you look again, and all of a sudden, the next rock appears, and before you know it, you're moving your way across this river when you could not see the path at all.
And I think that because in being able to sort of look back and. And trace back sort of the pattern of my life, it has been very much like that, that I don't.
There has never been a clear path, and there has never been a clear sense of, oh, this is going to lead to this, which is going to lead to this, which is going to lead to this. It has always been a path of, okay, I'm gonna take a step, and I have no idea what's coming next. And even if I think I know what's coming next. Oh, no. That. That rock that I see there and I try and take a step on it, it's gone. It disappears. Okay. Nope. And another rock appears. And so I think that the main thing that I want to leave our listeners with is this idea of, or I guess, really pulling out what you talked about in the beginning is this idea of the note that we each have our own note. We each have our own way of moving across the river. And for me, it was thinking, I need to build a bridge. That's what I'm going to do. I'm going to gather all my materials, and I'm going to get my saw, and I'm going to cut down a tree, and I'm going to build a bridge. Oh, no, no, no. The universe is like, oh, no, no, no. That is not your journey. Your journey is, you're going to take a step and you're going to have no idea what's coming next. And that is also so antithetical, I think, in a lot of ways, to how our culture is structured and what we see as acceptable. And so I just want to highlight for people that whether it's you building a bridge, whether it's you walking the long way to find, you know, where the water ends and the land begins and you cross it that way, whether you see the whole path across in terms of these rocks that. That you can see, you know, from one side of the bank to the other or where you just have to take a step and you don't know what's coming next, that each of us has our own experience of movement toward that other side. And in the same way that you were talking about the tractor beam or that thing that's pulling you across the water, that's pulling you across to the other side, and maybe that other side is symbolizing moving us to greater joy, love, awareness, and moving us into a greater oneness with this greater intelligence.
So I really appreciate the stories that you shared today and your perspective on surrender and intuition and our own unique journey in that. And I would just like to give you the opportunity to add any other closing thoughts that you have. And thank you again so much for being a guest today with us. Henry.
[01:10:11] Speaker B: Well, thank you. I really enjoyed it. And, you know, I'm a shrink. I like stories. I like telling stories. I like hearing stories. But I do want to share one thing, if it's okay. Nikon came in the early 20th century. He died in 1927. He was pretty young when he died.
So there's something I want to read. It has, and it's entitled Hazrat. And Hazrat means teacher or accomplished one, Hazrat and icon on the new era. So it was unpublished. It was published. And his son wrote a book called the message in our time, and he didn't say where this came from. And it came. I think it came from some unpublished material, so I can't tell you when it was written. But he died in 1927, and he came to the west in 1910, somewhere between 1910 and 27. Okay, so think about this. This is an. He came from India. English was not his first language, but he spoke in English. He gave all his teachings in English. He was trained as a musician. He was the premier indian musician of his time. And he comes here with his brothers and a cousin to do music. And within a year, he's giving up music to teach spirituality. And we talked earlier on Sufism. So in the spirit of what we. How we started about, you just play your note, but the new era is going to come. This is his intuition about what's coming. So can I share?
[01:11:59] Speaker A: Oh, please. Yes, absolutely. Thank you.
[01:12:02] Speaker B: And again, think about it. This is the early 19 hundreds.
And think of where we are now in 2020.
So coming up to probably 100 years after he wrote this, the races in the coming era will mix more and more every day, developing finally into a worldwide race. The nations will develop a democratic spirit and will overthrow every element which embitters them against one another.
There will be alliances of nations until there is a world alliance of nations. So that no nation may be oppressed by another. But all will work in harmony and freedom for common peace.
Science will probe the secrets of the life unseen.
Think about what we talked about. Epigenetics and genetics and art will follow nature closely. The people of all classes will be seen everywhere. The caste system will vanish. And communities will lose their exclusiveness. All mingling together. And their followers will be tolerant toward one another.
The followers of one religion will be able to pray by offering the prayers of another. Until the essential truth will become the religion of the whole world. And diversity of religions will be no more.
Education will culminate in the study of human life. And learning will develop on that basis.
Trade will become more universal and will be arranged on the basis of a common profit.
Labor will stand side by side with capital on an equal footing.
Titles will have little importance. Signs of honor will become conspicuous.
Bigotry and faiths and beliefs will become obsolete.
Ritual and ceremony will be a play.
Women will become freer every day in all aspects of life. And married women will be called by their own names.
No work will be considered menial. No position in life will be humiliating. Everybody will mind their own business. And all will converse with one another without demanding introductions. The husband and wife will be like companions, independent and detached. The children will follow their own bent. Servant and master will be so only during working hours. And the feeling of superiority and inferiority among people will vanish.
Medicine will take away the need for surgery. And healing will take the place of medicine.
New ways of life will manifest themselves.
Hotel life predominating over home life. Isn't that a riot? Hotel life predominating over home life. Grudges against relatives, complaints about servants finding fault with neighbors will all cease to occur. And the world will continue to improve in all aspects of life. Until the day of Gayamat, the day of judgment, when all vain talk will cease. And when everywhere will be heard the cry, peace. Peace, peace.
[01:15:47] Speaker A: Henry, thank you so much for sharing that. That's a beautiful note for us to end on.
