Feel, Heal & Let that Sh*t Go with Rachel Kaplan
This is Wendy Halley, and you're listening to Lucid Cafe. Hi there, and welcome back. If it's your first time tuning in, thanks for joining me. Before we get to today's episode, which is a really good one, are you ready to unlock the secrets of your inner self? To journey beyond the ordinary and experience the extraordinary?
Wendy:Become Your Own Shaman is a self paced experiential introductory course that gives you the groundwork to start a personal shamanic practice. The foundation of the course is based, with permission, on my understanding of the indigenous Hawaiian spiritual world view that was shared with me during the early phase of my apprenticeship. We'll explore subjects like the nature of reality, the nature of the self and how it relates to consciousness. And you'll learn the mechanics of how to safely and easily enter a Shamanic trance state using sound. Then we'll dive into some fundamental experiential exercises introducing you to the Shamanic realms and 2 of your personal spirit guides.
Wendy:My goal in creating this course was to make it as affordable and as user friendly as possible. It incorporates all I've learned teaching introductory Shamanic workshops over the last 20 or so years, including ways to address the common areas where new practitioners can get a little stuck. So don't wait any longer. Take the first step toward becoming your own shaman today. Visit lucidpathwellness.com or use the link in the show notes to enroll and start your journey toward deepening your connection to the unseen world and yourself.
Wendy:Alright. On with the show. My guest, Rachel Kaplan, is a bundle of energy, enthusiasm and creativity. That is no joke. She's a licensed psychotherapist and the host of the acclaimed podcast Healing Feeling Shitshow.
Wendy:Her accessible approach to self care and personal transformation, which she calls emotional potty training or EPT, is a revolutionary call to action that will teach you precisely how to feel your emotions by moving them through your body as nature intended. Rachel has found that conceptualizing serious mental health work through the lighthearted metaphorical lens of EPT resonates with clients across the board. In her new book, Feel, Heal and Let That Shit Go, and in this conversation, she shares the time tested practices of her one of a kind modality in a way that's easy to relate to. Her step by step guidance leads to real world emotional resilience, empowered authenticity, and stronger relationships. Please enjoy my conversation with Rachel Kaplan.
Wendy:Rachel, thank you so much for joining me.
Rachel:It's my pleasure.
Wendy:I wanna start out by saying that I loved the dedication in your book.
Rachel:So it's like what it said or that it was a Radiohead quote or reference?
Wendy:Both. That's actually not a very popular Radiohead song so that you chose it is very cool.
Rachel:I have two lines tattooed on my arms dedicated to all human beings is on my right arm. My left arm says from that song, my left arm says, dancing for your pleasure because that's like my deepest personal delight of way to engage is to translate rock stars music through my body and my dedication to the web of life because there's anyway, it's not gonna translate well to the audio but I have 2 eyeballs. 1 is me, 1 is the web of life so I I love that song.
Wendy:I do too. And music also plays a really important role in my life. So I totally get it.
Rachel:And the song is Reckoner by Radiohead if anyone wants to know.
Wendy:Yes. Thanks for clarifying. Yeah. It's a pretty amazing song.
Rachel:Yeah.
Wendy:Alright. So let's start out with you have a book out, Feel, Heal, and Let That Shit Go, your guide to emotional resilience and lasting self love. The way you approach this book is quite creative.
Rachel:Thank you.
Wendy:Sure sure you've been hearing that. The correlation between taking a shit and healing emotional wounds Mhmm. Didn't get lost on me. Mhmm. It's pretty right there.
Wendy:Yeah. Would you say?
Rachel:Yeah. Yeah. And specifically between taking a shit and basically, like, the clearest way to understand how we ideally would relate to our emotions if if we look at how we relate to our shit. And that they're they're very similar body based signals that something needs to move through us. But one of those signals, the rumbling guts sensation, don't shit in your pants signal, We were taught how to deal with and the how to move your emotions safely through the body.
Rachel:We were not. And most of us, even in the best of situations, were conditioned out of that. And so we're all desperately trying to scroll and eat and drink and smoke and validate and success our way out of our emotions and so that means we're all emotionally constipated and full of it and it doesn't work and so I'm just like, hey guys, what if we were to relate to it this other way?
Wendy:In a very direct way.
Rachel:Yeah. Yeah. In a in a direct way where you learn how to allow this the signal, learn how to read what it's telling you. And also just there's so much fun in and I didn't do this too much in the book because the publishing industry was like, oh, honey, we don't talk about poop. And I was like, oh, well, I I I do.
Rachel:You know, it was it was a real journey.
Wendy:Well, I can't imagine what they
Wendy:edited out then because, I mean, you do it's in there.
Rachel:It's it's a it's probably we edited out poop emojis as, like, different and there was a point where I got on board with that. Like, I one of my favorite endorsements, I don't know if you've heard of Roger Kamenetz. He wrote The Jew and the Lotus and really brilliant scholar, writer. He wrote his endorsement for the book was, you know, Rachel Kaplan, da da da da. She's got the poop.
Rachel:And I was like, well, actually, we're not using that metaphor. Can we not use that? He said, nope. We're using it. So in the journey of de pooping the book, I also got a little more cautious about it.
Rachel:But things like, for instance, if you have to poop twice in one day, you're not like, oh, God, what's wrong with me? I'm so weak that I'm pooping more. You're just like, oh, I know what to do. And we we don't necessarily need to know what food went into that poop. We just know that it needs to move.
Rachel:And I think our world and partially and this is something interesting to get into but maybe not yet even as a byproduct of the therapy world or the mindset manifest your world like there's almost an obsession with like thinking about our feelings and like well why am I feeling this? And so you don't need to know why you have to poop. You just need to know that you do have to poop and you need to go do the poop and to and that's the only way to not have to poop. Right? And so I think emotions are similar and that the more we just learn how to in the most skillful way, like, let them do their thing and not get stuck in our heads trying to analyze them or have a story or feel bad about needing to have them, just the lighter and less full of it we are.
Rachel:So the the metaphor is just stunning.
Wendy:It is, actually. If you distill it down, they're both biological processes like you were saying. It's like taking a shit is as normal as having an emotional experience.
Rachel:And for most people who were conditioned out of their feelings, if you imagine not shading for a decade or even 5 years or even a week You would be dead. You'd be dead, but also like to try to get if you just think of some more normal constipation, the bigger the more backlog you have, the more patience you need, the more you might need help, like, getting that movement out. And that's what this book is.
Wendy:You also get really toxic too.
Rachel:Yeah. And that's what we're living in. Yeah.
Wendy:Yeah. Exactly. And if you think about that through the emotional lens, we can get really toxic with our emotions too when we're emotionally constipated. Yeah. It's it's quite
Rachel:clever. You Yeah. I mean, and there's, you know, I was like, there was a guy who had a big viral video about feelings being like farts. I mean, there are other ways to equate it. I think poop is the best, but I've always been really into poop.
Rachel:I'm a very good pooper, just so you know.
Wendy:Oh, well, that's good to hear. Yeah. Alright. So I do wanna come back to what you'd started talking about, and that is how we're typically handling our emotions. But first, I wanna touch on a bit of your background and what led you to write this book to begin with.
Wendy:I mean, you had pretty tragic circumstances early in your life. It seemed to pave the way that led to, I'm guessing, us having this conversation and you writing this book and yeah.
Rachel:And that gives me chills. Isn't that amazing that I can be 30 years out from that experience and it gives me chills just how true that is?
Wendy:Do you wanna talk a little bit about that or...?
Rachel:Yeah. I'm happy to talk about it. First, before I tell anything about that story, I'll just say that I had the run of the mill wounding that anyone with human parents will have. The older generations knew even less about and had less permission to feel and knew less about how to feel. And any parent knows it's really hard to keep a kid alive and tune into the kids every feeling.
Rachel:And I'm not even saying that's the answer, but so all of us have a certain degree of wounding, and I had that also and had a deep sense of things that were wrong with me by the before I met this young man and probably was part of my attachment to him. But, basically, the first person I was just wanting to be as close to as possible was this young boy who I met probably at 12 and designed, a very serious way to try to make him my boyfriend, which worked. And by 8th grade, I believe, he was my boyfriend. And halfway through our freshman year of high school, after a very convoluted way of bringing me into a fabricated lie, he took his life. And I was the cryptic subject of his suicide note and he was really like my entire world and I tried to stop him by saying I would kill myself also And I spent years in the aftermath of that annihilation thinking maybe I would.
Rachel:I actually you know, you seem like a spiritually oriented person. I heard a voice interestingly in the room when it was confirmed that they found his body. I don't talk about this often, but this voice, very clear voice was not something inside my head. It was not him. I don't know what it was, but it said you will never do this.
Rachel:And then that was the only time I heard a voice.
Wendy:Okay. That's very clear. Yeah.
Rachel:So clear. But, and, you know, they're screaming all this stuff happening in the room. My mom's like, my daughter needs help. I mean, it was just so chaotic, that moment.
Wendy:Intense, man.
Rachel:But anyway, I I did spend a few years kind of planning that because I just it hollowed me out. I couldn't tolerate it as a 14 year old.
Wendy:Planning what, taking your own life?
Rachel:Planning my death. Yeah. I think lightheartedly. Like, at least for about a year or so. And then the first time I I was in another romantic relationship almost by accident is really when I started to see how injured I was and how I mean, I was really sarcastic and mental.
Rachel:I had stopped feeling and anyone who was outside of my immediate life was dead to me. I had really my attachment when it was so injured. Right? My my sense of safety and it being safe for me to like someone was deeply injured and through that process of just I tried to break up with this partner, I realized, oh, man. Like and I took mushrooms.
Rachel:My first time, which was just dark. It was like, I was well, I mean, it was helpful. There was a lot of intense stuff going on. It was right on the heels of realizing, wow, I'm injured and I need to get therapy. But we thought my mom had cancer.
Rachel:We had just found out my and I'm like a teenager, but my sister had friends over, and I basically walked through my high school house just feeling terror in my bones. And then finally, at the end of the experience, after just asking people who are around me to make it stop as I was coming down, I sat outside in my backyard with my sister. This is probably one of our most precious shared moments and just wept and talked about how we were like these orbits that were maybe you sync up with someone's orbit for a minute, but we're doomed to be alone. And, I just got such a deep picture of, like, kind of my reality having been annihilated like that. And then, I started therapy.
Rachel:And, this therapist, my first therapist is fantastic and she wrote the forward for my book, which I don't think was in the book by the time you got it.
Wendy:No. I don't have the forward in the copy that I have. Yeah.
Rachel:Yeah. It's precious. And actually, a couple years after I launched my podcast, which is the first form that this content came out in, we had a moment of getting in touch with each other and she said, I've been spying on your life through your podcast, which is mandated listening for patients. Wow. So my therapist from my high school, and she's actually I'm giving a TEDx talk the week after the book comes out, which is in a couple weeks, and she's flying out to Boston to hear me.
Rachel:It's really precious. But anyway, I did very deep work with her. She was really the first person that helped me slow down and come out of my very voracious mind, very fast mind and start to feel again. And by the end of my senior year of high school, I thought I was further along that I was, which I admit in the book. Of course, it was the next quarter century of actually healing that wound.
Rachel:But I was, at that point, knew that, okay, this is I'm meant to be a companion for people on this healing path. And, you know, the truth is is that there are plenty of people who are psychotherapists because it's a great job. I mean, you get to sit and talk to people for money. I mean and for all the people who their wounding showed up as caretaking their family members, I mean, there's so many people who had hard childhoods and that's how they decided they would survive. And so then having that job is essentially a monetizable version of their adaptive slash maladaptive strategy.
Rachel:Right? So I I will just say and and my editor made me cut the chapter where I just said, hey. I think the therapeutic industry sucks right now, and we're phoning it in and b minusing it. But they're you know, not all therapy is created equally. And some people were lucky enough that they didn't get torn up and shredded and annihilated as children.
Rachel:And bless them. That's great. You know? But if you really if you did, if you had significant trauma or if you just are trying to learn how to be with a pain that feels intolerable to you, whatever the cause, you want the person you're sitting with to have had to have done that and to know because you don't know. And I will say that the main help I got, and I think I make this clear in the book, really came outside the therapeutic industry and came and I would say that also it took me literally 25 years before I reached a place, and that was a full decade into being a practicing psychotherapist.
Rachel:And I was always good at this. But before I actually felt deeply well and deeply lovable and worthy. And so for me, the book, the podcast, everything I've done in the last 8, 9 years is sharing what made the difference between me hobbling around and still kind of feeling like a worthless piece of shit inside and me actually having this baseline and and what have I seen of course with 100 of client? It's not only me, but it's like what are the pieces that are actually required for someone to heal and not just compensate? And so that's what the book is.
Rachel:It's like, this is the parts you actually really need.
Wendy:Right. Okay. Lot there. So
Rachel:I warned you. You did.
Wendy:Alright. So I'm like, okay. Ticking things off in my brain, like, let's go back to this. Let's go back to this. We'll see how many of them I actually remember.
Wendy:But the thing that stands out most is that and I don't usually say this publicly as a mental health clinician myself, that how limited it is, I think, in its effectiveness.
Rachel:Mhmm. Yeah.
Wendy:And I I remember in graduate school thinking that there's gotta be something more. Even as I was learning all the theory and the different therapeutic approaches, I was like, yeah. They're cool, but there's something more. And then now close to 30 years in, it strikes me of of how head centric psychotherapy is. It's like it's all Yeah.
Wendy:Everything that's in your awareness and then bringing things out of your unconscious and into your awareness and developing beautiful insights. Right? Mhmm. That's why I think the way I do or I I behave or react the way I do, the way I feel, it makes sense now. But it doesn't necessarily change the reason why you No.
Wendy:The way you do, you react the way you do, you feel the way you do, you will understand it, which is actually can be more vexing, I think. Yeah. Absolutely. Have all this insight. It's like nothing to do with it.
Wendy:But that's what I find is that people tend to stay in story, especially people who are doing longer term counseling.
Rachel:Or Freudian psychoanalytic. Yeah. They'll just report what happened since the last session.
Wendy:Right. That's there are other ways to to heal, and I think that's what's really cool is that I think psychotherapy is wonderful and it's a great support and I think developing insight is is a cool thing.
Rachel:Well, it depends what kind of psychotherapy. I mean, there it's, you know, there is a more somatic approach at this point and someone who
Wendy:That didn't exist when I was studying.
Rachel:Yeah.
Wendy:So somatic therapy has so body centric, body centered therapy has
Rachel:Yeah.
Wendy:Come into the foreground because of the limitations, I think.
Rachel:Absolutely.
Wendy:That's brilliant. And you are also an EMDR practitioner Mhmm. Which helps people move through trauma.
Rachel:Yeah.
Wendy:And it's not about talking, but it's about reporting as you're going through the process using the technique.
Rachel:Right. Yeah. I I agree. The narrative often gets in the way with the healing, which is it's a great thing to look back at your poop. You know?
Rachel:Do you need to understand anything about it?
Wendy:Yeah. Well, it that's like keeping your shit in a Yeah. Container and, like, bringing it out every so often and looking at it and saying, oh, I remember that shit.
Rachel:Right. Yeah. I think it there there is something I'll there's one piece. I think the secret sauce of, like, how you actually heal is is something that really goes in the face of that that I think we'll get to. It's like the crux of of the journey, but yeah, it's like a lot of those stories or a lot of the ways that people come up with those stories are to try to be more compassionate toward themselves or the therapist helps them realize what was the best you could do and it wasn't your fault and it was your parents or it was your effort for this or for that.
Rachel:And in a way maybe I'll just say it now. It's like in a way when we tell ourselves that we're kinda talking ourselves out of our deep Great point. Fears and pains. Like if some if some part of us thinks that we're not enough and we're like, oh, no. You were always enough, but your mom this or your dad that or it's like we're still essentially saying to that deep part inside that feels like I'm the worst or I'm not lovable, you know, stay in the closet.
Rachel:You stay away. Like, you're wrong. And that's whether a parent was shushing us telling us we're fine when we were scared or telling us there's nothing to be afraid of those are very benevolent ways that we're conditioned out of feeling our feelings when we're little and of course it becomes much more can be traumatic or abusive when we're taught I'll give you something to cry about or that it's not okay to feel a certain way or that it's not okay to express ourselves in a certain way. So our core wounds that run the mill attachment wounding stuff I was saying we all have, they're all these pain parts that feel like they're a problem, they somehow make us less lovable or less acceptable, and they're positive no matter how bright and shining our lives are, no matter how successful we are, no matter how much we think we have these other good things about us, they're positive that everything else is a cover up and that like if people knew us well enough or that deep down there's something wrong with us and so in order to actually heal those, and that's what I feel like my life has taught me really how to do, you can't just give it an explanation.
Rachel:You can't just tell it, no, you you aren't bad. You aren't wrong because that's more of that dismissal shit, you know? And so it's like what I think I'm ultimately doing is teaching people a series of skills that step I call it becoming. It's like kind of the crux of it. It's deep in the book, it's deep in your process because you're not gonna be able to allow that feeling to to come through as a truth unless you find the part of you that feels that unless you've cultivated a relationship with that part of you where it trusts you enough to show you how it feels and then you have to know how to move your your awareness into the part of you in pain.
Rachel:But what I will say if someone wasn't gonna listen to this whole podcast and they were like, I gotta go. What's the deal? The deal is until you know how to let the wounded part of you feel its pain as truth like that yes you do suck you're still gonna be compensating and that once you learn how to skillfully dip into that and from a place of identifying with it which is not what the Buddhist would tell you to do it's not what most therapists tell you to do but, like, letting yourself become the part that's like, yeah. Nobody loves me. Like, release the pain from that vantage point, and then there's a whole recovery process.
Rachel:That is the crux that I think makes a difference between someone who feels lovable and someone who is hobbling around.
Wendy:That was the very cool thing that was refreshing to see in your book was that you actually have a much more shamanic approach to dealing with emotionality. In that, you talk about having a relationship with your feelings, which is a much more indigenous perspective than our western cultural worldview. So the idea to make friends with your anger, your sadness, your shame, all of those things, then you can get somewhere. Right?
Rachel:Mhmm. Yeah. Yeah. And and this is having a moment, you know, a lot of people are talking about inner child healing. So it's like parts work is part of the conversation.
Rachel:The first phase of my approach is about parts work and so luckily that's not totally new and that's good because it's essential to healing as you But it is new
Wendy:in the psychotherapy world. IFS Yeah. Internal family systems thing. I never studied it but
Rachel:I didn't either. But I had parts where my foundation was Gestalt. Parts works all over Gestalt, and that's been around at least since, like, the seventies. So which is still pretty new. But, yeah, as far as befriending these parts or befriending our feelings, it's like, yeah, that relationship building, I think, in my approach is most important there.
Rachel:It's like you're not gonna be able to help yourself feel your pain if you have it all still tucked away in a closet. And the parts of you that you've tucked away, I used a Radiohead quote for this too. I don't know if you remember. They don't trust you because it wasn't just your parents and your teachers and your peers when you were little that said, don't be that way. Ew.
Rachel:It's like you decided that was the truth and you are the locker, you are the jailer, and all of us that are denying these parts and trying to cast them out or blaming ourselves for this quirk or that quirk, we're the ones who, at this point, are really kind of abusing our our little parts. And so we have to rebuild trust with them and we have to court them back out. The Radiohead quote is you do it to yourself. You do and that's what really hurts. But so yeah.
Rachel:The first half of this is really about like how do you find and reinvite, reintegrate with these hurting parts and then once they trust you enough then you can maybe help them clear out some other pain and yeah, Shamanism, Eastern Spirituality, it's all been a big part of my path. The person who was the most helpful who I'm private about because he's very private. He lives in a mud hut. He was, Apache initiated, and and he was the biggest influence of my work. And so and he was not he didn't like therapy.
Rachel:But but it's, you know, you can get good therapy. There is good therapy. I'm doing good therapy with people. But it's it's not what you think of.
Wendy:No. I totally understand. Yeah. So can you talk a little bit about your more spiritual bent? Like, how do you look at all of this through the lens of
Rachel:what
Wendy:you've discovered through your own spiritual experiences?
Rachel:Yeah. It's interesting. I mean, when I was young, when I had that awakening at 18 which in some way was just like I reclaimed some piece of my wounded self if you've heard of and maybe your audience is really used to spiritual talk like when people do soul retrievals and they bring back these like, fragmented parts. It's like that's a that's a version of the work we're doing, but it's someone else doing it for you. And I don't think it works that well, honestly.
Rachel:I mean, maybe it works.
Wendy:For you?
Rachel:Yeah. It's like at the end of the day, we have to
Wendy:Probably depends on the practitioner.
Rachel:It's true. Yeah. But also the person I think if we don't feel like we know what's happening or we didn't work for something, it's much harder to integrate it. Like, a lot of the end of the book is helping people. How do you integrate the transformation you've gone through so that you actually know who you are now?
Rachel:If we're not involved with something, in fact, my mentor would say a lot of what's missing as far as the wellness in our society is the convenience of things, like people who were living more indigenously or more earth connected. You had to have well-being and strength in order to bring forth fire or build your your home structure or hunt your food. Like, you can't be lazy and entitled and doing those things. Like, no matter how cold you are, if you don't know how to contribute what's needed to a fire by friction, you don't have fire.
Wendy:Right.
Rachel:So anyway and that was so foreign to me when I started learning from him in that way. But anyway, just to go back to the soul retrieval, and I'm not saying it never works, but I think the more involved we are in our healing, the more sustainable it will be and the more we will own the work we've done. You know?
Wendy:I wonder if what you're referencing is the person's state of readiness. I mean, because the idea of healing and going to a practitioner who will allegedly heal you when it's really it doesn't work that way in shamanism. The shamanic practitioner is just taking someone's request for healing from this world to the dream time world. Yeah. And it's the practitioner's relationship with their their helping spirits.
Wendy:That's that's the key. But in our culture, we're used to the magic pill. And if you go to a practitioner thinking, like, I'm gonna walk out of this session and voila, I'll be healed. I'll have all my soul parts returned, and I'll be whole again, and it'll be great. But it's just like a psychedelic experience to me.
Wendy:Right. I've never had a psychedelic experience, but well, with medicine. Mhmm. Right. They say the moment the medicine is out of your system is when the real work begins.
Rachel:And I think
Wendy:that's true with shamanic healing too. The moment your session is over, that's when your true work begins.
Rachel:Yeah. I love that. And I think the therapeutic industry is way too focused right now on psychedelics as that bigger, faster, quicker thing. And, you know, I realized while you were talking that, like, one of the big supports right now in my life in the last few years has been a Dagura lineage diviner. Like, the first time I met him, I think I went in because of dating woes and I will get back to your question by the way.
Rachel:Although, in this exact moment, I can't remember it, but the soul Soul Rejuvenation. Yeah. I do remember it. It was about, like, what happened at 18.
Wendy:Oh, yeah. Your spiritual journey.
Rachel:Yeah. Yeah. I'll come back to it. But what I'll say is there was a diviner involved with a lot of my community and I was frustrated about dating and went to him but didn't say anything and blew on a quarter and he was like, woah. There's a huge space in the world for your work, but there's this block and he figured out all these things.
Rachel:Anyway, I've done probably, like, 6 or 8 sessions with him over the last 2, 3 years. And he has me doing stuff that is not intuitive to me, like, making offerings of milk, food. The last one, I just got back to my desert property and I was instructed to dump out 4 full bottles of liquor all over the land, which I had to spread out of course, so I didn't kill anything. But so in that way, that is a place in my life where I am happy to have help that I don't know anything about. You know what I mean?
Rachel:I'm like, tell me what to do. I'll do the rituals. I bring my most authentic feeling to it. I've received the help. It's clearly helping, like, so much has happened in my life since then.
Rachel:So it's not like I think we need to know everything about what's going on, but I do think in parts work integration, it's helpful. And so anyway, you asked me about my spiritual journey and when I first got access to my feelings again and when that first chunk of me came back at 18 through it was actually through the the boyfriend I had by accident. He begged me to stay with him when he went to college. You might know this from the story. And then the moment and I was like, hell no.
Rachel:Because I didn't wanna be left again. But I finally agreed, and the moment he went to college, he dropped me, like, whatever you would drop. And it was through being left again that I actually had this huge wake up, and there was this whole imagery around life's not a circle, it's a spiral, and here I was revisiting this thing I had been terrified of, but I wasn't the I wasn't the same person and so there was a real spiritual tone to this first layer of coming back to myself. I think emotions I was also smoking weed at the time. It was like in my new phase of exploring.
Rachel:Pretty sober in most of my life since like 21. I think things are intense enough as they are, but, yeah, I was having a pretty far out trip and I think I got really into Eastern religions. I spent a year in Nepal, and I was studying I was looking for what are their what are their healers like? And it it was so fascinating. We had talked about that forever, but because they didn't have the type of healers that I was expecting and where they did have them, it was really designed toward tourism.
Rachel:And they did have these village healers, the Jonkarees, and there was this thing, but it was so far outside of my ideas. And during that time, I also had a big insight around I'm not a Buddhist and I'm not a Hindu and but, like, I'm Jewish. That's how I found that author Roger Kamenetz. What does that mean? And so I've always had and part of my spiritual life now is in the the Jewish cycle through the year.
Rachel:I think there's some real brilliant technologies around the seasons and earth connection and doing evaluating how am I not being my true self that's part of my world. But, yeah, I taught yoga for years. I've done my undergrad thesis was on meditation. I did I've done a lot of meditation. And I think at this point, what's funny is when I was young, I really identified with being spiritual and I think I was trying to transcend or achieve something.
Rachel:And the more I've healed, I could I really don't care. Like, I feel like I'm mostly interested in being, like, my full human self. And now, like, I'm not trying to transcend anything at all. Like, I'm not thinking about liberation or enlightenment. In fact, I'm like, god, I wish I cared more because I don't know that I wanna keep doing this, but I will say as far as spirituality is like I this I am so driven right now.
Rachel:This is so clearly, like, the purpose of my life and the the work I'm doing.
Wendy:Right.
Rachel:Like, bring it using everything I have access to to, like, bring this body of help to the planet at this time and the the way that infuses my drive because I have a full time therapy practice. That's how I pay for my life. I have an apartment that I don't own, but that's expensive. I bought a house, and so it's like, I can't slow down no matter how much I've done for the book or retreats or anything publicity. Like, there's no slowing down.
Rachel:So I'm just really and hopefully, there will be, but I'm working so hard, but it's just so much like the calling that I can't stop.
Wendy:Right. Understood. Yeah. It makes me wonder if, I mean, it sounds like there's just, like, an integrative experience that you've had where it's like spirituality isn't this thing that's out there that you're striving for. It's just become a part of probably how you see the world based on all the experiences you've had and how you approach your work.
Wendy:Yeah. Yeah. Like, there's more to it than just this material reality. Right.
Rachel:Yeah.
Wendy:There's there's the mental world. There's the emotional world. There's potentially an other world.
Rachel:Yeah. Many.
Wendy:For those of you who are open to that idea. But but, yeah, I the idea of enlightenment makes me laugh. Yeah. I think it's, I don't know. It doesn't sound interesting to me to
Rachel:Get off the wheel. I don't know. This human thing's hard.
Wendy:And anybody who says they're enlightened, I wanna run-in the other direction, actually.
Rachel:Yeah. But Right. Yeah.
Wendy:The reason why I wanted to dive into that a little bit is because it seemed like, from reading your book, your reaction to Keith's suicide, which I think Yeah. Death does that to most of us is that we go into a really dark existential place.
Rachel:Yeah.
Wendy:And it's a a real perspective builder. Like, you start asking questions that you'd normally wouldn't ask unless something like that happens. Right?
Rachel:Yeah. I call myself an initiate of death. I mean, it changed my whole life. Like, I might be in fashion design or interior design if it wasn't for that. Luckily, I still love beauty, and I my apartment was in apartmenttherapy.com whatever.
Rachel:It's like I still buy too many clothes but, yeah, this I mean, my entire life was shaped in this being able to rise to the occasion to be able to transform this. And I will say, I think I I found this a lot in dating, like, that I underestimate how deeply spiritual I am, and I think it's because it's so integrated into who I am. But I've seen many a person look like they were electrocuted when they leave a date with me. She's so intense. Or just like, yeah, I mean, the interestingly, I think I am intense, but I think also there's been a levity like the last many since I feel like I got to a place where I really feel self love, like, I'm mostly having fun.
Rachel:And I and I think that I actually just edited a video I'd made for the Internet this morning or maybe yesterday, just being like, if you're not getting lighter in your healing, what is the point? Like, we don't have to take this seriously. I think the point of healing is to enjoy these short precious lives.
Wendy:Good point. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It doesn't have to be painful, drudgery.
Rachel:Yeah. And I think that is the natural outcome. When I say emotional resilience in the book title and one of my favorite little quips I came up with in this work is emotional resilience is the new happy. And the reason is that if you know you can handle and you know how to move all of your feelings through you, then you're gonna heal so much because you're gonna be able to clear out some of the backlogged feelings. You're gonna have such strength and confidence as you move through your life because surprise, surprise, there's never not hard feelings.
Rachel:No matter how strong you are, we're all gonna die. Everyone we love is gonna die. Like, there's no way out where you're not gonna occasionally feel bad. But if you're not afraid of feeling bad because you know how to feel bad well, like, skillfully, you're kinda golden to be who you are and to go big and to take risks. And I think people fixating on happiness or joy instead of that kind of robust, I'm going to feel everything.
Rachel:And the more we are willing to feel our bad feelings, our hard feelings, bad with in quotes, the more access we get to joy and to happiness. And I think the more genuine levity and delight we can have. So
Wendy:Yeah. You're talking about freedom, really. I mean, if you can experience all of you, the good, bad, and the ugly
Rachel:Yep. Yep.
Wendy:Then that's that's pure freedom.
Rachel:Yeah. Then it's like, well, what do you want? What do you wanna do with this short little life?
Wendy:And it's all very it's all very human too. Yeah. I know we've already kind of touched on this, but I wanna ask this question in this way because the word stuck comes into my mind all the time with respect to how I describe the folks that I work with in my practice too. And from your perspective and what you've learned, why do you think people are feeling so stuck?
Rachel:Lots of ways. I think the one level or echelon of people are they're just trying to not feel bad and so they're they're deeply ingrained in habits like, constant distraction, constant consumption, or chasing a high to avoid their pain that is so pervasive and those kinds of behaviors only lead to suffering whether it's relational or disease addiction, whatever it is. So there's there's that level. Those people are clearly stuck because they're trying to outrun themselves. There's no way of course, those people aren't coming into your office, so I don't think that's what you're talking about.
Rachel:I think probably the people that are coming to get help that are still stuck. I imagine it's more about kind of what we've already been alluding to around wanting to dip their toe in the pain maybe or or the truth enough to say they did it but that they're quickly running from it. So maybe if let's say like someone had a hard work presentation and so suddenly they're feeling imposter syndrome or shame or did I screw up? Am I a screw up? Those kinds of feelings.
Rachel:Most likely people are going to be like, oh, no. No. No. You know, kinda battle with themselves. No.
Rachel:You're doing it good. You're you're you did this well. And we think that that's us taking care of ourselves, and there's a lot of schools of thought that will say that's the right thing but it's basically like it's almost like trying to ride 2 horses would be one way to picture it or that I like to say there's a door in the bottom of the well of your pain but if you just dip your toe and then run away from it, you're you're not gonna get down there to see what happens when you feel it all the way through. So what I think I'm trying to teach is can you learn how to create a contained experience to actually feel how bad you feel? And it it wouldn't be in that meeting.
Rachel:It's not always the appropriate time to do it. That's why I talk about there's reactive emotional release work, there's proactive. Reactive. Let's say you had that hard meeting you feel like shit maybe go into the bathroom or around the block and you let you give yourself 20 minutes to really like wallow or suffer in that fear or shame that came up from your performance. Right?
Rachel:And then you would try to come out of it. That would be more of a way to move through something than just like the kind of constant battle. I think what people are dealing with more generally is that there is a constant suffering happening but an equally constant numbing happening and so nothing is acute enough or loud enough to be actually transformative whereas if we can touch or experience our our acute grief or our shame as a sensational experience of burning and collapse in the body for, like, a couple minutes. I mean, most people are afraid. Well, if I do that, I'll never come out of it.
Rachel:I'm like, yeah. Good luck trying to stay with it for a few minutes. Like, that's not unless your partner just died or you just got dumped. Like, most people can't sustain feeling for very long.
Wendy:I think you just hit on the key point that I think what leads to the stuckness is people's fear of if they allow themselves to feel the thing that they'll never come out of it.
Rachel:Yeah.
Wendy:And that they'll just sink down into a well of despair and stay there. Yeah. Maybe because of that lack of resilience, they haven't known what it's like that emotions do have that distinct beginning, middle, and an end. Right. Each wave of it.
Wendy:Yeah. And if you allow yourself to go through it, you will come out to the other side. But if you haven't let yourself have the experience, then you don't know that yet.
Rachel:Right. Yeah. There's the fear, but I also think all the years of numbing our body's natural mechanisms are being shamed out of them or conditioning ourselves out of them. That even once people are like, alright, fine. I'll feel my feelings.
Rachel:You got me. Even at that point, it's like you have to kind of like massage the system. You have to, like, retrain the body's capacity, the person's awareness. They're they're kind of like creating the muscular strength to stay with the feelings. A lot of and I think it's important to know that and I trust anyone who's inspired by this and picks up the book.
Rachel:You are gonna have so many very specific tips and tricks to try when you try. It will still be hard and a lot of the early experiences are feeling like a failure. The good news about that is that you probably already feel like a failure and so if you can just recognize up here I am, I'm even failing feeling bad. Then if you can track that into your body, then boom, you're in your feelings. But I think there's the fear that I agree is huge.
Rachel:And then there's the lack of kind of the system operating in in a healthy way. So that's part of what the skill building can do and in general I just think like the distance we have from our experience and there's so many ways that happens I think it's through what we've already said I think there's also language gestalt therapy really helped me. There's so many people were when they're talking about their experience, they start saying well, you know, and you go do this and then you feel this and there's all these ways we're trying to get away from our experience and one of my favorite things about gestalt is like the idea is agency, that sense of I can create change in my life is part of what creates health in a person and the only way we know what change to create is if we're really close to ourselves. So So it's all about really using language that's like, say I. You're not selfish if you say I.
Rachel:You're talking about yourself. Like you don't know what if someone's telling me they're experiencing like, well, you know, when you do this, you don't know what happens to me And I don't let none of my clients I call it the I game. They're not allowed to say or you when they mean I. Unfortunately, I've done it on dates too. People don't like that as much.
Rachel:But it's like, I think we're stuck because we're afraid of being really close to our experience, and we're afraid of it because it's painful. And once we taste and I think this is really important. It's an important point on the healing journey. People have to taste the relief for themselves. Well, I do my best to really make a case for this and to teach people how to do it.
Rachel:Sounds good. But until you have a tiny bit of relief because you sat with your pain for 15 minutes and you feel a little lighter, you feel a little more relaxed, you're gonna be like a little bit unsure. And if you cannot give up in that time, just keep trying until you have a taste of that relief. And then it's very self motivating because there's something that actually works. Like the hours of watching and scrolling and the pounds of eating, they don't actually make us feel better, but feeling how bad we feel does.
Wendy:Healing is not an intellectual process. It sounds like that's what you're saying. And that's, I think, where a lot of us wanna stay, and that's what I was kind of referring to earlier in how a lot of talk therapy is
Rachel:approached. It
Wendy:keeps you in that intellectual place. Yeah.
Rachel:Yeah.
Wendy:And if you read the book and if you get the steps in the book and you understand the steps, but then you don't actually go through the steps.
Rachel:Yeah. At the end of every chapter, I'm like, stop reading. Now go try it, please. But, you know, I can't make that choice. You paint the map to the well, and you you hope to make it sound enticing.
Rachel:And it's my deep prayer with my life that people will use this to just get freer and happier and kinder and more empathic, but I can only do my part. So but yeah.
Wendy:Yep. The invitation is here in the book.
Rachel:And I tried to make it really like I tried to not sound smart and to really I tried to make it really applicable for lay folks. Like, that's why poop is so great. Like, you're pooping. If you're alive, you're pooping. Right?
Rachel:And so I I've tried to make it accessible. I hope it is. It is. That's what I was going to say that it is a
Wendy:very reader friendly book. Yeah. Not intimidating at all. I mean, it makes you laugh. It also makes a lot of sense.
Wendy:So your approach is super inviting. Thanks.
Rachel:Yeah. Yeah.
Wendy:And so as we wind our conversation down, you are a practicing psychotherapist. So I imagine your practice is full, and you might even have a waiting list.
Rachel:You know, you'd be shocked. It's not. I've had moments well, the waiting list part, that's on me. Right? It's up to me to say, okay.
Rachel:No more clients. And I think that will happen more and more as the years go on. I think right now, like I've said, it's like I have 2 homes, and I love the work so much that I I don't always say no to the clients. I feel like I do have space. But I do yeah.
Rachel:If you you're welcome. If someone's interested in working with me, you could reach out. I do also have ways to work with me where they aren't so personal. Like, I have a DIY course that is like another guided journey through this emotional potty training program. I have like a bunch of classes I've taught that are all like in a catalog that you could do at your own pace.
Rachel:I have a membership and all of that is housed together and actually tomorrow I have 10 people coming to my property in the desert which I do twice a year for what I call the Becoming Ourselves Healing Retreat, where people come and they do kind of a deep dive of this parts work reintegration. They may they dedicate the retreat to a specific part of them. They're trying to court back and get to know, and we have a log for chopping wood, and we have a whole field of Joshua trees and cacti for throwing rocks and feeling feelings, and we we even nature connection and death and all these, like, sound healing. So, yeah, there's various ways to work with me, but all of them can be found through the feelingsmovement.com. One cool thing about making all this content, both the podcast and the YouTube version and I'm on some social media things, is that I really ask my clients like you said about shamanism it starts at the end of your session.
Rachel:I'm asking people who wanna work with me and you should only contact me if you're willing to work between sessions. You're willing to like kind of use the book and use the episodes to practice what you're so because I don't wanna talk at people for their therapy. I wanna use our connection.
Wendy:What's the point of that? Yeah.
Rachel:And but the great but if I didn't have all this somewhere else, I would need to because I would need to teach them. I don't think that the main thing that heals them is our voice.
Wendy:Oh, I see what you're saying. Okay. I thought you meant just as an approach. Yeah.
Rachel:Yeah. I mean, I don't believe anymore that it's our compassionate kind regard for each other that's gonna heal them. That's nice. I'm sure that they didn't get that always, but I'm pretty kind of fierce with my clients. I think the point is they need to learn how to be that for themselves, and there's a lot of teaching that happens.
Rachel:And so luckily, I've done that elsewhere, and we can use our sessions just to troubleshoot how it's going and to for them to practice with me how to drop into their feelings makes me a lot more efficient, but I only want people who are willing to do that. If you come in being like wanting me to explain the same thing to you over and over or just wanting to tell me your dramatic week, it's not that interesting for you. I could have you pay me to talk at me like your buddy, but it's not good for you and I'm too committed to that.
Wendy:So but as far as doing psychotherapy with folks, are you licensed just California. And when I
Rachel:work with people who are not in California, we don't use insurance and we don't call it psychotherapy. But because it's it is a little different, I've become a psycho educator. So I can do helpful work in a slightly in a slightly different way that feels in integrity. I think those laws are really about maintaining people's safety and integrity. They are.
Rachel:Yeah. I don't think it's that my my skills aren't helpful if we're not living in the same town. But, you know, I hold it a little differently, And and you can't get a super bill for it.
Wendy:Right. No. I just wanted to verify that for people who might be interested in
Rachel:Yeah. Looking for it. Trouble, but I do work with people outside of California. And we do
Wendy:Well, psychoeducation is a very different thing than psychotherapy.
Rachel:Yeah.
Wendy:So that makes sense. And and then out of pocket makes sense too. What is the name of your podcast?
Rachel:The podcast is the healing feeling shit show. Yeah. You know and every episode has a poop story like in fact if you have one I'd love you to record it and email it to me and I poop my pants kind of story at comic relief poop story but I I mostly am not doing episodes. I am gonna do an abbreviated season this season with about 6 to 8 episodes just to kind of, like, celebrate the book coming out. But because this was the first iteration of me getting this workout.
Rachel:So now the book is out.
Wendy:So is it just you discussing your ideas and thoughts with folks? You're not talking with guests.
Rachel:Well, season 1 is kind of like a version of the book. Season 1 is a guided journey through healing in this way. It's a lot less refined than the book at this point. I wrote it in 2018, and it's really good. It's thorough.
Rachel:It's like and a lot of the quotes that you hear from in the book of clients are actually in the podcast. I wrote essentially a book and then turned it into a podcast and then tried to turn it into a book and edited it for 5, 6 years. But, season 1 is that. Season 2 is interviews with healing experts and there's like, probably maybe about 10 sessions of me doing therapy with people Oh, wow. Who were willing to do it on the Internet.
Wendy:Okay.
Rachel:And then I did a few special episodes, one with my high school therapist like I said, one about coronavirus, one with friends who are in a band for, like, a kind of very sporadic season 3. And then this season will be me interviewing people. Like, the first interview is the person who has a quote on the cover of my book who's a trauma therapist. Part of the motivation to do this, I met Gabor Mate and gave him a letter, and he agreed that I could, interview him. I'm waiting to hear back to schedule it, but I was like, yeah.
Wendy:That's a big get. Alright.
Rachel:So, like, it's a good idea to put out a few, and part of it will be for people to meet some of the endorsers of the book. Like, who are these people that are sharing their opinion? But I generally I don't think that the best use of my life is to be a talk show host. And so I'm trying to just go where I'm most useful. And so that it was really important and I knew that I wanted to get the book out.
Rachel:Like, this is really about championing a body of understanding and knowledge to help train people and so the book is a good way to do that. We'll see what other ways come up.
Wendy:Well, your creative mind, I'm sure, will come up with some interesting things that will probably surprise you.
Rachel:Yeah. And, like, whatever the universe wants from me. Right when I went viral, I had a viral moment shortly after that first set of rituals, which is funny because at first, I was I was on a trip in Europe after I did all the rituals, and I had a different thought. I was like, oh, maybe I'll do this book instead of that book first. And I was like, oh, that must be the the fruit of the ritual.
Rachel:Like, that was it. Right? And then, like, 6 weeks later, I went from 2,000 followers to a 112,000 followers in, like, a week. But anyway, right after that, I had a couple TV producers reach out to me, and we actually created a pitch. And it was one of those moments where I was, like, that kind of attention could ruin your life, like, ruin my life.
Rachel:Let's say, Let me own it and not say yours. But it was even in that opportunity. I'm like, I'm just a yes. Like, I want to be used well. I want to took me this long to be able to ride this weird pony that I am, and so I think there's medicine in that, just being willing to be seen as a weird authentic expressive human.
Rachel:And so I'm kind of hoping to say yes to as many of the opportunities that come my way but also with balance and hopefully getting compensated so I can work a little bit.
Wendy:That sounds reasonable. Yeah. Alright. Well, Rachel, thank you so much for coming on the show.
Rachel:It was so fun. I really like you. So easy to talk to you.
Wendy:Sweet. I like you too. Yeah. Thank you.
Rachel:Cool. Well, thank you. Thank you for having me.
Wendy:Well, given how things are unfolding in the world, and in the US in particular, who knew a shit show could be this inviting? To learn more about Rachel's work, or to purchase a copy of her book, please visit the feelingsmovement.com. Thank you so much for joining me today, and for helping me spread the word about Lucid Cafe. I'll be back in a few weeks with the next episode. It's another really good one that's delicious and heart opening.
Wendy:How's that for a tease? Until next time.
