Ep. 3 - Are the inner and outer different, or is it "as is the microcosm, so is the macrocosm"?

Are the inner and outer different, or is it "as is the microcosm, so is the macrocosm"? 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Welcome back, or welcome for the first time. Are the inner and outer different? Or is the microcosm as is the macrocosm? That's what's on the table today. I am Myung An. I'm here with Dr. Ruby Lambert. Dr. Ruby Lambert is a licensed psychologist specializing in mind-body wellness interventions. His Zen monk name, Mu Sang, which means Dispeller of Delusion. Dr. Lambert also integrates the wisdom of Zen with modern-day scientific psychological research to provide training and interventions that target the mind-body body, and spirit.

SPEAKER_01: 1:03

And I'm here with Myung An Sunim. Myung An Sunim is the abbot of Soshimsa Zen Center, a spiritual chaos specialist, inner turmoil pacifier, stale water agitator, transformational guide, Zen master, and a speaker.

SPEAKER_00: 1:23

As is the microcosm, so is the macrocosm. This is our topic for the day. It shows up in so many different traditions. This is not Zen only. We see this in Taoism. We see this in emerging in all of the traditions when we look deeper into the perhaps mystic approach to reality. More so then the question of is the inner and outer same or different, to be perfectly honest, the same or different, again, are problematic, as was with our last episode. Here's the and or problem again. Here's the and or problem again, yeah. It is, well, we'll let people draw their own conclusions and look at their own, Lives, perhaps. The principle of it, the inner and outer, could jump from the internal elements of the body versus the external elements of the larger body, if you will. We are just about the same amount of water as is the earth. We have our cycles, as does the moon. We have our seasons as does the world around us. We are a miniature reproduction of what is. If we consider the approach perhaps from the physiological standpoint and the low-hanging fruit being this idea, perhaps, of the trees outside, and they're rooted into the ground, that which is beneath the surface, and then we see the tree trunk, the canopy. And if you consider the branchial tree, the lungs and the upturned, And if you consider that Holy Communion of our exhalation of carbon dioxide and the tree's inhalation of it, and then the tree's exhalation of oxygen and our inhalation of it, we are in Holy Communion. Or if you wanna get a little bit more vulgar, we're French kissing the world continuously. And this rhythm, these Rhythm of life, this is the heartbeat of existence. In our physical being, the heart has a musical rhythm to it. And it's not only that it echoes within our veins and it's not only that it pumps blood through the veins, veins also could be compared to the rivers of the world, if you wanna look at it that way, but it is this echo that our thump is the thump of the world the ebbs and the tides of the waters outside. If you consider, from the oriental medicine standpoint, sleeping far too late into the morning and being subject to tides and then the flooding of tides and things of that. So in terms of managing our health, it's the same principle. Being in accord with the grand. The rhythms of life.

SPEAKER_01: 5:23

And so that's... Synchronizing. Synchronizing with it. You know, and even with sleep, there's a scientific principle called the circadian rhythms, right? And when we synchronize to that, then your body is basically working in harmony with the inner processes of the body and the external forces within nature, right?

SPEAKER_00: 5:41

The natural was always like this, dictated. When we were attuned, when we have prior to... the development of the technology as we have it today, it's

SPEAKER_01: 5:58

easy. Yeah, now people say, there's an app for that.

SPEAKER_00: 6:01

It's easy. There is one. Don't think about it. There's a Circadian app that you put in your, I believe, your location, and it maps out for you when to go outside and get some food. sun exposure, when you should eat, when you should go to sleep, when you should wake, according to your circadian rhythm, and balancing that out. It is easy for us to get lost in technology. We've invented these fantastic tools, these lights, etc., etc., and they are useful when they are useful, and they are detrimental to our well-being when they are used not in accord with these kind of rhythms of life and nature. The blue light, there's so much talk about it now, staying off your devices and things like that prior to ensure that you have the proper chemistry going on in your body. I mean,

SPEAKER_01: 7:08

insomnia is a major issue that millions of Americans suffer from nightly. and you look at the connection between good sleep and countless physiological and psychological health benefits, right? So if you have this preexisting condition of insomnia, and then now you don't engage in good sleep hygiene, such as the endless scroll that many people are facing on a nightly basis, And it's funny, I heard some theory of evolution that said in the future, human beings will have a very large index finger. And they were referring to the endless scrolling that were just going and going and going, right? The index finger is doing a lot of work, but like you're saying, that blue light exposure, it's really having an impact on the release of melatonin. And something I always try to highlight to people is that try to catch that magic window of sleep. It's the hours of what, 10 p.m. and 2 a.m., I believe, where the melatonin release and the human growth hormone release occurs. But again, if we're throwing off the sleep cycle, if you're engaging in just bad habits before bedtime, and you did a workshop on insomnia, right? I have one coming

SPEAKER_00: 8:26

up this month, in

SPEAKER_01: 8:28

fact. So you're not aligning with... The circadian rhythms.

SPEAKER_00: 8:35

Right. And on the... There are various ways, obviously, to measure one's state of depression. Hamilton scale, as I'm sure you know of it, is one of those things. Supposedly, the... Balancing out of your sleep pattern, the sleep hygiene and getting your sleep in order could lower your score on a Hamilton scale more significantly, somewhere it said, more significantly than the medicine does. And again, so now back to this is the microcosm and the macrocosm thing. It is my understanding that the medicine we take made outside works only because we have the receptors already inside. And we have receptors because we make the same pharmacology that we get from outside, we make inside. We have the whole entire pharmacopoeia of hormones and painkillers and everything if the body, if the organism is doing what it needs to be doing, if it's in alignment with its natural mode of existence. It is such a balancing act and such a difficult task nowadays with developing the wisdom that just because a technology is available to us, it doesn't necessarily mean or the idea of when and how to use it properly. That's maybe better put. And so this idea of seasons and time externally are also present in the body. Again, in oriental medicine, we have the clock, the body clock, where every two hours there's a interest of a particular organ and its function in the body. Now, of course, the view of organs in the body from the oriental medicine standpoint is a little bit different than the Western medicine. So the organ is viewed as not just a physical location, but everything that it is kind of responsible for as well. And so we have this clock of this and this hour, this and this hour, which part of the body, which organ is being given more attention, which organ is working harder.

SPEAKER_02: 11:21

And

SPEAKER_00: 11:23

then also we have the same thing within the seasons. We're coming out of winter, going into spring. The spring-associated sluggishness is, of course, this echoing of the external

SPEAKER_01: 11:41

and the internal. Right, so you're saying the changing of the seasons. I think that people look outwardly, and obviously these eyes look outwardly, right? And so we can see that pretty soon the things are gonna start to sprout. The temperature is gonna change. We're gonna get more sunlight, right? Isn't the issue also people don't reflect inward and they think, oh, that's out there. I'm separate from that. And they don't see the natural changes that are occurring inside of themselves, right? So like a snake might shed its skin. What about human beings? What kind of changes occur inside the body during the changeover from winter to spring, right? We understand that right now people might start to get a lot of dreams, right? The body will start to change, just like nature is changing, right?

SPEAKER_00: 12:28

We get the falling leaves, and we say, well, look how messy it is outside. Go and rake. But if you have an animal, their falling leaves are falling out of them. They're shedding. You've got animal, your cat, dog, chinchilla, fur everywhere. And we have to consider that there's an internal change going on in the tree, and there's an internal change going on in the animal. And like you said, we think ourselves fancy. We have four legs, but we think ourselves fancy, so we call these upper ones, we call these arms, and those down there are legs, because I wanna be special. We're a four-legged creature. We're an animal just like any other animal. And we have internal changes that go on, that mimic the change of the world. We dress differently. You get your wardrobe out. You might as well get your- There's a new

SPEAKER_01: 13:27

skin that we're

SPEAKER_00: 13:28

putting on, right? Yes. You control your temperature. We have AC and heating and all of those ways that we now don't need to shed in a sense, although we do, absolutely do.

SPEAKER_01: 13:43

And I think there's a very interesting aspect oriental medicine principle that I've heard you speak about where in this transition from winter into spring, during the winter time, the body, almost as if it's frozen, holds on to many of the toxins. So there'll be a, as things start to thaw out, there'll be this dump, therefore giving people a sense of fatigue, right? And having maybe difficulty concentrating and things of that nature. And so that's where you recommend, what, talle, right? To eat as a

SPEAKER_00: 14:20

counter. If you could forage for the wild scallions. By the way, remember the disclaimers of this podcast. None of this is medical advice. It's just the two of us chit-chatting, meandering through the twists and turns of our brains. The tiredness... is a result of overworking liver. So this thawing out that we see outside, in the winter, the earth holds water. It preserves the water for when the spring times, we need lots of water in the springs, ergo the rains of spring, but also we've held water ready for the spring. Our bodies are the same way. We've held so there was tension over the course of the winter now things are thawing out During the holding that tension that the body holds all over the muscles Now with the thawing out there's a release of everything that's kind of stored there including toxins including things that now the liver has to process in this processing the liver gets tired, and so we get the seasonal sluggishness. The multitude of dreams are a result of the

UNKNOWN: 0:00

,

SPEAKER_00: 15:41

the unconscious mind changing the way that the body functions. So now, again, seasonally speaking, liver has to do more work. It knows. It knows that it has to do this, and so it does. So whatever we could do to support that, roasted dandelion root tea, is available in your regular supermarkets. That's a nice supportive thing.

SPEAKER_01: 16:05

Yes, it's supposed to be one that, it's a toxic cleanser,

SPEAKER_00: 16:10

right? Yeah, and a little of a

SPEAKER_01: 16:13

support for the liver and the kidneys.

SPEAKER_00: 16:16

Yeah, the other experience of the spring season, the shoulder seasons, both fall and spring, is that we have a tendency to be more emotional. Now, your mileage may vary. Different person is going to experience this differently, but we see more melancholy, some more depressive tendencies, sadness, things of that nature. But some people experience a little bit more agitation. And this is simply because we don't feel 100% in this season. Children express this in that same way. They are finicky and unhappy and they're crying. they're more attuned to, they can't verbalize any of it, but they're more attuned to the reality of how they're feeling in a sense. We, on the other hand, are so, so busy and so clever that we say, well, you know, I went for a longer walk yesterday, so that's why I'm tired. But there's a difference between the tired organ system and tired from work. It's a very different thing.

SPEAKER_01: 17:26

And if I can just piggyback a little bit off of that, Also, in oriental medicine, isn't the liver associated with the emotion of anger?

SPEAKER_00: 17:34

That's right.

SPEAKER_01: 17:35

So you might be more quick to anger in this season, too, since the liver is

SPEAKER_00: 17:41

overworked. And manage, must manage and subdue one's anger. Since we talked about patience in the last episode, I've mentioned idema with the sasang medicine, this idea of also... Letting your emotions run amok is equivalent to literally stabbing yourself in your organs.

SPEAKER_01: 18:02

Another interesting point, because we're talking about as above, so below, as in the external, so as the internal, as is in the macro, as in the micro. What we've seen for the past couple of days is a lot of wind, right? So imagine in the wind almost represents activity. The waking up of. The waking up of mother nature. And a lot of work is being done to do that. So when I reflect on that, I think, well, let's think about what you're saying there. In the inside, there's a lot of wind right now. My little guys in there are working

SPEAKER_00: 18:33

overtime. And if you have children, you'll see that. Children are bouncy. They are wind. Why? Because the season of life that they are in is the spring season. And they must vibrate. Their body must vibrate to pop open like popcorn

SPEAKER_02: 18:50

to

SPEAKER_00: 18:51

grow. The wind that we see outside rattles and shakes trees and grasses and things. They are clayed in by the winter. So the earth is polluted. pinching and holding on for the life to them in a sense. And this wind loosens the earth around the plant so that it could grow. It stimulates aeration, et cetera, et cetera. So it breaks away dead branches of trees to inspire new growth. Everything really is. Right, and

SPEAKER_01: 19:24

trees

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don't move.

SPEAKER_01: 19:25

So in order to have the tree vibrate, to, again, have the leaves come out, the wind shakes the tree to get all that stuff to come out, right? You hear that, parents? So I always try to teach parents, okay, yes, when kids are active, it's bothersome. But try to look and see the other side. What is the function of that? What is a benefit that can arise from that? So patience with your kids. All this extra activity is actually because, like you said, they're in the spring of their life. They're in the stage of growth. And so this helps to have them vibrate and grow.

SPEAKER_00: 20:02

Right. For children, the lungs have to be challenged during youth. If the lungs are not exercised, their development, their brain development is going to be stifled. Now, if we kind of extend and stretch out, if you consider in the body a state of imbalance, say some sort of edema where there's a pooling, So we have a pooling in one side. In a sense, if you think of like a pinched hose, you have the edema on one side and you get this vacuum on the other side of it. This is. Or a balloon, when you tie a balloon and you squeeze it, then

SPEAKER_01: 20:49

the

SPEAKER_00: 20:49

metal inflates. Yes. So you have this imbalance, too much of one thing and now insufficient on the other side of that pinch. we could consider that as a sickness in the body. In Korean, as a greeting, we say, Is your circulation well? Are you feeling well? Meaning is, whether it's blood or limb, is the circulation of your body and energetic, et cetera, et cetera, is your circulation well? And if that's the case, then you are considered to be in a state of good health. If it's not, if you have some kind of edema, and energetically speaking as well, then your circulation is not well. And so whether it's by holding a certain emotion so rigidly that it affects the body or the body's condition, and then now we have this mind and body element. If you consider that, that pinching, And that edema on one side and vacuum or insufficiency on the other side, within the body, that's a sickness. When a person or a family goes to a psychologist for family therapy, the psychologist must survey the whole family as one body and survey and see where the edema lies. Where is too much being given, whether it's too much... attention and where is the vacuum of insufficient attention, especially if you have multiple children. How is the circulation of interest and attention and affection and sternness and all of those multivitamins of life, is that circulating through the family well or is it not circulating well? Is someone feeling left out? Is someone feeling being always?

SPEAKER_01: 22:53

Well, there could be a dominant force, right? that is sucking all the air in the room or taking the resources away from the other family members, therefore creating that pinch. I always tell people, especially when they bring their children, it's not just a child, right? I use the metaphor of the ship. The family is on a ship, yeah. So it doesn't matter where on that ship you are, if you can be the captain driving, aka a parent, or you can be in the bowels, if a wave comes and hits, Does only one person or one part of the boat feel it? No, everybody feels it. So we have to survey and take a look at the family as a whole to understand, like you said, what are the areas in which we need to lessen a behavior or a form of communication and interaction? And what are the areas that need to increase, right? To kind of balance the scales there. Just like the organs inside of your body, This all ties in together. Circulation is key because let me just give a quick example of the outside and the inside. When you want to get to work and the highway is blocked, you cannot go. It's a traffic jam. Your destination is stopped. There's an edema somewhere. Now you have to stop. And when your circulation in your body stops, it is a heart attack.

SPEAKER_00: 24:19

Right, so it's a disease when the circulation isn't well. And then you've mentioned traffic patterns if we consider economy. Economy too. If we consider society, it is also. If the imbalance is there, it's not a healthy society. If the one side is pinched so severely that there's edema on one side and...

SPEAKER_01: 24:45

Yeah, just look at the eggs right now. The eggs are pinched. And the price of eggs are swelling. There's a diva on the price right

SPEAKER_00: 24:54

there. We have this idea of samje. Samje means three disasters. And again, this is more on the grand scale. If we look at the diva, then suje is the water disaster.

SPEAKER_01: 25:16

And

SPEAKER_00: 25:16

so if you consider, again, the world, when it's out of balance and we have these great disasters, whether they're fires, that's huajie, or pungjie, which is the wind, the tornadoes, those things, and whether it's tsunamis or severe floodings or droughts, et cetera, that's unbalance in the body of the world.

SPEAKER_01: 25:38

Yes.

SPEAKER_00: 25:40

Trying to balance itself actively. The body wants to be in a state of equilibrium. and homeostasis. But just like in our physical being, our cleverness gets in the way of the healing frequently. So too, globally speaking, we have gotten in the way of the natural cycles and we've caused some major things. And the way that we try to resolve these issues and address them, sometimes, well... Sometimes works, sometimes

SPEAKER_01: 26:14

doesn't. There's a saying that I tell people, the body has the innate capacity for healing. We just have to learn to get out of its way. And I want to also highlight a major point. You're talking about the three disasters with the wind and the earth and fire, and it falls in the realms of the excess. And I think this makes a good point because sometimes people, they learn about something that's beneficial, like water can be beneficial or some nutrition can be beneficial and they misunderstand because it's good, that means let me take more of it, right? And if you just look out into the world, the world is screaming and shouting these concepts of wisdom to people, helping them understand what is balance, right? So excess water in the body, essentially you're creating a flood, right? inside of your body. You're over flooding your body, which is not healthy or beneficial, so.

SPEAKER_00: 27:13

You know, if we hanker back to the oriental medicine principles and the system of meridians, right? So the meridians are these channels through which the flow of energy, and if it's flowing correctly, then it's all is well. And if not, so it stimulates our acupuncture points by various means to restore that circulation. during the occupation of korea the occupying forces would go around korea right the pungsochiri the feng shui principles if you will apply to the lay of the land and the flow of energy through the land and and there are therefore places that are more we call myeongdang, more suitable and packed with energy, and some other places that are not so good, depending on what you want to do in that place. And so the occupying forces would go around Korea and drive these long spikes into the ground as if it were acupuncture needles, sticking them into the grounds at times the energetic meridians, as in to cause illness to the country and therefore be, you know, weakened country, you could subdue it easier. And again, now we have this kind of internal and external micro and macro principles.

SPEAKER_01: 28:47

I believe in the Western science or the Western esoteric world, they call those ley lines, or throughout the earth. The... meridians or the channels in which energy flows. And very interesting too, I remember that Unsanemar teacher told us about Sokoram. So when they had made the, it's a national, actually international protected historic site that is preserved by the United Nations. And it's a very large stone Buddha that they originally had measured The intake of wind and the release of the wind and the rain flow and all of those things, all those factors were taken into place. And I believe upon the occupation, it was tampered with. So originally, no mold would grow on the statue. They had created a natural dehumidifier. But then they tampered with the placement of those things and then... Now the statue needs to be cleansed and things like that to get the

SPEAKER_00: 29:47

mold. It's covered. It's covered. Yes. And the same thing happened with, at Hainsa with the, with the sutras blocks. Yeah, it is, it is the same principle, internal, external. When we look at the consciousness and all of its various layers, In Zen, we really kind of go ham on it. It's not just conscious and unconscious or the subconscious. We have

UNKNOWN: 0:00

,,,

SPEAKER_00: 30:17

et cetera, et cetera. So these layers and sub-layers of conscious and unconscious and deeply unconscious minds. When you consider how those things express themselves externally, the external facing, our regular consciousness. We get dressed, we get pretty, we get makeup and do your hair when you go out and this is your expression. Hey,

SPEAKER_01: 30:46

speak about some others, not me. There's no hair to make up here.

SPEAKER_00: 30:50

Yeah, there's the expression of, the superficial consciousness expresses itself externally. Then what we get is sort of the more private portion of the, we could say, for example, not accessible to our conscious mind. So what we get at home is, you know, pajamas and disheveled hair. It expresses itself in that way. And then further still, what we get is the forgotten, almost storage of your basements and your garages and your things. And that's the storehouse consciousness, we could say. And this also could be seen when you look at your work desk and how you leave your work desk and your home office desk. If you look at those two things, there's frequently a tendency of them to being, look, they look very different. Your work desk, it's your outward facing mind manifests. The way that we do interior design. You design the interior of your house, of your office in a certain way to express or invite some mindset. If you look at your teenager's sort of classic room with their, you know. Posters

SPEAKER_01: 32:25

on the

SPEAKER_00: 32:25

wall. Right. If it's a boy band, then it's posters on the wall. Or, you know, if it's goth, then, you know, things are dark and black and things like that. If they're an athlete. If they're an athlete. They have sports related things. So it's an external expression of the internal. So as is the microcosm, so is the microcosm in this sense.

UNKNOWN: 32:48

Right.

SPEAKER_01: 32:48

Right, and I've noticed these patterns with people that become severely depressed. What comes first, the chicken or the egg? Does your environment become disorganized and therefore now has an impact on your psyche? Or does your psyche become sad, depressed, and fatigued, and therefore that has an impact on your environment? I think there's a correlation that goes both ways there, right? And so that's why it's very important to keep the environment organized neat and organized because we understand through psychology and feng shui that the flow of energy is blocked when things in the home is out of place, right? But sometimes internally things are out of place and therefore there's a spillover effect onto the home environment and then you're in a rush to get to work and you don't know where your keys are because they're out of place. And you think it ends there, it doesn't end there, right? You rush to get your keys, you're already in a heightened state of alertness, then finally you find it, you get in the car. Now because of that delay, there's that domino effect, now you're late to work, now what are you doing? You're rushing, you're doing the dash.

SPEAKER_00: 33:59

Get out of my way. Tending to your environment, inner and

SPEAKER_01: 34:02

outer. Then you get to work, your inner and outer world is completely out of balance.

SPEAKER_00: 34:07

Yeah. Remember, we did a summer camp years and years ago and How can I ever forget that? In the downtime, we designed these t-shirt images, Zen graphics, I think it was. And we created a Rorschach inkblot test, remember? It was on a t-shirt and it was blatantly a meditation guy in the middle of a butterfly. But yeah, I mean, granted, Rorschach is... for some now met with this kind of vestige of pseudoscience and no longer, but it was, it's an expression of an internal state of being. Sure. So again, this internal and external things that we can speak out and things that you can't speak out. Now, in Zen, we do the middle path because there are dangers as there always are. Too far away, towards the sort of microcosm focus, the individualization, and what we get, we get disconnected. We get wrapped up in self and one's own glory to the point where the egoistic tendencies become so, so, that it becomes unhealthy state of being. The I, only me. the only microcosm and the external is no longer taken into account.

SPEAKER_02: 35:42

And

SPEAKER_00: 35:43

so it's a problematic place to be. We could get despondent in that. We could get sort of listless. There is a psychological effect of being so tied up in oneself and not taking into account the greater element of existence. And on the other hand, we go the other way, because one could be so focused on the external, and the external is so, in fact, prodigious, so magnificent, this elephantine, great thing, and a human being is not able to cope with that, and they're ripped apart then. And then they suffer at the hands of... of this only external focus and interest and pursuits, and it becomes too much. We have a saying in Spanish,

SPEAKER_01: 36:46

which is this, what you're saying. In the house of the blacksmith, everyone eats with wooden spoons. This is someone that's just focused on the external and then forgets the things that are right there, right next to them on a day-to-day basis.

SPEAKER_00: 37:01

Right. So this idea, as is the microcosm, so is the macrocosm, invites a broadening and a balanced perspective on those two worlds, the inner and outer.

UNKNOWN: 37:13

Yes.

SPEAKER_00: 37:15

a healthy way is to consider both. If you're seeing yourself more wrapped up in one direction, if you're shrinking and gravitating towards only pursuing your own individual interests, and you're forgetting that we don't live in a vacuum, separate from the world, the umbilical cord from the mother is not cut we have an umbilical cord that connects us to the world at large. We are still connected. The inhalation and exhalation we've talked about, the water, if you poison the rivers, you end up drinking the thing, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So finding this balance of if you're going too far to one side where you're being too individualistic and too selfish and narcissistic, then you have to make an effort to expand your mind to consider the balance

SPEAKER_02: 38:14

the

SPEAKER_00: 38:15

thing that is bigger than I. And then on the other hand, if you are too much, too spread, and there's a balance of interest in dealing with reality at large, one cannot tend to all of the suffering of the world. We could do it drop by drop, we could do it here, right in front of us where we have the thing. But sometimes the mind spreads itself so broadly over the entirety of the world. And especially if there's a proclivity of it to focus on the negative and the horrible, of which there is plenty, absolutely. But if you gravitate only to that thing, it will rip you apart. So there's a wisdom in that. So if you're feeling yourself that you're too far stretched out into the world, then balance it out. Bring yourself back towards some of the individual inner versus outer, the microcosm and the macrocosm thing. And there isn't a fixed location for it. This is where the challenge is. As we move through life, we have to move between these two extremes. When do I consider the broader picture?

SPEAKER_01: 39:35

when

SPEAKER_00: 39:36

have I lost myself in selfishness, or when have I lost myself in the outer and haven't any left enough to tend to my own needs, to take care of my own self. Neglecting myself. Yes, and we see that in caregivers. Caregivers are externally focused so heavily that it almost becomes that if I tend to myself, I am selfish. Selfish,

SPEAKER_01: 40:01

and then there's this guilt issue. which mothers sometimes suffer from too, the mommy guilt. They just give, give to their kids and the household and the husband and work, and then they never take time to stop for themselves. And then this was where there's a reflection that we give to people, right? Well, yes, I respect that you're supporting your family, but you're neglecting your first family, the family closest to you, right? Your organs. Those are your family too, and they need support. support and care and tender loving too so we have to remind people to balance things out and then that's where we tell them in the world of self-care stop penciling in your self-care right take that sharpie marker and use the sharpie marker to the cell you have to consider that right when things are out of balance you have dis-ease in your life and then you can no longer help anyone as a matter of fact now people need to help you Right. You

SPEAKER_00: 41:01

become a burden. Essentially. You're providing, but if you provide so much that you've pulled everything out of yourself, then you become the one that is in need of being provided for. And also, as is the microcosm, so is the microcosm. Tending to your own state of mind, your own well-being, makes you a better caregiver. Right. makes you a better provider if you tend to your own things. Because if you come home and you're furious and frustrated and burnt out, everybody in the house is gonna get a little

SPEAKER_01: 41:36

bit of that. That's called displacement in psychology.

SPEAKER_00: 41:39

You're just

SPEAKER_01: 41:40

dumping.

SPEAKER_00: 41:41

And the innocent. Innocent

SPEAKER_01: 41:44

bystanders.

SPEAKER_00: 41:46

And so which one is the state of balance? How do we look at our Tending to ourselves is... Tending to others. Tending to others is tending to ourselves. As is the microcosm, so is the macrocosm. When do we end up in the separation? That is the crafty handiwork of the ego. It wants to put you over there and wants to put me over here, which... Doesn't mean we mustn't think like that, sure.

SPEAKER_01: 42:25

There's a time for that,

SPEAKER_00: 42:26

yes. So when do I gravitate towards the individual self without becoming a narcissist? When do I gravitate to the broader and the prodigious expanse of existence? And with that thought, your mind opens and broadens. So there's in that collapsing and opening And there's a fantastic element of the mind that I call the shrinking of the mind, and perhaps in one of the future episodes, we could get to that. Speaking of which, if you would like for us to address a particular topic or talk about something or mention something, you are welcome to leave a comment on Buzzsprout is where we host this podcast the audio version of it on YouTube we have the video version of it and of course elsewhere Facebook's, Instagram's, etc, etc so if you want to throw down a comment if there's something you would like for us to meander through we'll be more than glad to so far thank you for your support thank you for subscribing Thank you for joining and for listening. We enjoy our conversations. We've been doing this for years, this chitchat. And this is, it's external expression, external now including a broader world. What was just going on on a smaller scale, we are now out and open with this in a sense. Yes.

SPEAKER_01: 44:07

Thank you for supporting us. Please subscribe and like. And if you enjoy what we're saying, please pass it on to another person. Because a bucket gets filled one drop at a time. So spread the word, spread the love, spread the teachings. Thank you. Take care of yourselves and each other. Until next time.