The Self-Connection Podcast: S1 E 21 With Jennifer Nagel : Pregnant with Life

Jennifer Nagel is the Director of Training Development for the Satir Institute of the Pacific.  She has a private practice as a therapist, is a published author and an international trainer (in China, Canada and Kenya. in the Satir Model and Transformational systemic therapy.

We explore the topic of grace and finding grace in moments of chaos and overwhelm. Jennifer provides insights, wisdom and practices to help bring into our lives the energy of grace, gratitude, stillness and peace.  Jennifer discusses the importance of ownership of one’s feelings and responses and how empowering and grounding this can be. Jennifer shares her experience of Virginia Satir’s work and how it brings her such joy and vitality.  She shares some advice for how to stay connected to Self during difficult times and we arrive at a beautiful idea that we are all pregnant with life and we ought to protect, nurture and live fully that life within us. 

1:32 Jennifer leads us in a self-connecting meditation

5:21 Tim reads from Jennifer’s book and Jennifer reflects on the word “Grace”

What is helping me here at this moment right now? Can I notice my breath, the fresh air?

What’s sustaining my life?

9:12 We need chaos in order to experience grace.  Jennifer talks about the importance of pausing and being in the present moment to connect to grace.

How does your grace interact with the chaos of life?

Jennifer talks about how grace helps create a sense of peace and presence. She talks about the practice of taking moments of stillness and of gratitude. Putting a hand on her heart and stilling herself.

Notice and appreciate that keeps going on no matter what happens.

12:40 What are the thoughts, attitudes and beliefs that are connected to grace? What are the expressions of wisdom that express grace? Jennifer mentions that we have all the resources for survival and growth.  Also, as human beings we do the best we can with what we know how to do.

Jennifer talks about going beneath the surface of behavior and listening with curiosity for the deeper need. The need to be heard and connected

We may have the capacity to love,but the capability occurs through learning and practise over time

Imagining the iceberg is a skill that can be learned. Awareness of one's and another’s feelings, perceptions, expectations and deeper still their yearnings

17:52 How can we connect to our Resources? Asking yourself when do I start to react? What’s happening in my body? Can I pause and take a breath? This allows us to slow down, pause, instead of going into fight or flight or freeze?

Be curious about what is going on inside of you and in others?

20:28 Can I own my experience? Notice what’s happening in my body, feelings, what meaning am I making? Being open to alternative meaning.

Some helpful questions for self-reflection

What else could it mean?

What’s happening in my feelings? What am I needing right now? What need is unmet?

I can only be in charge of my response and what I am doing.

23:30 Beliefs are alive. They are living when they are embodied in action. I own my experience and actions. Owning my experience and then connecting to a deep yearning that can help transform the experience.  We can be in touch with peace and start to embody that.

26:00 Tim asks Jennifer to make more concrete the forms of grace and peace as living energies.

Jennifer talks about flow and harmony and how she experiences calmness and stillness with vitality in her body. Feeling grounded on the earth.  Experiencing something greater than oneself.  “I experience myself as part of a whole. “ she says.

The notion of ownership may be grounding itself.

I own my experience; I own my response.

Anger is an emotion that projects our attention externally and it's easy to lose ourselves in the experience of anger.

Tim shares Virginia’s idea that parents experience having holes in them which they try to fill by bringing children into the world; those children experience/feel that they have holes. Virginia helped people understand that they were already whole, not hole-y. Being whole means that I have all the worthiness and resources within me.

A grounding exercise might be to say:

I own my feelings, thoughts and needs

I own my responses

I can breathe and own the response that comes next..

Connect to your deeper yearnings.

 When I connect to my yearning, for example, the peace that becomes a gift to myself  and to the other.

30:30 Jennifer when we are in touch with our yearnings we are much more able to be compassionate towards ourselves and others.  Connecting to yearnings helps us account for ourselves, others and the larger context.

32:30 Jennifer shares about Virginia’s work on her life, personally and professionally. She had always felt something was missing. Learning about the foundations of Virginia’s work provided a framework that was grounding for her.  Whereas other models focused on different aspects of experience, Virginia’s work helped Jennifer look at the full spectrum of experience.

Experiential, transformational, looking at the whole system.

36:00 Jennifer shares her ideas about changing our use of the word tools to vehicles for change. Focusing on the process of change. There is a dynamic fluidity to processes than tools. 

39:30 Jennifer shares the 5 essential elements from the Satir Model: Positively directional, the use of Self, Change focused, systemic, experiential. As long as other techniques are congruent with these 5 elements she can incorporate it. She focuses on the relational process and does not see therapy as doing something to people.

41:30: What is self-connection to Jennifer and how she connects to herself. She describes herself as preparing herself to be fully present so she can connect with others. Spending some time alone perhaps in silent meditation to simply be.  Jennifer emphasizes the importance of owning one’s experience as separate from other people.

44:40  The belief and knowing that clients have the resources to learn and survive. Jennifer doesn’t burden herself with having to do something but focuses on being something and providing the conditions for the work to occur. She experiences a lot of energy and fun in that work.

47:00 Jennifer encourages Self-connection to pause and to reflect on what we can be grateful for. Finding moments of grace in the face of chaos.  “At this moment in time, I can breathe…I am alive…”

In each moment reflecting what you can be grateful for.

48:30 Tim asks how do you encourage grace and gratitude in the face of deep anxiety, depression or anger.  Jennifer shares that during her husband's cancer diagnosis and treatment she was pregnant and this pushed her focus on self-care and manage her energy.

Jennifer said she emphasized breathing and being in nature. Being in nature helped her feel grounded.

 50:33 In order to get to that place of gratitude, you need to believe that there is something to be grateful for.  It’s an act of faith to get there. If I have the belief that there’s always something to be grateful for, then you have something to strive for.  You may not be pregnant with a  fetus, but you are pregnant with life and potentials in you. We need to protect the life within us and the yearnings that are desiring to come out. What if we protected our core Self to the level we would protect an unborn child?

We are all pregnant with life. We need to protect our life force...

When we do not honour, protect and express our life force..atrophy, destruction and suffering ensues.

The Self-Connection Podcast: S1 E 19 With Eva Wieprecht Coping with Fear during the COVID -19 Pandemic

Eva Wieprecht joins me again to discuss some strategies and ideas for coping with stress, fear and anxiety during the pandemic. She shares a tool using the acronym COACH which stands for Centering, Openness, Awareness, Connection and Holding. We go through these steps which involve processing challenging emotions like our fear and using physical movement to help embody each resource and to deepen our connection to ourselves and to others.

The Self-Connection Podcast: S1 E 18: with Heather Valley

Heather is musician who lives in Hamilton, Ontario and is originally from a smalltown in Northern Ontario. Her music can be described as dream folk or americana noir. I first meet Heather back in July of 2019 at a time when I had first learned about my mothers cancer, and I had experienced a few other significant losses in my life that were very difficult for me.  

Her debut album, Desert Message, was released independently on November 22, 2019 to great critical reception, earning a coveted 5-star review and the #1 album spot at altcountry.nl for 2019. It was included on numerous 2019 "best of" lists and has been reviewed, covered and playlisted by The Philadelphia Inquirer, Hamilton Spectator, View Magazine, Steel City Music to name a few. , She performed at various music festivals and has a growing following. I feel fortunate to have met Heather at this point in her career and to see her play at these small and intimate shows as I’m sure she will grow to have many fans and playing in bigger and bigger venues. 

In this interview we talk about Heather's journey over the past few years, her transition from being a litigation lawyer to a musician, the toxic relationship that played a role in leaving that career, and ultimately her ongoing journey of recovery from a complete breakdown and learning to love herself.

2:00 Heather provides some background about her music and the genre it is situated within. Southern country gothic. Tim shares about encountering Heather’s music and its impact on him. 

6:20 Heather shares her story. Growing up in Northern Ontario surrounded by nature and training as a cross country skier. She describes her relationship with nature which was a touchstone connection that runs through her music. She describes herself as the opposite of an old soul. She describes her naivete and belief in people at their word and her yearning for life experiences. She studied cultural anthropology and transitioned to law school. Pursuing law was a way of proving herself that she could make it in the world of man. The further she went down the path of law the further she diverged away from her natural and inner desire for art, music and nature. This made it more difficult for her to know who she was. As she went further down this path, she describes feeling trapped within it, which then lead her to look for validation in the wrong places. 

14:00 Heather honestly expresses wearing the trappings of roles and exercising that ability to be able to meet everyone else’s expectations and the pain that creates of not knowing who she was. 

14:45 Heather describes the romance that unravelled her life. She shares her experience of being deceived, cheated on and hurt within this relationship and the inner conflict between what she was going through and experiencing. and who she thought she should be as a strong professional woman. She talks about her attempts to leave the relationship but also the ambivalence that can exist in any toxic relationship and how challenging it can be to end such a relationship. 

19:50 After experiencing a great deal of stress and anxiety that manifested in physical symptoms, she took a vacation and went to see Gillian Welch perform live and it reminded her of a world that she longed to be a part of. Soon after she had an intense experience of being so disconnected mentally and physically at work losing her sense of time for several hours and feeling a fogginess of mind that made it feel like she was underwater. That same day she left her office and never returned. 

21:57 Tim asks what kind of validation was she receiving within the romance that lead her to getting caught up in an unhealthy relationship. She describes the emphasis within the practice of law the importance of managing your appearance and impression as part of the role. Heather talks about feeling that aspects of her self outside of specific roles had never felt seen before and that this person was able to make it seem that he could see and wanted to connect to that person. 

24:00 Heather shares about how her shared passion for music that was very romantic in theme finding its way into her experience of the relationship. She bravely shares that she was seeking a way out of the life of a lawyer and that this person offered and encouraged her departure from a life that did not feel authentic to her. 

26:50 Heather describes feeling like she was beginning to know herself through the gaze of this other person, We talk about what may be a necessary step of needing to lose yourself with someone, an unhealthy connection, in order to find yourself. We talk about the widespread dynamic of external approval seeking that we all experience in our growing up, in our education system which then finds its way in how we approach intimate relationships and relationships of any kind. 

29:10 Heather talks about a ‘conflict habituated form of love’ that we can all begin to become attached to because of their emotional intensity. She describes how long it took for her to recover and begin the process of grieving and feeling again. 

30:30 Tim asks Heather how she was able to create a boundary to leave the unhealthy relationship and heal. She describes the challenges of being deceived and struggling to trust. On some level, she thought this was the best that love could be. Heather honestly shares about the ambivalence of wanting to leave and also wanting the relationship to continue.  

In her situation, Heather gives credit to the circumstance of this person being arrested and giving her space as he would not have the means to contact her so she could heal and as part of that to write her songs which was an important part of her healing. 

38:57 Heather offers her story as a caution that when someone breaks your trust to listen to that as an important detail that person and what to expect. She talks about how difficult it is to have a healthy relationship when cheating has taken place. 

40:30 Heather points out that the painful things of our lives do not end neatly. She felt she needed to hit absolute rock bottom and to learn to love herself from that point.    

41:45 Tim shares his reflection on the ways we are invited to play roles and the potential we have to lose ourselves by getting hooked by the expectations of others.

44:30 Heather talks about her wish that she could transform her experiences into something beautiful that could be meaningful for other people. Heather says:

“I don’t believe in justice. I believe the most noble thing you can do with your time is to help other people who are suffering feel less pain and sometimes feeling understood is part of that.” 

“When you have gone through trauma, naming it is a way of taking it out of your own soul and putting it in the world so it’s not able to just eat away at you. And it’s a way of telling the truth of where you have been, which is a way of standing up against abuse.”

46:00 Heather shares feedback about her music from audiences that sound like, “I’ve experienced something that’s being called out in this music and thank you for helping me feel like I’m not alone.” These moments make Heather feel it is all worth it. 

47:10 Heather describes how difficult it can be for people who are highly empathic and who have survived abusive relationships to set boundaries. To not feel guilty about setting boundaries and saying no when that’s what fits and feels safe and right. 

50:50: Heather shares the acronym for identifying toxic relationships: justifying, arguing, defending, explaining. When the relationship is a toxic pattern and you find yourself in these modes of JADE, these efforts are more opportunities to be invalidated. 

51:40 Often, toxic relationships stem from the seeking of validation outside of oneself. This pattern of seeking external validation is established in our public education.  

“You can’t be worried about how you will be received. You just have to be as authentic and true as you can be.” 

54:30 Tim asks Heather how, as a performer, she deals with ego-mind that could easily worry about other’s judgments. 

In preparing for a show, Heather explains her thought as, “I’m going to be as honest as possible and to tell these stories through this music in the best way I’m capable with this practice.” And then I have to just trust that it will connect with people.”

56:30 Heather reflects positively on the challenges she has experienced as allowing to be in a place where she has something that she feels is worth sharing. She talks about overcoming her shyness and the dynamic of sharing something that is specifically her story but general enough that it resonates on the level of human experience with others. 

58:15 Heather shares “It’s ok to be weak. When the right people are in your life, they’re not going to make you pay for those moments. You can’t be strong all the time.” Heather shares that she went through her difficulties because she was so proud and afraid of showing weakness and internalized everything.  

Tim reflects on his work with people, particularly men, who begin with an attitude that feeling and expressing vulnerable emotions is weak. Through their work in therapy, they learn that, in fact, feeling, sharing one's weakness is tremendously courageous and also receiving help can be the ultimate expression of human strength rather than isolation and suppression.  

1:01:40 Heather emphasizes the importance of finding people that you can trust and feel safe with to open up with.  

Heather quotes the saying, “When you’re wearing rose-coloured glasses, all the red flags look like white flags.”

The Self-Connection Podcast: S1 E 17: Building a Community

0:00 Sharon begins with a medtiation.

8:30 Our conversation begins focusing on community.  Community is a coming together of people with like minded values. There is a sense of belonging, Sharon cites research that people are going to be experiencing more depression over time as people are sequestered into virtual social media spaces. 

We talked about the importance of community for refugees like the Vietnamese boat people that came to Canada in the 70s of which Tim’s wife is a child of.

14:00 Sharon finds inspriation and energy from her connection to the Satir community and her church.  Many windows one light. There is something powerful and connective when a group of people sing together. 

17:00 Tim shared his appreciation for the joy and willingness that people at the IHLRN conference showed for contributing to the conference with even the smallest of tasks.  Our sense of feeling useful and helpful we can feel meaning and purpose in our lives. 

19:30 Sharon shared about her community growing up of about 100 people and that neighbors would be very well connected and helpful to each other. Now that most of us live in large urban settings, we are very disconnected and we don’t know our neighbors.

24:00 Tim mentions how Sharon is a leader in building communities virtually through Virginia’s work. 

29:00 When we connect through our similiariities we can apprecaite our differences in a positive way. 

30:30 Sharon mentions the temperature reading tool as a way of getting to know each other. 

A temperature reading involves sharing appreciations for oneself and others, puzzles (things that are problems that need to be resolved), complains and recommendations, new information and hopes and wishes.  

33:00 We talked about Tim’s experience doing a piece of therapeutic work in front of a group of 40 people with Laura Dodson and how supportive it is to do personal work within the context of a safe group , a community.