Ready to be THE CALM amidst the CHAOS? Here’s how!
Season 1 • EP 04 • March 19, 2024
With Co-Hosts davidji & Elizabeth Winkler
Ready to be THE CALM amidst the CHAOS? Here’s how!
The power of presence is a superpower that leads to deeper fulfillment in life. And in this episode, meditation master davidji & transformational alchemist Elizabeth Winkler share the secrets of living in the present moment as the key to greater clarity, happiness, empathy, emotional intelligence, and creativity. Our co-hosts share the surprising tranquility that a meditation practice brings to our most important relationships, our daily decision-making, and navigating the often chaotic morning routine of getting ready and out the door to work & school.
Parenthood, with its relentless pace, often leaves us yearning for a pause button. Elizabeth shares her own journey of finding peace of mind amidst the turbulence of restless kids in carseats. davidji takes you through the power of Pratyahara, the practice of releasing all of our senses and turning inward, and its application in our daily hustle & flow. As they exchange stories and insights, you’ll discover how a consistent meditation practice can not only offer a refuge of calm but also enhance the dynamic bond with our children. It’s about being the stillness inside the storm and learning to welcome life’s interruptions with grace and laughter.
Wrapping up the episode, the transformational pair boldly discuss the illusions we all chase: our perceived need to be perfect, the finish line of life, adulthood’s pressures, and the ever-lurking impostor syndrome. The Shadow and The Light Podcast casts a light on these hidden facets of ourselves, celebrating a holistic embrace of life’s full spectrum. We leave you with practical mindfulness techniques and an invitation to hold up the mirror and continuing to explore the depths of our shared human experience.
Big shoutout to the amazing Jamar Rogers for creating such powerful music and lyrics for the official song of The Shadow & The Light Podcast! Deep gratitude~
Music: 0:00
I will not be afraid of the shadows in the dark. They will lead the way to the hidden deathways of the heart and that secret place that is where I find my start.
davidji: 0:17
Welcome to the Shadow and the Light podcast with internationally renowned meditation teacher davidji and heart healer and psychotherapist Elizabeth Winkler, as we guide you through our unique fusion of ancient wisdom and modern psychology.
Elizabeth Winkler: 0:33
Get ready to awaken your true essence, heal your wounds and transform your shadow into.
Music: 0:43
The Light is here to remove our deep tenderness, to bring you light. The Light is the one that will go to the deep to take us to new heights. The Shadow and the Light.
davidji: 1:03
Hi davidji. Oh, hello there, elizabeth, how you doing. I’m great.
Elizabeth Winkler: 1:09
I was talking with a psychiatrist the other day. Yes, we’re talking about meditation and having a daily practice. We work with a lot of the same people and she’s very big on physical exercise and meditation, mindfulness, all these things in order to be able to regulate emotionally. We both often work with younger people, younger moms, and she was saying, yeah, I don’t know, for a younger mom it’s hard to create a meditation practice. I said that my meditation practice is the most important thing I do. You know, at the beginning of the day, she was saying that she thinks that might be really difficult for people with children and it’s my experience that actually that’s when my meditation practice went to a deeper level.
Elizabeth Winkler: 1:56
So when my kids, when I was raising little kids, I found myself getting more reactive. Anyone out there feel that, like you, find yourself getting frustrated trying to get kids out the door. My children will tell you that when moms started meditating, there was less arguing to get out the door or yelling going on, and that was the transformation. I told the psychiatrist. I actually found the opposite to be true the shadow that was created in our home or in our relationships. We all have shadows in our relationships. That’s what this is all about right. So that shadow of feeling like I’m telling them to come down or get out the door. Anyone who has little kids knows that getting out of the door in the mornings is the hardest thing. It’s the hardest thing. That’s when I started to meditate regularly every morning and that transformed me. But it went beyond. Then I started to create something called car seat meditation.
davidji: 3:00
Brilliant.
Elizabeth Winkler: 3:01
So I was meditating in the morning and I told my kids I’m going to meditate and if you come in my room and I’m meditating, I’m not responding, I’m not breaking my meditation. If I’m in meditation, that’s my time and unless someone’s hurt, I’m not going to break my meditation. So they would come in and they would test.
davidji: 3:19
They’d be like Mom, I have an ingrown toenail. Sorry, it doesn’t qualify Next.
Elizabeth Winkler: 3:24
And I would treat that just like a doorbell or a phone ringing. It’s funny. I’ll call someone and they’ll be like oh, I was meditating. I’m like, and you answered my call, treat the phone, the doorbell, the child walking in just as you do, the disturbing thoughts that are moving through your mind. So, anyway, this was a very long time ago and my children it was a teaching to them because they noticed Mom doesn’t raise her voice as much. And so then I was like, okay, maybe I need to test this on my kids and I would drive them. They were in car seats back then. I had them in their car seats, they weren’t going anywhere, and so I would take them through a guided practice on the way to school seven minutes, I don’t know that I’ve ever told you about that, and I thought it was a good conversation to have and maybe we can even guide some people through car seat meditation.
davidji: 4:15
Yeah, if you want to really explore, like, who are you and what’s your life like? Who are the five to seven people that you’re spending the most amount of time with and what are the five to seven things that you’re doing the most and what are the five to seven places? So it’s the people, the things and the places. If you can identify what are those places people and things or actions or behaviors that we’re doing or showing up or activities that’s your life. And if your life is working, then those things are working. And if you are fighting or resisting any of those individual things, a person got some like resistance or issues with them and activity that you don’t like it, or you’re struggling, or a place In this case it sounded to me like one of your places was car seat. You spend a lot of time in the car seat. This is an opportunity.
davidji: 5:09
We think so often that whatever is going on in the moment is the thing that’s driving the emotion, and you, of course, as a brilliant psychotherapist and transformational healer, know that this is stuff that’s percolating from other areas of our life. Flip the script in another way and you’re like looking at your kid coming in and saying, hey, I want your attention, mom, and you’d say, oh my God, I know that one day you’re going to leave the house and I know one day we’re going to be far away from each other, and I know one day one of us is going to die, and I know all this stuff, and so of course I should embrace you at the highest level. But if we can meditate consistently, we can cultivate that space of equanimity. There’s no emotional charge when someone interrupts us. Patience is a virtue. It needs to be tested a little bit.
Elizabeth Winkler: 6:01
Yeah, children tested quite a lot. I was noticing at that time in my life. I really doubled down on my meditation practice early in the morning, before the day began, and sometimes it was interrupted. But I just kept that commitment as you teach. But then I was like wait, why am I not doing this with them? They get in their car seat. And they were interested because they noticed that I changed. I get phone calls from parents about parenting or relational issues in their marriage, whatever it may be. If you work on yourself, you transform yourself. You transform the world. That’s you. My children were like wait, what happened to mom? Mom’s different? This is interesting. So then I’m like okay, and these are early ages of imprinting and etching.
Elizabeth Winkler: 6:45
They were very young I think we’re talking kindergarten I start teaching meditation and mindfulness to kindergartners and there’s different ways of doing that, but anyway.
Elizabeth Winkler: 6:55
So they’re in their car seat and I’m like, okay, let’s go on a little journey and close your eyes, and I’d take them to a pond or wherever I would take them and invite them that when they’re in recess, if they get upset by a friend or so they can’t share or whatever, they can always come back to this place that we created on the way to school as this safe space of stillness or connection to their deeper level of peace. And then I picked them up at the end of the day and I said did you go to the pond? Did you visit that space within? And sometimes they didn’t, sometimes they didn’t, but I think there’s little kind of sprinkling in if they’re seeing it with you. And then they get to find their own ways and, honestly, children have their own ideas and being able to empower them with their own ways of meditating or being mindful. There’s a lot of practices we did in the car and if you live in LA, you’re in the car.
davidji: 7:55
Yeah, what a beautiful way to condition. There are so many conditionings that we’ve had throughout the course of our lives. Imagine that as an early conditioning, and I think that certainly if you’re of the age of sitting in a car seat, that’s a transformational, age, captive audience. You get to inflict on them whatever you want. Some people they’re just plastic music. Other people they’re just playing stuff over in their mind and shouting it out, and the kids are absorbing it. In this instance, you taught them the beauty of stillness and silence, so how great is that? They’ll remember that forever. It’s an early implanted seed. But what if you didn’t have a mother as gracious and generous as you?
Elizabeth Winkler: 8:36
I was not always that. The reason that was born was because I was losing my temper at home, trying to get them out the door, getting frustrated. All of my practices that I created for families and for children were because of the shadows.
davidji: 8:53
And this speaks really to the ritualistic nature and the ritualistic importance of certain behaviors that really are nourishing and add value to our life so critical. This wasn’t a willpower thing, this wasn’t like you kids make me so mad. Get in the car, get into your car seats. This was born out of love and this was born in the process of let’s create a higher vibration for all three of us.
Elizabeth Winkler: 9:19
It was honestly experiment, it was a total experiment, all of it. If we’re doing a drearck there was the beginning of this, which was me meditating more regularly Then maybe I’ll test it on my kids in car seats, and then there’s an end of the arc of what was created and I’ll get to that. But do you want to explain what the drearck is before I go there?
davidji: 9:43
Dree 10,000 years ago, was a force of nature that actually held the stars apart so they wouldn’t bump into each other. Imagine this force of nature, like electricity, like gravity, that is holding the stars apart, pushing them into infinity so they don’t bump into each other, and yet simultaneously wrapping its arms around the entire universe so it doesn’t just totally vanish. So imagine a force of nature that expands infinitely and yet understands its purpose. This was called 3, d-h-r-i 3. I’ll often say to people what holds your stars apart and your universe together? What’s that spark that’s pushing outwards and expanding you and exciting you and inviting you, and it’s that combination of exploration and curiosity and beauty and so many other aspects, and it’s infinite. It just keeps spreading and expanding, and yet simultaneously, the thing in your life that you’re wrapping your arms around, that matters so much to you, and when those two things have this really powerful fusion.
davidji: 10:57
My theory is that there are arcs in our life, these 3 arcs, and the word D-H-R-I 3 actually means that which upholds, that which upholds.
davidji: 11:10
So when we ask ourselves in my life right now, and this changes as you go through different phases of your life, and that’s really what my theory is, a lot of great teachers, certainly of our era, are like no, you’re here for one reason and one reason only, and I think that doesn’t really speak to our evolution and our personal empowerment. And I believe that we’re not just here for one reason in our life. We haven’t been born to accomplish one thing. We go through these waves, these arcs so I refer to these as the 3 arcs where there’s this beginning, this birthing of your 3, that which upholds, and then, once it gets to a certain part, it just rolls and you’re like dancing in the froth of it. And then there’s that moment where you’re like let me tap the brakes a little on this, I think I’m putting my energy into something else. And then, of course, wherever that energy is, wherever that’s going to, that’s the next birth of your 3 arc.
Elizabeth Winkler: 12:07
Yeah, I love that. It’s like the fruition of that story. It’s another car story. I drove the kids they were a little bit older to the airport, lax, and pulled over. I was early to pick up, so pulled over and let them out of their car seats while we waited in the parking lot.
Elizabeth Winkler: 12:25
Two tigers in the back of my car, basically, and I was sitting in the front seat, and the stillness the only way I could describe it. Deeper still, that’s how it felt. It felt like I was in the deepest depth of the ocean, that the waves at the highest point of the ocean were not even touching me. If they were tidal waves, there was no movement in me. And I look back and there was a lot of movement. There was a lot of activity in the back. It was like two tigers running around and all I could notice was that there was nothing moving in me. It was so, still, so peaceful and I was like what is going on here? That was the fruition of this practice. So that was a very powerful moment for me. That was so quiet but so remarkable.
davidji: 13:21
And this is the secret. People may say I’m trying to block stuff out, I’m trying to like silence, all this other movement and sound and noise outside of me. We don’t have control over that. This is an ancient teaching in yoga going back 2000 years, known as Pratyahara, which is essentially allowing the senses, all of the senses, to just be released so they no longer are pulling us in any way. The most obvious version of this would be just closing our eyes. When we close our eyes, suddenly the shade and the shadow and the light and the movement and the stillness and our peripheral and all that stuff, it’s not there, it’s not pulling us. And if we would put in earplugs I’m not recommending this, but if we put it in earplugs, then sound wouldn’t. And so suddenly we realized this concept of Pratyahara, which is essentially allowing the senses to fully be released and not be pulling us in any way. This is a cultivation.
davidji: 14:21
You’ve heard me say at least a couple hundred thousand times Can you be the calm amidst the chaos? Can you be the stillness inside the storm? It’s not. Oh, storm coming. Let me batten down the hatches. Can you cultivate that so that you can go into that deep space, the space that you had cultivated with them, which was their first gear. In this instance, it feels like you were actually shifting into your third gear. From this they could have been wild and jumping around and screaming and shrieking and giggling and laughing and doing whatever. You had suddenly stepped into that third gear so that it was still happening. But this is the second sutra of potentially, yoga chitavritti nerodha Oneness, union, which clearly was what you were experienced, or, as you so eloquently put it.
davidji: 15:13
Deeper still is the progressive quieting of the fluctuations of the mind, and in that moment there could have been Atomic bombs going off. They weren’t going to invade your space, and that is who you are. That is who you are because the more we cultivate that space, the more we cultivate that stillness, that silence, that third gear, fourth gear, fifth gear, whatever. And it’s not a target and these aren’t goals. This just happens progressively as we continue the practice and I think it also in train your kids. We’ve seen that in the movies, where we’re watching the movie and suddenly there’s no sound and everyone’s moving in slow motion, and it’s because everything is so quiet, and so we know. That’s all about our insights, that’s all about the aspects of ourselves, and I don’t know. Is that our autonomic nervous system? Is that our vagus nerve we could say? Is it this? Is it that it’s you cultivating your ability To truly be the silent witness?
Elizabeth Winkler: 16:11
and it was effortless, right. It caught me in that moment. I was not In any, as you said earlier, will wasn’t a will act. It was the fruition of all of these moments of time, of practice and walking through the storms. So let that be something for people to consider in their own lives. That it’s not if you are a busy parent with little kids. This conversation I was having was really interesting to me because you’re saying I think it’s really hard for a busy parent to have Meditation practice. I think it’s actually when you need it most, and it was when I really said okay, I was raising both my hands like okay, something needs to shift and it is possible. So let’s say that you can’t sit in the morning. You can find ways to do this. There’s so many ways. Again, don’t be limited by what someone has done before. We each have our own creative ability to create a practice that works for each of us and for our children.
davidji: 17:10
And this has to be a practice. There’s no finish line, there’s only a starting point. The magnificence of meditation happens when you open your eyes up and you’re back here with the rest of us. And how are you going to perceive the moment and what are you going to do with that? And that is the secret of life, and what you do with that becomes the fabric of your entire existence. That’s why we shouldn’t beat ourselves up when suddenly we realize, ah, I can’t take it. But our goal, our quest is not to find the cave in the middle of the wilderness and sit there.
davidji: 17:45
I’ve meditated deep inside these caves in the cliffs and parts of India. There’s two things I found there one, mosquitoes and number two in that type of environment, my thoughts were so loud, they were screaming At me, they were the loudest thoughts that I could ever possibly have. And so it’s not like putting earplugs in is going to stop the noise, and it’s not like going into a cave is going to stop the mind stuff. It’s by cultivating this ability to connect to the stillness and silence, and we do this Using an object of our attention. We do this by watching our breath, we do this by repeating a mantra, we do this by just getting more comfortable and more relaxed and more comfortable and more relaxed and not resisting. And we’re training ourselves.
davidji: 18:33
If I cannot resist this moment, physically, physiologically, and I cannot resist this moment, mind-shatter, wise, I’m just going to allow, let me just allow, let me just accept. But if I cannot resist and not resist, I’m training myself for that next moment when suddenly my sister or my cousin or my relative or my boss or my colleague or my friend or my lover or my partner suddenly imposes something on me in a particular moment. And I’ve been training myself Not to resist. That doesn’t mean I allow my boundaries to be transgressed. It’s just about what happens internally inside of me. Can I then respond with greater grace and ease, or do I snap back and bark back? And the most obvious Barking and snapping is done with kids. We see it all the time.
Elizabeth Winkler: 19:24
It’s so hard and it’s so hard. I really want to speak to that as a parent, please. This is not easy stuff. It’s so hard. I’m sharing that moment by the airport.
Elizabeth Winkler: 19:35
There are many moments that are not that way still to this day.
Elizabeth Winkler: 19:38
So I’m not saying it’s like you cross the finish line, like you said. No, you’re moving to deeper levels of the self and you’re growing, and then life brings more shadows and you get to To expand yourself and see what’s holding you back, and I really believe that those disturbances that we find, the things when you’re not in that deeper still space, anyone listening, if you’re feeling reactive or Activated by anything in your life, I truly believe that those are the doorways, those are the places, those are the teachers. When I was recently visiting Michael Singer in Florida, he was saying we fail a math test and they hand it back to you, and all of the red marks, all the things you failed, those are your teachers. So all of the things that we’re falling down on, those are the places for us to be Learning, growing. We’re here to grow, here to evolve, and so do we continue to fall down.
Elizabeth Winkler: 20:39
Absolutely, it’s not about being perfect. It’s not about running the marathon race perfectly. You may do very well in certain areas of your life, but what’s challenging you most and I think that’s the doorway for us to expand the life- Every moment is a teacher.
davidji: 20:55
Can we see it like that? Can we actually look at each moment, see them as teachers and go oh wasn’t aware of that. Let me adjust. Let me course correct we see this so often and maybe you’ve heard me talk about this concept, elizabeth. My shower doesn’t have two separate knobs, it’s got that one knob in the middle, and a lot of times I start my shower and I’ll step in and suddenly it’s oh, that was a little colder. Then I anticipate it and then I just adjust it a little bit and it’s ooh, ooh, too hot. Let me step back a little bit and I may adjust three or four times as the water’s heating up and as all that’s happening. Once I hit that perfect temperature, then I’m in and everything’s perfect, that Goldilocks temperature. Then I step out of the shower after I’ve showered and I move on with my day. I don’t judge myself in that moment. It’s too hot, so I make it a little cooler. It’s too cold, I make it a little warmer.
davidji: 21:52
This is how we learn how to move through life, and I think there’s so many things that we have tricked ourselves into thinking, or diluted ourselves into thinking, that they’re supposed to be perfect on the first step out there, and nothing in life is actually like that. You watch Elon Musk launching all those space rockets. They canceled so many space launches, rocket launches. There’s so many different things. Every single company that’s out there they try something. You’ve been in a restaurant and this week here’s our special. We’re going to offer this out and see how it goes. Do people like it? Then we’ll consider doing more of it. If they don’t like it, we’ll consider canceling it. For some reason we were taught we’re supposed to be in real time in the first moment and be perfect, and first of all it’s not true in any other aspect of life. We’re supposed to be learning from the stuff that either doesn’t feel right or doesn’t work right, and then we adjust it if we want to, and then we maybe perhaps show up just a little bit better or more balanced or clearer on the next time.
davidji: 22:58
I remember I was in the early stages of me learning to eat certain types of fruit. I didn’t really know how to peel an orange and someone gave me an orange and it was like a squeezing a juice orange, so it really wasn’t meant to be peeled. It’s not like a tantrine or a naval orange, and I remember I didn’t know how the orange was. I was trying to claw it open and it wasn’t really separating and I had opened naval oranges and they opened so easily and I couldn’t figure out if.
davidji: 23:30
I was in school and I was trying to open this orange and I remember leaning over to this girl next to me and I go how do you open this thing? And I remember her laughing so hysterically and pointing out to other people that I didn’t know how to eat an orange and they were laughing and giggling, and laughing and giggling. And then somebody came in the defender because I was being bullied. Obviously, in a little way it was horrible, I was so good at dealt. And this guy came over and said, hey, these kids didn’t know how to eat an orange until someone showed them. Either, let me show you how you do this. And he just stuck his thumb like, crushed it into the orange and popped it open and then started pulling the skin after that and I was like, oh, I was trying to be so delicate, I didn’t know. I was trying to be so gentle with the orange skin. How can I lovingly do that?
davidji: 24:19
And I’ve eaten a couple of million oranges since that moment and we learn to do stuff, and it’s not always the most glamorous or elegant first time out of the box. But we must remind ourselves that everyone is experimenting in their first step, and we are too. And just because then you experiment and get a result, guess what. You’re gonna guess the next time also, and perhaps it’s gonna take you like three, four or five guesses and then you’re gonna go oh okay, this is how things are, and especially with different age kids.
davidji: 24:52
Someone was sharing with me just yesterday that their oldest kid. They used to cut the strawberries into quarters when the kid was a baby, because they were so afraid that they might choke on this strawberry. They would quarter these for you and feed them to you, one at a time. And on the third kid they would just take a bowl and put all the strawberries in it with the stems and everything, just like here are your strawberries. They figured all right, if the kid is struggling a little too much, we’ll tell him what to do. It’s the parents learning about the kids. It wasn’t even the kids actually learning. I’m sure you went through these exact same kind of things with your kids.
Elizabeth Winkler: 25:26
Totally and with everything in life. I think it’s a great metaphor for just living. It’s like we think okay, so now I’ve got it, we’ve learned how to open the orange, right. Guess what? Then it changes. It becomes some different kind of fruit, right. So life is constantly evolving and changing. We’re constantly evolving and changing.
Elizabeth Winkler: 25:45
There’s no finish line. It’s always a shifting river, and I think that education is such the block for this. When we go to school, I work with a lot of college kids, so they graduate, and then they’re like okay, so now I’m an adult, I have all these expectations on me. I need to have it all figured out. That’s because of the educational system. Christian and Marcie wrote something on this. It’s called On Education, I believe. So you pass this grade, you take this test and you move on, and so that sets up this paradigm, this conditioned understanding that, okay, now there’s a finish line, and now I’m an adult and now I need to have it figured out. And then people are just they feel like frogs, they feel like an imposter in their own life. There is no finish line. Guess what Death Haven’t done that yet.
Elizabeth Winkler: 26:35
That’s an experience that we’ll all get to have, and we don’t know what that will be like. I’m sure that’s very scary to many people, but it is an experience that everyone goes through in a different way. But we’re going through an experience in this moment, each one of us. Whatever experience you’re going through, if you’re challenging your relationships, if you’re challenged by yourself, if you’re being held back by patterns of behavior, if you’re being held back in your work, you always have a choice, as you said, to course correct. To look at that dreary, that deeper level of inspiration, something that’s trying to emerge within you, to start to inquire into that. I think meditation is critical, but inquiry in conjunction is such a powerful way to be able to open up that flower that is trying to emerge from deep within and it’s always changing. And then it emerges, it flowers, it dies and something else comes. It’s a constant shifting, changing experience.
davidji: 27:40
Yeah, Our whole purpose for creating this podcast, the Shadow and the Light. Our whole purpose for this was really if we could find aspects of our lives, all of our lives, in the most universal forms, even though we’re so individual but different, parts of us that we view in some type of shadowy or negative or fear-based or desperation-based, or trying to hide these aspects of ourselves because we’re so embarrassed that we even don’t know how to open in orange or turn on the shower and have it be the perfect temperature. We’re suddenly connected to that stillness and silence. You look at your kids and you’re like, oh my god, another 15 years of this and I’ll never have one more silent moment here.
davidji: 28:30
But we can create it, and so that’s really why the shadow and the light, because life is the yin and yang, life is the wholeness of all of this, the extremes and the middles and everything in between, and it’s the light in the dark, and we can go on and on with all the different metaphors, but it’s the wholeness and it’s the memory of our wholeness that we can continue to return to in every single one of these aspects. So, elizabeth, is there something, as we say goodbye from this podcast, is there something that you can guide people some mini practice that when they find themselves ready to freak out or scream or wrap their kid in Alabama Chrome or Velcro them to the wall or just slam the door or walk out or just say the thing that the kid will remember for the rest of their life what’s the pattern, interrupt? Or what’s that important step that we can do to save humanity in that moment?
Elizabeth Winkler: 29:27
I’ll tell you what’s worked for me, for many clients of mine and again I tested this in my own lab of raising children as a single mother. It is what are you noticing? So what am I noticing? This all began because I was starting to find myself yelling to get the kids out the door and I didn’t like that. I didn’t like how it felt me, I didn’t like how it was affecting my kids, and so, instead of doing that I would, I started saying I’m noticing that my voice is starting to raise, so I would talk about what I’m noticing inside. First time I did that, both of my kids turned their heads, like turned 180 degrees. They’re like what’s going on, like what’s mom doing, talking about what she’s noticing inside. It was a very interesting thing. So, as I start to talk about what I’m noticing inside, they turned within and looked at what they were noticing inside Because, as we know, every action has an equal and opposite reaction.
Elizabeth Winkler: 30:25
So if I say, why aren’t you moving faster than they’ll say something back right, it’s that egoic response. If I say something judgmental at you, you’re going to say something judgmental. So this is the opposite. This is me noticing something mindfully inside, even though I’m really activated. I’m noticing my voice is starting to raise. I’m noticing I’m getting tense. I really don’t want to start yelling. And then the kids were like they started to respond and they started to talk about what they were noticing in them and they picked up their bags. And then I’ll tell you weeks later. I come home, I walk in and Eli’s working doing homework at the table and he’s. I literally walked in and I heard him go. Chloe, I’m noticing and he’s talking about what he’s noticing.
Elizabeth Winkler: 31:08
I’m like, yes, so talking about what you’re noticing inside, you can do this in any relationship. Another thing to help is to use your body as an anchor. So, right now, just put your attention on your feet, as you’re listening to me. When I work with couples I’m like, as you’re listening to the other person, put your attention in your hands, put your attention in the chair beneath you. You think that will distract you. It doesn’t. It makes you present. So if you’re driving your car, right now, put your attention on your hands touching the steering wheel or the sensation of the chair beneath you. That is an anchoring practice. It will keep you present.
Elizabeth Winkler: 31:45
So, anchor into the body and talk about what you’re noticing and talk about your experience. It’s mindfulness. That’s like bringing your meditation into the real world, which has a busy parent, all those busy parents out there and we’re all we all are. You need to find ways to integrate this through language and being able to be that support to yourself. So if I’m talking about I’m noticing, my voice is starting to raise and I really don’t want to yell. It keeps one of my feet in the white light of awareness, in the full light, and it keeps my other foot in the rainbow of experience, or you?
davidji: 32:23
could say, in the shadow.
Elizabeth Winkler: 32:24
So it’s like I’m grounded, I’m not fully in the shadow or I’m not fully in the anger that I got lost in, so I can stay in a more steady walk than like fully falling down. We do fall down, that’s okay, but we get back up and we can talk about our experience. So talk about what you’re noticing anchor into your body. Those are my big things.
davidji: 32:45
I’d love that. So brilliant. Thank you so much, and so everyone, thanks for joining us. Thank you, elizabeth Winkler, thank you, davidji. Thanks, davidji, from the sweet spot of the universe, and we’ll see you on our next episode. I love listening to Jamar as we outro the shadow and the light podcast.
Music: 33:34
I love listening to Jamar as we outro the shadow and the light podcast.