Practice-In-Place Roundtable | (10/26/2021 — “Ask Us Anything – LIVE” With Denny K Miu And Guests Lydia Grace and Joanne Muir)

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For this month’s regular open-audience, open-discussion “Ask Us Anything” — continuing discussions about meditation and related topics — Denny and I hosted a open roundtable on “Practice-in-place” with fellow Insight Timer teacher Lydia Grace and Joanne Muir. The term “Practice-in-place” comes as a wise meditative response to “Shelter-in-place” induced by reactions to Co-V.

Lydia Grace

Amongst discussion about now using more technology in our practices and sessions we also get into, not necessarily in this order:

Lydia’s Insight Timer circle Embodied Living

(Mostly Regular/Daily) Virtual Meditation Groups

Some of my original notes not mentioned:

  • wake up call for me as I’m taking on more and more computer time. I turn off cell phone as much as possible and use a wired internet connection to help stay more embodied and not get lost in a wireless virtual reality of screens and have minimized dependence on two-factor authentication and apps with functionality exclusive to their mobile app
  • importance of supporting both those formally practicing in real life and those who “practice-in-place”
  • spirit rock retreat center looks like it is reopening next year
  • my online 1/2 day retreats with beth upton and ajahn succito’s online retreat love as the breath of life
  • real life opportunities via dharmagates.org:

In-Person Retreats:

Hermitage & Self-Retreat Opportunities:

Note: self-retreat opportunities are generally only recommended to those who have an established relationship with a Buddhist lineage and teacher, and for those who have done extensive meditation practice

Audio: Practice-In-Place Roundtable | (10/26/2021 — “Ask Us Anything – LIVE” With Denny K Miu And Guests Lydia Grace and Joanne Muir)

Or listen via Insight Timer (app or website)

Join “Ask Us Anything LIVE” next month, November 30, 2021 at our new time of 4pm Central via:

Join Denny live Saturdays online for Yi Jin Jing and mindful joint, stretching, breathing, and qi exercises at 8:00am Pacific via:

The raw unedited YouTube transcription of this podcast:

good morning good evening good afternoon everyone everyone who’s watching um uh

this is this is this is as far as as excited as it gets this is even more exciting than an hour ago when i talked

to my mom and find out where i was actually born but anyway

what hospital i was actually born but anyway i i wanna so this is uh this is our

monthly aua what we call the all ask us anything and

uh so uh here’s josh and i the yin and yang of the uh buddha dhamma but today

we have two very very special guests we have lydia and joanne

and why don’t why don’t we go to lydia first and let lydia introduce um her to

the people that don’t know her yet and then we’ll just go around yeah my name is lydia i currently am

located in colorado in the mountains and i

am an embodiment coach which means i help facilitate space for people to kind

of get out of their dissociated head space and come into their body so

they can feel connected come back into connection with themself to be able to live from a

more anchored and grounded place my background is from doing 15 years of

teaching yoga and meditation working with thousands of clients in body work like massage

and various forms of tuning into their body and those very tangible

forms and i’ve kind of integrated a lot of that and brought it into the online sphere

to see you know especially it started with covid realizing the need was here

and there was this access to start bringing a lot of a lot of what i already did locally into

technology so that’s where i’m at thank you thank you lydia and joanne it’s your turn

hi yes so my name’s joanne um i am in sunny florida you can see the sun coming

through the windows so we’re coming into our favorite season here winter in florida is bliss um

i am a practicing shaman and an energy coach helping people in many different ways

whether it’s um in a ceremony format whether it’s body work lydia and i share a past in a lot of body work

many many hours on the body and on the table craniopsychotherapy and visceral

manipulation have been two of my favorite modalities uh touching and playing and communicating with the

cellular structure and trauma of people’s bodies really helped me uh perceive read and translate energy

and then it went further past the body and now i teach people how to tap into their own ability to channel tap into

their own ability to have a relationship with their body uh tap into guidance um feel connected to their ancestors uh and

quite often a lot of my work is to clear any interference energy i find a lot of people come in and they want to get

there and they think that it’s just up to them they can feel very defeated when they can’t uh obtain their goals and

quite often what we’re doing is sort of unwinding through the physical and energy realms to remove any interference

whether it’s beliefs or ancestral trauma or cultural programming or whatever the case is so um i love my work and i’m

happy to be here thanks that is so cool duran and and josh your turn now

hey josh co-host on ask us anything it’s uh no you know i guess i never

plugged my website but probably ought to not do that if you want to put this on inside timer um

i don’t know but no i write a lot about meditation and

yeah i facilitate meditations and into retreats and studying buddha

dharma practicing buddha dharma writing

i just wrote well i mean what was the modality after uh cranial

sacral that you mentioned do you remember visceral manipulation working with

the organ system right on yeah right now i i’ve been for a few months my daily practice has been with

this analysis of the idi potassouda which is the the powers and whatnot and

one of the things recommended in there is the 32 parts of the body so i’ve been working intensely on that and cranial

sacral is a great modality uh for no for anybody that’s energetically

sensitive that’s never experienced cranial sacral i would highly recommend it it’s amazing how you can get into

doing mouth work even on the higher levels of the craniosacral um yeah so you know um that’s that i just

did a two-hour sit today um there’s a group of uh monastics in uh caves in

almeria spain and they send out a whatsapp notification to people all over

the world to sit at the same time for two hours straight so so i would say

getting into more hardcore meditation you know it’s inner journeys inner exploration

okay danny back to you thank you josh there’s so much about josh that i don’t

know i’m discovering new things about him every time anyway um so so josh and i um

um been collaborating we’re actually fellow students of the same master who

resides in saint louis josh resides in st louis as well the master doma master thank you thank

you thank you thank you that much so so um in the in the most simplistic sense we’re both um

uh uh we were just having that conversation the other day that it’s it’s it’s it’s

it’s it’s probably not good for us to call uh what we do buddhism because it’s not

an ism it’s really uh so we just say that we’re buddhist

students and we’re learning uh you know so we’re pursuing a spiritual path

that is consistent with the buddhist teaching i

started teaching um meditation and all that about maybe about four or five years ago mainly to

a group of elderlies cantonese speaking elderlies in san francisco and among them is my mom

and over the time i discovered that they need more

help with the physicality than they do with mentality and so i’m shifting more and more towards

and the body as opposed to the mind it’s just it’s just more accessible and so so when i met um lydia and actually had a

conversation with her yesterday and it just blew my mind in terms of how similar we are in terms of approach that

you know when we live in this environment where we’re just bombarded by

um distractions and and the one place where we could find tranquility is is

actually our body you know this is the one thing that among other things is the least um

it’s the most constant it’s something that we’ve been living with for decades you know so

so in that sense we’re we’re approaching the same way so our meditation technique is very much body-centric

and overtimes as it turns out my dad started it’s very apparent it wasn’t apparent um

maybe a few years back but now it’s very apparent that he has uh he’s suffering from dementia

and so um it becomes more and more so my practice now focus more and more on

trying to give him the last bit of energy without actually having to um

put a lot of constraint on his body so when i find out that for example lydia is

is a teacher in thai yoga meditation that was just amazing

you know the the the thai yoga massage actually not my meditation i meant it’s

actually um based uh very much on the understanding of the energy lines in the in the body

and so forth and so i i looks i i i am so looking forward to uh collaborating

with all you guys and plus more you know i think the idea that we should really

bring together more and more teachers and and fundamentally we’re students more than we’re a teacher actually you

know we’re really learning uh

as our my focus anyway is really about learning and i find out that over the

years that teaching is the best way to learn and so i’m really looking forward to that now

um i think i think i’m hoping that and i believe that that today is like the

opening of a a a lot of collaborations not just the forwards perhaps with other

people that that could uh

would join us in the future but i’d like to think today we would have a focus which is that

i remember about a year and a half ago it was march 26 exactly when the mayor of san francisco declared

that there is an order for um uh what is that word um

something in place um shelter in place you know shelter in place that was the

day that uh our mayor in san francisco declared that we should have a shelter in place i i remember really well i was

having lunch with my wife having rose stuck and we were like what

let’s take that to go so this is exactly a year and a half ago

and and i’m just curious on how this whole change in paradigm you know

where we went from really person to person one-on-one type

of interaction with the students to one where we now are kind of separate by this screen you

know how does that work so that’s why today’s talk for

just because um it’s thought i thought that would be good good place to start is is what we

call practice in place and so um how about we start with joanne i

think i know that joanne has a has a time number how about we start with you joe and how does how has this last year

and a half maybe middlebury more change your way of practice and your way of teaching

i love that i wasn’t ready for that question because then whatever my unconscious wants to say is going to

come out um personally i wanted to note that i really appreciated the space for a

moment um and i really appreciated having

space around me to feel my full energy body again i know that when we interface with people a lot

there can be a joy and an alchemy of the connection and then sometimes it’s really nice to

feel your own center um and then i started reaching out to people and doing some classes via zoom

which was incredibly odd for me being that i’ve always been a hands-on practitioner

but i actually really enjoyed connecting that way

and [Music] co-channeling together i have a few people that we still just jump on zoom

and channel together it’s not even a class it’s just a way of connecting and asking questions about what we’re seeing

in the world and how we’re perceiving human consciousness and how we’re perceiving

what gaia is going through and actually i have some sustained

practices connecting with people virtually that started sort of in the height of

2020 that even though i’m back to the office and i’m back to connecting with people physically we’ve still continued

these practices because we’re enjoying them so much so i’ve had i’ve had quite a um

so i’m grateful actually for some of the things that have come out of this yeah but how has it changed your way of

how did you have to adjust your way of teaching

i did yes i did um and yet i was pleasantly surprised

all of us here loving playing in the realms of energy every moment of the day

i was pleasantly surprised how much i could still see and play with and direct and

receive and share energy even though there was a screen my first zoom class i thought oh gosh i

hope i’m able to assist and facilitate in the same way i would

a room and um and i was really really pleasantly surprised at how much energy could still

be read and shared and experienced so um

it changed the way in the sense of i wasn’t looking around a room but it

didn’t hinder the experience at all that that’s very profound um i’m

reminded of something said i’m a i’m a student of science

and um when he was talking about the beginning of the universe in that

you know right before the big bang there was really no concept of space and time

and then when the universe was you know

first appeared it was space first and then there was time and the idea was

that if you didn’t have space there was no need for time

if you have nowhere to go who bought and okay yourself you know how long would it take to get there and so he he has a way

of saying that it’s the space and the space was was this change in our in our

in a continuum um that was the beginning of the universe and then with space and then

there was time and so i’m trying to remember i’m trying to really digest what you said because i

think it’s really profound because i have the same experience i really do have the same experience that

i have in one when i first i i’m used to teaching one on not one-on-one but one

on many but still you know they were like reviewing right and i thought that that was

important that was my only way to interact with them if not by visual by energy

and what i find is that once you have no choice you know you now

pandemic happens and now the only way that we can connect with them is through the screen

but actually what it does is that it removes the artificiality of the physical space

and the connection is just as strong so what that means is that the physicality

is there and we always think that is real but actually that connection doesn’t need physicality

it can actually be done through space and

i wanted to add i i just remembered that a client of mine was in boston and had an accident um as a cyclist he had

rented a a bicycle and got hit by a car and he’s used to my work in person

and i said i could offer you some energy work to just help with

and we set up zoom and we did sound and lots of beautiful just energy work that

came and he messes the next day and said he was surprised how helpful it was and i

love that as you’re saying it may be for us as practitioners to change our paradigm of doing energy work but it

really changed his paradigm of what energy work was to receive energy work

through a zoom you know platform which he had never done before and he came into it

a little skeptical and he left really open-minded and it was nice

you know that both of us got to experience that are you guys familiar with matt khan

i don’t know if i am oh yeah check him out on youtube he’s become very popular i mean like hundreds of thousands of

views now but everything he does is encoded with an um

an energetic healing so he’s been doing it for years and you guys will be able to notice it right away probably um you

can just scroll through his stuff and on youtube or it’s k-a-h-n um yeah so it’s

pretty quite amazing um he’s it’s it’s like he’s in a state of samadhi that transmits healing energy just with his

regular teachings the whole thing so anyway thank you

while you guys were talking i just had this like visual of learning about electrons in

school how like in a in around the nucleus or whatever the protons and the electrons electrons jump

and it looks like they’re teleporting they’re like here and they’re here and there’s no

you don’t see how they got from one place to the other they can just jump and when you were both talking

i was like oh that’s maybe more what we’re tapping into is this

jumping where we’ve created collectively this understanding that solid material is

real and that solid means barrier and what technology on some level is

starting to i’m because i’m noticing this in teaching to clients and groups of

people online too is there’s a level of connection we weren’t necessarily tapping into because we

didn’t have to when we were in person and now that we’re not now that there’s so many uh

experiences where we’re not in person or we can’t be in person by tapping more into a presence within

ourselves we’re actually tapping more into clarity with others

you know what i mean so there’s almost because we have to be more present with ourselves like me in this room there’s

almost a level where that actually enables me to connect on a deeper level than maybe if we were

in the room together and i was just reading all the non-verbal communication that was happening with body and

kind of from the five senses and were i don’t know it was just like oh this is interesting

well i i agree with that i i agree with that yeah for me the most challenging thing to do is to be aware of the

physicality though because you know actually right now what’s going on is i’m in my room

talking in front of a computer screen nobody’s here but my mind is filling in the rest right

it’s picking up on all kinds of other things but i tend to forget the body especially when i’m interacting with the

computer because what’s really here now is not you guys right

it’s my computer and a room and i get sucked into this virtual world and completely forget the body a lot of

times it’s really easy to do so i was asking wondering if you guys have tips on that too i’d like i’m actually

holding a real physical object this crystal in my hand to help remember that i’m not in a virtual world

right now that i’m talking in a room in front of a computer and that’s it and i see likenesses of denny i’ve actually met

denny a couple times in real life but as far as i know you guys could be deep fakes right no probably not but

how do i know for sure um i wanna i wanna pick up what lydia

said about the the adam and and so um bringing in a little bit the little

understanding i meant adam you’re right yeah so bringing my bringing my little uh limited understanding of physics um so

in physics there is this thing called the the duality the particle wave duality which basically says that what

we think of as an atom uh depending on perspective can actually be wave so the idea of the energy and

and and the material is is actually interchangeable okay so of course um

that that speaks to the beginning of the universe that it was just all energy and

then somehow something happens and then a bunch of energy got together and created the first atom and then now we

have the universe and then of course the sad part is that the reverse can also be true that if you take two atoms and

whether you smash them or or other ways that it creates tremendous amount of energy and that’s what we call atomic

bomb so the idea that that that whether it’s it’s atom or wave it

really depends on the perspective and so bringing that back to what we talked about which is the physicality

that we’re so accustomed to the physicality accustomed to this one-on-one interaction in close

proximity with a student we would never think about what the world would be like had we if we were to

deprive of that but yet we that’s what happened to us uh in the from the from the beginning of the epidemic and i

guess what we’re saying and it seems like we all agree is that there is this unintended consequence when that happens

that we’re forced into this space now this is this domain now where

we are rob of the physicality but yet because we rob the physicality

another part of our experience uh come up that is actually much more

energy like and and that transcends you know the space and i think this is very profound

now let me switch ahead and bring in a little bit of the buddhist teaching now

the buddhist teaching talks about the physicality and the mentality and so if you were to kind of look at

the extreme of that the pure mentality the pure energy in the end is about compassion loving

kindness empathy and and and equanimity and i think fundamentally as teachers

we are healers you know we have different modalities in terms of how we heal but we are healers

and so what makes us effective is is deep down we have our own

something we take very very very dearly which is our sense of compassion and loving kindness and empathy

and that’s pure energy and that energy can transmit through all medium including the lack of

medium and so i i find that really profound i find that really profound now let’s

let’s get let’s let’s um let’s get a little bit more more personal and lydia you you

talk about how your own experience how how you kind of remember yesterday we’re talking about

us all of us are actually kind of introvert i assume uh maybe not josh is john of the

outliner over messi over rosie aware all right so so so lydia you were you were talking

about you know how we we balance between being a a introvert in an extrovert and

and somehow this practice in place opens up some dimensions that you didn’t you didn’t

know that exists in terms of how you would present yourself to your students

yeah well what we were talking about yesterday i was kind of expressing how it’s been a cool kind of interesting

expansion in a lot of ways for me because i love what i one of the things i love about

thai massage is you’re giving the body a chance to see

itself differently from different positions which is also the what you do

in yoga what i’ve liked about something called acro yoga which is like a layman’s acrobatics

what i love about travel i feel like travel is us putting ourselves in a different position with the earth and

seeing it from a different perspective similar to a yoga practice or thai massage

and then and then of course like what joanne does is like all of that at a much more subtle level like internally

like can we shift the the connective tissue or the fascia and create this tiny little shift and then

everything in the body’s like whoa all of a sudden like big shifts you know from in the subtleties and nuances which

is what i those are the main modalities i love receiving personally but one of the things i notice because i’ve been

really learning a lot more about trauma like societal trauma individual

trauma modalities that have been studied and are coming more into the mainstream and that whole thing is

within the paradigm of this theory called polyvagal theory which is all about understanding the complexities of

the nervous system there’s something called the window of tolerance and when more trauma happens to us our

window of tolerance gets smaller and then the idea and becoming more

resilient and growing is to recognize and acknowledge and then to give space for that to expand back into whatever we

want and one of the things i’ve appreciated about technology is it’s almost

allowed us the safety of having a smaller window of tolerance without judgment because we all had to do it

and this pandemic kind of closed a lot of us in like a big kind of a collective

contraction into kind of like what you were saying joanne earlier about like all of a

sudden you had space because there was so much less interaction you could like feel yourself in space within your

like your smaller window of what you were existing in and there’s something for me that i’ve

noticed has been very profound about that because when people feel judgment on

themselves and when i’m able to share what if this was

what if if we reframe this and saw this as like amazing like you have now

given yourself a space of safety that you didn’t know was possible before because it wasn’t collectively agreed to

be okay now it is can we like settle in a little bit and

like feel supported by that as we come into this new

feeling of the chaos of the world and i mean just before this joanna and i were

talking about the chaos that is coming up for a lot of us to be like in your words you said burned

off and cleared off you know because i was sharing some stuff that’s come up for me that has felt discouraging

and she’s like what if you saw as more of coming up to be cleared and burned off rather than

a self-sabotage pattern or something else and immediately i felt that in my body of like

oh that’s what it is and i didn’t see that the same way and i

when i’m on insight or or even in groups and share slightly different perspectives i see because i’m so much

into watching non-verbal the shift in people’s breath and their shoulder tension and like the facials

tiny nuances of like oh of like it’s it gets this gets to be okay

this doesn’t have to be threatening or i can adjust and my body knows how to

if i start giving it permission and space i have to say i love that i’m going to

jump in for a moment i saw a message come in that is my next client coming this way so

just while there was a pause i wanted to say it’s really nice to share

screen space with you all transcendent space with you all um i did want to say

actually that the word transcendence is coming up for me a lot today and so thank you for saying that i think there’s something about this paradigm

that we’re in that we’re transcending the old paradigms of physicality and going beyond and so just wanted to

say thank you for that thanks joanne yeah it would be cool to hear maybe you can come back and maybe

talk about some of the subtle bodies like the astral body and the etheric body and if those have been enhanced or

neglected because of technology and maybe i love that all graphic realities who knows yeah

yeah i love the holographic world yup absolutely i’d love that so um let’s stay connected

thank you so much thanks lydia for sending the link and thanks for being spontaneous and jumping in yes absolutely

thank you joanna it’s a great pleasure knowing you and we look forward to uh having more time together likewise

likewise just thank your names thank you all bye thank you bye

that was that was wonderful that was really really wonderful so i was thinking um is both

because um i i think in some way josh and i um over the years that we know each other we

share a lot of common language and so today it was actually quite a new experience

for me because the language that you use lydia and the language joanne uses are quite unfamiliar to me so i’m really

like learning a lot but it i can’t help but to think that um

the one thing that we perhaps all four of us have in common is is how we view

uncertainty and so you know going back to practice in place um i mean that was a tremendous

injection of uncertainties not not just on a personal life but on a professional life

and from hearing your um presentation and from joanne’s you know

i couldn’t help but say hey you know these are the people that actually embrace uncertainties

and and and i would say abstractly my human ego not so much

the daily ego part he wants to fight it yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah

this comes to fear right because for me the this this thing that we’re experiencing has way more to do with

fear than anything else uh i mean it’s gotten so much better now because people have gotten used to it and they’ve

they’ve worked on it at coping meccans but at one point during this the fear was just off the charts ridiculous you

know and i that that for running down our immune systems

um you know it’s it is it’s not good at all so the fear is i think

for any danger so the teaching i got that was most helpful just real briefly is that as long as we’re able if we’re

not running for our lives or fighting for our lives we are safe enough to feel

fear and so instead of trying to do everything we can to avoid it um you

know suppress it get away from it deny it um you know cope with it in the wrong

way so many different wrong ways just to be you know knowing that you’re safe enough

to feel it and to feel it to heal it and then that’s that’s the way to to to go

through it um yeah it so many people are deathly afraid of being

feeling pain and uncomfort being uncomfortable and you know to a certain degree as long as we can discern okay is

there harm in this or is it just unpleasant and the longer we can be with unpleasant it doesn’t have to be like a

stoic thing but the longer we can be with something unpleasant we talk about the threshold right um you know we we

adjust ourselves to uh more threshold so when we do come into something that’s

actually you know threatening or you know some situation that we can’t

get out of um as easily then we’re more prepared to deal with it

we have more space that opens up and we’re able to uh be prepared and know

and have time to how to respond wisely to it yeah yeah i agree with that thank you

for that josh in fact i i think um even though we we have different

approach you know that lydia goes about it with the embodiment coaching and you know we do it through meditation

exercise and qigong whatever in the end i think what we’re doing is really

addressing fear it’s always about fear it’s always about fear and fear is just

our way of reacting uncertainty and there’s always uncertainty and so

what’s interesting is that we come at it different way but what we have in common is basically telling our

students it says look we know so little about our existence

there’s all these dimensions that we haven’t explored so why are you even feared you know why would you even be in

fear about that limit dimensions when there’s so much to explore and the more you explore the less you will fear i

mean that’s that’s the reason why we i’m at least my view is why we need to explore the space

you know if you close yourself off from this from the rest of the universe then there’s just that much more to fear but

if you’re willing to you know put the technology and the resources together and explore there’s less to fear

you know so everything is above fear inner space exploring inner space too right yeah

really fear is an illusion i think the only things we’re born with scared of is like a loud sound and falling backwards

because those are i don’t know i’ve heard that i don’t know if that’s really but here right go ahead lydia go ahead go

lydia um what if we took a

so i always like the what if what what what’s another viewpoint what is possible what if fear wasn’t wrong

oh it’s not wrong yeah meaning some of

this could be my own i can’t tell if it’s my ego or my intuition someone will say

let’s find out um when i was hearing you some of the things that i was recognizing in this

past year and a half that i’ve been really trying to learn is the effects of oppressive aspects of

society that that there is real fear that’s needed for certain populations and like i’m a

white person right i i’m in a white body i live with privilege and so much less need for fear than

other minorities other not even minorities because that’s as as a population a world

population white people are actually a minority at this point but like

where does where does the aspect of trauma come in where like the window of tolerance i was

talking about before when we’re outside of the window of tolerance that’s where

the negative effects of dysregulation on our body happens in our nervous system and that comes from conditioned trauma

accumulation of things that at some level our body wasn’t able to handle over time

and so for me specifically i have gone almost against through my

own intuition when people are saying feel it be with it my body has been like i do that too much

that’s not helping that’s making it worse i need the tools to navigate i don’t i no longer want to feel i want to

i want the roadmap i want the tools i want to i want the support to feel like there’s

a reason to feel it there’s a because the feeling took me too far

and so what i’m realizing and a lot of the nuances of what i’ve been learning

is what if again what if it wasn’t what if we weren’t wrong in our experience

because we all we’re all comparing our experiences to other people from our small limited

context you know and so i’m just going to say it straight when

you talk i hear privilege as someone who experiences privilege you

know what i mean yeah this is why i just this is why we all deserve more love not less you know we deserve more love

the thing that jumped into my head is is is fear is survival yeah

fear is an illusion illusion of reality doesn’t matter but it’s part of a survivor it’s part of our

our evolution is to to allow our body to sense fear

without the influence of a big brain i mean that’s why when we talk about the parasympathetic

nerve which is which is based on on on on stimulus most of it is fear and

certainty it comes back to a spiral core not to our brain because it’s it’s really our

survival um so um

it’s not about it’s not about feeling or not feeling it’s not about rejecting or embracing fear it’s really about

having that that balance having that harmony between

embracing our mechanisms where we can feel fear and survive as a species

and not and yet at the same time having the other side the yin and yang side of being able to say hey um let me just

kind of back off from that and not to be consumed by that and so the problem with fear is not for

yourself is that we are so consumed by fear yeah it’s in the mind too you know because

there’s not a lion there anymore ready to jump out and kill us you know but some people are though that’s that’s the

thing right but i’m not other people i can only speak for myself right and just to say that i can understand everybody’s

situation no i can’t so um that’s why i can always say we deserve more love not

less you know so well there’s me let me know

yeah lydia mentioned that the fact that she’s white and so which kind of said

that i’m i’m non-white and then you know but then at the same time she’s female

and trust me i am not female but i think i think i think it’s important to to kind of bring a little

bit of background in here lidi actually grew up in west africa

so she was a white minority i mean you can’t get any more minority than

that you know being a white person living growing up in in so i i i

remember when um i before i was uh before i retire and pursue

spiritual practice and i was entrepreneur and before that i was a i was a professor

for nine years at ucla i remember the first year that i was there being a junior faculty

i was invited to the first faculty meeting and it turns out that they were talking about admission you know mission

of uh how you know this is the time to the beginning of the time when people start to say that hey you know maybe

there is something called reverse discrimination that if you put the criteria you know towards the the

non-white and what happened to the white and then someone turned to me he says denny you’re a minority what do you think i

just i said well actually i have never been a minority i have often been underrepresented

you know since we’re all interconnected right when i love my own heart all hearts are loved you know and that’s

what we we really deserve more not less love and so all these different ideas

some of them are better than than not but the body has its own um

non-translatable intelligence so there’s intelligences that we have that aren’t trying to interpret the world right

their direct knowings like our body can walk on ice and will automatically kind of adjust if we’re in it

without we having to think or bring back what we learned in college or you know what’s socially acceptable now what’s

not you know what’s in our in group or not um you know um whatever kind of

movements were or you know things were involved in the body it

yeah it’s just it’s so amazing and um i’m still wanting to go back to my question of how

you guys remember to be mindful of the body while interacting with the computer too

i can speak to like direct experience right now so

when i felt the need when i was listening to you to to say what i said after

i had an experience of a little bit more activation and tension up my spine

all the way into my head afterwards when you had your like

response rebuttal whatever i noticed there was a shift because the

activation i tuned into and i was like oh i need a little bit more energy i need a little bit more of adrenaline to

say say a piece right because sometimes when i feel that in my body i’m like is that because there’s anger am i you know

but it was like oh there’s a little bit of a sympathetic response because there’s a clarity that i want to come

across with what i want to clarify from what i’m hearing but then i started noticing the tension

started accumulating around the occiput where the neck meets the head and that felt like

okay now i have to let this go otherwise that’s going to become a headache or that’s going to become tension

and so how can i adjust how where it has there been any shift in my posture to be

a little more defensive or like step up because there’s been a a little bit of a

shift in the conversation and so just noticing my body of like oh i kind of want to like lie down on pillows right

now and just give my spot my physical spine a chance to chill out without having to necessarily

change my brain yet or my cognitive biases that i’m interpreting this conversation through

and so for me just noticing like when i’m doing an insight timer live i’ll chatter chat or chatter right

and then and then my intuition will be like you’re not in your body let’s bring everything everyone in so i immediately say okay where are you when you’re

listening to me what’s your position right now where’s your shoulder tension where is your breath is it down more to

your hips is it up here in your head in the awareness does is there shift so

i just take them straight into like let’s do it now like who gives a what i’m talking about how is your body responding to what i’m

talking about let’s tune into that yeah so that’s what i’ve been doing yeah you’ve been talking you’re very empathic

too because that is a trouble area and i really ought to go get some more cranial sacral and just to plug my own work here

it just did a recent post uh that i worked on for a long time uh dharmic strategies for empaths so um that might

be of interest on my thing but yeah it’s brilliant thank you so much thank you lydia that was wonderful um

it it it got me thinking about um what makes us

all of us including including joanne and others what what makes us who we are and

also we say that we’re a teacher but often we use the word coach so what is it about us um

and so what we do is we’re really bringing technique we’re not bringing

theory we’re not bringing you know big ideas what we’re doing is

really like providing a step-by-step technique and to the extent that we are focusing

on our body and wanted to have this practice that are body centric is that we’re really teaching a student how to

use this body as a tool and so i think what you just said

lydia is just it’s it’s it’s a i i love it because i we talked about yesterday

about um emotional intelligence emotional

intelligence and so people talk a great deal about i mean you just do google search and and it’s just like so many

talks so many papers on emotional intelligence and we used to have um uh

fellow students uh that were from kodak i mean about google and i remember

inviting making the arrangement to invite our dr master to give a talk at google and google you know that’s all

they talk about is emotional intelligence but what you find is that all of the people who talk about

emotional intelligence very few of them actually talk about the technique you know how do you you know if you if you

push aside you know all the talk how do you actually get there how do you actually

what is the tool because that’s that’s what we all about is is is we’re providing two so one of the things that

i like to to provide is the the word intelligence the word intelligence have

two meanings you know has two meanings that the how do you use your emotion intelligently

that’s one meaning but there’s another meaning you know it’s it’s it’s central intelligence agency it’s it’s the

intelligence actually means you know what is the what is the sensors what is that that that

that you know is the canary in the cave mind you know so so what is what what tells you that you’re going down the

wrong path so what you just described so so eloquently is really how do you use your body different parts of your body

so that it becomes a measure of your emotional

state and and so now once you’re trained to that once you

become sensitive to that then it becomes innate to you and you know so i’ll be having a conversation

that this is this gets me in trouble all the time i’ll be having a conversation and then all of a sudden she said she

looks at me in the night i’m just stopped and i said i just cut off and she said like what’s going on i thought we were having conversation

because i sense something i don’t want to go down that path where we become negative

it’s not what i want and so i know so i have to explain to her that i i don’t need that it’s not what i want i don’t

want to i’m not a negative person i don’t want to be negative and when i when i when i can sense my body then i’m

going down to either anger or you know aversions or whatever i want to pull

myself back from that and that’s that’s sort of what we’re trying to teach to a student isn’t it lydia

yeah it’s interesting i don’t know if either of you have heard of the polyvagal theory that’s something that i started studying

and now i’m in training learning more about it and it’s all about the nervous system so it’s all about the complexity

where it’s not we’re not an on and off switch rest and digest fight or flight there’s something called

well you probably know the vagus nerve which is a cranial nerve that goes all the way down through the head brain

heart brain gut brain connects to so many different things and 80 percent of the information is coming from

is towards the brain only 20 percent is brain down and in this it’s a form it’s an

expansion of understanding of our nervous systems related to trauma and and window of tolerance that’s where

that term comes from and we have blended states and we have

different states and one of them one where the ventral vagal is the one where we’re in connection

and that like i purposely am like tilting my head because in the ventral vagal state

expression of of eyes what we’re hearing with our ears our forehead our the position of our head

is showing to others whether we’re a threat or safe at any very minut details

from all these nerves that are happening from the heart upwards and i think that’s what a lot of these

tools lead us towards is more of a ventral vagal state and when we come into what they call a more regulated

state it’s the ability to move between blended states in our nervous system the dorsal is more in the

gut which relates to digestion and all that but when we’re in dorsal we go more into collapse exhaustion

paralysis of decision sympathetic is like this you know in the thoracic spine

mostly which is like fight flight freeze fawn which means like people please are

trying to just make the situation not be in conflict kind of trying to move away from it and it’s our nervous system like you so

articulately said earlier always moving towards survival and

the the guy that developed this steven porges developed a term called neuroception which is awareness without

without perception which is what you were describing like we’re taking in information our nervous

systems are responding it hasn’t even gotten up to our perception yet our shift these tools like qigong

meditation embodiment somatic practices is this ability of starting to expand

our awareness of all this and then create disruption and how quickly we’re interpreting it to be

negative or threat and shifting our perception while recognizing

sometimes we’re in a fight or flight because it’s very appropriate to the situation we’re in and then that’s very

appropriate and healthy for our nervous system to move into adrenaline and you know fight or flight response you

know so that’s kind of the lens that which i i’m seeing a lot through right now because

that’s what i’ve been kind of immersing myself in studying and sharing have you guys heard the definition of

ego as an overstimulated nervous system that’s cool it’s not yeah that’s uh it

puts it in a really good language that people can understand it really pins down what the ego yeah that’s really

that comes from matt khan that i mentioned before but yeah does that modality or that teaching system talk

about the peripheral nervous system too because that’s where a lot of sensing comes from too right

i’m sure it does i’m a newer student within it you know what i mean um but i’m in training right now i’m doing

through this brilliant company they’re super collaborative speaking of collaboration the embodylab.com and it’s

a training integrative somatic trauma therapy certification i’m doing it for personal

understanding and awareness and because i feel like if i’m in the coaching world i need the

understanding of trauma to understand where my scope is and to maintain integrity of the energy i’m holding for

people you know so that i can like if it’s out of my scope i’m v i can be very transparent and help direct them to the

resources that are going to better serve them because i’ve been that client where the scope i was out of their scope

and i it made me feel like i was more broken or like it was my fault rather than

their lack of education and their lack of ability to be transparent with what was the situation that’s right so you

got to take it in your own hands and that’s the other thing when we’re when we heal through these things and uh then

the people who haven’t yet we become heroes for the people who have still going through the same things right

yeah yeah and yeah learning from the essentially some of the trauma i’ve gone

through for me one of the things that like trauma and i always use a broad term

because someone brilliant in one of these modalities spoke to trauma as similar to

the definition of ego anything the nervous system doesn’t have the capacity to handle like to be able to down regulate from

comes in as trauma to the body and then our tools then either absorb it and like it gets

stuck somewhere or we are able to move through it or whatever and so i i don’t so when i say trauma

i’m not thinking extreme only acute big situations it’s like anything um

[Music] yeah and i suddenly lost my train of thought but maybe that’s where it needs to stop that’s okay i always like to say

that you know if you if you’re in a human body you’ve experienced trauma you know nobody really gets into this world

without any kind of trauma and we all have especially if you start going into subtle or subtle forms of it i mean

that’s one way to frame you know part of a reality and the quicker or the sooner we realize that most of us here are on a

healing journey the easier you know the easier it gets because so many people are on site are

so steeped in a healing journey that they have no idea they’re on you know and then they’re crying out for

pain you’re usually expressing the same abuse that’s been done to them

so they’re they’re they’re crying out for love you know wanting recognition and also

wanting respect to their power especially for the masculine right to be honored and respected and respecting the

power of the shadow as an equal expression of consciousness because it doesn’t mean what their

actions it doesn’t approve their actions at all but that shadow is saying oh hey i’m

important too i want to i’m an equal expression of consciousness now the actions are another thing

that doesn’t mean what what it’s wanting to do or has done is is right you know

so yeah go ahead go ahead ed go ahead

i think you know coming back to covet and the pandemic in isolation and then i

think one of the things that we’ve all experienced at least i have is

suddenly because we’re all online more we’re exposed to so much more of the world’s trauma that

maybe we weren’t tuning into before and suddenly our nervous systems are like taking and taking and taking and taking

and taking in and it’s like oh and so there’s like this extreme response of i don’t want to know the news i don’t

want to know anything i just want my bubble or like my response was i want to find out everything what what’s happening how

are people responding i need to be part of this like i want to understand the collective

but i think either extreme obviously it was whatever it’s our nervous systems

but one of i think the most brilliant and compassionate because those four

principles compassion equanimity that you said are like the

underlying principles of thai massage because it comes there’s a huge branch that i learned from tirabita buddhism

and the four aspects that it was when i was in teaching mode years ago

that was like the majority of what we were teaching it’s not about what you do it’s about how you do it it’s about your

presence and the grand master that i never met but the teeth the

teacher who learned from the grand master in the lineage of tai was like puja which is the pali word for

um intention prayer presence puja is where all the healing happens the rest is window dressing

and i love that because it because i immediately took it as the movement the tool the technique

that’s for our ego that’s for our intellect that’s for the part of us that’s like well i need to be doing something otherwise what is happening

the intention the approach our presence is where we’re at the quantum

level of experience and yet we’ve all agreed to collectively live in linear time and space so we live

on that pathway so many times i’ll say at the quantum level it’s done now my human lives it out linearly let’s see

what happens [Music] so um we start out by

the title that we just kind of pick our thin air which is practice in place

and as we uh discuss it become very clear that

practicing paid pla practicing in place is really encompasses all the fear because

behind that is shelter in place and and this last year and a half year and

three quarter there’s nothing but that it’s uncertainty it’s it’s all that and

let me take a step back and before i retire i took out early retirement i was entrepreneur i actually

started two companies and spent a great deal of my time presenting my business ideas to

the venture capitalists the people who actually manage money for someone else and so they’re sitting in a position of power

and you know we come in and just present a case and you know [Laughter] and

10 times our 10 times out of 10 at the end of the presentation someone we said something like

is the dog eating the dog food in other words have you even tried your

idea you know with a customer i mean you have this great idea how you’re going to change the world but has the dog eating

the dog food and and and that’s kind of just bring you back into earth and says now

today we have four instructors or four quote unquote uber students right that’s

that’s who we are and i think the thing that you can take away from today’s discussion is that

these are the dogs that have eaten their own dog food that we’re really talking about our own

personal journey in the last and a half how to deal with uncertainties both in a professional

arena as well as a personal arena and we are actually taking the tools that that

we have honed over a career that we

are in a position to present to students and we’re actually using that on our own

to manage our fear right and we do that by keep reminding

us that there’s so much that we don’t know you know there’s so much so many dimensions of existence that we have yet

to explore and so then why are you so you know why then it

just kind of put things in perspective then you know i remember i remember there was this one scene that was one of

my favorite scene on i think was finding ryan or or you know where were where the

they were they were they were they were uh they come up to the to the beach and the germans were shooting at them and

and and the lieutenant was you know trying to bring his soldiers in and one soldier is

shaking like this and he says what he says you’re already dead so why are you [Laughter]

why are you in fear so i think this is what we do is that we you know

we each have our own understanding of reality or or whatever the word that we

choose and it’s a lot more than than our everyday you know and what we’re trying to do is

just present it to our students say hey you know there’s this and there’s that and there’s this helper we explore together

and we’re doing that with a student and definitely in the last year and a half

we’re the one that had to consume the dog food you know for me it’s it’s that’s a great

analogy denny for me this really hasn’t been much of a change for me uh

uh kind of ironically right because i i’m not into shopping i’m not go into

going out and partying a lot you know i mainly i was going to grocery stores before i’ve had a daily sitting practice

since 2012 which is mostly solo so actually a lot of the stuff has been you

know and it has been great online because i can connect with people from all over the world now more than more than i can

beforehand but for me it’s more about um you know

how are other people relating to this trying to figure out how other people are relating to this and then adjusting

to that and it seems like everybody’s experienced this a little bit differently you know it’s kind of like

us we’re all so interconnected but we all have we’re all a little bit different different expressions of that

same so in san francisco in san francisco um if you just drive down gary boulevard

the main the main boulevard yeah like i would say seven out of the 10 restaurants are closed they just can’t

survive the pandemic the ones that thrive are the tickles because they said what difference does

it make so josh is like the tickle of spiritual teachers

it doesn’t change it doesn’t change my life i do i do only fast food

i’m sorry forgive me forgive me that’s the wikipedia is the uh the mcdonald’s of information now yeah yeah yeah yeah i

mean yeah no no i i no but let me put the joker i couldn’t i couldn’t help that one but but the joke aside is that

is that josh has this way of you know he he is true you know it hasn’t changed his

life all that much and i think for some people that’s really true you know when i moved

i moved to colorado in 2018 away from florida and at the time there

i was dealing with a lot of ptsd and like symptoms and i needed i would i was headed to denver not the mountains

but i was like i want to be near mountain energy i just make decisions like that i’m like

i’ve never been to colorado let’s do this let’s let’s see what happens no job no house

it’s something that it puts mountains put things in perspective don’t they

waking up and cleaning the mountains every day medicine and then i was in denver and it

wasn’t working like i found a great place to live but then the job wasn’t working i got an offer up here

and my goal was like i’ve worked for myself for a while i’m burned out let me let me see if i can step up and work for

someone else and show up and because that felt like it needed to be

part of the accountability of moving stuff within my own healing to just like

be in more of a submit and it was very hard i gotta tell you um but there’s something about the mountains that’s

like shape up or we’re kicking you out oh yeah and self-reliance if there’s

even like right now my window right now is white because there’s a snowstorm happening you know

and the winters here are like intense and i’m not a huge winter person

so it’s it’s a very as a morvata you know in ayurveda my body type is more like

i like the spring and the fall and a little bit of the summer you know whatever so i’m like

my body’s like are we gonna do this are we gonna do this we gotta figure it out where’s the nurture i was born in

the blizzard by the way seriously i was born in the blizzard [Laughter]

so anyway yeah it’s like i was just it i actually traveled to denver during the pandemic the height of it and it was

challenging i’ll just put i’ll just leave with that i won’t say too much but there’s a little video of me doing yejin jing on on table uh table top mountain

and gold which is really actually i really like gold and it was really cool hey hey guys what do you say we wrap

this up yes and and again you know this is this is this is this is not the end this is the

beginning of the beginning i i look forward to having more of this and and josh i’ll let you go first what uh wrap

this up for me and then we’ll go to lydia and then finally to me so this is the first time that we had a round table that was actually round

the very first episode we did in september of 2020 we had four guests on i don’t know if you remember ah i

remember throw it back to you you this is where you shine the the the wrapping up of the intro

no no you go first you go first you go first no you you have to do it thanks for having me i i i’m tripping over my

own words i i want danny to do this okay all right lydia what do you got

safe i mean i really appreciate this i appreciate this kind of

i think on some level there’s a need to hear processing happen and i appreciate the

the structure like the least structure of this round table discussion because there’s a processing of different perspectives

and you know when i do lives it’s just me and i really appreciate the dynamic of other more you know more than one all

the way up to four for a period of time um because even my like nervous system

and approach was integrating or ideally integrating we’ll see um the different perspectives in

i love when i love our the human capacity when given more information to change

and i feel like that’s there’s a lot of potential for this where there’s different perspectives

that are being shared and different potential experiences in our nervous systems that are

that are seeing something new maybe from a slightly different approach or perspective that’s either confirming the

beliefs we had or shifting them slightly or putting a slight pivot of perspective

on the direction from which we’re seeing it and of course anyone who’s watching

now or later gets a little bit of that experience um so i think i just have a

i’m excited about the potential for collab future collaboration and i have like a sense of like

on the main channel meridian governing meridian gratitude like it feels like it’s kind of running central you know

inside outside of like superficial personality like at the deeper level there’s like a sense of like

ah yes this is good you know i’ll throw in a real quick sound bite from the suit to this

surmountable by wisdom are all things and as we know information can turn into

knowledge and knowledge can turn into wisdom so beautiful

let me let me just i for some reason i lost focus there you go so so

before is before i retire i was entrepreneur where he said that and then before that i was i was i was a faculty

member and before that i was a graduate student so i had a thesis advisor

uh you know and the dynamics of graduate school is that your thesis advisor is like the emperor

you’re like the underlying you know and that that relationship continues into your professional career because you

constantly need to get recommendations for this recognition for that and so one day

we were flying into um i believe it was uh dallas and we had a

big conference and it turns out that i was following up from l.a and as i got on the plane my advisor was there and so

wow you know oh danny i know i’m so happy to see you and so we’re flying together and of course we choose the

sydney charter you know chatting and all that and so it turns out that um in the middle of flight we encountered this storm and the plane

actually dropped three times and and you know close to 5 000 feet each time

and in fact one of the stewards just had her laid caught under the seats and actually turns out that um there was a

big mess and i remember as we were flying down i hold on to the seat and i said i don’t

want to die next to this [Laughter] so all the nice things that i had

so this is what i learned this is what i learned you can pretend to like someone but you can’t pretend to respect someone

yeah and so this is what i got from today is that i

really like the idea that we built a a roundtable

of healers and providers where the relationship is built on

mutual respect for the purpose of providing more

knowledge not less to the consumers and i use the word consumers because otherwise you would

call them students they consume our product our practice

but the consumers always come first it’s all about them and

this is what i said yesterday that that the one thing that i dislike or one thing that maybe just like is there is a

strong word one thing that i think inside timer needs to improve

is that there ought to be more collaborations among the teachers and because right now um by default we are

like in competition you know it’s it’s a it’s a zero-sum game if the student comes to me then

they’re not coming to you if someone comes to someone else then they come to neither one of us so

i think we need more collaboration because i think the student would benefit i think the student would benefit knowing that oh

in thai yoga massage they talk about this and then in the you know qigong

practice or in egypt they talk about this and guess what it’s the same thing just from different perspective it’s

just another dimensions i look forward to that i look forward to that i hope that this

is just the beginning of the beginning cool same okay so with that

thank you so much lydia and thank you for introducing us to joanne and thank you joanne we hope to see you next time

we’ll have to decide when we’re going to do this again um we may maybe we should do it more often than once a month we’ll

figure it out yeah possibly we’ll figure it out thank you josh thank you josh for your

for all your brilliance always the one that starts something

okay all right okay it was all right thanks so much okay thanks everyone thank you everyone who’s watching out

there um yes and uh we’ll see you

Published by josh dippold

IntegratingPresence.com

One thought on “Practice-In-Place Roundtable | (10/26/2021 — “Ask Us Anything – LIVE” With Denny K Miu And Guests Lydia Grace and Joanne Muir)”

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