Citizening at The Source (Sam Rader)

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
It's a radical act of citizen ing to change our story,
to change the narrative that we're living within and our
relationship to ourselves and others in the world of like.
I won't participate in the authorizing, the dehumanizing, the fighting,
the oppression.

Speaker 2 (00:19):
I won't.

Speaker 1 (00:20):
I'm not going to do that to me. I'm not
going to do that to you. I am going to
stand for love. I will stand for love, and in
that being, this change my world.

Speaker 2 (00:34):
Welcome to How to Citizen with Baratunde, a podcast that
reimagined citizen as a verb, not a legal status. This
season is all about how we practice democracy, what can
we get rid of, what can we invent, and how
do we change the culture of democracy itself. We're leaving
the theoretical clouds and hitting the ground with inspiring examples

(00:54):
of people and institutions that are showing us new ways
to govern ourselves. I can't believe this is the final
episode of our fourth season of How to Citizen. I'm
so glad you're here now. If you've been with us
from the start, thank you, and I hope we've given

(01:15):
you new perspectives, solutions and practices to get inspired by
and to try. If you're new to the show, thank
you as well. It is never too late to start citizen.
We kicked off this season with Adrian Marie Brown. It
was a beautiful, expansive conversation about the importance of getting

(01:37):
into right relationship with each other and seeing democracy is
something we create at the micro level at home and
in our communities, not just at the macro level via
the ballot box. Adrian shared this idea that I'm still
playing with in my mind. The idea that the external
systems were fighting so hard against also exists inside of us.

(02:00):
The inequality, racism, extreme capitalism, all the isms don't just
exist out there, they take root in here. So as
much as we need to citizen externally to make our
communities and our country better by participating, investing in relationships,
understanding power, and valuing the collective, we also need to

(02:21):
citizen internally. And that brings me to our second pillar,
invest in relationships. We have mostly focused on using that
as a way to connect to the people around us
and to the planet, but the full line is invest
in relationships with yourself, with others, and with the planet.

(02:44):
And it's so important that we take that first piece
that relationship with ourselves as equal to the relationship with
others in the planet. Today, doctor Sam Raider is helping
us go deeper so that we can understand what it
takes to create a culture within ourselves that supports creating
a culture of democracy for all of us. I was

(03:07):
introduced to Sam through my wife Elizabeth, who you should
know by now is executive producer of this show. And
if I'm being honest, when I first met Sam, I
thought she was a bit out there. She was always
talking about alternative approaches to healing and what we could
learn from quantum physics, and what we could learn from

(03:28):
psychedelics and how to undo our internal wirings from childhood
and blah blah blah. It was a lot okay, But
over time, Sam and the way she sees the world,
they started to click for me. In her eighteen years
of practicing psychology, Sam couldn't ignore these patterns she saw
her clients living through and realized she needed to step

(03:50):
outside of that traditional practice and try something new. So
she developed an approach called source Code, which she says
focuses on the speed theirritual dimension of healing. Sam believes
that our early childhood experiences write a code in our
unconscious which then determines the way our story unfolds. And

(04:11):
she's committed to helping people rewrite their code. And I
want to be clear, this isn't talk therapy, and I'm
not going to ask you to lay back on your couch,
but it is deeply vulnerable. What Sam asks people to
do is get honest about the role we cast for
ourselves in our lives and the responses we think we're

(04:33):
hardwired to have. If you have any exposure to the
modern world of wellness or healing or Instagram spirituality, then
you know it can feel completely divorced from and even
in denial of reality. I have found that Sam has

(04:53):
a foot in both worlds, the internal and external. She
protests signed petitions, her money where her mouth is. I
literally depend on her for my LA voting guide every
time we have to vote, which feels like every other month.
Sam is so dedicated to this inner work because she
believes that our personal healing is what's going to help

(05:16):
us create collective healing. After the break, Doctor Sam Raider
on the source code running our lives and how turning
inward can help us create a culture of democracy that
supports a just and loving world. We are so excited

(05:43):
to have you here to explore this belief that I've
had for a while now, based some on my own experience,
based some on your work about the importance of healing
ourselves before we can heal the world, and how we
can sit as in better. So that's the crux of
why you're here, and I want to start with just
asking you, how did you come to make this connection

(06:03):
that our internal worlds directly link to our experience of
the external one. Did it happen in a moment a
series of moments with some of your discovery of this link.

Speaker 1 (06:13):
I was a psychologist for eighteen years in private practice,
starting with my practic and going through, you know, having
my own business, and I started to see that there
were these patterns that people were coming in and saying
the same things to me, even across all different walks
of life, all different socioeconomic status, race, gender, you know,

(06:35):
it didn't really matter. There were these universal patterns. And
when I started relating with the patterns instead of the
specifics of what the person was bringing in, I noticed
that there were these radical shifts not only in how
the person showed up in the world, how they felt,
how they behaved, but also how the world showed up

(06:56):
for them in an almost mystical way. Things change in
their external environment to now reflect their new internal environment.
And it started happening so many times that I couldn't
unsee it. And that's why I guess I walk this
divine paradox, like, yes, I create the voter guide every vote.

Speaker 2 (07:14):
I believe in.

Speaker 1 (07:15):
Citizen ing deeply, and I believe it's all an illusion,
kind of how the Hindus have been saying for thousands
of years. It's all you know, everything we're experiencing is
a part of ourselves.

Speaker 2 (07:28):
The idea that everything we're experiencing is a part of
ourselves links to some of my in field experience is
making America outdoors and the idea that we are a
part of nature, not apart from nature, and so we
see ourselves in the external in these patterns that you
were seeing in your patience, your clients in the psychology
realm you described, you know, a shift in them that

(07:51):
would then shift some of the world around them. What's
an example of what you were noticing and what changed
after you called attention to or intervened in some way.

Speaker 1 (08:03):
Yeah, so I was thinking in preparation for this interview
about this client of mine whose political beliefs were those
that are sort of associated with oppression. And when we
explored his internal landscape and the sort of symbols that
run him, we found that he experienced his father as
oppressive as a little one, and actually said sometimes when

(08:23):
his father would get really angry, it felt like a
silver back gorilla. And so we started talking about the
silver back gorilla, this part that's so big and so
scary and gets to have all the power, and that
that part is paired with this other part that feels
so powerless. So in his symbolic landscape, there was this
big thing and this little thing and they went together

(08:46):
in such a scary, disturbing way. And so if you're
living in a universe where there's big guys and little
guys and the little guys always lose, of course you're
going to want to be a big guy.

Speaker 2 (08:57):
Logical' that's just that.

Speaker 1 (09:00):
So you know, I never spoke to him about his
political beliefs, and all we did was work on the
symbols that run him, this awful split in power, these
symbols of bigness and smallness, and oppression, and we started
to alchemize those symbols and replace them with new symbols
of togetherness, connection, empowerment, equality, equity, and we started shifting

(09:25):
things down, down, down at that symbolic layer. And then
he comes in and says to me, you know, I've
been thinking about the way that I vote. I think
there's something off here, like I'm realizing it doesn't actually
honor the human beings in the world. And then a
few weeks later he comes in and says, it doesn't
feel right anymore to have a gun yet a gun,

(09:46):
and it's like, yeah, well, if we're living in the
big guys and little guys paradigm of dominance, it makes
a lot of sense to have a gun, right, Yeah.
But this is someone who would find himself regularly these
pickles in life. You know, people on the road would
cut them off and they'd get in these battles or
just odd problems would be coming into his life in

(10:08):
various social settings where there was a lot of conflict
and shows of dominance, and as he shifted his internal landscape,
those things just didn't show up in his world anymore.
He wasn't being beckoned into that fight because he wasn't
organized around fight.

Speaker 2 (10:25):
Thank you for the silverback gorilla tail. I've been on
a tour over the past few years doing a lot
of talking and connecting, and one of the stories I've
been trying to shift with the audience I connect with
is like, I'm not here to take anything from you.
You know, there is so many of us wired to
believe in what Heather McGee, another previous guest on our show,

(10:46):
calls the zero sum game. If you get something, it's
got to come at my expense. And it's like, that's
a possible interpretation, or we could get more together, which.

Speaker 1 (10:56):
Is how nature has worked for time immemorial. Everything springs
up interdependent with one another.

Speaker 2 (11:03):
You know.

Speaker 1 (11:03):
It's just this ecosystem of life that supports itself and
each other, and everyone wins and everything keeps each other
in checks and balances and thriving. Something about the way
we've started to organize ourselves in the last couple thousand years.
We're getting away from that, but we can also return
to that.

Speaker 2 (11:24):
I keep thinking back to the first conversation this season
with Adrian Marie Brown. We spent some time on fractals.
We talked about how fractals you represent these patterns that
replicate at the small medium at every scale. The implication
being if we change something at the small scale, it
will replicate, it will ripple to the larger scale. And

(11:47):
I know you're a big fan of fractals, and even
the story you shared has you know it hints at this.
But where do fractals fit into your worldview when you
think about the connection between shifting our internal world to
shift the external world.

Speaker 1 (12:03):
So, for those of you who don't know, a fractal
is a pattern that keeps repeating at every scale. So
if you zoom in, it's the same pattern. Zoom all
the way out, same pattern. Turn to the left, same pattern,
turn to the right, same pattern. It's infinite. Fractals are
everywhere in our universe. The branching in our lungs mirrors
the branching in nature in trees and so on and

(12:25):
so forth. So there are certain patterns that keep repeating. Now,
source code is based on the idea that in our
first five years of life, our early experience encodes into
us some patterning. What we learn explicitly by what we're
taught and also implicitly from how we're treated in our environment,
creates this deep patterning inside of us, and that pattern

(12:49):
keeps repeating. So for that client, it was that pattern
of dominance and oppression, and that pattern keeps repeating like
a fractal. There's actually this really beautiful book called You
Matter more Than You Think. It's written by Karen O'Brien
who's a professor of human geography at OSLO in Norway,
and she talks about that this is a fractal universe.

(13:09):
You know, quantum physics and mathematics is bringing us closer
to this, knowing that we really do live in this
place where it's all just patterns that keep repeating. And
for us at the societal scale, how we're citizening. It's
the idea of paradigms. So the paradigm of dominance has
become really big, but it's become really big because as children,

(13:30):
there's a lot of children who experience that dominance thing
in their family system, so then it's encoded into them,
then they embody it, and then our collective embodiment creates
these larger macrosystems that mirror like a fractal. So the
cool part from that book You Matter More Than You Think,
is she says, you know, every point is the center

(13:53):
point in a fractal universe. So what each of us embody,
how we show up up, what we believe, how we
citizen is the beginning of a new world. Every moment
can bur the new world of how we want to
show up.

Speaker 2 (14:09):
All right? So I literally got like slightly emotional slash
chills because I don't think I speak just for myself
when I say that the world can feel very frustrating,
can feel very overwhelming. In terms of the challenges, I
could list off a litany of isms and ologies, yes,
which are impeding our growth and our evolution, and patterns

(14:30):
and stories and systems that we were born into, sometimes
literally in our families, sometimes more metaphorically as a society.
And if I want to counter that, right, if I
want to change that, I'm like, I got to join
the right organization, I got to fund the right politician.
Oh everything they said was a lie. And what I'm
hearing in this you matter more than you think. And

(14:53):
the center is actually everywhere, is that the front line
is also in here. And so if I just start
right the place, the space matters a little less than
just the commencement. And maybe I could start with me
and have that be my own front line.

Speaker 1 (15:11):
Absolutely, Oh my god, I feel you know, tiriy I
just hearing you talk about it. And in twenty sixteen,
when Trump was elected, I wrote this cheeky article entitled
why Trump's presidency might promise more hope and change than Obama's.

Speaker 2 (15:26):
What Okay, hold on, I'm with you, I'm with you,
But I mean that's the very clickbaity great clickbaby. My
emotions are moving now because nobody speaks against my man,
old I loved you. Would you talking about doctor Stale?

Speaker 1 (15:40):
Well, when we go looking out there and absolutely keep
citizen ing, keep contributing, keep funding, keep going, keep protesting,
and when we're only looking out there, we forget that
power that every point is the center point in the fractal.
So the way I see Trump is that he's kind
of a caricature of our collective wound in this nation

(16:01):
of otherizing. So he does this big thing about let's
build a wall, and these people are bad, and you know,
I'm the greatest, and then we liberals say no, you're
bad and we're good. It's just a mirror image. It's
Malkovich Malkovich. So the dehumanizing that's festering at the core

(16:21):
of our nation. He's coming forward as this big embodiment
of that going do you see? Do you see who
we are? And it's our opportunity and invitation to go
inside and go Okay, where am I dehumanizing even them?
Because if I had lived the sum total of their
life experience, I would also believe and act the way

(16:43):
that they are. And so it's like, there are no
bad people, only hurt people, hurt people.

Speaker 2 (16:51):
I've heard that line so many times, and you know,
the people who are hurt in turn hurt others. I think,
you know, Trump is a tricky caricature as a particular example,
where yes, we hold the truth that hurt people hurt people,
and we act to counter the harm and the hurt

(17:12):
that's being created by this person. It's the both, at
least for me, I don't even know if that's a question.
It's more of a statement to get your response to, Oh,
because I don't want to feel like so just have
to vaguely love, you know, hurtful people and the world's
going to fix itself.

Speaker 1 (17:29):
Oh yes, I do think there are some people who,
because of their coping styles and wounds, are living in
a little bit of denial of reality and doing what
I call spiritual bypass where they're like, everyone just needs
to raise their level of consciousness. And I'm like, okay,
you tell that to a slave in chains in a
diamond mind right now, like, oh, just raise your level

(17:49):
of consciousness. Like we have to hold both.

Speaker 2 (17:52):
We have to hold.

Speaker 1 (17:53):
Both that there are certain sticky spots in this universe
where people don't have the flexibility like on Maslow's hierarchy
of needs to be thinking about the quantum and my
embodiment and what story am I telling? Sometimes things are
just really real, and how can we hold both that
our relationship to things matters, that are embodiment matters, that

(18:17):
are being this matters, and that there are very real
things going on in the world that need to be stopped,
that need to be talked about, that need to be
addressed and not swept under the rug.

Speaker 2 (18:27):
Yes, and it's improv It all comes back to improv comedy.
I want to back up on some terminology. We've got
source code, We've got a coding session rather than a
therapy session. We've got symbolic versus concrete or circumstances. I
think you use that word can you give us a

(18:49):
lay of this linguistic land that you're also creating. What
is symbolic versus the traditional way we tend to approach
kind of articulating our our problems are in our selves.

Speaker 3 (19:02):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (19:02):
Sure.

Speaker 1 (19:03):
So if we think about the client who had the
dad that he associated with the silver Back guerrilla, the
concrete circumstances in his life that week may have been
that some dick cut him off on the road. He
comes in and he wants to tell me about this
specific situation that's so frustrating and so irritating, and what

(19:25):
do I do about these people everywhere that are trying
to cut me off?

Speaker 2 (19:29):
Right?

Speaker 1 (19:29):
And it's this very specific thing. But instead of going
with the concrete specifics, we're going to dive deeper beneath
to the symbols, the symbolic landscape or symbolic nexus that
got encoded into him when he was little, that's running
his life now. It's the algorithm of his matrix. It's
what he notices, it's what he attracts, it's what he

(19:49):
orients around. It's his favorite story to keep telling, no
matter how awful and enraging it is. And so we
go down, down, down, and we work with the symbols instead.
Like we were talking earlier, there's this gorilla in the mouse,
the big part in the little part. Those are archetypal symbols.
And when we can resolve things down at that symbolic layer,
poof his life shifts. He notices different things, he attracts

(20:12):
different things, he creates different things, he embodies different things,
he believes different things, he relates in a new way.
And that's the work that I do.

Speaker 2 (20:21):
Yeah, and I want to dive deeper into your source
code world and your coping styles world. What have you
found when you've gone inside? What are the wounds that
you've been able to kind of categorize and label and
give some structure to to help us make sense of
that internal landscape so we could adjust how we show
up in the external landscape.

Speaker 1 (20:42):
So source Code has identified that there's twelve coping styles
that we all share, and all of us have several.
I had all twelve, which is sort of what allowed
me to be the conduit for the work. But those
coping styles are the defense mechanisms that we inherit in
our early experience when we don't get the precise support
need at each developmental stage. So all of us are
walking around with these patterns or coping styles, or glitches

(21:05):
in our matrix that make things hard, these tough patterns
that keep repeating. But what's more interesting to me is
that under them, as soon as we dissolve them, which
is what source code does, under those defenses, each of
us is the most exquisitely beautiful energy, the most loving, relational, curious, playful, magical,

(21:29):
gentle spirit waiting dormant inside of each of us to
awaken beyond those defenses. That's what I find inside when
I assist someone in stepping out of a lifelong nightmare
that they've been trapped inside of. You know, when you
think about your life, you notice those patterns that keep
repeating of like why am I always invisible? Why does

(21:49):
no one hear me? You know? And it's like, because
that's something that got encoded into you and now you
keep reliving it. But it doesn't have to be. So
this morning I received a DM from a student who
was in a class with me last night, and she said,
you know, I was feeling very upset and missed because
in the first half of class, every time I wrote
something in the chat, you missed it. You skipped over

(22:10):
that and read everyone else's and I felt so invisible
my whole life. And so during the break, I decided,
let me stand taller and speak my truth and speak
my needs. She came forward and was like, I won't
be invisible, and then she got the love and the
support she needed. So she saw that it was a pattern,
a pattern from childhood that keeps repeating, and she shifted

(22:30):
her energy, she shifted her embodiment, she shifted what she's
willing to participate in. I'm not going to keep playing
out that old story. And then she got to have
a new experience.

Speaker 2 (22:40):
So what flash into my mind just now was an image.
It's a civil rights image from nineteen sixty eight. The
Memphis sanitation workers are striking. They're all black. They're holding
up signs that simply say I am a man right,
just affirming and asserting a different story, a different ownership
of self that's been denied, you know, and encoded right

(23:02):
into laws and practices and cultures. Also children who created
those laws and practices and cultures, and not being seen,
not being humanized. But to humanize yourself first and demand
you know that others humanize you as well, and so
even in that image, for me, there is a bridge
from this symbolic work and the things that are going

(23:23):
on in any individual person right back to the way
you even protest. The way you show up can affirm
a truth that you find in your own, you know,
kind of internal landscape.

Speaker 1 (23:35):
Yes, Like it's a radical act of citizen ning to
change our story, to change the narrative that we're living
within and our relationship to ourselves and others in the world.
Of Like, I won't participate in that old way of being,
the authorizing me to you, humanizing, the fighting the oppression. Yeah,

(23:56):
I won't. I'm not going to do that to me.
I'm not going to do that to you. I am
going to stand for love. I will stand for love,
and in that being this change my world.

Speaker 2 (24:08):
So standing for love it literally sounds and feels beautiful.
You've mentioned, you know, this term coping styles. Can you
describe one or two of them and how they relate
to that early childhood development.

Speaker 1 (24:21):
One of the things we're developing as children in our
first five years of life is our sense of will.
What do I have control over? What can I impact?
What's my scope of influence? And we need to be
able to feel that we can control things and not everything.
It's got to be that optimal frustration like ooh, I
don't get to control absolutely everything, and also the optimal

(24:44):
indulgence of but I do get to decide what I
wear to school, but not a hero costume, not a
superhero costume. But you know, I can wear any of
my shorts or any of my tops. Right, So that
we need to feel that we have some say, some voice,
some choice, some agency, agency power, but not despotic agency,
not control over absolutely everything, where our tantrums can control

(25:06):
our entire families. So as we're developing our will, which
really happens between ten months of age and four years
of age, during that process, things can go wrong in
one of two ways or both ways, which is we
can be over indulged or we can be overly frustrated,
and those create the indulged coping style and the frustrated

(25:28):
coping style, and you can actually have both. But when
we're overly frustrated, it's like everything is in no, we're
constantly blocked and thwarted. Our will doesn't matter, our voice
doesn't matter, our needs don't matter. And so the cool
thing about the human spirit is that it can never
be broken. The will does not disappear, but it goes underground,

(25:53):
and it turns against the self and against the world,
and we become self sabotaging, and as frustrated people feeling
bad starts to feel good. Somehow, we couldn't win by winning,
so we learn how to win by losing and making
everyone else lose. And we feel a lot of stuckness,
a lot of resistance, a lot of warlike energy.

Speaker 2 (26:14):
Life is hard.

Speaker 1 (26:15):
That's our mantra, and we're literally frustrated. And the antidote
of frustrated is to get in flow, to say no
to what we don't want directly, instead of kicking under
the table, say yes to what we do want. Want
what we want, get what we want, feel clear, feel direct.
So one of the ways that the frustrated coping style

(26:36):
can play out in terms of citizen ing is if
we feel like there's no way to win and my
will doesn't matter and I won't be heard, why the
f would we show up to vote? I don't matter,
No one listens to me anyway. You know, f the man,
and we don't realize we are the man.

Speaker 2 (26:54):
I am the man.

Speaker 1 (26:56):
I am one of we the people who get to
decide what goes on here. But if we didn't feel
empowered as children to be able to make decisions, then
as adults we also don't feel we have the power
to make decisions. So the indulged coping style is sort
of equal and opposite. It's when during the time of socialization,

(27:17):
no one sort of showed us how we impacted others.
So either we were deeply indulged by our parents or
neglected by our parents, and in either of those situations,
our will ruled the roost. Whatever we wanted, we got.

Speaker 2 (27:30):
That's what I'm feeling. I'm feeling like I don't know
who coined it, but you know, to the person born
into the benefits of a system of oppression, other people's
freedom feels like their oppression because waits, you got something
you wanted, Well, that was mine. I was supposed to
get that, And so like we've indulged at scale. You know,

(27:50):
some groups of people men have been indulged, you know,
relative to women in the world. The backlash to feminism
by people like and Andrew Tate, who's a caricature as well, well,
there's something indulgent about that, right. The lack of patience, perspective,
respect that someone else's will also matters.

Speaker 1 (28:08):
Yes, And really the indulged experience is an unawareness that
anyone else is even real or exists or matters. It's
like I want what I want at any cost, and
I'm going to get it. It's kind of like the
Stanford marshmallow experiment, like I can't even think about later.
I never really fully developed my frontal I.

Speaker 2 (28:27):
Think you're talking about an experiment involving torturing children with
access to marshmallows.

Speaker 1 (28:34):
It's like, if you don't eat this one now, you
can have two later, okay, And to it's developing their
capacity to wait.

Speaker 2 (28:41):
That's what a PhD would say. Yeah, from the outside,
I'm just like, give the kid the marshmallow. Come on, man,
Like they're a child. They can't like rationalize this right.

Speaker 1 (28:50):
Well, that's you know, that's that critical period in development
when they start to be able to either wait or
not wait. And if we can't wait, we have that
indulged coping style. So how looks as a citizen is
why would I vote? It doesn't affect me, doesn't affect me. Yeah, yeah,
it's all me, me, me, me me, It's not anything
against anyone else. It's like, I don't want to mess

(29:14):
with anyone else, but don't tread on me. Don't take
away my freedom. Don't take away right exactly, don't take
away my capacity to always have exactly what I want
in every moment, because I'm used to that indulgence.

Speaker 2 (29:29):
So with these styles you've mentioned, you know the word antidote.
As far as what we do with them, what does
that mean? What are we trying to do with these
styles beyond get over them or process them? Right? What's
the goal?

Speaker 1 (29:42):
I like to say that we go from being possessed
by them to possessing them. I have this coping style,
but I'm not unconsciously ruled by it. So each of
the styles has an antidote, which is the healed position.
So for indulge, the healed position is actually intervening, which
is a term coined by the late Buddhist monk tik

(30:03):
not Han. He coined that term to talk about how
within every single being is every other being. So in
a piece of paper, you've got to know about the
tree that made that paper, and the birds and the
squirrels that lived inside of that tree, and the water
in the sunshine that nourished the tree, and the logger

(30:25):
that cut the tree, and the mill worker who made
the paper, and the mothers of the humans who were
involved with making this book who fed them from the land,
you know, and the big bang that created all of
this divine unfoldment forever ago. So starting to know about
we're all nodes in a web of being. I'm not

(30:48):
the only node. And really the wound inside of the
indulged wound is that we didn't grow up in a village.
And it's this deep emptiness that causes this consumer and
this need for more and more and me and me,
because we don't have a sense of belonging, and so
we're in this sort of solitary confinement of the myth

(31:11):
of separation that it's me against you and we're competing
for finite resources dominating a land instead of being of
the land, of the animals, of one another and belonging.
If we had that sense of togetherness and rootedness and belonging,
we wouldn't be me. MEI me, gimme, gimme.

Speaker 2 (31:29):
You just described something Elizabeth and I talk about a lot,
like why the suburbs is responsible for gentrification in the hood, right,
It's like people who didn't grow up with a village
out there in the Bonies, coming into the city because
it's cool, don't know how to be around other people.
See some black kids on the Stuplan music, don't know
how to inter be so they call the police instead

(31:50):
and say, like, this is disturbing my existence, right, this
noise is foreign to me. Therefore I have to squash
it and mute it and silence it and push it away.
And that's lack of practice at inter being at some
larger but still I think parallel level. That's my translation.
When I'm hearing things that have to do with early

(32:12):
childhood development and what we inherit, I think of generational healing, right,
these inter connections between generations. What does that term mean
to you? And do you see any connection between that
and our ability to create better circumstances to have a
healthier democracy, to create a healthier culture of democracy through

(32:34):
generational healing.

Speaker 1 (32:35):
Absolutely, So we're talking about the fractal nature of reality
and how our outsides reflect our insides, and how our
insides get encoded in our first five years of life.
So we are born into a long lineage of unconscious
generational pain handed down through the millennia. But for some
incredible reason, we're alive right now at the time where

(32:57):
we actually have the capacity to become aware of the
paradigms and dynamics and patterns and say the buck stops
with me. I won't unconsciously pass this down to my children.
I'm going to see these things and I'm going to
shift them. When I would do it as a psychologist,
it would take me a long time, and it was
pretty laborious because I was working with the mind, which

(33:20):
can play tricks and go around in circles. But the
thing about energy is it can shift in the now.
I did a coding session on.

Speaker 2 (33:28):
That's what we call them coding sessions in source code.

Speaker 1 (33:30):
Okay, yes, because we just work with the symbolic code.
We don't work with any of the circumstances going on
in your life. But I was coding someone who essentially
realized and named I was born into this metal chamber
of fear around me. My father had one kind of fear,
my mother had another kind of fear, and both made

(33:51):
me feel so trapped and so scared and like I
can't trust myself. And so we started to know about
that started to know about the metal chamber, started to
feel how impossible it was, how it wasn't, can't, can't,
And we started to dissolve and resolve that so that
he could energetically feel this shift of that outside thing

(34:12):
oppressing him. Ah release, and he was like, I trust myself,
I trust my instincts, I trust my energy. I've never
felt like this in my body before. I've never felt
this much good energy circulating in my body. And I said,
you know, there's always some fear when we outgrow our parents' paradigm,
that we're going to have to split off from them,

(34:33):
or that this means we don't love them. But no,
we invite them in.

Speaker 2 (34:36):
We go. Come with us.

Speaker 1 (34:38):
There's a new world where we're not ruled by this
metal chamber of fear. Come with me. I love you,
Let me contain you in a new way. Let me
show you. This is evolution. And he felt it. He
was like, I want to invite them into this new world.
I don't want to keep living as a captive to
my parents' childhood wounding.

Speaker 2 (34:59):
It seems like if we break or shift, you know,
our paradigms, if we rewrite some of our code, that
can also shift the relationships around us. If we outgrow
our parents, right, we're also shifting and maybe they're not
ready for that shift. You know, maybe we are losing people.
We are erecting a new boundary and they don't fit

(35:19):
on the new inside of us. Can you speak more
to the consequences, especially relationship wise, of shifting our internal landscape.

Speaker 3 (35:30):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (35:31):
I think that sometimes people have such calcified coping styles,
and we're so tormented as little ones that they show
up in a way now as adults that really is
legitimately unsafe. That no matter how relational we try to be,
no matter how safe we are as we show up,
no matter how much love and understanding and forgiveness, which

(35:53):
is just understanding that we give, they're still abusive and
cruel and frightening and disturbed.

Speaker 4 (36:01):
You know.

Speaker 1 (36:02):
If that is the case, I do understand erecting that
boundary of you know, until you can be kind, I'm
not available for contact. And you know, another one of
my students a couple of days ago, had an experience
with her father where he has really not shown up
for the family. And my student's sister is quite sick,

(36:23):
and she said, hey, dad, this is what's going on
with my sister's condition right now in the ICU. And
he said, I didn't need to know that. And she
used the technique that I just taught them, which is,
if you want to go deeper, just go slower. And
she said, you didn't need to know that. She just

(36:43):
mirrored that back to him slowly, and he said, it's
hard to hear that, and he started showing up. He
went to the hospital for the first time when she
wasn't planning on doing. He reached out to his other children,
which he wasn't planning on doing. So her courage in
that moment to not be victimized to his pattern that
she'd experienced her entire life and instead lovingly reflect it

(37:06):
back to him patiently, slowly. He shifted because within each
of us is that essence. I was talking about an
innate healing function that wants to express and receive love.
And she gave him the opportunity to be freed from
that lifelong defense of avoiding.

Speaker 2 (37:26):
With a person like the father you shared with us.
I almost want to say being forced, but even that
language doesn't feel adequate. Being given the opportunity to see themselves,
A lot of folks don't get that right. And it
was done slowly, just gently in this particular example. And
there's power in just you know, holding up that mirror

(37:49):
with love but still holding it right. You're not accepting it,
You're just saying like, here you go, you like what
you see, without saying all those words either yes.

Speaker 1 (37:58):
And that is the essence of source code. That's all
we do is we hold him loving mirror up to
the code we've with precise aim and accuracy, reflect the
code back to itself and it starts to shift.

Speaker 2 (38:12):
I keep finding these other historic sort of external world
concrete world examples. I'm a huge fan of Frederick Douglas.
I think he was just like Savage with his language,
and this brother held up mirror lovingly to a country
that in so many ways refused to see itself. Honestly,

(38:34):
but he found words, He found language, He found jokes,
you know, he found rhetoric, He found panash and style
to help dress up what was ultimately a mirror. Is
this your fourth of July, America? Is this what you're celebrating?
In one of his most epic and famous pieces, which
is posed as a question, what to the slave is

(38:55):
the fourth of July? So the power of the mirror,
fractally with a father figure or with a founding father figure.

Speaker 1 (39:02):
Absolutely, because when we mirror something back to itself and
it starts to alchemize and dissolve and shift, that person
is now the center point of a fractal universe, in
a new reality, a reality that can connect instead of disconnect.
And the ripple effect of every minute change is unspeakable.

(39:25):
I literally went to a yoga class a couple of
days ago and it was so good that I was like,
what is going on here? She was having us talk
to our neighbor, touch our neighbor, look at eye contact.
When we walked out, she sprayed each of our faces
with rose. Missed all fifty of us from the class,
and I said, Alex, what is happening? And she goes,
I read your chapter and I was like, what she said,

(39:49):
I was inspired by your book and it shifted me.
Now her shift from reading my book shifted that class.
Those fifty people are walking out into the world now
from a place of deeper connection oneness, inter being, love, safety, joy, pleasure,
beauty whoa Every ripple effect is so so strong and

(40:14):
so meaningful.

Speaker 2 (40:15):
And what I took is spray myself in the face
with rose water. So see, we all have our stories, right,
that's my coding, that's my After the break, Sam shares
how we can recode ourselves without abandoning our responsibilities to
our communities. How do we stay present to the process

(40:40):
of recoding ourselves while still being present to our responsibilities
to others, to our families, to our communities. Do you
have any advice on how to practice the both here? Yeah?
I mean that.

Speaker 1 (40:54):
Actually that question speaks to one of the other coping
styles called the premature style. And I won't go too
deep into it, but it's basically this idea that my
only way to know about love is to give. That
receiving is not okay, So all my energy goes out.
I give, I do, I volunteer, I caretake. But we
don't know about feeding, receiving, needing. It just feels wrong.

(41:18):
It's a feeding injury from toddlerhood. But when we're premature,
it really feels like a split, like either or, and
you know that split around giving. I can either give
or receive. It's a misunderstanding because if we just give
and give and give, we're pouring from an empty cup
and eventually we burn out. But when it's that beautiful

(41:40):
loop of nourishment, of taking and tasting the love, receiving, receiving,
receiving support, receiving care, receiving guidance, and feeling so nourished
and so full that it's like my cup runneth over.
Of course, I'm here to share and show up for you.
I mean, it's as simple as put your own oxygen
mask on first. It's a give and take that's much

(42:03):
more sustainable and pleasurable for everyone.

Speaker 2 (42:06):
Much of your work centers on this belief that what
we experience in our families, our early childhood, shapes our
lives as adults in major ways. And in talking about
dissolving these childhood wounds, these coping styles, we pick up,
you've also mentioned the importance of growing up. Right when
we do this work, we're growing up from this adolescent

(42:28):
stage and stepping into more fully formed adulthood, becoming elders,
not necessarily an age, but in kind of self knowledge.
What does that shift look like to you? And can
you give any other examples of how someone can begin
to think about moving past that hurt child into more
full adulthood or elderhood.

Speaker 1 (42:49):
So my sense is that we've been living in what
I call the age of the wounded child, where that
generational pain has been passed down through the millennium.

Speaker 2 (42:58):
Hello, hello, Elon. Sorry, I just again, Well, that's right.

Speaker 1 (43:03):
It's not just us that are wounded children, but it's
also you know, our leaders that are wounded children, and
so our infrastructure and our laws, and you know, the
systems that are holding us are created by wounded children,
and they perpetuate wounds. And so it is my heart's
greatest wish and my intuitive prediction that we are now
exiting the age of the wounded child, and what that

(43:25):
means to me is becoming true elders. In indigenous communities,
they know about the importance of that right of passage
into elderhood, and adolescents go through vision quests and other
rituals to have an initiation into elderhood. And we don't
have any of that. We're still running around as wounded children,
creating democracy, as wounded, stinking.

Speaker 2 (43:46):
Children in our adult bodysuits.

Speaker 1 (43:49):
Yes, and I'm always inspired by psychotherapist and soul activist
Francis Weller, and he talks about how moving from adolescence
to elderhood is about going from looking for places of connection,
seeking for places of connection to building them. So I
want to talk about when you talked about Grace Lely

(44:11):
Bogs and Adrian Marie Brown's reference to that in that interview,
the first interview of this season, she was talking about
Grace Lely Bogs being accused of a politician of being
a naysayer you don't like the way we're running this country,
and she said, yeah, I'm not just a naysayer. I
can create. And she went out and created many places

(44:31):
of belonging and places of social change. So one way
to citizen and to become an elder is to literally
go out and create places of belonging. And also, if
we think about source code and the fractal nature of
the universe and that our inside world creates our outside world,
simply our being this when we stand for love, is

(44:52):
inviting people into the new world. Instead of saying, gosh,
darn it, I'm living in a world that I don't like,
that doesn't resonate, that doesn't feel like a fit, that
doesn't feel safe, that's not organized the way that I
want it, and focusing on what we don't want. Instead
we embody and live into exactly what we do want.
You know, the yoga teacher brought a little more love
to the room and everybody lit up. So when we

(45:15):
bring more love into everything we do, that's how we citizen.
That's true elderhood.

Speaker 2 (45:21):
Yeah, what does that true elderhood look like for you
in your life?

Speaker 5 (45:26):
Oh?

Speaker 1 (45:27):
My cry. I was talking to a friend who's known
me since I was fifteen, and she was looking at
the source Code community and she said, my god, Sam,
you created the love you always knew as possible. Like
the way we relate with each other in my dy
networks and our membership and all courses, all the groups
is radical transparency, unconditional love, safety, unconditional welcoming, and the

(45:53):
boundary that you know, cruelty is not okay, Meanness is
not okay, Hiding is not okay, Lying not okay. There
are pillars of boundaries protecting this space. But within that
everything else is just met with love and understanding and
support and care and fun.

Speaker 2 (46:11):
It's really fun.

Speaker 1 (46:13):
I think fun is a big part of the new world.
I think we've been taking things really seriously.

Speaker 2 (46:18):
Yes, you're like a quantum time traveler, and so your
report back from the future world being more fun is
welcome news. Thank you Paul Revere from the symbolic world
to tell us that fun is on the horizon, not
just threat. Well, congratulations on your own transition into elderhood

(46:38):
and breaking that cycle, and thank you for sharing that
with us. I think you know that's also a demonstration,
and I think a lot of us expect stoicness and
stiffness and hardness and coldness and softness is also very powerful.
So yeah, thanks for practicing and not just preaching. There's
a sequencing in terms of I guess it's a statement

(47:02):
I'll make and then see how you respond, Okay, because
I'm putting some of these pieces together that you've shared
already that even if we embrace a fight mentality, we
have a fight lens. We have a fight writer in
our internal writer's room that sees and projects everything into
the world as a fight. So I'm a fire. That's
my identity. I'm just going to do that all day,
every day, real hard, and that's how I'm going to citizen, right,

(47:24):
I'm going to citizen as a fight. We have us them, right,
it's us versus them, and I'm going a citizen in this
binary of you versus me as opposed to you and me,
And so people who've done no internal searching whatsoever are
citizening every day. Right, But it seems like while we're
doing some of that external stuff, if we rewind a

(47:47):
little bit, if we dive inward, citizen inward, then the
effect of what we're doing externally is going to be healthier,
more sustained, last longer. And so is it a prerequid
it is it preferable to try to work on and
heal some of those wounds before we engage fully in

(48:07):
all the dreaming together. Otherwise we might corrupt our own
dreams and envision something that's not as whole or as
healed as we really want the world to be.

Speaker 1 (48:15):
Yeah, I think that's exactly right. And I noticed this
when my students try to, you know, dream about what
they want for their personal lives or the life at large,
and their dreams are tainted by their coping styles. I
don't even realize it. Like I had a student who
just really wanted to win his court cases so that
the judge would believe him, and that was an enactment

(48:36):
of his childhood when he was judged and wouldn't be
believed and it's like, what do you really want beyond
the wounding? So yeah, but I don't think it's that binary.
First you have to do this and then you have
to do this. It's always like a you know, it's
all happening simultaneously.

Speaker 2 (48:49):
Because the center point is everywhere. I'm taking up what
you're putting down.

Speaker 1 (48:54):
But I feel like I want to share this story
because this idea of dreaming together can sound a little
woo woo. But there was this troop of wild baboons
in Kenya that was studied by a man named Robert Sopolski,
and he wrote a book called a Primate's Memoir. But
what happened was that this was well, let me back up.
So primates are one of the only animal species with

(49:16):
a lot of learned behavior. Most animals are just guided
by instinct, but we actually teach our young how to
do things like use tools or what the social rules are.
And in this particular troop of baboons, like all baboons,
there were alpha males who were really violent and rowdy,
and there was a lot of oppression in the group.

(49:36):
So the female baboons were taunted and new males coming
in from other troops which is what the adolescents do.
They have to leave home and find a new troupe
so that there's no inbreeding. They would taunt the new
males and haze them, and they would prevent the females
from grooming them in order to assert their dominance.

Speaker 2 (49:56):
Sounds like a college fraternity, Yes, exactly.

Speaker 1 (49:58):
So these males we're going and eating food from a
nearby tourist attraction place from the dumpster, but only the
alpha males were allowed to go eat that special food. Well,
they contracted tuberculosis through the food, and they died. All
the alpha males in the troop died. And it was
mostly female baboons and their instinct and their sensibility was

(50:24):
to groom everyone and to touch everyone and to include everyone,
and so new males that would come into the circle
would be immediately met with touch, welcoming connection, and it
became a peaceful maybe the first peaceful troop of baboons.
There was no conflict, there was no fighting, there was

(50:45):
no hierarchy, there was no alpha. It was a new culture. Now,
new baboons are coming in all the time into this
and so he didn't know what would happen. But the
researcher seven years later came back and it was still peaceful,
Which is why I say things can shift now. If

(51:06):
every human laid down their arms literally and metaphorically.

Speaker 2 (51:11):
That would be that. Are you saying we have to
kill all the alpha males.

Speaker 1 (51:14):
Doctor saf No, we have to love them and set
boundaries with them.

Speaker 2 (51:20):
There again, that's my inner child.

Speaker 1 (51:23):
Yes, so there are ways to be powerful. They just
don't know how else to be powerful. They're scared.

Speaker 2 (51:29):
You know, I get it, there are other ways to
be powerful.

Speaker 1 (51:32):
I know in the moments when I when I get
intense and dominant, it's because I'm scared. It's because I'm scared.
And when I feel held and supported and safe and
attuned to and believed and I calm down, I stop dominating.
So I'm just like them.

Speaker 2 (51:51):
We all are, and and that is that's really powerful.
I'm just like them. Can be very hard to say
about people We judge harshly because we want to believe
that we're nothing like them. My sister Belinda is nine
years older, thirty years wiser. She is a Yogi. She's
a Buddhist. She is a teacher and very spiritual leader

(52:14):
in Lansing, Michigan. That's I don't know if she called
herself a spiritual leader, that's baby bro looking up to assist.
But I remember during some of the deep intensity of
the Trump era in her yoga classes, she was encouraging
people to feel compassion toward Donald Trump, and a lot
of her students were like, that's where Jordan line b.
We're not doing that, Like he's nothing, I am nothing,

(52:35):
like she's like, there is a part of us represented there.
It's not the part we want to amplify. We don't
want to turn it up to eleven the way he's
caricaturistically display but we got to recognize the self and
the other. Our very first guest, Valerie Corps, shared that
lesson with us. There is no stranger. The stranger is
a part of myself. I do not yet know who
do not yet acknowledge. So thank you for sharing those words.

(52:59):
In that perspective that we are in everything. We are
in everything. We ask all of our guests one final question.
Because we have a definition here of citizen as a verb.
We have some principles associated with that interpretation. But given
your life story, given your work, given your source code
and the coping styles and everything you've been journeying through.

(53:21):
What does it mean to you the word citizen if
we interpret it as a verb.

Speaker 1 (53:26):
I suppose it's the functional side of knowing about inter being,
that we're a part of something larger, that each of
us matters, that what we do affects everyone else and
what they do affects us, and that it's worth giving
that some time and attention and care.

Speaker 2 (53:45):
We have a transition now to a live audience Q
and a yes. All right, so yes, say your name,
where you're at and your question. Cynthia lloyd Hurst.

Speaker 4 (53:54):
I'm in Palm Springs, California.

Speaker 6 (53:56):
Today, we I think a whole hell of a lot
of people we are working to be more self aware
and I'm loving your way into it.

Speaker 4 (54:06):
I think it's fantastic. What I keep noticing time and
time again, and you've mentioned it just a little bit today,
is that sense of I'm growing in my goodness and
awareness and if they would just stop, everything will be okay.

(54:27):
Those jerks need to leave for my world to be wonderful.
And I'm just wondering if there's just one other thought
you might give us around our own work there.

Speaker 1 (54:41):
So what I do with source code is I look
for the symbolic realm. So everything we're experiencing is a
reenactment of our early experience in our coding. So if
our sense of self is I feel okay in here,
and if they out there would just stop, everything would
be o okay. That person is telling us about what

(55:03):
it felt like to be a very young child. If
they would just stop, everything could be okay. And that
echo and that haunting of that feeling as a little
one becomes how we see the world and how we
make sense of the world and how we talk about
the world. So if I was doing a coding session
with that person, I would say, we need to know

(55:25):
about this thing outside that's doing something that feels like
it just wishes something could stop this, and inside feels okay,
but outside doesn't feel okay. And we just work that symbolically,
and as we did, something would shift inside, and because
we're fractal, something would shift outside.

Speaker 2 (55:46):
How much time we talk in five minutes, five weeks,
five months, Like, what's the lag time? What's the Doppler
effect on the internal shift to the external shift? And
I'm sure there was no formula, but I am curious
about measuring the rip I guess, and when we see
signs that something has actually changed.

Speaker 1 (56:05):
I think again, it's the yes, and like it changes
everything right now, and there's also incremental change over time.

Speaker 3 (56:14):
Thank you, Aaron Mast from the good old little state
of Delaware, not the city on Ohio. First of all, Sam,
thank you so much for everything it was for your insight.
I am very aware of my short temper and ease
of frustration sometimes with my kids. Been working on it.
I'm much better where I am now than one it

(56:34):
used to be about two years ago, probably so. I
have a son who's turning five. Pretty sure with my
short temper and frustration I've already imprinted on him a
little bit at least. I just want to know do
I need to work on myself. Is it better to
change my code first before I start working with him?
Or can we do this together? Aaron?

Speaker 1 (56:52):
I just want to celebrate you coming forward as a
man and owning your impact on your child and owning
your coping styles with such grace and dignity. I find
that when we change, our children change without much effort,
sort of instantaneously, especially if they're younger. But I want

(57:13):
to speak to this part of you that I think
is the omnipotent coping style, which is one of my
core wounds, which is how we didn't feel safe as infants.
This is pre six month stuff, and so when everything
is not ordered in the way we think it needs
to be, we feel very threatened and frightened, like life
or death kind of feeling, and we explode. And so

(57:36):
I would encourage you to be with your five month old,
six month old little Aaron and hold him and just
let him know he's safe, because the antidote to omnipotent
is safe. We didn't feel safe. Things don't feel safe,
and that haunting comes with us into adulthood. Things have
to feel very controlled or else they don't feel safe,

(57:59):
and so we just want to that little baby you
in so much love that didn't feel safe and that
wasn't helped through feeling difficult feelings and knowing that it's
all okay. It's like okay to not feel okay. Sometimes
we didn't get that support, and so feeling not okay
feels really not okay, and it becomes a very FASTI
ear to sixty reaction. So notice what might shift for

(58:20):
you if you can hold this part of you with
even more care the way that a very young infant
needs to be attuned to, instead of judging this self,
which I didn't really hear you doing. But I just
want to even encourage more, more love and more understanding
for this very young part that still doesn't feel safe yet.
Just help him feel safe, little by little and come

(58:42):
join us in the source code community.

Speaker 2 (58:43):
We can help. Thank you so much for that question, Aaron.
I think you've captured and represented many people beyond yourself.
So you've done You've done a bit of citizen ing
right there all right. Next in the queue is Mishaq Weber.
Go ahead with your question.

Speaker 7 (59:00):
I'm calling from Minneapolis, Minnesota. We Shack Weber. So what
I find creates a lot of change is kind of
simple recipes, And I was just wondering if there's just
a few, like everyday things that come to mind that
we can do to help create a stronger sense of
interveing ourselves or others the belonging that you talked about,

(59:21):
or any of these other kind of healing methodologies. I
was just kind of curious if you had kind of
everyday practices that people might have in mind.

Speaker 1 (59:29):
I think what's beautiful about the process of healing is
it's often a lot more gentle and a lot more
pleasurable than we thought. So one way to activate a
sense of intervening is to just connect with ourselves first,
because again, deep in our hearts, deep in our bones,
deep in our beings, deep in our bodies is all

(59:51):
the truth we would ever need to know, and this
deep connection with all things. So simply slowing down, having
a cozy cup of tea, journaling, getting a massage, which
Bear Tunda and I are huge proponents of.

Speaker 2 (01:00:04):
Massages for freedom. That's my new movement.

Speaker 1 (01:00:06):
You know, baths, snuggles. It's really that simple. It's just softening,
becoming more embodied, connected to that deep wisdom that lives
inside of all of us and our connection with.

Speaker 2 (01:00:17):
All that is. When you say embodied, Sam, what does
that mean? I think the way that I.

Speaker 1 (01:00:22):
Use it just there was different than I sometimes use it.
But when I just said embodied, I meant living more
from the energy in our body than the little ticker
tape in our minds. And also when I talk about
embodiment in terms of emerging from a coping style and
entering its antidote, when we are stuck in a coping style,
we are stuck in a certain embodiment. It makes us tense,

(01:00:43):
it makes us feel a certain way in our tummies,
in our viscera, in our emotions, in our energy field.
And if we shift that embodiment and we start to
soften and loosen, That's why I say the shift can
happen in the now with energy is like, Oh, I'm
not close anymore. I'm open. And that shift and embodiment

(01:01:06):
to walk through the world open, receptive, warm, heart centered
creates those ripple effects. It's not just a concept that
we think about in the mind. It's an actual embodied
way of being and living.

Speaker 2 (01:01:18):
Thank you for that, and thank you miss Shack. We
have a question from Elizabeth Gratch that our producer Ali
will voice for us, which means you all get to
meet Ali. Hello.

Speaker 5 (01:01:31):
This is Ali coming in from Toronto, Ontario, Canada, and
I'm voicing Elizabeth Gratch's questions. So this is for veritunde.
Have you always been able to nurture your confidence and
was there someone or someone's in your life who helped
set that beautiful self possession, focus and drive in motion?

Speaker 2 (01:01:50):
And how yo not expecting a question from me? Thank you,
Ali Slash Elizabeth Ah. I had a complex and diverse
array of early coding by my mother and by my hood,
and it was filled with a lot of love and

(01:02:12):
the confidence that you are perceiving. First, thank you for
nice words, self possession, focus, drive, and like, I'll put
this on the LinkedIn. But I remember that my friends
often dreamed of being things that their parents wanted them
to be, and I noticed that because my mom was
so different. She was just like, you could do this,

(01:02:33):
or you could do that. You could be an actor
if you want, or you could be like a gardener
or as you tell me now, a garbage man. I
really wanted to be a garbage man for a long
time because you get to ride on trucks yay, and
you get free stuff double yay. Like it's a win
win situation. That built an early habit of me of
confident exploration of possibility because there was not so much

(01:02:55):
weight attached to the specific path that I would walk,
just encourage to find and walk the path. So I
just give like a thousand pounds of credit to my
mom for encouraging that and embedding that piece in me.
She embedded some other stuff too that wasn't always sustainably useful.
But in answer to that question, that's Mom's work. So

(01:03:18):
thank you. Rest in peace, Anita, Lorraine Thurston, and whatever
you're perceiving there, Elizabeth is a piece of her shining through.

Speaker 1 (01:03:25):
I just want to acknowledge that a lot of what
we inherited from our parents was really good and beautiful
and useful. So much of our coding works. It's just
these twelve glitchy things that are in our way. But
all of us got good stuff too.

Speaker 2 (01:03:42):
Thank you for that.

Speaker 5 (01:03:43):
You know.

Speaker 2 (01:03:43):
The way you describe these styles is I think healthily
judgment neutral. Right, you talk about finding antidotes, not destroying, erasing, shaming.
These are not like diseases to be eradicated. They are
pieces to be integrated, not being possessed by, but possessing.

(01:04:06):
And so if we can own those parts, then we
can own our full selves. And I always skip to
the macro metaphor with a society, a city, a nation,
a species, and it's like, let's own the glitches. You know,
they are features, not bugs, and they give us an
opportunity to walk a different and better path. They give

(01:04:28):
us an opportunity to learn, They give us an oh
yay me I get a chance to recode myself. I
get a chance to refound myself. I get a chance
to reconstitute you know, myself and a nation at the
same time. All right, last up, we've got Janine the
novig one of our most frequent contributors.

Speaker 8 (01:04:47):
Thank you, Philadelphia. Here's my question. It comes from my
location as both a parent and a daughter. This has
been so resonant for me in this way. I think
other people too. I'm looking at Aaron and other folks
in the chat where we were kind of resonating about
how we raise our kids and then how do we

(01:05:07):
raise up the little us that was hurt? So my
question is, like in that silver back example, right, we're
all very seduced into being the silver back, Like we
all have a version of a scenario where being the
silver back is adaptive. It's safe, it has worked for

(01:05:27):
in my case, forty some odd years. It satisfies my ego,
it matches the world around as opposed to being soft.
You know. So I'm in this work all the time,
and I'm wondering if you have daily practices for interrupting
that seduction to be the silver back of you know,

(01:05:49):
your own life.

Speaker 1 (01:05:51):
Thank you so much, Janine, and that question really helps
me clarify that to me, it's not that the alternative
our silverback or soft that's still that old paradigm of dominance.
But to me, standing for love is very firm, very firm.

(01:06:13):
Do not touch that stove because I love you. I
love you. It's different. So it's beautiful that you're firm
with your children. They need that. Where's it coming from
If it's coming from love?

Speaker 3 (01:06:29):
Yeay.

Speaker 2 (01:06:30):
I want to formally thank you again Sam for being
a part of this with us. Welcome to how to
citizen community, and thank you for showing us how to
citizen within so that we can citizen better out there.

Speaker 1 (01:06:44):
Thank you. I have truly loved being here. I've been
listening to your podcast from the beginning and it is
an honor in my life to be your dear friend
and to learn from you. You are quite a force
of love and goodness in this world.

Speaker 2 (01:07:00):
In the face of all this work we've collectively got
to do, it's easy to feel like the last thing
we have time for is ourselves. But I want us
to really take in what Sam said. It's a radical
act of citizen ing to change our story, to change
the narrative that we're living within, and our relationship to

(01:07:22):
ourselves and others in the world. She reminds us. She
reminds me these issues, especially the current culture, the things
that we don't like about the way the world works,
they all came from us too. We are at the
end of our fourth season and I'm so glad that

(01:07:44):
Sam helped us close it out. After this interview, we
let Sam drop off the zoom and I stayed on
to have a conversation with a few of the live
audience members, and I got a question that felt heavy.
Aaron mass from Delaware asked, what direction do you see
the country headed in? Do you have hope for our future,

(01:08:04):
for my kid's future. Whoo, Aaron put his kids on me.
All that was a lot. That was a lot, And
I want to share with you a version of what
I shared with Arin. I see the United States of
America getting harder to live in. You can sense it
in the weather, and that's not a metaphor literally the weather.

(01:08:27):
You see it on the ground in our behavior. There's
something really sad about a nation that requires this many firearms.
It's an explicit indicator of the lack of inter being
the lack of trust that we're all building walled cities
around our two car garages and trying to recreate entire

(01:08:47):
societies within that as opposed to joining and participating in
the societies were already a part of. And so what
I'm observing is this large slide in that direction, and
it feels like it's picking up. I don't think the
climate migrants knocking on our southern border are inspiring evolved
levels of political response from our federal or many of

(01:09:09):
our state governments. I don't think that the human beings
who are recognizing the inter being within themselves in terms
of gender identity and giving a voice and new names
to that, I don't think they're being met with the
most mature, evolved, healed response from the prevailing establishment of
rule makers and gatekeepers. And I don't think most of

(01:09:31):
us are afforded enough time, space and security to truly
meet this moment we find ourselves in. So yeah, I
think it's gonna get harder, it's gonna get hurt, and
I have great hopes for us and for our children

(01:09:54):
because this culture's unsustainability is so readily obvious to so
many of us, Because our ability to indulge in and
digest the lie that more and more and more and
mine and mine and mine will get me everything I
need is on full display to be a lie. And

(01:10:16):
I think that underneath all that froth and that noise,
there's this stillness, there's this deeper truth. There's people like
Sam and Adrian, Marie Brown and Ruhab Benjamin and John
Alexander and Claudia Holitz and Steve Kerr and Priya Park
for all our guests, and they're all coming from different experiences,

(01:10:38):
saying essentially the same things, trying to take us to
this same place, a place of completeness, of peace, of belonging,
of membership, of citizen ing. And I'm willing to keep
hoping and fighting for that place for them, that journey

(01:11:00):
to that place, no matter how hard it is to
keep envisioning it. What's keeping me citizening is holding both
these feelings. I'm exhausted and I'm excited. I'm pessimistic and optimistic.
I mourn what we've lost and celebrate what we can

(01:11:24):
still create. And we can still create a lot of
good as long as there's enough of us working towards
creating a culture based in love. One where we try
to live together better. Then I'm in for more ways

(01:11:50):
to connect to doctor Sam's work. Head to her website
Doctor Samraider dot com. There you're going to find a
free quiz to discover your coping styles, as well as
ways to access the forthcoming source codebook through her Return
to Love membership program. As always, check the show notes
for links to all this as well as the books
referenced in this episode. If you take any of these actions,

(01:12:14):
please brag about it online and use the hashtag how
to Citizen. Also tag our Instagram how to Citizen. I
am always online and I really do see your messages,
so send them. You can also visit our website howdocitizen
dot com, which has all of our shows, full transcripts, actions,
and more. And I want to thank you one last

(01:12:35):
time for joining us this season. Please stay connected. Follow
how to Citizen on Instagram, Visit howtocitizen dot com to
join our email list, explore all of our episodes, and
engage with our massive library of actions that you can
take together. Let's keep citizen it. I look forward to

(01:12:56):
seeing you again. How to Citizen with Baritunday is a
production of iHeartRadio Podcasts and Row Home Productions. Our executive
producers are me Baritunde Thurston and Elizabeth Stewart. Our lead
producer is Ali Graham, Our associate producer is Donya abdel Hamid.
Alex Lewis is our managing producer, and John Myers is

(01:13:18):
our executive editor. Our mixed engineer is Justin Berger. Original
music by Andrew Eapen with additional music by Blue Dot
Sessions and our audience Engagement Fellows are Jasmine Lewis and
Gabby Rodriguez. Special thanks to Joelle Smith from iHeartRadio and
Leila Bina Row Home Productions

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