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Dr. Brad Lichtenstein: I think that we're causing more harm because people believe if I just do all the right [00:01:00] things, I'll never die.
Now, juxtapose that with acceptance. I believe most people misunderstand the idea of acceptance. First of all, it's not a passive process. Just practicing acceptance is not passive. If it was so passive, everyone would be doing it. It's very difficult. It's a practice you have to do again and again. And what I mean by acceptance is that this is what is. I don't have to push it away. And I can, as you said, so beautifully exhale, which means you can also soften your body. And now I can do some work.
I do think green pharmacy does a lot to mitigate side effects from synthetic medication. It kept some people alive longer and helped them have less suffering or pain, but the patients died in the end. And so, this is what flipped things for me. I was still interested in all these nutraceuticals and supplements, and diet and nutrition, but the real conversations were, how are you living with this?
I've said this story so many [00:02:00] times, but that's the only question I ask people now. The main question. All the other questions come from it. How are you living? How do you want to live with this?
Dr. Erin Hayford: Hi everyone and welcome back to another episode of the Sacred Illness Podcast. I am Dr. Erin and I'm incredibly excited and honored to have Dr. Brad Lichtenstein with us today. Dr. Brad is who got me into mind body medicine. He is One of the, if not the reasons I am here doing this podcast and doing the work that I do, had I not come across him in my healing journey and in my work and studies as a student, I don't know where my career would have gone.
So it felt very appropriate at some point to get Dr. Brad on the podcast. And so today is the day. Welcome Dr. Brad. Thank you so much for being here. I am so excited for our conversation today.
Dr. Brad Lichtenstein: Thank you. I'm excited too, and I'm really honored and touched from that intro.
Dr. Erin Hayford: Yes. Well, it is, it's no small thing. And I was reflecting back on, my days as a student and what we can maybe talk about this later, but, just how actually resistant I [00:03:00] was to mind, body medicine initially because of how intense it is and how it gets really into. Nitty gritty layers of yourself that I had not previously experienced.
It is important to be skeptical. It's important to question because then you can have your experience, which is about what we're talking about. Bastyr is where I went to school and where Dr.
Brad taught and is teaching.
Dr. Brad Lichtenstein: No, I left Bastyr in December 7th, the day before my birthday, 2021.
Dr. Erin Hayford: Oh, wow. Okay. So it's been a while since we've talked then.
Dr. Brad Lichtenstein: Exactly. Yeah. I left after 27 years or so. Yeah.
Dr. Erin Hayford: Wow. Okay. Yeah. so he was the biofeedback teacher and many other things at that time that I was a student and, introduced me to this idea essentially that the mind and body are linked and it just clicked for me.
It was this aha moment. And, I think a lot of my listeners know, as I was going through Bastyr, I was also working with my own chronic illness journey and seeking answers. That's essentially what led me to naturopathic medical school in the first [00:04:00] place.
And it was when I started the biofeedback elective that I had this aha moment of like, this is, this is it. I feel like I'm onto something here. it was exciting and it was like kind of nerve wracking how right it felt at the same time because I was very hopeful that I had found the thing.
and so I want to just ask you to kind of back it up a little bit and get into, Just to understand your orientation and how you got into this work. what is your journey? how did you land on mind, body medicine?
Did you have an aha moment? Did you have anything where you felt drawn to it? at what point in your studies did this come on board? I don't know the story and I'm so curious to hear your journey with that.
Dr. Brad Lichtenstein: Thank you for asking that. And it's interesting as we age to look back and reflect.
And that's something I ask my patients to do, it's interesting to do that timeline. And I think journaling is invaluable. And the reason I'm saying that is it's interesting to look back at a journal from 20 years ago [00:05:00] and hear how you told the story and hear how you tell it now, because memory people don't like hearing this,
is a construct of the present moment. And it's so fascinating when I tell the story and how many things get wrote, but how many times they start to change. so I just think about that cause I've been reflecting, about the year and I always want to look back at the journey and what influenced me. so there's several things and I still say them.
I categorize different events in my life that had an impact on me. I never wanted to become a naturopathic physician, or a physician, or do anything in healthcare. I was a young theater, musical theater geek, dancer, singer, that's what I thought I was going to do when I went to college. And that was a shift.
When I went to college, Emerson College in Boston, I wanted something to fall back on. So I also studied speech pathology I studied speech pathology and [00:06:00] audiology and went through their undergrad master program and never finished it. I transferred because along the way, I learned that, speech pathologists, even if you have a PhD, couldn't diagnose things.
So, little Brad had that, like, well, I don't want other people to tell me what to do, which I think is a thought process in naturopathic medicine. So I transferred. That was a long story. Got back into dance. Got into the arts again. when I was 13, I became a vegetarian, backing up a little bit.
I was an ovo lacto vegetarian. I also had severe GI stuff. Fourth grade, I was told I had IBS. Ulcerative colitis. I mean, there was a number of things that kept saying put on medications. I missed almost half the school year in one of those grades. I think it was fourth.
told it was psychological and it wasn't until college when I ended up in the hospital three times. And I went to the Harvard bookstore, and I found this book, Anna Mae Colburn's "Healing with Whole Foods", if anybody knows that one. [00:07:00] And there was this whole thing about, a lot of people are allergic to dairy.
it took me six months to get off of it. And all of a sudden, I didn't have GI pain and I had normal bowel movements. What a concept! And so that started this whole thing about natural foods and whole foods. And when I went to Pitt, University of Pittsburgh, I transferred back home, and thought I was going to go to conventional medical school.
It just didn't feel right. And I heard about Bastyr. All my life though, even though I was interested in the arts, I was always interested in psychology, in thoughts, there's another part of that journey, when I tried to commit suicide at 16, where I was growing up in Pittsburgh, being a young gay man, 70s, early 80s, Early 80s, late 70s, and I didn't know how to throw a football or basketball, and thought I wasn't worthwhile, never going to amount to anything, there would be no possibility of finding love, so I tried to commit suicide, the good part of this [00:08:00] story, is I met a psychologist who told me, you're a Taoist, and I didn't know what that was, So I started looking at that.
So, tying these threads together, I started to learn about the difference between pain and suffering. I started to learn about how our attitudes impact us. And that was a through line through all of this. I was interested in holistic medicine, got really fascinated, so I was going to go to University of Chicago, but wound up going to Bastyr, didn't know anything about naturopathic medicine, showed up, and I thought I was really going to do physical medicine, because I had knee surgery and all these other things.
I never thought I would do homeopathy, I never thought I would do counseling, and that's what I did. but then I started working in HIV care. And I did some HIV work before I went to Bastyr, too, but it, that's the most profound thing. I don't know if I can say most profound thing. The other stuff was fundamental because back then in, we're talking about 93, 94, we didn't have medications that we had after like [00:09:00] 95, 96, 97 that changed people's disease.
So a lot of the people that I worked with got a diagnosis and they were told they had two to five years to live. And this is why this is so profound. Because, we did all the naturopathic things, we took all the herbs, we took all the supplements, they might mitigate side effects. They did. Actually, I do think green pharmacy does a lot to mitigate side effects from synthetic medication.
Yes. It kept some people alive longer and helped them have less suffering or pain, but the patients died in the end. And so, this is what flipped things for me. I was still interested in all these nutraceuticals and supplements, and diet and nutrition, but the real conversations were, how are you living with this?
I've said this story so many times, but that's the only question I ask people now. The main question. All the other questions come from it. How are you living? How do you want to live with this? And I worked with [00:10:00] hundreds of people who couldn't get away from it. They weren't going to get rid of it. You know, it's changed since in the late nineties, a huge change happened.
And I even worked with some people who said, you know, I was waiting to die and now I'm not, and I don't know how to live with that.
Dr. Erin Hayford: Wow.
Dr. Brad Lichtenstein: So that. Really, I would say that was one of the most profound things. I worked in the, Bastyr Integrative Oncology Center. I did a research study with, them as well doing guided meditations.
I went to the bedside of hospice patients twice a week doing guided meditations. Did over 500 bedside hospice meditations.
Those impacts really shifted me and I just kind of said, you know, I don't want to do the supplements anymore. I don't, I don't want to do any of those. I know that they work. I know they're helpful. I know diet and nutrition is really powerful. Believe me. I know that. I don't care about that anymore. I want to talk to people about like, how are you living with this?
And then 20 years [00:11:00] ago, I got into biofeedback and I loved that simply because it was a tool of making the unconscious conscious to people. I thought that was an interesting device, but I don't even do much of that anymore.
It's more about helping people feel into their experience. I taught a number of things at Bastyr. I taught in every department, but where I really am comfortable with is talking to people about their chronic pain, their suffering, their chronic illness.
Dr. Erin Hayford: I think it's incredible how these seemingly little pings, you know, can just, they're just like little nudges that push us down this path and we could never know where it's going. But, when you add them all up, it gets us to where I think we're supposed to be, when we just keep following those nudges and those intuitions, we end up kind of settling into the space of like, Who and how are we supposed to occupy this lifetime?
You know, like what is our medicine? What are we bringing to the table? This concept of acceptance was. the theme of, something you've been sitting with a lot [00:12:00] lately and have arrived to in your own work, and it feels like an inevitable place if you're consciously paying attention to the work you're doing, there has to at some point be an acceptance of, yeah, these things can only take you so far. But like you said, before we hit record, we're all going to die, you know, things do eventually end. And culturally we're so focused on like biohacking and anti aging medicine and you know all these things where we're focused on how do we keep getting bigger and stronger and healthier and better like as if there's some I don't know some perfect place of arriving in health and I think it's a distraction, right?
It's a distraction from what's uncomfortable and what's painful and the fact that we're all going to die no matter what. And so, you know, sure, if that's what helps you get through the night or whatever, but I think there's so much more peace and freedom when I think about acceptance, I think of an exhale. Oh, okay. I can just be with what is. So yeah, can you speak to what you [00:13:00] see with the people you work with, with this lack of acceptance that is rampant everywhere?
What are the conversations you're having around that right now?
Dr. Brad Lichtenstein: That is the question. Thank you for bringing that up because it is, and you touched on everything. I, I'm not on social media and I don't want to vilify all of social media. I know social media has been very helpful for some people finding more information, for finding community.
My read of it though, I feel that social media has amplified that perfection notation that you're talking about.
Now you can find all the biohackers, oh, we can go into that. I think naturopathic medicine, I was saying to you before this, I think that naturopathic medicine, holistic medicine, biohackers, I think that we're causing more harm because people believe if I just do all the right things, I'll never die.
Now, juxtapose that with acceptance. I believe most people misunderstand the idea of acceptance. first of all, it's not a passive [00:14:00] process. I don't mean once you do acceptance that you're passive. I mean, just practicing acceptance is not passive. If it was so passive, everyone would be doing it.
It's very difficult. it's a practice you have to do again and again. And what I mean by acceptance is that this is what is. I don't have to push it away. And I can, as you said, so beautifully exhale, which means you can also soften your body. And now I can do some work. Acceptance has nothing to do with liking or not liking. And then we embrace that. We accept that we don't like this or we like this, but then we soften, we breathe, and we can get into how that regulates the nervous system.
But regardless, it's just that I don't have to exude all this energy to fight something. And now I can do something.
So when I talk to patients with cancer or Parkinson's, or when I talk to the ones with early dementia, you can expend less energy and accept it. Now, what do you want to do?
You might still do that trial. You might still try those [00:15:00] supplements, but you're not clinging to it in such a way that you're harming yourself. And I agree with you that a lot of the messages out there, if you just do this, because now everybody needs to do psychedelics and everybody needs to do breath work and everybody needs to wear their aura ring.
And so many of my patients I've gotten to take off their tracking devices. There's a lot of research coming out now that people who wear those tracking devices have worse sleep because they're anticipating more sleep. I love when people tell me my aura ring said to me that I'm not sleeping.
I was like, did it? So my conversation is with people saying, how do you want to be no matter what? Akhlav Havel has a quote. In Czech, but you know, the translation is we don't do things because they'll turn out a certain way. We do things because it's the right thing to do. So what I would say in that, I'm not taking these supplements because I'm hoping it's going to change everything.
I'm doing it because I'm exploring how it will be. I'm seeing if there's a benefit. If there's a [00:16:00] benefit, I'm going to keep doing it because it's my value. The right thing to do is the value you have. And I think the number one to jump into the next part of that, the number one dis ease we have is being productive.
If I do, oh, and I know, I know this personally, but it's, if I do more then I'm worthwhile, if I do more, I'll be safe. And it's, can you do some of those things and breathe and soften? Do you need to do those? Are you worthwhile without doing those?
And most of the people I work with are. Struggling with I'm, not good enough because I didn't do anything. From my patients with intense diagnoses who say, I'm not worthy because I didn't help out around the house, or I can't be at parties with family for a long period of time. I'm not good enough. This is not to say to anybody listening, you just need to pull yourself up by the bootstraps and ignore those [00:17:00] messages because good luck, those messages are everywhere.
Dr. Erin Hayford: I talk a lot on here about subconscious programming and how it's automatic so we just, you know, until or unless you stop and examine and look at it, you think it's just how things are, right? Cause it's just how your brain is instructing you to respond or to show up in the world. And I really love what you were saying, this idea that we are so focused on getting those metrics or getting those calories or getting this much sleep or getting symptoms, like we're so focused, it's like a dangling carrot.
We're just not alive now. We're missing everything right now. and I feel like that's how so many of us spend our entire lives is just trying to get to that thing. And then we're two weeks away from our death and we're like, what did I do with my life? You know, how did I, did I even live it?
How do you be with it? How do you live with it? How do you, how can you be in relationship with it now is I've been using language in my one on one sessions, something similar to that, how can you relax around it? This idea of, if there's something, a pain in your body, we often [00:18:00] tense around it just on a physical level.
And that is going to obviously not only make you more uncomfortable, but it's sending more signals to your body that this is bad, this is bad, this is bad. And it's creating more and more and more tension. And so it's more about how can we. Accept that it's uncomfortable, but relax around it. So just give it space to be there and to show up.
And as we do that, oftentimes in my sessions, as we make space for it, it does start to shift. It doesn't always go away. It doesn't always get better quote unquote better.
Dr. Brad Lichtenstein: It shifts is what you said. Everything's impermanent.
Most of the time I talk about how do you want to breathe? How do you want to breathe into it? Because most people, again, statistically, I would say most of my people with whom I work, are orienting to that mobilization, right?
Dr. Brad Lichtenstein: Gotta do more. I rarely meet people who do the opposite of complete collapse. But I do work with a number of them. And for them, it is a threat, so that's why they collapse, right? But they also have to say, okay, [00:19:00] it's safe enough to take a breath. You do have to relax the musculature.
So I try to come back to the body because people say, how do you let it go? What does that mean, let it go? Think of that fight you had. Are you tensing anywhere in your body? If we had enough biofeedback sensors, we could show you. Most people aren't aware of their thighs or their feet.
So many times I've been saying to people since all my work is virtual. Are your heels off the floor? Are you like starting gate ready to go? And surprisingly, a large majority say, yeah, I am. Where are you going? Like you said, we're not here. And so it's like, What would it take just in this moment to put your feet on the floor, whatever you're feeling.
And this came home to me because I think it was around the first wave of vaccinations for COVID. And I did get my COVID vaccine. And for the first 12 hours, I was like, I'm not going to have side effects. This is fantastic. And then like hour 25. Bam. I was in bed, fever.
I had [00:20:00] a headache. And there is some new research shows that your expectation about those side effects impact your immunology and your immunological response. If you see them as beneficial, not only do you have less symptoms and severity, But it actually seems to confer more immunity. Wow. For longer.
Interesting. So expectation attitude, which is what we've been talking about. But I remember sitting there and I go, okay, I know the breathing to cool down my temperature. I'm doing the same thing we're talking about with everybody else. If I breathe this way, the temperature, it wasn't working.
The pain was intense. It was really a bad headache. And I was trying to do that. That wasn't working. I was nauseous. And then I thought, Oh, this is where I am. I'm just going to breathe into this. I don't like it. Of course I don't like it. I know that this is going to help confer more immunity for me later.
But I'm like, right now I'm in bed. I'm not seeing patients. I'm not working. I can't even watch movies on Netflix. I'm under the covers. My cat's coming and saying hi occasionally. this is [00:21:00] where I am. So I just like, Be here in this moment. And then I, as you said, relaxed into it. So that secondary suffering... in Buddhism, they say the second arrow, you've got the pain, but then you shoot an arrow at it about, what does this mean?
I'm bad. I got to get rid of this pain. I didn't like it. I wouldn't wish that on anybody. And when I did that, I fell asleep. I woke up three hours later, had the same pain, did the whole cycle again, tried to get rid of it. But then when I like, oh, yeah, remember. And so the pain didn't go away. It lessened a little bit, but all that secondary suffering of the tension of the tightness was...
Dr. Erin Hayford: Yeah, it's understandable because we're wired to react poorly to pain and discomfort.
And then there's the cultural conditioning saying symptoms are horrible. Illness is horrible. It's that idea of like, got to get away from it, got to get away from it, which then is that secondary arrow of fueling the fire, creating more of a fight or flight response in the nervous system, which is not going to help anything.
Dr. Brad Lichtenstein: We [00:22:00] all say about get away from the tiger. Is there a tiger? If I'm thinking about taxes or elections or any of that, you know, those are real things. We're not denying any of that.
Then the question is, okay, right now, is there something I can do about it? That's the acceptance. If there's something I can do about it, then do it. If there's nothing I can do about it, ruminating isn't helpful.
How many people have you worked with, who when you say something about affirmations or mantras, they poo poo it. We're practicing mantras every day. We're practicing affirmations every day when we go, "I'm not good enough. I'm not good enough. I can't do that. I can't do that." So you said something earlier about your narrative... we do not have the respect for cognition as a practice.
I work with a lot of people in tech who, they get the message, "I want you to take time for yourself. You really do need to take time. Can you get that done tomorrow?" Yeah.
And I read another article. it was an article about, in companies, teaching people about resilience [00:23:00] can actually be cruel. Because what you're doing is saying, "Oh, you, you individual, this cog in the wheel, if you're resilient enough, you can deal with the 80 hour work week they're telling you to do."
Or maybe it's not even 80, 50, but the "take time off for yourself, but get that done today." Yeah. And so what they were saying is we need to look at the system and the systemic damage. And we're, we're directing the blame on the wrong anchor.
Dr. Erin Hayford: It's like adding yoga on top of 80 hours of working as if that's gonna fix it.
It's like, no, add yoga and subtract 60 hours maybe we'll see a difference. That just goes to illustrate what we're talking about , this idea of just keep pushing ahead. Just keep adding more, do more, do more, do more. If you're not getting the results you want, do more is the message.
And that's the American way. If you're not taking on all these things and you have failed and you are weak and you're not resilient... when we are having those stories of lack of worth, that's what drives us to do more, but that's the root of it to begin with. If we felt worthy, we [00:24:00] could just exist. We could just be with what was, we could just be, we could just accept ourselves for who we are. So it's, it's this vicious cycle where a lack of worthiness, a lack of enoughness, whatever those stories are, whatever that programming is from most likely childhood, comes into play and pushes us and pushes us and pushes us.
I keep seeing these memes that are like, I'm supposed to be picking berries and laying in the grass with my friends and not working 60 hour work weeks. We're not meant to live the way that we live. And then we wonder why we're sick. And I think we're starting to understand more and more why we are so chronically ill, but, the antidote that we're giving is adding a yoga class or telling people to work on their resilience, but we're not changing any of the underlying factors, which is not going to bring us the shift we need to see.
Dr. Brad Lichtenstein: And we talk about, you know, I do too. I talk about meditating every day. And somebody said, "Oh, I've got another 20 minutes to do of something?"
And I, I really am clear about that. It's like, I don't want you to think I'm giving you another thing to do. Because what it is, is it's a [00:25:00] practice. And if you're doing that, you're not doing something else. But if you're just adding it on, don't do it.
Formal practices, which are really important about learning a new skill, any new skill, knitting or drawing or anything that you've done, playing an instrument, you've learned it. You had to practice formally. What's more important is how does it generalize into your daily life? How do you sit down to your computer?
And every time you look at your texts and emails, you go, and you do that for 45 minutes, that raises your blood pressure, raises your heart rate. And then you wonder, why don't I feel well? When we talk about ergonomics, I'm here at this standing seated desk and I, I have this thing. It's on a stabilizer, I have to stabilize myself and I have this up at a certain level When I don't use this, I can't breathe.
I get tense and maybe it's not because I'm stressed. The point of the ergonomics is I how do I change my lifestyle to fit my needs?
One of the biofeedback practitioners I know used to say, don't adjust your posture for the environment, adjust the environment for your [00:26:00] posture.
But we don't do that. It's like, Oh, I'm in this little cubby. I got to do it this way. But I think that's the essence is that it's what we're doing with everything. And people don't like when I say this, but you can't do it all. You can't have it all.
I don't know what it all is.
Dr. Erin Hayford: If you're so tired and unable to be present to it and enjoy it, what's the point? The need to work and make money is not the problem.
It's the way in which you're engaging in that work. It's how you are approaching it, how you're living your life in every micro moment of your life is how it's going to be overall. I think that's one of the most potent things I learned from our work together in biofeedback is how you don't even have to be psychologically stressed.
If your body is hunched over and you're not breathing and your muscles are tight, you're sending a message to your system that you're not okay and you're not safe. I think most of us are chronically low level stressed anyway, just because of how life is in general.
Dr. Brad Lichtenstein: We're always accessible, always checking things. The rate at which things are coming at us, we're being bombarded about so many [00:27:00] things.
And so many of my friends will talk to me like, oh, I got to take a news fast, media fast. I actually am not an advocate of that, because I don't think it's The absence or the presence of news. That's the issue. I think it's how we're orienting to news. So if I am doing it and scrolling and need to find more and need to find more, that's the problem.
Now, of course, I know if you don't have a physical newspaper anymore, you're on a device that's designed to keep you engaged. So I know that you're already fighting a current. Yeah. So for some of us, we can't do that. So yes, the media fast will be good. But if we can develop a different attitude to it, I want to learn this, this is how I want to do it...
like I remember my father would come home and he would read the two newspapers and that's what he would do before dinner. And that was it. Then it was done, And we don't do that because it's always accessible. We can find out anything [00:28:00] anytime. You have to identify, what do I want my relationship with this to be? And how much time am I going to dedicate to that? And then the honest question, do I have the resources right now? Do I have the resources right now to actually do that? Because if I don't, then avoid it.
Dr. Erin Hayford: I think that is the hardest lesson for us to learn or reality for us to face is being mindful of everything you just said, because I think it's so easy for us to just pick up the phone.
You know, it's just what we do. But what is the intention? What is it doing for us? How is it adding to us or subtracting from us? Have you heard of that, metaphor for folks with autoimmunity? The spoons, like you only have so many spoons. I use that all the time. So it's a similar idea.
If we're constantly giving away energy or joy or attention or whatever it is, if we're just constantly giving those away, we're emptying our cup and we're not refilling it in ways that are meaningful.
What you're saying is such an important message to just continue to reiterate: it's not about just cutting it out because that's the medicine approach, just [00:29:00] cut it out, just suppress it, cut your body part off, whatever, like whatever the problem is, just get rid of it so you can keep going. It's not about that. Certainly. Sure there are moments where we just need to get rid of the pain, like you said, if you just need to have a media fast, do it . Generally speaking, how you do anything is how you do everything, and if you don't have a relationship with discomfort that allows you to make space for it and move with it and allow it to be there and accept that it's part of life, then yeah, it's going to be a constant struggle.
Dr. Brad Lichtenstein: How have you done that? I'm curious. How have you, that very question of how you do everything, you know, how do I want to do everything?
Dr. Erin Hayford: How have you been applying that in your life? Yeah. Yeah. That's a good question. So I don't know if you know that I have two children now, cause you're not on social media. So yeah, I have a three year old. Thank you. Three year old and a four month old. And yeah, the three year old is in the throes of
just tantrums, very intense [00:30:00] behavior. you know, expected normal developmental behavior, but it's bringing out everything in me, you know, it's testing all of my skills, so to speak. And so it really, has illustrated how easy it is to go back to old ways of being, because I was defaulting to more unconscious ways of being reactive and so it's really, this is just an example of how it shows up in my life, but it's forcing me to slow down and to, to first of all, accept
that his behavior is what it is, and I can't just change it. I can't just make it stop, you know, because that's what my system wants. I want to be like, stop screaming. Just don't ever do that again. Please. It stresses me out. It's not going to happen, right? So I think initially that was the energy of just like, Oh my God, how do I just fix him?
How do I make him stop doing this? And so I had to come around to accepting That this is the discomfort in my life right now. I love him more than anything and he triggers me more than anyone. It's this incredibly [00:31:00] intense juxtaposition. so it's like the test of all tests, right,
to learn how to be with that and to just accept that that is what it's going to be. And instead of him going away, which is, I wouldn't want it to happen, I need to learn how to be in relationship with it differently. And it's a work in progress. I'm not even close to where I want to be with that yet.
That has been a big deal for my husband and I, to have forgiveness or acceptance. Like. Okay. Today was okay. I felt skillful. I felt embodied.
I felt more present to this stressor. And the next day, maybe not so great, but, it's allowing things to just be in flux and that's hard.
I'm curious for you too. How do you, how does that show up in your life?
Dr. Brad Lichtenstein: I love what you're saying about, with your Children, because I think relationships are one of the more triggering things for all of us. And some people say, I'll just not be in relationship and good luck. I mean, some people can. To [00:32:00] piggyback on that. I mean, you just addressed everything we've talked about today and you're talking about also the fundamental belief I have that, all of our emotions, all of our reactions are conditioned.
I don't care if you want to take a, contemplative approach to it or a affective neuroscience perspective. Lisa Feldman Barrett, who talks about how emotions were made. talks about this, but it's like we haven't experienced something happens. We hear something inside or outside and then the brain makes a prediction and it's trying to be efficient.
That's the reason, right? So we make a prediction and then we keep those predictions going. the minute we make a prediction, it sends a simulation down to the body. Just like if I imagine biting into a lemon because I've had a lemon, I can make a prediction what it's like. I start to salivate.
This happens to all of us. We make these predictions based on our conditioned responses. So, to talk about my relationship, and my husband's listening, he knows I talk about this all the time. you know, I [00:33:00] know I was raised by Judy, in McKeesport, Pennsylvania. And, I was the baby of four.
So the best, sorry, but the baby, but the baby of four, but my mom had four kids and she would have signs on the refrigerator, "please close the refrigerator door- the management," "put the dishes in the dishwasher- the management," and being the snarky kid I was, I would say, I don't know the management mom, who's the management?
But I did it. I mean, we learned how to make our bed before we went to first grade. Now, not everyone in the family did these things, but the point was I was conditioned. I always thought that's what people would do. When I went to college, I thought everybody cleaned their bathtub and sink every day after they used it.
Wow. And it wasn't until I lived with my first partner that I realized people didn't do that. so the point is. My partner, my husband will put a dish in the sink. I'm like, can you put the dish in the dishwasher? Can you just, or he'll take off his socks. He knows, I tell everyone about this. [00:34:00] He'll take off his socks and put them by the coffee table. There'll be a pile of socks at the end of the week.
People will say, if you loved me, you would do this. It's easier with a three year old, a four year old, a two year old, even twelve year old, a sixteen year old. Yeah. Their brain's not developed yet. But with our loved one who's an adult, we go, don't you know, we've talked about this.
What I practice, this is my mantra. I say, that's his neurobiological adaptive response. He's conditioned to see it that way. And I'm conditioned to say, he's not listening to Judy. But he wasn't raised with her. so that gives me pause. And I go, this is my condition response.
And sometimes I do pick up the socks and I put it right in front of his office door and I say, that's what you're doing. Okay. Cause you know, if I didn't have sleep, if I ate something that had dairy, there's so many factors that will affect that reactivity. But like you, I'll say, Hey, I was less skilled today, I was more skilled today.
What can I do differently? And that's the thing. That's learning. That's part of the [00:35:00] practice with people in my life. Like even, you know, friends don't text me back about something I'll go, why didn't they? And I was like, how many times have you not texted people back because you forgot all kinds of things. And I own, I practice owning that.
Dr. Erin Hayford: I always think of it as little nervous systems, ping ponging off of each other, this is my program meeting your programming and these programs don't fit very good, but if you can take that perspective, it really helps to take the edge off of things.
Dr. Brad Lichtenstein: What I heard was, this is my nervous system and it's reacting and this is your nervous system reacting... many people I hear say. Well, mine's the right way or maybe we just can't, but you said it takes the edge off. so it's recognizing that then there must be another step that you're having yours.
I'm having mine. And then what do you say to yourself?
Dr. Erin Hayford: Well, so if it's my husband, for example, because that's a good example, always, I think in those cases, it helps me to move into a place of acceptance of just saying, this is who he is and how he's showing up and the next step might be, okay, I'm [00:36:00] going to go calm down or take what's mine and go sit with it or something for a minute.
And, oftentimes in the moment, maybe not the most skillful, right when everything's escalating, but usually there's a moment of reflection afterward of, you know what, it's really not that big of a deal. A lot of the times it's recognizing how that program just created this big response, and it's important to recognize that is fight or flight. You're saying, this thing is a threat to my, way of being in the world. And so I'm either they're going to fight it and destroy it, or I'm going to run away from it. but either way we want to conquer it, we want to overcome it. That's the fight or flight response. It's that, gosh, what is his name?
Victor Frankl? Between stimulus and response, there is a choice, you can insert a pause between those two things. You can make a choice of how you're going to respond and in there lies all of your freedom.
Dr. Brad Lichtenstein: The language I'm using now is that prediction. You're making a prediction and you said that thing about safety, I use the word safety, like my identity, like you said, this is my identity, if you're challenging that, that's not [00:37:00] safe.
And I'm curious if you've also seen this, that some people, not everyone, but some people do that with their diagnosis.
Dr. Erin Hayford: Yes. 100%.
Dr. Brad Lichtenstein: That this is who I am and don't even challenging it. And it's the attachment, like you were talking about before, holding on to that identity. It's not safe if that gets challenged.
Dr. Erin Hayford: When I step into that kind of mindset, again, it's that idea of relaxing around it. So much space opens up and it's saying, this is my automatic response. This is my programming. I can work to get to know it and to maybe rewire it or reprogram it, but I'm going to relax around it so that it feels like it has breathing room, because ultimately for me too, what I'm recognizing is when I get triggered or when these things come up, there's an inner child or there's something in there that's hurting or feeling like it needs to be expressed or it's unseen, or there's a story in there of I'm not worthy.
So it's something in there needs attention too. What is in me that's being triggered that needs to be attended to?
Dr. Brad Lichtenstein: And assessing that because we also have to acknowledge there [00:38:00] are real life threats.
I said something about the tiger and how many of us have the tiger, but how many of us have, whether it's from their health diagnosis, whether it's... we could talk about any of the world news events right now... we're not saying, don't mobilize, don't run.
So you get a diagnosis and say, okay, what do I do about that? If there's an immediate life threatening issue, we take action. If we have an acute threat, the building is shaking. I'm going to run.
Dr. Erin Hayford: Yes.
Dr. Brad Lichtenstein: The question is when it's more an existential threat. It's not an immediate threat. You don't know what to do... is there a way to reframe the threat to a challenge?
I want to be like some of the EMTs. I know that no matter what's happening they still take action, but they relax into the action. Can I breathe into it? As you say, is I can relax into it. And I hope that helps create that framework. We're triaging. This is an immediate [00:39:00] threat. What do we want to do? This is less of an immediate threat, but it's something I want to address, but can I soften into it so I can see clearly?
Cause the other thing is, as you were talking about that fight or flight response, your prefrontal cortex, a lot of your clear thinking is offline.
So we're not trying to tell everybody, oh, you need to be calm and peaceful all the time. It's time to move.
Dr. Erin Hayford: Yes. That's like spiritual bypassing, it's saying if you're doing it right, you're calm all the time, you're peaceful, you're one love everyone and everything, you know, blissed out, whatever it is.
I love my cancer. I love the flooding. Yeah. And that's part of acceptance is like you said earlier, it doesn't mean you have to like it or want it or any, right. It's just, it exists. It's real. This is a thing that is in my life.
that's acceptance. And I think any form of bypassing, spiritual bypassing or suppressing, that's not what we're talking about. it's different from acceptance.
Dr. Brad Lichtenstein: And I think that we haven't, [00:40:00] I don't know what you think about this, but I think that we have, there's somewhere we've got the message that if something's uncomfortable, we should immediately get rid of it.
Dr. Erin Hayford: Yeah.
Dr. Brad Lichtenstein: I know when I used to teach chronic pain. classes, you know, about chronic pain, not how to have it. But one of the, I can't remember the researcher, he talked about integrative and naked pain. And the example he gave, it's the farmer, the factory worker, they come home at night, they're at aches and pains, and they say that's part of their life. So they're not suppressing it. They go, yeah, that's it. I'm gonna take a hot bath. Yeah, I got it. It's part of life. And their relationship to it wasn't debilitating. Whereas naked pain is, this is pain, pain is bad, pain is bad, I gotta get rid of it.
The paper that I read about this was saying Bayer aspirin, the advent of aspirin was really good because what they said, good for marketing is you got pain, we can take it away, take it away, take it away. So there doesn't seem to be [00:41:00] space or training around tolerating discomfort.
Dr. Erin Hayford: I think that's the paradigm shift that has to happen because how would that shift medicine in general if we shifted the way we're approaching it of just, get rid of it, get rid of it, get rid of it.
I use this phrase, we're missing the medicine. This podcast is called Sacred Illness, so the idea is there's a message here with the pain. Any discomfort has a message. And if we just rush to get over it or to bliss out over it or whatever it is,
Dr. Brad Lichtenstein: We're not getting that message. And true transformation, if you take the Jungian perspective, if you take, Joseph Campbell, it's never going back. You know, I used to teach a class at Bastyr... I don't know if you ever took it. It was a class called "Myth, Ritual and Healing".
Oh man.
It was my favorite class teaching. But what we talked about is all illness, or all disease or illness in mythological terms, there's three parts. There's that separation, you know, like today I'm invincible.
Oh my God, I got this. And then that separation immediately plummets you into the wilderness and you [00:42:00] don't know where you are.. And that's what we have to tolerate. Being in the wilderness is okay. And so many of us don't like it. It's uncomfortable. And I'm not saying we should stay there, but then the transformation, the re entry is not going back to this one.
And so many people tell me, I just want to go back to this. And it's like, Then there was no learning and I don't know where I land personally about it all happens for a reason. I think happens for cause and effect and I will never impose on anyone else that this is the reason you have this illness.
but what I will say is, what do you want to learn from it? And that's up to you. That's completely up to you.
Dr. Erin Hayford: My Crohn's disease journey and your illnesses, your digestive issues... I've been working with this idea of wounded healer.
It's either you take that Wound and learn how to make medicine with it or you can get stuck there and I think going back to what you said earlier about folks who Need their [00:43:00] illness to so to speak or need their symptoms as part of identity... I think that's, that's where we, you know, people can get stuck there because they're needing that for, for safety, for identity, to receive care, to get things they never were able to get.
Dr. Brad Lichtenstein: To say no.
Dr. Erin Hayford: To say no, yeah, to set boundaries, all those things, right?
I use the Joseph Campbell hero's journey a lot in my work, where you get to that bottom part of the circle, where that's the choice point, right? Either you go forward and come back out transformed.
But you can't go back. And I think that's why we get stuck in illness because it's like, this is all I've ever known. This has always been my life. This is how I've always shown up. These are the relationships I've always had. I don't want to give this up. This is everything to me. And even if we know consciously, yeah, it's not the best and maybe I could be happier, but it's what I know.
And so I think that's where illness, I think this is what I was trying to say earlier is illness is protective in that way because it's helping us stay in that life and we don't want to move into that other life where if we suddenly [00:44:00] made space for the pain or had acceptance around the pain and discomfort or learn how to expand around it, then suddenly there's space for us to become someone else and I don't think we always want that, there's fear there, there's resistance there.
Dr. Brad Lichtenstein: I used to teach yoga. I used to be a yoga therapist. I used to teach yoga therapy classes at Bastyr. I used to be a professional dancer before that. I don't do much yoga anymore because of my knees and I was just doing something this morning I was like, oh my god, I can't do this. And that could be, wow, with curiosity, I can't do this, isn't that interesting? Or is it, oh, who am I? Well, I used to be this way, now it's not, this is bad. You know, if you want to live long, you have to exercise so much, and you need to be able to do this and that.
Dr. Erin Hayford: It's like, Wow. Am I going to shame myself? The answer is yes, I'm going to, but it's so fascinating to watch because it shows up so many ways. It's not always this massive death and rebirth that's happening in these cycles.
It's, it can be these little micro moments, like you just described where anytime we're met with [00:45:00] discomfort, it's that choice point of, do we want to allow ourselves to change and orient to the world in a different way to allow this new layer to be who we are, or do we want to resist it?
Dr. Brad Lichtenstein: I love that choice point. I love that you say that, because that is the action there. It's a choice point.
Dr. Erin Hayford: Which is the Viktor Frankl thing, right? Between stimulus and response. We have that choice point.
I'm curious if there's any, stories or cases from your own work is there anyone that comes to mind when you think of someone who has allowed space around discomfort and what that led to for that person?
Dr. Brad Lichtenstein: One of my patients in a hospice. She was the very first person in the hospice study, and she didn't die when the hospice study was ended. And I said, you know, you're ruining our data. That's a joke. I said, and she laughed. But she was the happiest person I ever knew.
So I just want to mention this. She did not get out of bed the whole time. I knew she couldn't get out of bed. They had to do pulleys and all of this stuff to get her out. She congestive heart failure and a number of things. It took me, several months to [00:46:00] get her full diagnosis because she was so skilled at turning around and talking about you and not because she was bypassing.
She was just so interested in people. And even though she had all these health issues, she was always saying, what exciting things going to happen to me today? Who's going to walk through my door?
She had eight kids in 10 years. During, the study, her eldest, who was 50, had a cerebral aneurysm while he was repairing a roof, fell off the roof and died. And everyone said to her, Oh, you're going to start grieving. Like the social worker that came in for hospice, like you're going to start grieving. And she said to me one day, what does that mean? Because I think about him every day. And then she said, I don't know how to be sad when I'm appreciating the 50 amazing years I had. This was not a show. This was not contrived.
She wasn't trying to bypass. I met a Buddha. That was a message I keep hearing, No matter what happens, how do you want to celebrate all the things you have? I know, tell somebody in excruciating pain that. [00:47:00] I don't tell people that. But that's something I'm remembering, you know, for me.
Things aren't going to happen the way I want. Look at the world. It's not happening the way I want.
Dr. Erin Hayford: Yeah. I think what's interesting is despite her being able to approach life with that expanded way of holding space.
She's still sick. She's still dying. You know, life still is happening.
Had a bunch of cardiac symptoms, heart symptoms. Yep. Right. So it's, I think that's the most maybe uncomfortable thought that we're introducing in this episode is you can do all the right things and still be sick.
You can do all the right things and not get well, it's more about, and I kind of mentioned before we started talking about my definition of health is wholeness. You make space for all of it, be with all of it, the good, the bad, the ugly, and just move and expand and contract as needed, but continue doing your best to maintain this space of acceptance and mindfulness and approaching it from that place, I think is, if nothing else, it's going to give you some freedom and [00:48:00] some, peace of mind, maybe, around what it means to exist.
We are a little overzealous with our fight or flight response as a species. We're like, I don't like that. That makes me uncomfortable. I'm going to limit your life.
Every little thing that makes us uncomfortable, we have this massive response. And as we're saying triage, if it's truly, truly, truly threatening you. Sure. Yes. A response is appropriate. However. There's so much nuance between, that response versus everything else.
So can we expand to the other side?
Dr. Brad Lichtenstein: That's where the practice of meta meditation, loving kindness meditation comes to me because I practice having meta loving kindness for all kinds of world leaders. But as the Dalai Lama even talked about, that metta meditation is wishing that the person feels safe, healthy, at peace, at ease, because I believe if I'm at safe, healthy, [00:49:00] happy and at ease and at peace, I'm not going to do half of the reactive behaviors I do.
So if I could really feel safe when my husband leaves his socks there, it doesn't trigger that. I know that sounds like a benign thing, but it really, everyone knows in their family, it's like, ah, why do I get so frustrated? It's like, if I felt safe, I would just look at it, pick it up, put it away if I wanted to.
So I know if it's that small and it goes that big, that everyone's responding. This is the belief. Everyone, even the doctors who dismiss patients, they feel like that's what their job is. They need to be safe. So if everyone felt safe, they would do different things. Not necessarily my things, but different things.
And I don't believe they'd be violent.
Dr. Erin Hayford: I had forgotten about loving kind- I think you might have introduced me to it. I know I learned about it when I was in Seattle. It's a beautiful practice and I will put a link if people aren't familiar, unless you have one that you love to use?
Dr. Brad Lichtenstein: On my website.
Dr. Erin Hayford: Ah hah. There we go. Good transition. Yes.
Dr. Brad Lichtenstein: The Breath Space, [00:50:00] TheBreathSpace. com, I do live stream meditations every Thursday at eight o'clock Pacific time. and those are free. I've been doing those. since the beginning of the pandemic. So I've been doing it every week, every Thursday morning at eight AM. and we go through a number of different meditations.
So they're all mindfulness based about being present, stabilizing our attention, but loving kindness is there. And then I do have several for free. People can sign up to the library and there's just a ton of other ones that I've done before that they can have access to. But I think in the free one, there is, some loving kindness meditation.
I learned this not in person, although I've taken classes with her from Sharon Salzberg. she has amazing loving kindness. There's so many of them out there, but it's just to remember, it's never about condemning and condoning an action. It's not saying this is good action or bad action. They're saying this person is doing the best they can.
How many times have we said that the person is doing the best they can with the resources they have, [00:51:00] but it's really embodying that. Yes. And the hardest part is to ourselves.
Dr. Erin Hayford: For us. Yes, it is. It is. and in that space is where freedom lives, right? When we can slow down and create that space for ourselves and that awareness and forgiveness for ourselves.
Yes. That's where
Dr. Brad Lichtenstein: Choice point.
Dr. Erin Hayford: Choice point. That's the word. So you just mentioned that thebreathspace.com is your website and what, aside from your free offerings, which are incredible and I didn't know that about Thursday, so I will be seeing if I can log in and join you on some mornings, but, what else, how else can people work with you, get in touch with you, see your work, et cetera?
Dr. Brad Lichtenstein: So my practice is all virtual. So I see people all over the world. I tell them I'm not working as a naturopathic physician. I'm working as a coach. I know life coach has been so overused, but I am a coach. I'm a guide. We're in a collaboration.
My first session is talking about how do you want to live? No [00:52:00] matter what comes up, what is it? Of course, I'd want you to sleep more and have less pain.
Those are the side effects. What we're talking about is, if that's happening, how do you want to be? And for many people, when we start to do that work, those side effects change. Not all of them, as you know. so people can book sessions online. I do online sessions. I have the guided meditations.
There's a library of meditations. I also have some other classes for biofeedback. People interested in biofeedback practitioners, for practitioners only. People can sign up for my newsletter, which I do intermittently. I also do death cafes. And I'm going to do another one this October, I think, and maybe December.
I'm not sure. I used to do those in person. And those are just a virtual offering where we gather together and we talk about issues that arise about death. Everyone can come as long as you're alive, it's for everybody.
It's not about needing to have a [00:53:00] diagnosis needing to have lost somebody. It's always different. I've done 50 of these now, sometimes I've had 60 people, sometimes I've had 5 people, and it will morph. I've also had climate cafes where we gather to talk about the same, because I see those as the same thing.
And how do we sit with all of this? So people can go to my website, they can look at the events, they can sign up for a newsletter. And people can just email me too, if they have any questions.
Dr. Erin Hayford: And I assume your contact info is on your website as well.
Dr. Brad Lichtenstein: It is.
Dr. Erin Hayford: Okay, excellent.
So I feel like the appropriate way to sign off our podcast. Well, first, I want to say is it's been an honor to see you since it's been, I guess, a long time since we've talked and like we were saying, it doesn't feel like that long. But here we are. It's been almost 10 years since I was a student, which is hard to believe.
so I haven't seen you in person since then, which is not okay. But, but anyway, it's been such an honor. And again, I owe [00:54:00] so much to you. I mean, who knows if I would have stumbled upon this at some point, but it was... not just, like anyone can teach biofeedback.
It was the way in which you taught it, the enthusiasm, the energy, and just the way that you got us thinking about it. And it just, it's something about it just really, it changed my life and it changed not only, you know, professionally, which obviously matters because the work I do, I think is important and needed, but personally, right, my health journey.
Like I, I am symptom free. I am one of those people whose symptoms did resolve through doing mind body work and being with my body and creating space. So, you know, for, for that, I owe you so much thanks that words could never do justice. The gratitude that I have for you being on my path and especially now that I know you're not at Bastyr I'm grateful that the timing worked out that I got to be with you while you were there. So thank you.
Dr. Brad Lichtenstein: Thank you for saying that. I appreciate that because we often don't know the impact that we have. We don't. Even when we hear it, [00:55:00] sometimes it doesn't register. And I'm going to say this in all sincerity.
You don't know the impact you've had on my life. Any professor, teacher, I believe, gets so much from the people they work with. And I think of this as you are part of my healing journey. It gives me so much even this conversation gives me so much and I appreciate and I'm so thankful that you're doing this work, and that you were in my path as well.
Dr. Erin Hayford: Thank you. I'm like, Okay, I'm gonna log off I'm gonna cry and no one can see that because that's my thing.
Dr. Brad Lichtenstein: Own those tears, cry.
Dr. Erin Hayford: I know, I know, let it out. I was going to say, I feel like the appropriate way to log off is, is the mantra that you've said to all of us.
I don't know if you still say it, but.
Dr. Brad Lichtenstein: Yes, I do.
Dr. Erin Hayford: Can we say it together?
May you go gently knowing, knowing your goodness. Thank you.
Dr. Brad Lichtenstein: Thank you.
