Ten Ways to Stay Present When They're Not Doing the Work - The Transcript
Kristina: Hello, Anna.
Anna: Hey Kristina. We're together in person. We
Kristina: are sitting on a couch next to each other. It's quite nice. It's very
Anna: nice. Especially after your battle with Cohen,
Kristina: after my battle with so many things. Oh
Anna: my gosh. Well, we're going to get into all of that. So for anyone who's new to our show, I'm Anna, and this is Kristina, and we usually start every episode with about a five to 10 minutes off.
Anna: Yeah, some topic is we call it a prelude or prelude. So what we're going to do today is actually funny and fun. It's called psychometry. Psychometry is the psychic practice of trying to Intuit information from inanimate objects. And there was absolutely no scientific evidence out there that this works, but fuck that.
Anna: Well, we don't
Kristina: actually know that's the case because it actually, that it may be that there is scientific evidence. Mostly just because I read this book by Dean Raden called real magic and the number of things that he sites like PSI research that he sites that people say don't exist. Like it's kind of an urgent research.
Kristina: There actually isn't a siphon
Anna: Organon, well, or who isn't Israeli into. It has been used by multiple governments across the world to do some crazy stuff. And he defies statistics and he does psychometry. So for psychologists. You take an object that you know, you could go into an antique store, whatever you take an inanimate object and you put yourself into an alpha state and you open yourself up to receiving either sounds or images or feelings about the object.
Anna: And it's part of a class I'm taking right now called the Silva mind control method, which was a really You know, popular mind control method back in the seventies and eighties. And then it had all these proprietary issues when jose Silva died. And it's now getting popularity again through mine valley.
Anna: So I'm taking that course and this one. The topic is psychometry. So I wanted to try it. So I asked you to bring an object from home and not to, into rapid and paper, not tell me what it was. And I did the same. So I'm going to just put myself into alpha and see what happens and I might be totally wrong.
Anna: And then you'll go. Okay,
Kristina: cool. Can you explain what the process is like, what is it. And you just said, we went to alpha. You already explained the press. Cool.
Anna: So I'm going to do the Silva mind control method of putting myself into alpha, which is I'm just going to count in my head from three to one.
Anna: So I'm going to see the numbers in my head 3, 3, 3, and I'm gonna allow my body to relax. I'm going to see the numbers. 2, 2, 2. Mine's relax. And then I'm going to see the numbers. 1, 1, 1, and I'm going to allow myself to center.
Anna: And then I'm going to just ask myself to be open and suggestible to whatever I'm getting from the object that's wrapped in paper. Cool. All right. So here I go. Is it okay if it's not wrapped in paper? What is it wrapped in? I mean, it's plastic paper. Is it, does that plastic paper have any emotional residents with anything?
Anna: Okay. No, I think it's fine. Okay. All right.
Anna: Okay, I'm going to take the object and I'm asking the object to please tell me about its self
Anna: So I'm seeing children like pushing something back and forth, like a tire swing or a Seesaw,
Anna: and I'm getting the image of a horse. And I'm seeing movement. That's what I'm getting. That's amazing. It's what is it?
Kristina: It is a snow globe with.
Anna: What is it in
Kristina: there? I think it's a sled. It's broken. It's a broken snow globe is what it is. But I feel like there's a horse in there. Oh my God. There's a horse. Yeah. It's a horse. You
Anna: totally said horse. There's a fucking horse
Kristina: in this. Yeah. There's a horse and there's a movement and movement because it's a snow globe.
Anna: Oh my God.
Anna: That's
Kristina: really good. The crazy thing is that I didn't even know what was you guys
Anna: reference it's a slow globe with a horse inside of it, moving back and forth. Yeah, because the horse is no
Kristina: longer
Anna: the bottom of the snow. I also saw wood and the base of the snow globe is wood. I saw did I say, I didn't say would, but I saw, I saw a horse and I saw a movement going back and forth.
Anna: Yeah. Oh my
Kristina: gosh. Okay. And you saw kids, which were probably the kids .
Anna: Oh, cause this is your kid's toy. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So here's my I'm handing you my
Kristina: object. All right. I feel like there's no pressure. There's like you like literally got the exact
Anna: thing. Oh my God. People are gonna think this was rigged.
Kristina: Okay.
Kristina: I keep seeing like a candy cane shape thing with like white and it has glitter on it, but I also see there's some sort of circular something going on with it, like concentric rings or. Something. I feel like it, I see like a tie as if it hangs from something or if it's supposed to tie around something and I get the impression of like silver, like metal cold.
Kristina: Okay. That's the best I can do. Open it up. Oh, wow.
Anna: Okay. It's my daughter's baby bracelet. Oh my gosh.
Kristina: So I got it's it gold. It is gold. It's gold. So I got the wrong metal, but you
Anna: got that. It was the ring shape and that it was a medical metal. Wow. That's cool.
Kristina: That's awesome. I didn't get any of the impression.
Anna: I wonder she didn't wear it that much, but it was a gift from my step grandmother. So I was wondering if you were going to like tap into my step grandmother's
Kristina: it was okay. So that,
Anna: cause I just, the candy cane
Kristina: was so strong, the candy cane image of an ornament yeah. Was so strong that it was like what came
Anna: in initially was I think it was a Christmas gift.
Anna: Yeah. I think it was that's cool. That is really cool. That was fun. That was really
Kristina: fun. Can we just do that all the time?
Anna: So apparently in the course I'm taking, they say, this is like a really fun game. You can play with your children so that you can start teaching your children to be intuitive.
Anna: Oh, cool. I don't know why, but he says, you know, wrap it in paper that doesn't have meaning, you know, if you wrapped it in a piece of Silicon that look was your dead grandmother's or something, you're going to throw the whole thing off. So you want to pick a very like neutral thing. Yeah.
Kristina: And one of the fun things to do that I've done
Anna: before, I'm still just shocked about this
Kristina: horse.
Kristina: I'm really impressed by that. I've done it. I remember I did it a lot in in Savannah, they had a bunch of 'em. They had if you go along the Riverside and Savannah, they have stalls with like old bullets, like civil war bullets and stuff like that. And yeah for people who are in other parts of the world, if you can imagine they have civil war artifacts that they just sell on the riverfront in Georgia still.
Kristina: You pick up these things and it's, so it's like next level, like old fossils, you can tell which ones are fake and which ones aren't because the feeling of like how old, like a sharks to like a Megalodon sharks tooth is like, if you pick it up, you can feel if it's fake or not. Because you can feel how
Anna: old it is.
Anna: I wonder if based on how psychic you are, that's how much aversion you have to like antique shops. I can't see. And then I can't
Kristina: stand antique shops either
Anna: well today, Kristina, what are we talking about?
Kristina: We're going to be talking about methods for what you can do if you were in a relationship.
Kristina: Or whether it's a partnership or whether it's a friendship or whether it's a family ship or a work relationship with people who aren't doing the same level of work that you are my yourself.
Anna: And the joke is even if you are with a partner, who's doing the inner work and they are an avid meditator, or self-help a fixed unit or whatever, , there's still going to be conflict.
Anna: And there's going to be times where you're going to need to like, apply this stuff. I think. Yeah. So a lot of these tips come from the yoga couple.com and they are a couple that make little inner workbooks. They call it the inner work books and they had a great Instagram post about different things you can do it was called how to be present with someone who doesn't do their inner work and it had seven, and it had seven tips. And then we're adding three of our own.
Anna: All right. So number one, go ahead. No, I was just going to, I was just going to give a little intro to it. So it's interesting. Cause I've, talked with clients , who I do readings with and who I do sessions with are in a place where they are usually in the middle of a transformation of some sort in their.
Kristina: Whether they're going from their small self to their big self, whether they're trying to like, get out of their personal story and go more into a bigger story. A lot of the times people are moving. A lot of times people are doing big things like that. And so, so often people come to me and they're in the middle of a relationship moment where they're like, I don't know if I should leave my partner.
Kristina: And so often it is prompted by. I don't know if I can trust them to do their work or they're not doing the work and they're not dedicated to the work in the same way that I am. And so one of the things that I just generally say for this is that, everybody has to come to their own space for doing the work, right?
Kristina: Like everybody has to be, you can't force somebody to do the work because then they're not doing the work, then you're just trying to control them. So in those circumstances, if you try to project onto them and if you try to change them or make it so that they're motivated to do their work or give them ultimatums, those are all techniques that you can try and do to control them.
Kristina: But this is not about that. This is all about what can you do in yourself to be present for the other person. And if they do. To do something it's just to start doing more work as a result, because they're motivated by what you do or because you come to a place where you're like, okay, I've outgrown this relationship then, you know, maybe that's the case.
Kristina: But otherwise I think it's really important in this case to recognize that the work, what we're suggesting is stuff that you do for yourself, because that's what you can control. Exactly.
Anna: All right. So the first one on the list is accept reality as it is, and not as you want it to be.
Anna: And that is a great practice for all of meditation, which is basically. You know, if you're sitting on your meditation mat, you're in a process of accepting reality as it is, and not as you want it to be. And with people, what I think that means for example, is we have a lot of false projections and a lot of false hope.
Anna: So let's say for example, let's say your emotional partner is financially abusing you. If anyone has watched Netflix, there's a great series called made, and it talks all about. Basically the evolution of domestic violence and how it begins first with, some verbal stuff and then it eases into financial abuse and then eventually it eases into physical abuse and it just kind of shows how this goes.
Anna: And I think accepting reality as it is, is a great one, because if you're accepting reality, as it is, you have your accepted. This person is verbally abusing me. That's the reality. Now I'm not saying you're accepting, oh, I'm going to accept verbal abuse. I'm going to accept financial abuse. That's not what I'm saying.
Anna: I'm saying you're going to accept reality as it is. You're going to stop seeing it through rose colored glasses, which may lead you to make different decisions. So accepting reality as it is, is really important for you. I think you need to live your life assuming that people are not going to change and to recognize things for as they are not as you want them to be.
Anna: Because I think a lot of times there's red flags in a relationship or yellow flags and we don't want to see them. So we hide them from ourselves out of view and accepting reality as it is, is to look at someone and say, this is a red flag. And then what are you going to do about it? So if they're not doing the.
Anna: Recognize, they're not doing the work except that they're not doing the work. Don't accept them. I'm not saying accept them in spite of them not doing the work. I'm just saying, accept the facts. they're probably not going to change and see them
Kristina: as facts because ultimately when you come into a position where there's so many issues when you're making a decision to stay with someone or not stay with someone accepting the reality for what it is.
Kristina: Is the first step in, in accepting, in looking past all of your self-worth issues, which are going to inevitably come up in this situation, is you're going to be like, oh, well, this person isn't doing their work, but maybe that's okay because I love them so much. And because they do this for me and it's like, okay, no, no, no, no.
Kristina: get rid of all that first. And just say accepting the reality of the facts of as they are right now. Exactly. And in a situation where it's not like a deal breaker, like for example, I love my husband. He forgets to take out the trash and 90% of the time. And that's just the reality.
Anna: I can argue with him and fight with him and try to change it. And , or I can just accept reality as it is. The reality is he does not remember to take out the trash and I'm going to choose my battles and I'm just going to take it out. So, you know, accepting reality is also, I think, recognizing what your partner's limitations are and aren't, and sometimes if they're not a deal breaker limitation, you accept it and move on.
Anna: Yep. Yep. Yeah. Great. Okay. Number
Kristina: two, maintain your frequency. I, or as I say, I have a poster that I got in an art circle in Atlanta, that was, it just said particular energy, which is kind of the same thing. Maintaining your energy is about the idea that when you come into any relationship , you have a chance to meet somebody with your level of energy.
Kristina: Or go to their level of energy or average out between the two of your energy, right? So kind of meeting a third place. And when you come into a relationship and when you're doing your work, you will find that naturally as you do your shadow work, as you move through it, you'll find that your energy fluctuates, right?
Kristina: Some days you have a faster resonance and everything makes sense and you accept everything and you don't have any resistance and you have gracefully coming into you and you feel enlightened. And, you know, even if, just for a moment, and then other days you're just deep in your shadow work and it's just shit, right?
Kristina: Your partner, the person that you're relating to is going to be going through the same thing. But maybe if they're quote unquote not doing their work. They're resonating. Not as high as you, you could say that I'm not going to say not as high. I'm going to say not as fast.
Kristina: Okay. Like they have a lower
Anna: range, a hierarchy. No, there's no
Kristina: hierarchy. Yeah. They have a lower range. Maybe they're going from shit to a little bit worse shit. All the time, like that's that's where their ranges and everybody goes through that. The trick is, is that when we come to meet somebody, it is important.
Kristina: If you are doing your work to maintain your energy, which means to maintain your boundaries , and by maintaining your boundaries, whether it's energetically or behaviorally or or anything along those lines, by not going down and trying to rescue someone by diving into their shit and getting, and feeling like you have to sacrifice your own state of mind and your own emotional wellbeing.
Kristina: To join somebody in the shit. You're not doing anybody any good in that case. What the best way to maintain the best way to basically have a relationship is to help is to maintain your level of wellbeing, happiness, emotional boundaries, all these different things, and that will help them meet you at that place.
Anna: I love this quote by Krishna DAS. He says practice while you can you'll need it when you can't. And I feel like with meditation and all this inner work stuff, it's like when things are going well, practice and practice hard. That's when you should practice the most, because when things are going, shit, you need to rest on the shoulders of all that work you've done.
Anna: Let's say you've been working on staying centered, , and then this conflict comes up at work or this conflict comes up in your interpersonal relationship. You practice, when you could do it. And now that you can't do it, you can, that work you've done is
Anna: I can't explain it, but like you're resting on the shelf memory, muscle memory. Yeah. Yeah. And so that's a great practice because then you can maintain. It can remind you can be a great reminder to maintain your energy. And, you know, my husband tells me this thing. He says , when the going gets tough, you practice what you know. And so if the going starts to get tough and you're falling back into old patterns, that can be your. Aha moment or, you know, big arrow, like a neon light shining and saying, you don't know it yet.
Anna: You need to be practicing it more, that's what I'm trying to say with the Krishna DAS thing. It's like when you can do it, practice it. So when you can't. You've got it. Yeah. So it could be a sign. Okay. You're not, as, you're not as a quantum, it says, you thought you were sure your quantum is on that yoga meditation mat or whatever, but are you a quantum is at work when your coworker won't stop smacking their gum or whatever, you know?
Kristina: Yeah. And the thing is, is that ultimately practicing when you can so that you have it when you can't. People come into our lives as medicine, like everybody's coming into our lives and we can choose to accept the medicine is good for us or bad for us. So you're, if your partner's not doing the work, they're going to be stirring up your shit all the time and putting you in a place possibly where you can't a lot.
Kristina: You might want to remove yourself from that situation, but ultimately. If it's bringing it up in you, it's something that's there to give you. They're giving you access to something that you did
Anna: and therefore, and it finds me Yvette Bengali tea boy story, which I told when we were interviewed on the the luxury dropout podcast you were interviewed.
Anna: And I gave the story, but some of our listeners haven't heard it. There's a story about this Bengali tea boy that there were these monks. And Ben gall this Northern part of India. And there was a little boy who was terrible at performing the tea ceremony. And so for people who don't know in Asia, some of these cultures have tea ceremonies where you meticulously pour the hot water, and then you do this and you do that and you do this.
Anna: And apparently this voice sucked at it. He was clanging dishes, breaking dishes. He was a pain in the. And so one of the monks had to travel to, I think it was Tibet and everyone warned him. Oh, people are so nice and Tibet, nothing's going to irk you. So he purposely brought the tea way with him. Cause he's like, well, shit.
Anna: If they're not going to trigger me, I need to bring someone who will, so he could test his own boundaries and test his own practice. Yeah. And I love that story. So maybe when someone's driving you crazy, just be like, there's my Bengali tea boy. Yup. Okay. Number three. So this one was our own that we're adding to the list and it's called feeding your demon.
Anna: And we read this amazing book by I'm going to say it wrong. I'm sorry. Sue trim Ali own. She's a Buddhist monk and the book is called feeding your demon. And we talk about this in almost every primal wound episode, because it's such a great practice where you visualize or imagine.
Anna: The personification of the issue at hand. So for example, if I'm wrestling with jealousy or abandonment, whatever, I can visualize, imagine I'm having a conversation with the personification of that quote unquote demon. So when it comes to interpersonal relationships, you can do this as well.
Anna: You can just call that person your demon, or let's say, you know You're in your friendship, you're feeling like your friend has betrayed you. You could imagine them as the demon of betrayal and have a conversation with them, or you could imagine the conflict as a demon, you can personify whatever you want to personify in that conflict, and then you want to feed it.
Anna: So when it shows up in your imagination, you're like, well, what do you want? And they're like, well, I want you to feel really betrayed. Okay, I'm going to F I'm going to go into it because the idea is when you can go fully into an emotion or go fully into your quote unquote demon, the conflict. Then you're able to see what's on the other side of it.
Anna: What's the lesson in it versus having to enact it out in real life. So if I can quietly get in my meditation cushion and go into the depths of my betrayal or go to the depths of my feeling like a piece of shit, and then I don't have to act it out in the real world and learn my lesson in an interpersonal way.
Anna: Like I can do it. Yeah. I can take it and then go work on it by myself. Yeah. Which is such
Kristina: a great, it's such a great practice. That's the thing that. I feel like it comes with a lot of practice of doing a lot of your shadow work is that you start to recognize that you don't actually have to play it out on the real stage of life.
Kristina: You can play with the aspects of it within your own consciousness. And by doing that, you're able to to not necessarily cause harm to someone who doesn't understand it, someone who's not doing their work. So to speak, you know, in this context, someone who may not have the same level of understanding of shadow work as.
Kristina: And you're able to do that, healthily. And it was just like the other day I was doing a release for somebody and they had a lot of demons and I transformed demons into love. Usually that's how I basically do it naturally. And then I was like, Hey, actually, you have two demons who were hanging around.
Kristina: No. And there they're already transformed into love, but they can also become an ally. If you do this feed your demon technique, they can turn into something that has a lesson for you. And that's some, that's oftentimes what I tell people is that, I'm going to transform all these demons into love so that they're no longer in your energy system in the same way but they still have a message for you.
Kristina: And so it's worthwhile talking to them.
Anna: Definitely. All right. Number
Kristina: four, nonviolent communication. So I'm going to do a real. Like a whirlwind of this entire book by Marshall Rosenberg and nonviolent communication is something that comes along the lines of nonviolent demonstration and the kind of the whole nonviolent movement is, as it stands, it's a very different paradigm than what we're used to.
Kristina: But it's something that is incredibly worthwhile. If you want to look at it and you want to improve the way that you communicate with people so that they do not feel attacked. And so there are three main lessons in nonviolent communication. The first is separating observations from judgments. The second is connecting actions and requests to people's specific needs.
Kristina: And the last is that you can use nonviolent communication to improve how you talk with yourself as well. So just to go quickly more in depth into one into specifically. A lot of the times when, like for instance, the example that they use in the book a lot is they say if a teacher has a student and that student didn't do their assignment, you can be like, I have such a lazy student, lazy student is a judgment of your student, but saying the fact of the observation is the student didn't do their homework.
Kristina: It's a completely different thing than the lazy students. So when you're doing nonviolent communication, it's incredibly important to watch your language and say, am I judging them in some way or another? It's like
Anna: the four agreements or five agreements don't make assumptions. Yes.
Kristina: Yeah. Don't take things personal and don't take, don't make assumptions is very relevant to nonviolent communication.
Kristina: So the real trick with it is to say, okay, the student didn't do their work. Or another example that they have was if your husband doesn't take out the trash, my husband is lazy, or my husband is in is irresponsible
Anna: me or my husband had taken advantage of me.
Kristina: Those are all examples of using language to communicate that basically is mixing your judgment with your observation, which is actually the observation. My husband didn't take out the trash. Okay. So the straightforward observations leave much more space for potentially understanding the reasons why people did what they did rather than making a lot of assumptions.
Kristina: Others' actions might provide a stimulus for us feeling the way that we do, but they don't literally cause our emotions. And this is one of the great things that it's really worthwhile reading this book.
Kristina: If you're like me. Lack the vocabulary. Before I read this book, I lacked the vocabulary for emotions and how I felt about things, because I didn't even understand it. I was so intellectual that I literally was like, what is frustration is frustration,, a mental thing, or an emotional thing.
Kristina: And they give this whole massive comprehensive list of all the different feelings that you can have. The idea is that other people's actions provide a stimulus, but they do not provide the emotion. The emotion is your responsibility. And being in touch with those emotions is one of the best ways to separate your judgment from your observation.
Kristina: Okay. And so the second lesson is connecting actions and requests to people's specific needs, can diffuse tensions and point towards possible resolutions. So yeah, connecting actions and. So people's specific needs can diffuse tension and basically point towards resolution. So I'll give you example. Um, So the idea is that when a teacher labels a student lazy, the teacher is coming from a place that she is frustrated or stressed out because she doesn't know how to motivate the student, or the wife.
Kristina: Is upset because you know, the wife wants her house to be clean and she wants the garbage to go out. So she has an underlying need behind her judgment. And so the idea is that people's needs are often more alike than different. So we all have physical needs. We all have needs for positive, emotional experiences, positive social experiences, things like that.
Kristina: So the idea is that if we look at people's needs. Which again, you're not making assumptions for it, but you're basically trying to communicate in a way that. I hear that, you know, you're you have, you know, the teacher who judges her student may be trying to fulfill a need to be competent or job.
Kristina: So if you try to understand people's frustrating behaviors or their frustrating language that they're using you can help to humanize conflicts. Which takes the violence out of conflict. So it's if someone accuses you of doing something, instead of saying, why are they judging me?
Kristina: Why are they being terrible to me? You can actually be like, oh, Michael. We have a need, they have a need, they have a need that needs to be fulfilled. And by looking at that need and by addressing it directly, then you can start to diffuse the other person's judgment of you and start to act
Anna: in a non-violent way instead of taking it personally.
Anna: Oh, she thinks I'm lazy. You can be like, she has a need to have the goddamn trash taken out. Just kidding. No, I'm kidding. She has a need to have a clean house. Yeah.
Kristina: So if you're able to address somebody in a way that that shows that their needs.
Anna: Yeah, go ahead. Oh, I was gonna say so can you give an example of how a teacher could say that to a student with.
Anna: Being like you lazy. Well, we'll see. So
Kristina: in this case, In this case, if someone's, if the teacher says you're a lazy student, the student could then practice on button, they could internalize it, or they could practice non-violent communication back. And they could say to the teacher, they could say, okay, I see that you have a need to motivate me, or I see that you have a need to do this.
Kristina: You know, like to basically address this, the teacher's need for it. Right. On the other hand, the teacher could do the same thing and the teacher could say, I see that you're busy at the moment, or maybe you're not motivated to do this, or like to actually try and get to the need that the student had for why they didn't do their work.
Kristina: And so it's all about a level of communication that seeks to understand and clarify and to separate judgment from observation of fact, I like that
Anna: book. Yeah, I read it, but obviously I don't remember anything. It's
Kristina: funny, you know, I have to say even. I read it ages ago, and then I re-read parts of it recently.
Kristina: And then I read summaries of it before we did this. And there's a part of me that like, Doesn't it still doesn't click quite with it. You know what I mean? Like, I feel like I would need to see it done like 20 different times to like, see how it works. But in the book they talk so much about how useful it's been for mediations in particular.
Kristina: Right. So when you're in a situation, when you already know you have a conflict with someone, it is incredibly useful to use this technique as a way to break through any judgment or any kind of hard feelings that have already been created. Yeah. So that's nine violent
Anna: communication. Okay. Number five is see the God in them.
Anna: So this one is not about sugarcoating. It is not about spiritual bypassing, because I don't want you to like, hear this. Oh, see the God in them. And then just dismiss any unacceptable behavior because you're like, well, there's a God in them. And there's a, you know, God is in all of us. There was this great quote that I read recently and it said don't connect.
Anna: Unconditional love with unconditional acceptance of bad behavior. Yeah. So, , we can unconditionally love others, but it doesn't mean we have to unconditionally accept bad behavior. So I just want to put that preface out there. There's another quote that I love, which is see the light in others and treat them as if that's all you see.
Anna: And so I think with this one, when you see the God in others, what it's asking you is to recognize that even. The person on death row that has done the most horrific crime. They also have a soul. They also have a. We are ultimately, you know, we have three different types of reality going on. We have ultimate reality.
Anna: We have subtle reality and we have apparent reality. So on the apparent level, this person is a total asshole on the subtle level. This is the person who was wounded and is acting out because they were abused or whatever. And then on the ultimate level, we are all one. We are all just consciousness experiencing itself and we are all made in God's eyes and we're all perfect.
Anna: So. I'm not saying to always jump to that ultimate reality version because we don't live there. We don't live in the ultimate, but try sometimes to maybe look through those lenses and see that in others. And like I talked about this in the episode with Krishna DAS that I was visited by his guru who showed me an image of a flower growing from shit from poop and mud.
Anna: In the vision that he showed me was that the flower in the shit we're a package deal. And for me at the moment when I saw that, I thought, oh, he's saying that even though I feel like a piece of shit sometime I'm still also a flower. Like I don't cancel the other one out. And I think that also, when we see the God and people focus on the flower of them and not their.
Anna: You know, cause it's, I feel like that message has so many different levels of meaning. And one of them is where are you going to direct your attention? Are you going to direct your attention on the shit? Or on the flower. And I, for example, was upset with someone recently, I was holding a grudge against someone for doing some something literally shitty, and I've been focusing on the shit and I just told myself, I'm going to see the flower in them.
Anna: I'm going to focus on the flower them. And I did Ho'oponopono, which is a forgiveness exercise. And we have a whole episode on that season one, episode four. . And I said, I'm just going to focus on the flower of them. And I got into meditation space and I saw them as a flower with shit at their feet growing from that.
Anna: And I said, I'm just going to focus on the flower and ironically, or fittingly enough when I finished, I don't carry a lot of resentment towards them anymore. Just you know what? They're perfect. And they're shitty. And I'm just going to focus on the.
Kristina: Yeah. For anyone who's thinking that sounds like a form of positivity, like toxic positivity.
Kristina: I think it's very important to recognize that there are people in our life that we can create boundaries for, that are healthy so that the person doesn't have. But we still have them in our lives. It could be a family member.
Anna: Someone asked us this question today.
Anna: Well, what do you do? How do you make boundaries with someone where if you make boundaries with them, you'll be homeless. Yeah. You know, there's situations where you need to do what's best for your survival and
Kristina: There are situations where your survival is dependent on keeping a person in your life.
Kristina: And if that is the case, we really hope that you're able to find the help to be able to not necessarily be in that situation or to get into a safer situation. But at the same time, you know, creating the boundary in which you are not being abused. And yet you're still able to be with a person who does great on you or does trigger you in certain ways or does things in a, you know, that's that is precedent.
Kristina: So that technique that Anna said is very important for that, because, sometimes we just have people in our lives that You can't just cut them out. You can't cut them, their family members or
Kristina: your white colleagues, work colleagues. Great. Your
Anna: livelihood is dependent on them or your home situations.
Kristina: That's apparent reality for you. And that's part of life is like learning how to juggle these three different ones, ultimate apparent and subtle, you know, you gotta find what works for you. And
if
Kristina: anything, that toxic positivity is only doing the light work and not doing the shadow work that comes with having difficult situations.
Anna: Yeah. All right. Number six.
Kristina: So I remember once I did this technology that we've mentioned a couple of times on this it's one of the, one of our teachers does it. And I remember I was having a lot of trouble with someone, one of my colleagues from. And for some reason, my mind just got into this like compulsive thing about thinking about this person, about how upset I was about something that this person did.
Kristina: I was just like, I just was just continually thinking about how much this person really annoyed me and how much I tried to support this person. Just kidding. It was not, you it's a shocker. You . Um, It was, you know I was really, I was in a really, in a stress out situation. At work and I was directing it all towards this person.
Kristina: And I woke up after a couple of days of this technology that I would have every night for seven days. And always, I would have these kinds of re realizations that happened. And I came to this massive realization that every single thing that bothered me about this person was a trait that I shared with them.
Kristina: And. They were giving me a mirror of how much I did not like about myself and what I needed to forgive and love in myself. And so he says we don't see the world as things are, we see them as we are.
Kristina: Yes. And so if you have a partner or someone, a colleague who feels like they're not doing the work, who feels like they are.
Kristina: You know, they're constantly in their personal story. Maybe they're always doing the poor me or they're always, doing a control drama, right? They're doing either the aloof inquisitor, as we talk about in this listing prophecy at the end of last season, or they're doing the victim intimidator or talking about the drama triangle, which we will in a second, they may be doing one of those things.
Kristina: The thing is to recognize they are possibly pulling you into something and giving you access to something that you didn't have before. And they are a mirror of something that you don't like about yourself.
Anna: Yep. And that leads nicely into number seven, the primal wounds. So in season one, we really went into depth with the primal wounds.
Anna: We had an eight episode series about them and the five basic primal wounds. If you're not familiar, our humiliation and justice, rejection, betrayal, and abandonment. I really love the primal wounds as a lens to filter the world, because what you can do with it is that when someone is being an asshole, it's so much easier to understand them when you're like, oh, well, they're just experiencing the primal wound of whatever. Like it was so funny. My daughter listens to this podcast and she's nine years old and someone on the school bus.
Anna: Doing something nasty to her. And she came home and told me about it. And I, as you know, talking to her about it, she goes, oh mom, they just have an injustice wound. And it was so funny. Cause I was like, yup, that's right. Like when you can see clearly hurt. People, hurt people. If someone is being hurtful to you, it's because on some level they're suffering because happy people don't go around hurting other people, happy people share happiness. So if someone's hurting us, Chances are that they are suffering in some way.
Anna: And so the primal wounds is if you come to really understand those and go revisit that series. If you haven't understanding those wounds is going to really help you have compassion and understanding for people who are acting out because you can just clearly see, well, oh, they're being a controlling Dick.
Anna: Well, they got up a trail wound. Oh, she's invading my space. Well, she's got an abandonment when. Oh, he's being really unreasonable and unfair. He's got an injustice wound, like understanding , the way that the wounds act out is really helpful. And then another helpful side of it, as Chris was saying in the previous number six, is that they can be your mirror.
Anna: Is that oftentimes when people are bothering us, it's because they are triggering our own primal wounds. So it also helps to see, like if there a tuning fork, what are they. To what are they like vibrating against in you? What are they pulling out in you? Cause maybe that person's justice wound is pulling out my injustice, like politics is a great example.
Anna: Someone has this very strong opinion about X because it's an injustice to them and it totally reverberates with your why, because it's pulling out the injustice wound. And if you break apart the facts, ultimately at its core on the subtle level, It's just injustice wound bashing against injustice. Boom.
Anna: Yeah. So that's a really helpful thing. Yep. Yep. And that's one of the things you guys may or may not have seen it. If you've seen a video of someone bringing a tuning fork into a room, if there's a four 40 tuning fork that is just sitting there nobody's touching it and you knock another four 40 Hertz tuning fork right next to.
Kristina: They'll both start resonating, even if you haven't touched the other one, because the frequency is enough to excite the other tuning fork. And one of the things that just to kind of elaborate just slightly on that too. One of my teachers,
Kristina: Uh, charia Swami Jaya. Debbie , is the Swami at Kashi Atlanta. And she talks about meeting people at a certain Shakara. So when you meet them maybe your second chakra is, are resonating together, or maybe your third eye shockers are resonating together, or maybe your heart shockers are resonating together.
Kristina: And one of the things that we say with all the primals wounds is that they are actually shadow shakras of the shockers that we have. So injustice sits in the throat. Rejection sits in the heart, betrayal, sits in the solar plexus. Abandonments hits in the sacral chakra, and then humiliation sits in the root chakra.
Kristina: So in the same way, That you meet someone and you resonate at a certain chakra. So maybe you're always, you're both addicts together. So you're resonating in that second chakra. Or maybe you're both you know, experiencing levels of rejection together, or maybe you're highly creative and you're sitting in your heart shot,
Anna: things like that.
Anna: It also can mean why you know, your current boyfriend doesn't pull out any of your codependency, but your ex-boyfriend, , you were with him and all this codependent stuff came out because he was a tuning fork for your abandonment William, because he had that going on, and then. ,
Kristina: it's all a gift for you. It's all given you access to your shit. All right. Number eight is the drama triangle, Chris? Yes. So the
Kristina: drama triangle is as Robbie, our shaman says is the triangle is an incredibly stable.
Kristina: Shape. It is one of the most stable states that there is. And as a result, there is a dynamic of the abuser, the rescuer. So the persecutor, the rescuer and the victim, and in the drama triangle. The rescuer is trying to become the victim. And the persecutor is trying to become the victim. The exalted position in the drama triangle is to become the victim.
Kristina: And this dynamic exists in approximately 70% of all interact interactions that happened. And it is. The predominant way that we know how to operate the rescuer. You may recognize them as the person. Who's always trying to people, please. They're always trying to make other people comfortable. They're always going out of their way, even when they do not actually want to in order to make everything smooth and make everybody feel okay.
Kristina: But ultimately that. Accumulate for long enough that they will accumulate enough resentment, that they will then switch possibly into the persecutor role. And blame everyone for making them do everything and making them do all the work or making them do whatever so that ultimately they can become the victim.
Kristina: And then the abuser does the same thing. So the persecutor does the same thing. They're persecuting so that they can then become the abuser. The thing is, is that in any given conversation or argument, every single person will switch between all these different roles from one minute to, and
Anna: there is no conflict on this planet that you could find that there's no.
Anna: People enacting the drama triangle, like every conflict will have one of those three sides of the triangle. Like every single one every single conflict on this planet is going to have one of those three.
Anna: So if you're having conflict with someone who's not doing their work. And they're not going to do the work you could focus on. Well, what is your role in the drama triangle and how are you going to release
Kristina: it? So ultimately in the drama triangle, what you recognize is that if you have a partner who is quote unquote not doing their work.
Kristina: They may be completely entrenched in the drama triangle. And you may be able to see the drama triangle, the trick with this is not to go, Hey, guess what? You're in the drama triangle, because then you just, they can see you as the persecutor and then they can become the victim of you trying to call them out for being in the drama triangle.
Kristina: That's not the trick with this. The trick is not to. Say look at all the shit. Look, I mean, it's the same thing with the primal wounds. You don't want to be like, Hey you're showing your abandonment. When right now you got to do some about that. This is this whole episode is not about teaching is fixing others.
Anna: Call the rescuer.
Kristina: Exactly. Exactly. It's not what we're saying. So ultimately. What you can do in these situations to pull yourself out of the drama triangle so that you don't fall into it is that you can full one of the higher aspirations of the, basically the higher triangle, not the drama triangle, like the higher expression of all three of these roles, which is the coach, which is the coach.
Kristina: So basically the rescuer becomes the coach. The coach holds space, they're nurturing. They pray. They allow people to emote and have feelings without having the feeling the need to sacrifice themselves or to join themselves in the Meyer. Just like what we were saying earlier, the persecutor becomes the challenger the divine masculine aspect.
Kristina: They make sure to question what people's motivations are in a loving and kind way, but also to basically say, okay, what are we trying to achieve here? Where are we going with this? But not in a, Hey, what are we trying to do here way, but more of a supportive way. And then the victim has that tender, vulnerable place right there.
Kristina: They're the tender, vulnerable person who is allowed to have feelings. And to be hurt without having to pull everybody into their circle of victim consciousness.
Anna: And then one more thing to add. If you want to learn more about the drama triangle, because it's really hard to do it justice in this five minute session here is if you go back to season two and start on episode seven, we have a four episode series on the drama triangle.
Anna: Yeah. It's really worthwhile. Yeah. So number nine is called the swimming pool. Exercise is what I call it. And you could do it with any body of water, but this is a great practice that you could do if you're having conflict with someone, which is you get yourself into an alpha state or in a meditative state.
Anna: And you imagine yourself in. A body of water, it could be a swimming pool. I called the swim pool exercise. You could imagine a river, an ocean, whatever. And the reason why it's important to imagine that it's water is because when you're in water, we are made out of water. And so when we are in water, there is like fluidity, emotional fluidity that's happening, and things are more likely to change on an energy level.
Anna: It's just my intuition. There's no facts in that. I'm just saying, do it in water, do it in the bathtub. Imagine doing it. At the pool, whatever. And then what you do is you call upon your higher self to call upon the higher self of the person you're having the conflict with and have a conversation. And I've done this a lot.
Anna: You know, I imagined myself in a swimming pool and I imagine the person I'm having a conflict with shows up and we just have a conversation and believe it or not, I can come to. And I think anyone could come to some great insights or resolutions, just allowing in that soft, quiet space of your mind to see what comes up.
Anna: You don't know what will come up. And that kind of leads into number 10, which is the role-play.
Kristina: Yeah. You know, it reminds me of did you ever as a kid go to the bottom of the pool and you have tea party? Yeah,
Anna: we should call it the tea party exercise. I haven't done it. And it's actually, it's very helpful.
Anna: Yeah.
Kristina: Yeah. That's awesome. Yeah. I totally relate to that fluidity thing too, because whenever I'm in a place where I just like, can't get out of my head or I'm doing whatever, I just go sit in the shower for however long. Yeah.
Anna: Just put your feet in water or whatever.
Kristina: Yeah. Yeah. It's amazing. All right. Yes.
Kristina: So the last thing is role-playing so role playing is a really good technique. We've talked about a number of different techniques that are similar to this. This is a really great technique for again, playing out the dramas that you may experience with a person who you feel is not doing their work without having to confront that person directly.
Kristina: And the role-play goes so that you sit in one chair and then you get somebody else. Ideally somebody else, somebody who's neutral but maybe knows something about this situation. Good best friend to play the other role. And they are effectively going to be channeling. This and it may sound difficult to play that at a role, but it's actually not, it's actually becomes a bit like as soon as you start this exercise, you'll find that it's really easy to take on the characteristics.
Anna: Let's say you're mad at your cousin bill. I'm making that up. And I'm like, okay, I'm going to be your surrogate cousin, bill. Like I suddenly start to like, get into his vibe and yeah. Say what he
Kristina: would say. Yeah. I remember we did that and we did
Anna: it on WhatsApp. So you were pretending to be someone I was having a conflict with and I was lashing out and you were lashing back and we got
Kristina: so much stuff out.
Kristina: We got so much, it was so useful. And I really felt like that person I really was just
Anna: playing stuff that person would say. Yeah. Yeah.
Kristina: So it's like, it's really useful for. For getting out any kind of pent-up aggression that you may have at someone who may not be at the level of being able to handle this kind of shadow work directly.
Kristina: Yeah.
Anna: Yeah., they say, oh, write a letter and burn it. You know, that's another one. Oh, you've got all this stuff on your chest, all these things you want to say, and you can't really safely say them and you write the letter and you burn it, you can do that.
Anna: But role-playing is a great fun way to get some feedback. And some back and forth without actually having to execute it in the real world where you would either burn bridges or just waste your fucking time with that person.
Kristina: Yeah. And that's the thing is that ultimately, if you do everything on this list and you do it with.
Kristina: You may not want to be with the person at the time you get to the end of the list and that's okay. You know, like we outgrow people and I love the saying is you have relationships for a reason, a season or a lifetime,
Anna: and
Kristina: we'll go ahead and. Maybe you doing the work, you getting access to your abandonment wound and being able to feed your demon of abandonment and do whatever while you're in a relationship with this person you know, and then you find yourself worth, right?
Kristina: Like you go and you do this work, and then you recognize that you actually love yourself more than wanting to resonate at this place. And thus, you're able to heal that. Maybe that's the reason, and then you're
Anna: done. And one thing I want to throw in is like a lot of people are on the spiritual path and they think it's petty or silly to get all cut up in love stories.
Anna: And I don't remember if it was a book called the spirit catches you and you fall in or something. But there was a social worker like she was a social worker, or a therapist who was working at refugees. And she was having people coming in and they had witnessed genocide and civil war and like their whole village being burned down or whatever.
Anna: And she was there to facilitate trauma healing, and guess what? They all wanted to talk about their relationships. They all came in there to talking about their level relationship. And like, I met this one guy at this refugee camp and then, you know, it was all about that. She said she was fascinated because it's like here, she was expecting that they were going to talk about, you know the military coup that these people witnessed. But no, they all wanted to talk about the love stories. And I think that the love stories are such an integral part of our spiritual journey.
Anna: Don't discount. The meaning and the power that your love stories, whether it's with your coworker. And I don't mean romantic love, but you know, just the love and the relationships and the conflicts that come out and interpersonal dynamics that is so much of the juice of your spiritual path.
Kristina: Yeah.
Kristina: Yeah. And ultimately as where I'm dust says, we're all waking up. So whether or not you think someone's doing their work, they're still watching.
Anna: And I, like Odie also said was we're all just walking each other home