You Don’t Have to Ingest the Poison

Renae: Well, welcome to today’s episode of It Doesn’t Have to Be This Way. And so, Laura, you’ve set the topic for today. And I would love for you to just go ahead and tell us what we’re going to talk about.

Laura: All right. Awesome. Well, I as a yoga teacher, I have a theme in all of my classes every single month. And this month, what I’ve been doing is exploring Indian mythology. Like, you know, what lessons can it teach us? And also, how does it relate to the poses that we do in class? And one of the stories that I shared a couple of weeks ago in my class, I thought was really relevant to us was about Shiva. So Shiva is one of the big three deities in Indian mythology. And, and he is he’s actually the first yogis, the Lord of yogis, and he’s also the destroyer. And so he sits on a mountain and he meditates until it is his time to do his cosmic roll. And so in the meantime, once upon a time, at the at the beginning of time, all the rest of the minor Gods and the demons, they all got together and they decided that they wanted to search for the elixir of life. They wanted to find this, you know, thing that would give them everlasting life. And so they thought that a good idea would be to, like, mix up the cosmos. You know, they’re going to stir up the Milky Way and the elixir of life would fall out of that. And so they had the god of snakes. He offered to be the handle of this giant spoon they were going to use. He wrapped his himself around a mountain. And that was kind of like the the bowl part. And so they all together start churning and churning the galaxy and instead of the elixir of life falling out. What actually started to fall out was some really, really toxic poison. And they were very afraid because if it fell and hit them, it was going to kill them. But Shiva, with his wisdom, using his third eye, he saw that this was happening. And so Shiva rushes over to capture the toxin before it can hit the gods and the demons. And he captured it in his mouth. And the other gods were very afraid because they thought that this was going to swallow it and he was going to die. And then, you know, the cosmos as we know it, would stand still because he has a big role to play. Or they were afraid that he was going to discover how gross it was and spit it back out and spew it all over them. And then they would die anyway, even though he tried to save him. But what actually happened was that Shiva kept it in his throat and he neutralized it. And so a lot of times you’ll see Shiva depicted with. He already has indigo skin, but he often has even darker throat area because he took in that poison and neutralized it. And so the overall lesson is that, you know, there’s a lot of poison around us in our, um, you know, maybe people that we know, maybe society, society at large, maybe. And that’s toxic. So our choices are, we can internalize it and poison ourselves and make ourselves miserable, or we can spew it back out to the people around us and make them miserable, or we can take it in and neutralize it. And so I when I saw that story, I thought that was a A lesson that you especially would love and appreciate, because I know that that is one of the things that you are actively doing and helping others to do is to like, take what is coming in that is not good and transform it into something that’s more positive.

Renae: Yeah. Yeah. I haven’t, I, I have never heard that story before. And, um, I see so many very interesting pieces of, um, of different roles that we as humans play in that, that tableau that you just set, right. So whether we are, um, seeking after something and, and cause and cause destruction in our, in our hurry to try to get the elixir of life. And we, we’re not paying attention to maybe external wisdom or to the, you know, the caution of wait, like maybe, maybe there is more to do and, and, and, and to gather other wisdom before we move forward with something so drastic. And what can happen and doesn’t mean we shouldn’t explore, we shouldn’t have adventure, we shouldn’t try things or challenge things. But there’s this piece of what, what’s the purpose? And, and the, the elixir of life is not that well, in my view, it’s not that complicated. We don’t need to destroy parts of the cosmos in order to get there. Uh, we life giving things are, are choices that we make, micro choices that we make all day long. Um, and so there’s that part of peace. It’s like that part, that piece of it that’s, um, or maybe that’s predisposition. We have to think that we have to do these big bold moves in order to find the good stuff. Whereas it’s actually right here already. And we’re going to we’re going to miss it. We’re going to miss it. And then in our, in our haste to try to force something, we’re actually very likely going to do damage to ourselves and probably to others. And so I think that’s one particular level. And then another part of that that I really resonated with was this this caregiver concept. Um, and I would say very boldly that pretty much anybody who is listening to this podcast, there is a good chance that at some level they are a caregiver. So if someone is, if you’re caring for a person who’s in front of you, if you’re meeting a need, you are care caregiver. It may not be your title, it may not be your role. You may not get paid for it. Um, if you’re a parent, you definitely don’t get paid for it. Um, it’s incredibly costly, but the, the, um, choices we have as the, the carer is the person who creates felt safety in spaces, how we deal with toxic toxic, toxic ity.

Laura: No toxicity.

Renae: Toxicity. The opposite of positivity. No. Uh, um, I think I put together toxic positivity in my brain and came with toxic ity. But that’s, that’s kind of funny too. Um, I.

Laura: Feel like if we could coordinate that as a newsroom.

Renae: I really think we can. But the, the, the false narratives, the lies, those, those, the messages we receive from either directly or indirectly from, um, our experiences in this life, um, create this toxic environment that strip away our capacity for seeing the good stuff, right? And so as a caregiver, often we are we is we’re we’re navigating what’s going to be helpful for, for the people around us, the people that we care about. Um, and I don’t, I’m, I’m going to guess there’s probably not a whole lot of thought process before moving in and taking in this poison. And then it was like, oh, what am I going to do with this? Right. Um, and I think we find ourselves in that role as people who care often as well that if we’re standing in the gap, if we’re, if we’re acting as a buffer or a container or a helper, um, we might be the first line of defense for people, um, to, to protect them. But what are we doing with what we’ve taken in? And, and we know scientifically that if we don’t process it, this is where we develop. Second secondary traumatic stress disorder, right? Where we do that compassion fatigue, where it starts to actually degrade our our heart, mind, body and soul. If we’re not processing it. So I love that the visual of that happening. And I would love to hear what is what is a story for you? The a time that you took in this poison. And, um, I actually would love to actually hear a time that maybe you either swallowed it and spit it out in a time that you neutralized it.

Laura: Yeah. Well, I have a, I have a story that includes all of those states. Um, but I will first say that I, I am really, I find it really fascinating that you are positioning Shiva as kind of like a caregiver in this scenario, especially since he has that third eye and he’s always kind of like watching. That sounds to me so much like a parent, right? Like you just have an instinct for what is going on with your kids that you try to hone. Um, but yeah, I, so I had a job a while ago that was a really bad fit for me And it was just a bad culture fit. The person that I was working for isn’t a person whose values aligned with my own. Let’s just leave it at that. And so I spent a lot of times just being really angry. This person was basically spewing out poison, so to speak. And I took that in and was really mad and it was really hurting me. And at that point in my life, I also was drinking too much. And I think that a lot of it was because I was dealing with all of that anger that I had at this person and at this whole situation. And so not only was I taking it in then, I wasn’t my best, you know, being hungover most of the days of the week. So that was affecting everyone around me as well. I was pretty good at protecting my family from it, but some of the coworkers I had at that job, like I’m kind of embarrassed to look back and see how I was treating them because, you know, I’m just spewing out this toxicity. So I spent a lot of time trying to find a new job. And it maybe nine months or so, and I was sending out all these resumes. I was doing all the things that you’re supposed to do. Um, you know, like researching the company. It was a really interesting cover letter to send to say, hey, you know, I’m available, I’d love to work for you. Whatever. I did not hear one thing back from any of those places that I sent out a resume there. Not one single thing. And so this happened over a period of about nine or ten months. And then one day, um, I, you know, looking back, I can kind of see signs of those coming, but at that point, I had no idea this was coming. Um, this person I was working for called with a witness and, and this is before, you know, we were all on Zoom. So there’s no like video calling. So it’s just like a regular phone call. And, um, he basically fired me. Like he said, my position was eliminated. They were restructuring the company. So I got fired from this job, which actually was like the greatest thing that could happen to me, you know? And, um, and I knew that I knew that I didn’t want to be working there. And I knew that this now freed me up to really go all in on having my own business, which was the best thing for me and which is what I’ve been doing since then. But I was still really so angry at him and just the injustice of him firing me. And so it was at this point when I, um, had, you know, and I had been working on this anger issue that I had had and that led me to meditation that led me to quitting drinking. And so by this point, I was kind of on a more upward trajectory of learning how to neutralize that. But then when I got fired, it almost sent me back into a really negative place because I was so mad. And so I knew that I needed to figure out how to forgive these people that had fired me. And so I spent a lot of time with that and a lot of deep work and learning on forgiveness and what it is and what it means and how to do it. And my favorite resource that I found was, I don’t know if you’ve ever listened to Rob Bell’s podcast, but he has an episode on forgiveness. That’s amazing. I think it’s a whole series actually like two or three episodes. But he said that forgiveness is setting someone free and finding out that it’s you. And so that was such a perfect lesson for me. And I always come back to that quote. And so I’m glad all of that happened, even though it was super, super painful, but it really taught me a valuable lesson in, you know, taking in someone else’s toxicity. Like sometimes people aren’t at fault and it’s your interpretation and sometimes they are. And you still have to learn how to neutralize that. You know, like just because you’re forgiving someone doesn’t mean that they didn’t do something wrong. It means that you were releasing yourself.

Renae: Yeah. Well, and then there’s a couple layers in that for me to that I’m that I’m that I’m hearing too is, um, this forgiveness piece in, um, when I talk to people about forgiveness, um, and I’m going to quote my, my friend Cindy Lee, um, forgive behaviors. I mean, we forgive people, not behaviors. Let me make that clear. We forgive people, not behaviors. So behaviors have consequences. Behaviors have an effect, but we’re forgiving people with compassion to recognize that there’s a lot coming into the scenarios that they have their own histories, their own stories. And that part of that compassion is also extending that to us to realize we’re bringing stuff too. And so the process of forgiveness is that where we’re we’re recognizing that whatever conflict happened between between two people, that there generally isn’t injustice or something that happened that shouldn’t have or something that happened that didn’t happen. It should have. And we’re feeling this, this, this injustice in how we react and respond to that injustice is generally our, our behaviors in that. Right? So there’s a, there’s a, there’s, and there’s hurts that that generally occurs. Again, I’m doing like really broad strokes because I know that people sometimes are like, well, that’s not for me. And I, I get it. I’m talking broad strokes here, folks, but the, the process of, um, forgiving ourselves, I think we, we have even cheapened the, the new, the neutralizing of poisons by forcing kids to apologize to each other.

Laura: Ah, interesting. Yeah.

Renae: Right. Because there’s a whole process of making it right. Right. And so even going back to the story, like wrestling with that for a second of saying there’s the, you know, again, I don’t know. I don’t know this mythology, I don’t know this the history. I’m going to speak to it with my own cultural lens. And so that’s all I have is my own cultural lens to look at it, say there was an imbalance when you start to pull the cosmos apart, to try to make something for something, you’ve created a rift, you’ve created an imbalance. And when when that’s when things are out of alignment, we can’t get the good stuff. At that point. It is going to be things that are not life giving. It’s going to be things that are harmful And, um, in the, in the story that you told, there’s this, there’s someone who rushed in to say, okay, I’m gonna, I’m gonna bridge the gap. But that bridging of the gap wasn’t enough. That was just a bandaid. And that’s kind of like the say you’re sorry, shake hands. Right. You’re bridging the gap. But that’s not actually the justice that doesn’t actually restore. And so I, I’m like super curious now about the story. And like, after this poison was neutralized, how did the cosmos get put back together? Because at some point somebody needs to put the cosmos back together.

Laura: Right? Did they learn the lesson? You know, I think they continued, I’m going to have to research that. Um, they, I know they continue to search for it and did eventually find the elixir of life. But I also like how you took the first part of that and are reminding us of, I think something that we’ve talked about before, but always it’s good to reiterate that a lot of time we’re searching for something that’s outside of ourselves that’s going to fix things. You know, we’re looking for this elixir of life. And to your point, we have what we need inside of us to bring it back to the store. So we have what we need inside us to neutralize toxins.

Renae: Right? Well, it’s finding that truth. And again, the voices around us are so loud, right? Like I say, over and over, there’s a rooms full of people across the world whose job it is to figure out what it is that will make you feel like you are less than. That there’s something wrong with you, that you’re broken because they have something to sell you.

Laura: Yeah.

Renae: And they do a really, really, really, really, really good job of it. They do a really good job. And it’s not just in advertising. Um, it happens in academia. It happens in, in the church. It happens all over the place where People are saying, well, if you have this, then you’ll be happy. If you have this, you’ll, you’ll, you’ll have joy. And it’s, it’s coming to that, finding those, those, um, things inside of us that, that give us, like we talked about in our last episode, that contentment in that peace of the right now. Right. So I, I, I do want things to be different. I would like the world to be, I’m just going to declare on June eighteenth, twenty twenty five, I would like the world to be different. And I and I believe that the world can be different. And how do I find peace in the right now? And part of that is, you know, when, when that poison, when, if, if I’m taking that burden on and I’ve received that, um, it is to have a plan of what am I going to do when this happens? And so the pot for me, the journey of, um, taking in poison and having to neutralize it and not unlike you, um, comes in, in, in sort of a workplace scenario. Um, and I’m not going to speak to specific scenarios, but the, the, there was this, this time and at the beginning of twenty twenty when I had a really significant, um, period of healing, I, I had gone to receive facilitator training in this modality and going through it myself healed some very core fundamental wounds about truths and lies that were battling inside of me and in being able to let go of the lies and to, to recognize that, um, having not been in this normalized state of receiving these negative messages about myself, about what I do, about who I am. Um, once I let started to let that go and say, wait a minute, I don’t need to. That’s not true. I don’t need to hold that. Let me just anchor down into the truth of who I am and let that become bolder and grow my boundaries. As I looked around, I realized that so many of my relationships were were not healthy for, for lack of a better term. They just they weren’t healthy. And I couldn’t even be myself in those relationships because I was too much or not enough. And sometimes simultaneously, I’m too much of this one thing. I’m not enough of this other thing. And none of that was true. That was all about someone else’s need to control. That was all about someone else’s need to to control the narrative or to control the atmosphere. And it turned out that when I my true and authentic self, there’s a lot of spaces that don’t have space for me. Yeah. And so I, my neutralizing was to look at it and say, is it important for me to, to be in this role in this relationship anymore? Is there a reason that I need to be. Is there is there an opportunity for the cosmos to come back together here? Can we both learn from this? AM I able to, um, instead of spewing it out or taking it in and letting it ruin my heart, mind, body and soul? Is there something I can do that transcends or transforms and on my part that will make this environment better? And, um, and I asked a very wise person, I said, okay, after I’ve gone through this, this healing, like when people do this, what happens? And she’s like, if they can’t change the environment, they will generally leave. And that’s what happened. And it wasn’t just environment. It was it was significant relationships where I said this, if I continue to, to, to take this in a, in a while, certainly while I’m in the, the middle of this healing journey, it’s going to kind of undo my progress. It’s going to undo my healing. So I’m, I’m going to not I’m going to need to remove myself from that. Um, and then it’s been this process of forgiveness, of letting go of my anger and my resentment, my frustration. I’m still working on it with several relationships. I write every week. I’m writing down in my journal of these, these relationships that, um, I, I really want there to be healing. And on a few of them, I’ve approached people and said, hey, we’re not like, we’re not okay. Our relationship is broken. Um, and, and where I’m at in my life, I either need to fix it or move on completely. And, and has not gone over well with people. People are like, no, I just, I want to stay in the, the liminal space or the whatever. And, and I, and for me at this level, I’ve reached this stage of life. I’ve recognized that still continuing to do harm to me. So I will have to go through that forgiveness process on my own. Um, I’m not going to be able to reconcile with them in that same way. And I, but I need to reconcile with me. Um, it’s the, the forgiveness is actually for me so that I am not even holding that poison anymore. It is becoming transformed so that I’m, I’m learning and I’m also going to learn compassion. And I think that’s a piece of it too. And we let go with compassion. We’re not saying the behavior was okay. We’re not even saying intent was okay. I’m really getting frustrated with people. Like, why didn’t intend that? Yes. And I didn’t intend to crash the car. You still crashed the car.

Laura: Right? It’s still wrecked. Still wrecked. Yeah. You know, it’s really interesting to me, like how powerful the lessons are in once you when you’re not ingesting or spewing the toxins, when you’re working on that neutralization, like how really, really powerful and just like life changing and far reaching the lessons are that you can get from that.

Renae: So when we’re talking about this neutralizing poison, I think that, um, some people might hear it and think we’re talking toxic positivity, which is the opposite toxic. Um, we’re not talking about dismissing or avoiding. It’s there’s an active transformation of it, and it’s not even like I’m going to overcome it. There’s something else here that.

Laura: Mesa avoiding is internalizing.

Renae: Mhm.

Laura: You know, like that’s, that’s a way that you’re hurting yourself, that you’re not learning and growing from it. You just bring it back to that example that you had, like, just say you’re sorry. Like that’s, you’re not, that’s not a lesson.

Renae: Right? That doesn’t make it right. And so there is this piece of, I, you know, I, I would think that the neutralizing of the poison takes away the power of destruction. And I want to come back to that because there I think you’ve told me before, Shiva is the god of destruction. And there’s something really important about. But you’re telling me the story about this God of destruction who actually did Restoration and reconciliation.

Laura: Yeah, destruction is a key part of the universe.

Renae: So let’s I mean, we can unpack that for a few minutes. So I don’t want to get too long today, but I think that that’s an important piece of it too, that when that we, you know, we culturally in the, our, this podcast is, is being recorded in the sometimes United States of America. And we are, uh, from that cultural perspective, we often run away from pain. We are, we are pain avoidant, amazingly. I mean, it should be an Olympic sport at this point about the, the ways that we contort ourselves not to feel the pain should be some kind of event in the Olympics, I swear. And with that avoidance also, um, comes this immaturity for bereavement, for grief and for loss that we don’t. We haven’t woven that in well to our. And so we’re we’re scared. We’re scared of pain. We’re scared of death. We’re scared of these things that actually are part of life and part of the rhythm of life. Yeah. Um, and so if we’re not creating space for us to slow down and have the negative feelings and, and go through the entire scope of negative feelings about things and, and pause and tell the truth and safe spaces of this shouldn’t have happened or this should have happened. Um, and I’m, and I’m angry and I’m sad and I’m hurt and I’m scared because it didn’t and, and, and, and that, that transform us and say, okay, what’s the, you know, in that lesson, how do I, what are the things I can put into place so that I’m experiencing more life? by either being proactive or, um, what are the things I’m going to put into place so that I can, um, grow from this because there isn’t a single process of our life that is growth that does not involve some level of death.

Laura: Yeah. You know, and in the greater pantheon of this Indian mythology, you have Brahma, who’s the creator, Vishnu who is the preserver, and then Shiva is the destroyer. And they work in this constant cycle, you know, at a cosmic level. But I think that what you’re what you’re talking about is that that is a constant cycle in our lives. And sometimes that cycle gets stuck in one of those places. Like we’re not preserving or caretaking. We’re not destroying what needs to be destroyed. We’re not creating what needs to be created. You know, like those, that wheel is a place that stops. And when it stops, that doesn’t serve us right. But the turning of it can be painful.

Renae: So when you’re thinking about, what is a practice that you engage in that either, um, whether it and I’m, and I, yes, I know you have a yoga practice. And so this is probably the end of the answers, but that’s fine. Like my answer is usually Jesus, I’m sure yours is usually yoga, but this. Well, what is one practice that you engage in that helps you to build that, that, um, compassionate framework for yourself so that when you, when you go into situations now and receive those same types of, um, toxic messages, um, how, how are you, how are you addressing that?

Laura: Yeah, I think that there’s two levels. There’s triage, right? Like right now, this is really upsetting for me and what can I do to just regulate my nervous system at this time? And you know what you’re talking about prayer. I also do that a lot. Meditation kind of the same thing for me. Yoga is a good one. Breath work. So all those kinds of. And I’m not calling them smaller practices because they’re insignificant, but just like things that you can do right now in this moment to be like, okay. And as you always say, which I love, like, how am I going to respond to this instead of reacting to this? Like those kinds of practices allow us to then have some space to then do. What I love doing as a practice is just journaling and asking myself like, there’s this thing that’s bothering me. Why? Why is this bothering me? And sometimes the answer is obvious, but I need to work it down a little bit. Okay, well, why is that bother me? Why does that bother me? Why is that bothering me? And sometimes I uncovered things that I didn’t really realize that I hadn’t talked through or, you know, that I had just been kind of it was just like in the background and then never really brought to the surface. And so that journaling, journaling, practice of just digging down like, how am I feeling? Why am I feeling that way is really helpful for me to just get to the root of the issue. And then from there, a lot of times what I’ll ask myself is, you know, like, what is this teaching me? And who do I, who do I need to be for this not to bother me? You know, and that’s not necessarily like I’m trying to change who I am, but I think a lot of mostly what it does is it calls on me to be a better version of a truer version of who I’m being. You know, like a better leader or even more compassionate. Right. So it helps me draw those types of qualities that I want to continue to cultivate to the surface and puts them front and center for me. So that then that is what I can then focus on instead of whatever that thing is making me bananas. I wish I could tell you this true of all of it, but I’m not. I have to do those practices all the time.

Renae: I don’t think we stop as humans. I think maybe we get we get better at recognizing signs.

Laura: You can move through it faster.

Renae: I think I do I. Yes, exactly right. We, we shorten the, the duration intensity and hopefully the frequency, right? This is when we’re talking about how do we measure things like this? And it is, is am I if I’m not derailed as often now and again, I want to I want to be just really clear when I say things like not derailed as often derailed is not a problem. Um, until it stops your functioning.

Laura: Mhm.

Renae: Okay. So we can get derailed and it could be incredibly important for that’s, that’s coming to the edge that it’s helping us recognize there is an opportunity for growth. It’s, it’s, it’s our, our environment and our brains and our bodies saying, hey, there’s an opportunity to adjust here, to realign to, to heal, whatever it happens to be, whatever that moment is supposed to be for or inviting us to is supposed to be for inviting us to.

Laura: Mhm.

Renae: Um, but it’s when it’s when we can’t function. And that’s the part where the, when, when we’ve internalized the, the toxic, uh, messages, it’s breaking down our, our body’s ability to function and do its thing. So for to.

Laura: Rerail to get back.

Laura: To get back, you are going to jump the track. But it’s just, you know, how efficient are you at getting back on it?

Renae: Absolutely. Um, and I think that’s part of the truth telling too, of, of we, if we’re going to live as fully as humans, we’re going to experience pain, we’re going to experience destruction. And so how do we normalize that as a part of the, the rhythm of life and, and not try to run away from it? And so for, um, in the show notes, I’m going to put a link to a resource that I’ve created for the month of June. And it is body centered practices that have five micro regulations, um, in, in the download. And these are all small body centered practices that help us to reconnect to ourselves, to find some capacity to, to regulate our nervous system. They’re, they’re short, they’re, they’re, they’re tiny little movements. And if we create this rhythm of practicing those, especially when we’re regulated, we’ll create that muscle memory that will let us access it when we start to become dysregulated, when things start to go out of alignment. And if we want to come back into alignment, we have this strategy. And so that’ll be a free download in the show notes. And, um, you know, we both, both Laura and I have all sorts of other fun things coming up in this area. But, um, I just want to thank you, Laura, for the conversation today and the richness of bringing this visual, um, to the, to us to wrestle with and unpack and, and see where we might be, what role we might have in the story. Um, so is there anything else that you’d like to share with everybody before we end for today?

Laura: No, I just to go and download your practices because just like you’re saying, the more time you spend doing those, the more you can call on those in times when you’re really going to need them. Like don’t wait until you’re so angry and drinking all night like I was to start, start some nervous, nervous system regulating practices. Like maybe start those now and then you’ll have those to draw on and be able to retrack your train faster.

Renae: Right? Retrack your train. I love that. All right. Thank you so much.

Laura: Thank you.