Envisioning a Better Future
Listen in as Barry Michels and Kristan Sargeant join Leyla Karakas of Istanbul 74 for a timely conversation among therapists on issues of our times, fulfilling our potential, and the ways The Tools help us confront our pain, including a short experience of the Loss Processing Tool.
Leyla Karakas: Hello, everyone, my name is Leyla Karakas and I'm the communications and project director of Istanbul 74. Today I am with Barry Michels and Kristan Sargeant from LA. Thank you for joining us today. Barry and Kristen, how are you?
Barry Michels: Great. Thank you so much for having us.
Kristan Sargeant: Yeah, thank you Leyla. Really happy to be here.
Leyla: How are things in LA in terms of the Black Lives Matter movement and COVID-19?
Barry: Well, this is really an inflection point for the United States, particularly with Black Lives Matter. It's really a point where we can fulfill the ideas that we're supposed to stand for, or not. I mean, we are one of the most diverse societies in the world, racially, ethnically, religiously, and a lot of other ways. And our country was founded on the principle that all human beings are equal. They deserve equal access to opportunity, education, particularly the administration of justice—but we have clearly fallen short of those ideals.
Kristan: And beyond falling short of those ideals, I think there's a rising awareness that even though those are the stated ideals of our founding fathers, we don't actually have a history that reflects defending those ideals for everyone. What we actually have is a history of defending the privileges of a chosen few, namely white men, over everyone else.
Barry: And there's, you know, there's just no way you can ask an entire people to defer their dreams and subject them to violence based on something as arbitrary as skin color, and then be surprised when they explode at the continued injustices.
I always go back to Langston Hughes, who was a poet at the Harlem Renaissance who put it beautifully in a poem called Harlem. He says, "What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun, or fester like a sore and then run? Does it stink like rotten meat? Or crust and sugar over like a syrupy sweet? Maybe it just sags like a heavy load, or does it explode?"
The answer is: it explodes. And it's going to continue to explode until our society fulfills its potential, and that's not a moral statement, it's just human physics. It's how we're built as people.
Kristan: You know, our work as therapists really focuses on the interior world of human beings, right, helping our patients unblock themselves, so they can fulfill their potential. But there's a prerequisite to that work. And it's the same prerequisite we as a society have to face right now.
The prerequisite is that we have to admit we have a problem. So a patient, just like a patient has to admit they're depressed or anxious or avoidant, similarly, right now our country has to admit and be present to the fact that we're nowhere close to fulfilling our ideals. The truth is, we haven't even really tried yet.
Barry: And I think to segue into the pandemic, in a much more minor and less unjust way the pandemic is making all of us feel a very minor version of the helplessness that certain segments of our society have felt for generations.
Leyla: Yeah. This year really feels like a transformative time in many areas. And I really hope that we come out of it with the much needed social changes and solidarity.
Barry: Amen.
Leyla: Going back to COVID-19, the pandemic really affected everyone globally. I mean, I can't remember anything that had such a big impact on so many people at the same time. The uncertainty it has brought created a lot of similar losses, pains, fears, and anxieties for us. Barry, at a time like this.
How can The Tools in your book help people deal with these very real issues?
Barry: Well, you know, Leyla, everyone agrees that there are many, many painful and uncomfortable aspects of life, and I think we're in a period where that's really being brought home. Nobody is escaping this. But what we believe, and what The Tools and Coming Alive really purvey is the idea that behind every loss, every anxiety, every fear, every uncertainty that you experience, there's actually an opportunity for strength and courage and creativity. In other words, there's an opportunity to build and mold your character, almost the way you would a work of art.
And weirdly enough, what I've discovered as a therapist, and I think Kristan would agree, is that a lot of the pain that we experience is because we don't have a systematic way to convert pain into potential. Instead of really doing something with the pain, we just experience it and feel hopeless about the future.
And that conversion is what The Tools are for. The moment that you're in pain, whatever the pain is, you use a tool, which number one helps because it just gets you past the pain, but more importantly, you feel the potential starting to rise up inside of you. And when that becomes a regular systematic practice, you can actually systematically increase your potential.
And that's, I think, why I think both of us have seen in our practice, that people actually really grow from therapy. It's not the kind of therapy where you just simply overcome a problem. It's the kind of therapy where you learn to transmute the problem into increased potential and you start to see people really succeeding in ways they never expected to.
Kristan: And as horrifying and painful and intense as these times are, and we're all experiencing so much loss and so much grief and so much pain and that can't be understated or underestimated, and right alongside that there is this pressure cooker moment that we're all living through, like you said Leyla.
We've never experienced or witnessed something that has this amount of impact, and it's changing our lives so drastically. And that is creating an opportunity to deepen, simply from the standpoint of having more time on our hands. And then the other big motivator of growth is when the stakes are this high. We tend to live kind of disconnected from that reality.
Certainly here in America we don't you know, we don't reckon with this concept that there's a there's going to be an endpoint to our lives we live you know, checked out a lot and tuned out and in denial of that, and so the current circumstances insists that we face some of these bigger variables that normal life allows us to avoid, and in that pressure cooker, so to speak, we're not having too, but getting to ask some deeper questions about what really matters to us, what provides real meaning in our lives, even what our purposes here and what we have to contribute, and we honestly just haven't had those opportunities to consider at that depth those larger questions and you know.
If there's an upside to all of this, when you ask those big questions, you get big answers. And again, part of the work that we do is to help people number one, have tools to face the feelings they're feeling, right, because it's bringing up a lot of intense sensation and feeling and tools help you honestly reckon with what you're facing and then, as Barry said, transmute it, and then when you find what's underneath those feelings, operationalize those findings, do something with the information you get so that you're moving your life forward in a meaningful way.
Not just hang out there passively, but actually take some kind of action and we're witnessing a lot of that a lot of real meaningful growth with people now.
Barry: Leyla, would you like us to give you an example of this? We're in a period where everyone is losing something, and we could actually demonstrate a tool that would sort of give a more concrete sense of what we mean by this transformation.
Leyla: Yes, absolutely. If you and Kristan can demonstrate one we would love it.
Barry: How about if we do Loss Processing, Kristan?
Kristan: Yeah, that's perfect.
Barry: We're all in a period of loss. I mean, you know, at worst people have lost family members and friends. They've lost jobs. Maybe people in the audience have had to give up their apartment. At the very least, everyone has experienced a tremendous loss of routine—the walks you used to take with friends, the people you used to see at the gym, the time you used to have to yourself when your kids were in school and now they're getting under your feet all day.
So the law of loss is that every loss of something in the outside world can actually be leveraged into a gain in the inner world inside of a human being. And one of the reasons for that is that we are a very outer-oriented society. And we tend to get attached to the things in the outside world, whether things are actual objects or activities that we perform in the outside world. And that actually obscures our own inner potential. So if you learn to process loss correctly, you can not only give up whatever you have to give up anyway, more gracefully and with more poise in the outside world, but you actually experience a surge of potential in the inner world.
So let me demonstrate the Tool on you guys and your listeners, and let's see what happens. So what we want to do is start off with something that you've had to give up during this period. Or it could be something that's prospective, something that you're afraid that you're going to have to give up in this period. And just pick something and see it in front of you.
So again, it might be loss of routine; the loss of an actual person who you know, fell prey to COVID; or whatever it is, see it in front of you and feel how attached you are to that thing. You don't want to have to let go of it. You're really hanging on tight.
Nonetheless, you're going to have to let go. So let go of it and imagine yourself falling backwards as if from a tremendous height. It's almost like you're falling backwards off of a skyscraper. And just say to yourself, I give up, whatever that thing was that you were holding on to. Feel yourself continue to plunge backwards.
This is a very uncomfortable feeling, but this is what loss really feels like—it's a complete loss of control. And say to yourself, I've given up that particular thing, now I'm willing to give up everything. Because the truth is, as human beings, we are going to have to give up everything at the end of our lives.
And with that final release, where you've given up all of your attachments to the material world, imagine yourself plunging into the sun and becoming one with the sun. So now you yourself are a radiant source of light, generating light, warmth, and ultimately life in all directions. You are a source. And say to yourself, "The only thing I ever truly possess in life is this continuous flow of energy from inside my heart."
And when you're ready, open your eyes and tell us what that was like.
Leyla: For me, it was very visual, very bright.
Barry: How was it letting go and replacing whatever it was in the outside world with something inside?
Leyla: A sense of relief.
Barry: Yeah. That's what we find is that deep down, everyone believes that whatever it is they have in life is absolutely necessary. But the truth is it isn't. You know, several generations ahead of me were European Jews who lost everything. And they learned the hard way that you could actually give up everything and still have something inside of you. So the whole philosophy of this Tool is there is much, much more inside of you than you realize and loss is actually an opportunity to gain that.
Kristan: I love this Tool and I use it a lot in my life. And I love that experience of going from feeling really victimized by the loss to feeling my resources. And just that shift and in my sensation is so comforting and it's very empowering. I suddenly fell back in agency. I love that Tool.
Leyla: And when you're describing The Tools in your book, you talk a lot about spirituality and higher forces. I wanted to ask you, do you have to believe in anything spiritual to be able to use these four Tools in the book? And how do they contrast with the traditional psychotherapy?
Barry: No, you don't have to believe in anything at all. In fact, when I learned The Tools from Phil Stutz, some 35 years ago, I was actually a militant atheist. And I have taught these Tools to avid skeptics, they actually work because they go into a realm beyond belief. It's sort of beyond what you believe in.
It's really what I would call the realm of experience. I mean, you might believe that there is some sort of higher power inside of you that's represented by the sun, or you might think that's a crock of shit. And that's fine. It doesn't matter to us what you believe.
But if you can experience it, if you can experience loss, leading to a gain of something inside of you, then we've given you something—you've given yourself something—that's priceless, because then you can recreate that experience over and over and over again. And when you do that, you change. Because human character is based on experience; it's not really based on belief.
We're really not trying to change what people believe. We're trying to get people to experience resources that they've never experienced before. Now in the books, we call those resources higher forces, but if that's too spiritual, for you, call them strengths you were unaware of, or parts of your brain you suddenly gained access to. Again, because we're healers, not ideologues. We're just interested in maximizing your potential, not gaining adherence to some sort of abstract belief system.
And to answer the question about traditional psychotherapy, traditional psychotherapy is based on a very old premise that really started with Freud and the premise was that you have to discover what caused your problem in order to heal the problem. And that's just simply not true.
For a long, long time—I think things are much better now—but for a long, long time, what the psychotherapist would do is simply have you go back over your life story, mostly your upbringing with your parents, over and over and over again in the session, in the hope that uncovering what happened would magically change what who you are, what you are in the present. And frankly, it just simply didn't work.
So I think psychotherapy has gotten much, much better. It has moved away from that original premise. But we believe in interventions that help you change in the present, not just an endless exploration of your past. There's nothing wrong with having an understanding of what happened to you. We're not you know, we're not opposed to that. But that in itself is not enough to get someone to change.
Leyla: Yeah, It doesn't fix the problem.
Barry: No, not at all.
Leyla: There was a great quote in your book that said, "Until you can control your mind, you're spiritually immature." And it feels like negative thoughts are much more powerful than positive ones. I want to ask you both. How can we keep the negativity in check?
Barry: We put this in a historical context. Negative thoughts are very, very powerful. But that's a relatively modern disease. And there's a good reason that we call the 20th and 21st century the age of anxiety. And it is because for most of human history, human beings have taken it for granted that the universe was coherent, that there was some organizing principle, that something out there created the universe and loves all of the creatures that it created, and that all events in life are meaningful.
Now that essentially ended with the Age of Enlightenment, and it had to end. I don't regret that it ended, but it was replaced with what we would call a scientific worldview that is an operating system so deeply ingrained in all of us that we aren't even aware of it. And the scientific worldview is basically what you learned in your first science class, which is that life is nothing more than a struggle for survival, with constant unpredictable threats to your existence. And at the end of this struggle, the big prize you get for enduring it is ... you die.
I mean, it's a very grim worldview, and what we don't realize is that it actually constitutes an entire operating system through which we view life. So much so that I recently came across a quote from a neuroscientist where he said he sort of summed up his entire life, he said, "So here I am, a highly organized pattern of mass and energy, one of 7 billion. In any objective accounting of the universe, I'm practically nothing, and soon, I will cease to be." That's life.
Now, that is such a grim worldview, it's no wonder that negative thoughts are much, much more powerful than positive thoughts. And it's no wonder that negative thinking can't simply be overthrown with the power of positive thinking. If any of your listeners that have ever tried to substitute a positive thought for a negative thought, which I have, you'll see the negative thoughts just laugh at you and say, "Oh, yeah, you just think those nice little thoughts while your entire life is falling apart!" You know?
Leyla: Yup, definitely been there.
Barry: The National Institutes of Health in America have estimated that 85% of our thoughts are negative, and 95% of them are repetitive, which is again, ongoing proof of what we're saying, which is that there's something wrong with the operating system.
There's a Tool in the first book called the Grateful Flow that is designed not to change your thinking, but actually to give you a new experience of the universe. By using gratitude, by practicing, remembering, and recreating, for yourself the things, the myriad ways, in which the universe is actually giving things to you every moment of every day, you begin to create a new experience of the universe for yourself that allows you to relax those negative thoughts.
Because those negative thoughts are basically a survival mechanism. If you believe that there are constant struggles, constant threats to your existence, of course, you're going to try to spin out trying to anticipate everything bad that could possibly happen to you, before it happens.
Kristan: I would say that what is so exciting and kind of brilliant about the philosophy of The Tools overall is it gives us access to the world that we lost when we adopted that scientific worldview, again, with all of its upsides and technologies and the evolution that happened, based on that period of time, we did lose—we lost our experience of an inclusive world order where we're a part of something that has intelligence that's bigger than ourselves.
And Tools give you a way, like Barry was saying before, you don't actually have to believe in that higher power, but they give you a way to start to shift, almost shift your focus so that you're not just subsumed unconsciously, automatically, every day of your life by this operating system that is based on a premise that's pretty grim.
And when you practice these Tools, you end up, through your experience, getting access to a very different experience of a world where you're not alone, where you have support, and where there's more to you than just your ego consciousness. You start to experience the flow of information and support through your own unconscious mind, and it's, it's really, really powerful and interesting.
Barry: Thank you for that, Kristan. And I want I emphasize that we are not anti-science. I mean, especially in what we're going through right now, I'm very grateful that there are scientists out there who are eventually going to be able to come up with a vaccine, I would not want to be going through the plague in the Middle Ages—that would be horrible.
So we are not anti-science. It's just that as healers, we're faced every day with the consequences of an entire scientific worldview. The psychological consequences are deeply, deeply distressing, and people need something—in addition to science, they need an experience that allows them to calm themselves down and bring out the best of themselves in life.
Leyla: Yes, and I must say the Grateful Flow is an easier Tool to apply, at least for me, into my daily life because even with all this bad news, there's still something to be grateful for every day.
Barry: Yes. Yes, exactly.
Leyla: So during this time I observed two types of people, the ones who learned a new language completed five online courses and the last 10 pounds with home workouts. And then there's the ones who binge on Netflix shows, snacks, and merged with their couches. It can become really hard not to succumb into our comfort zones and to find motivation during times like these. How do some people do it so well and how can we stay motivated?
Barry: Yeah, it's a great question. I think part of it is just characterological, and that's a part that I don't think you can change. Some people just meet adversity with more of themselves than the rest of us. I've treated people like that in my practice, and I'm so impressed with how easily they're able to just face challenges and get things done. For the rest of us, I don't think you should put yourself down if it's more of an effort for you, but the effort is worth making.
And I think you have to inspire yourself with two things. Number one, that you can actually change your state of mind and have a better experience—if you are more motivated, if you do remain on the self improvement program—you can actually succeed.
A lot of the resistance is just hidden hopelessness. You may not be aware of it on a conscious level, but unconsciously, most of us are pretty hopeless that we can actually change ourselves. So if you can start to even just do an experiment, and use a Tool every time that you start to become a couch, couch potato, and I can we can discuss some of the Tools that I would use for that, but if you can make experiment and just say, okay for today, or if you're really limited to say, okay, for the next two hours, every single time I feel like lying down on the couch, I'm going to use a Tool and I'm going to try to do something.
Once you can start to experience the Tool as actually getting you energy, giving you energy, and allowing you to actually do more things, then it tends to get much easier because now you have an experience that you can refer back to tomorrow and the next day and next week, and you know then you're able to get yourself off the couch.
Kristan: Yeah, absolutely. And all of the small things, you know, I would just really encourage people by saying that's like a mini-battle that we're all facing every day, between our worst tendencies and our best tendencies. Or you could say the darkness inside of us and the light inside of us.
And when you wage that battle, and again, Tools are just a great way to help identify this is the moment, I'm stuck, let me do something. They’re interventions and they help. Just by using the Tool, you're already in action. When you wage that little mini-battle on a micro level, moment to moment in your life, and you choose, you end up gaining access to your ability to move forward—it really doesn't even matter what you do in that moment.
So I think that some of us are like, "I need to write the great novel," or whatever, and we're watching social media, and we're seeing that, you know, whatever is happening in the rest of the world, and we put this immense pressure on ourselves, but the way that it actually works, and what I've witnessed time and again, is that the small thing you do in that moment to move forward becomes, you know, starts to create momentum. It really doesn't matter what you do—it could be, polishing, I don't know, your kitchen table, or it could be deciding to make a dinner that night because you suddenly have energy, and so instead of just putting the frozen bag and whatever in the oven, out of the freezer, you do something a little bit more creative.
But those incremental steps that you take are really profound and meaningful, again, kind of on a deeper psychological level, and start to build momentum and you know, a new kind of flow, access to flow. So I would just encourage people to keep the scale small enough so that it's not overwhelming, but also have the confidence that all of those micro— again, it is a big battle that you're winning when you get into that positive forward momentum into a creative versus kind of a victim state.
And the only the only other thing I would say to that is and again, this is kind of just, you know, my feeling and interpretation about this moment, historically that's happening, substantiated by what I'm seeing every day in my practice, is that, you know, and I and I hope that this is motivating to people, for whatever reason right now that little mini battle that we're all waging between light and dark has this greater significance and meaning and purposefulness and opportunity.
And again, I can't begin to describe why that's the case. But I know that we're all experiencing it together, the stakes are really high, and there's this increased opportunity for growth and expansion. So, you know, that isn't always available. It just isn't, that isn't the way you know, it works. And again, I would say see that so much of my practice, people are forced, almost have their backs against the wall in a certain way and my point is that whatever work you put in now to fight those, the kind of worst tendencies in yourself, and every time you win that even just a little bit, the reward is like, tenfold.
You would say better than me, how would you say that Barry?
Barry: I think what Kristan is saying is so, so important. There's a premise that's actually operating behind the couch potato syndrome. And the premise is that I am a sort of world unto myself, an isolated individual who has no and can have no impact on anyone beyond me, and that I have no responsibility for anyone beyond me.
But see, the truth is lying down on the couch every day does have consequences for the people around you. It means that you're not giving them as much. It means that you're not actualizing your potential, which is actually necessary for the highest functioning of the world. Even if you think of yourself as a nobody, you have withdrawn from the human race at that moment. And part of the spiritual battle that I as being waged right now is a battle between that kind of isolating individualism and a more frankly, feminine ethos, which is no, we are all connected.
And when you remove yourself and give up on yourself like that, you're depriving not only yourself, but us, the rest of us, of you. So if you think of it as it's actually my responsibility to get up off the couch and call somebody who might want to hear from me, or might not, but it's just my job to connect with the people that I know or who are around me. Or it is my job to write something if I'm a writer or sculpt something, if I'm a sculptor, or be more involved with my kids if I'm a parent. Then you are automatically creating a connected world, which is what we need.
I mean, in some ways, you could say that the spiritual war is a war against the fractionating forces that are really trying to say that it's every man or woman for him or herself, versus the forces of the collective, where we are connected to one another. And that war is being waged inside of every individual, every moment of every day. It's waged, right at the moment where you have the choice to lie down on the couch, or to do something.
Leyla: Yeah, exactly. And that actually perfectly brings me to my last question for both of you. What do you think the lessons are from this crisis? But what can we take away for a better future as a society?
Barry: Personally, I think I mean, and the way I personally am actually approaching this is that this is giving us a profound way of changing our society. I'm, by the way, I'm not saying we shouldn't engage in social action—we should. But this actually gives you another way to change the world, and it's by changing yourself.
When you change yourself, you don't realize it, but you become a role model for the people around you. Even friends, who may not be seeing you all the time will feel your energy changing. And that change radiates out to your family, your friends, your community, your city, the world. And I am a firm believer, because I have seen it happen in groups of people, that when you change yourself, everyone starts to find it easier to change themselves.
And if there's going to be a renewal in the world, which it obviously needs, it's going to happen not from the top down. I mean, clearly, if you look at well, I do know a little bit about what Turkey is like, but I know that the United States cannot look to its leadership for any kind of good role model anymore, so it's going to have to come from the bottom up, and I really believe that that's the most effective kind of change, because it's irreversible. When you change in mass numbers, the society changes whether they at the top like it or not.
Kristan: Yeah, you know, amen. And ditto to that. I get excited because there is a shift that's possible right now in the evolution of human consciousness and we are shifting away potentially. Barry talked about how our premise for the last several thousand years has been this zero sum game survivalist narrative that has really been at the heart of and deeply embedded in our psyches, as the operating system. Darwinian where we are alone and we're fighting for limited resources. That's kind of been, unconsciously, the program that we're all running, and it's not working right? It is really tearing us apart and fractionalizing us as you said, Barry, and it feels bad. It's not a very fun world to exist in.
And there's an opportunity where I get really excited as you know, the examples in nature, there's so much evidence in the natural world for a different systems theory, right? Nature is the most sustainable, long term, successful model there is—3.8 billion years of evolution—and the premise at the heart of evolution, you could say or an equally evident I mean, there's certainly a lot of survival of the fittest, but there's also plenty of evidence of these more sustainable rules and systems where the underlying rules our mutual benefit, the sharing of resources, and generosity, and that ultimately communities survive better than individuals.
And I think we're right at the precipice of being able to revive some of those rules of engagement and bring that, back to life. And of course we really need that—obviously, our planet needs that and we need a big shift in consciousness. So I love this connection between what we can do in our everyday lives to be a part of bringing about that major shift in human consciousness.
We're capable of that, and it's absolutely possible that we can live in a world that depends on those values, and honors those values, and lives by those rules. And again, we can have a part in evolving that one through social action for sure, but also again, really use the force of our will and our imagination to understand that how we act in our daily lives, and if we show up for the more creative part of ourselves and find ways to get into creative forward motion, we are a part of that movement.
Barry: I'll give you an example, from our own personal lives. Kristan and I were sort of floundering around trying to find things to do when COVID hit. And we hit on the idea of doing webinars, and every other week now we're giving webinars to four or 500 people, and the feeling—I mean, it's not only a great opportunity to transmit information about The Tools and to work with people who are actually having trouble and asking questions about what, you know, questions like what do I do to get off the couch, etc., etc.—but for us, it's very meaningful to feel like oh my god, we're actually building a community here. And now with videoconferencing, it's so possible to do that all over the world. I mean, we have people from Scotland, from Europe, from the Middle East, from everywhere, and you can tell in the webinars that there is this sense of like, Okay, great. this will hold us for another two weeks until we get another crack at the webinar. Those things are incredibly important human beings need community.
Kristan: And there is an incredible affect that's happening as well, which I feel like demonstrates this point that we're talking about where people are courageously talking about whatever challenges they're facing, but there's some kind of group intelligence that is palpable that's taking over, that, you know, we only get the opportunity maybe to handle a certain amount of questions, but they're serving everyone.
The benefit feels really exponential, and again, it's like this visceral sense, and we've talked about these webinars being living proof in real time that when we contribute and show up wholeheartedly and participate in this community, that we know and imagine is deeply connected, the benefit has this ripple effect that is greater than the sum of the parts.
Leyla: Thank you so much for making the time for me.
