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Think Flow Grow Cast mit Tim Boettner
Willkommen zu einem holistischen Verständnis von Gesundheit und dem guten Leben. Ich bin Tim Böttner und mit Think Flow Grow vermittle ich mit meinen Gästen eine Gesundheits- und Lebensphilosophie für die Zukunft, von der dein Herz weiß, dass sie möglich ist. Mit einer Synthese aus moderner Wissenschaft, altbewährter Weisheit und Erfahrung. Enjoy the Ride!
Think Flow Grow Cast mit Tim Boettner
Feel to Heal, How Thinking can Harm, and the Natural Meditation Process with Matthew Zoltan [1/2] | #169
What if there was a way to tap into the natural healing function of your body, to truly understand the significance of your physical feelings and make peace with yourself? Join us as we sit down with Matthew Zoltan, a former yogic monk. This episode is an exploration into the importance of being in touch with our pain, our sadness, and truly valuing the uniqueness of our individual experiences.
- What is the difference between natural meditation of the body and other types of meditation?
- How did you first discover the mind body connection as a significant approach to healing, self-understanding and the body’s way of guiding our life?
- How to use thoughts in a natural and constructive way or unnatural and destructive way?
- What are Feelings and Emotions?
- Why do you place so much emphasis on pain, feeling pain an understand pain or illness as beneficial rather than harmful?
- Can we improve ourselves? Should we try to? What is wrong with this? Do we need to improve?
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It's a mistake and it doesn't work, because it's actually overriding the truth of yourself as you are and trying to impose an alternative truth, a lie of yourself, to make yourself feel the way you're supposed to feel, according to society, according to psychology, according to a tradition, according to your particular environment you've grown up in. So we're saying, yeah, this is good because it's making people happy when they're sad. Well, no, that's not good. If you're sad, then you need to be sad. You just don't have a depth of understanding or depth of contact in yourself with that sadness to appreciate the significance and the value of that to you as a unique individual. You are an individual and what has made you an individual is a lifetime of things that you've been through that no one else has been through yet. So your meditation is about you.
Speaker 2:Welcome to a new episode of the Thinkflow Growcast. In this episode, I talk with Matthew Sultan about natural meditation, about the body-mind connection, about thoughts, feelings, emotions, thinking and sensing, about sensing and life. Matthew Sultan's rare insight is based on decades of hands-on research, reflection and solid experience from successfully working with clients and patients with all sorts of physical and mental health issues, and with meditators interested in their own self-development. His approach to meditation is rooted in this deep understanding of the body's natural healing function, his own experiential discoveries and consequent understanding of the mind and body to be one and the same thing. I connect with Matthew because we share a lot of common ground and I hope that you will be inspired by this conversation too. His understandings of the significance of physical feelings or the felt sense of the body as our fundamental source for understanding and knowing ourselves, and his ability to impact this to others is unique.
Speaker 2:Welcome, matthew. And in the beginning, you are the founder of the Undo app and I want to start with a short story how we met each other, because for me it was really really a little bit weird. A little bit interesting because I listened to your podcast with Paul Cech in January or February 2023 and I loved your approach, obviously, and then I started your app. I listened to your app for maybe one or two months and I really enjoyed that because your approach is in my approach to movement. Listeners will know how we think about things.
Speaker 2:And maybe one or two months later, your team reached out to me if I heard about the Undo app and your work and if I want to offer what I like to have a podcast with you and it was really really weird because it was like I did your app you can't know that. I did your app and then your team reached out to me. So it was like what's happening in the universe? No idea, but it doesn't matter. But who knows? Right now we are here, we are together, so welcome and think for a broadcast. Yeah, introduce yourself just a little bit about your background story, because I think that's really really interesting for the listeners where you come from and why and where you developed your line of thinking or feeling and the Undo app. All right, very good.
Speaker 1:Oh, thank you, Tim. Yes, okay, I will log straight into the history of how I've got here. So it's been a quite a long journey. It started when I was about 18 and I'm now 63, so it's a lot of time span and that's been really all that time I've been involved in this work and in the development of this work for myself and the discovery of this work for myself and which led on to how to share that with other people, and so it started out.
Speaker 1:I was interested in movement, but in those days there wasn't really this a long time ago, so we really just used yoga. It was probably one of the main things and physical yoga and that gave that brought my interest into. I became a yogi monk which was more moving into the meditation side of yoga, and from that point on I spent about seven years in that discipline, if you like, and it was interesting and I got very involved to the point where I sort of was teaching that to not only to lay people but also to other monks, because I sort of progressed very quickly, mainly because of my nature, which has been to take things on 100% and really go for it. So within the first couple of years two to three years I was meditating a lot, like eight, ten hours a day, most days of my life, and this was unusual even for a monk, but it was just something that I found I was very drawn to and also I stopped using the technique. So we had a lot of techniques for developing and so-called improving ourselves and developing abilities that were perhaps considered clairvoyant or psychic, or city was a word they used to use and all these types of abilities and developments were, from the monk's point of view, was imposed. In other words, we used practices and techniques that were very highly disciplined and imposed from a mental understanding upon the physical body or upon ourselves as a physical body, and one of the main problems was that we had a belief that we are not the body, which is a very common belief in the general spiritual community of the world is that we are somehow some point of reference or point of consciousness or some entity that inhabits the physical body for a period of time, and the whole belief system around spirituality that most people have heard about and a lot of people have got a bit trapped in, and it's very limiting, which I'll explain as I go further. So I was also trapped in that, of course, you know.
Speaker 1:And what happened was my system I would have to say, my entire system went into a disruption which was unique to myself at the time, even though I was living with many other monks and nuns also were involved here but it was unique to me at the time because it wasn't really a common occurrence where one's body started to erupt. My body started to erupt, in which I, in hindsight, I only understood this. I'm talking about something I went through at the time which I didn't understand, but I had no resistance to it. I was very happy for it to happen, even though it was a bit scary, and it wasn't something within the yogic traditions or Buddhist traditions that was familiar. It was just something that was happening for me. I'm sure it's familiar in the world somewhere, but it was something happening for me. So I will get down to it.
Speaker 1:And basically my body was rebelling to what I was mentally imposing, and through techniques and through meditations and through philosophy, for, in other words, through beliefs about myself that were different to what I'd learnt as a child, of course, but there were still beliefs about myself which formed a point of identity about myself or a point of reference in myself that I thought of my thoughts became. You know, I created a new self, if you like, the yogi mark rather than the guy previous to that and that reference point of a self that was so in control of the body and going to make the body do what it must do. And it is an imposition that many of us put on ourselves in and creates a great sense of sensitivity to the wholeness of ourselves as a whole creature. And so this actually caused a disruption that started to take me over, mostly at night time, because during the day I was so disciplined so when I got tired I wasn't able to impose that discipline. The body, my body myself as a body, which I later came to understand, started to reject all of this tradition, to reject all of the, the tension and the effects that it was having on me as a body to live in this very artificial environment and this very idealistic way that is very common to all human beings.
Speaker 1:In somewhere another, we, we impose our ideas on ourselves, or society's ideas, or our culture, in my case this particular belief system. So we impose these beliefs upon ourselves as a body which are in conflict with nature, in conflict with the nature of the body and basically in conflict with the nature, nature itself, not that the the whole nature of the universe that work, all the world that we're, that we've part on, and so this brought about, basically almost like a wiping out of this whole mentality of being a monk, and I was unable to. After two years of this going on, two or three years, I went through a lot of physical changes and what I mean by nothing mystical this is nothing mystical, I'm trying to say my body took over and I was just lucky, and it was like another intelligence within me was saying this is wrong. Yeah, this is doing, this is doing harm, and the harm that it was doing was causing a separation, a duality inside of me where I was create, you know, so involved in this artificial person that I'd created as the monk, inside of this body, rather than an integrated experience of my, of my body self, of the whole of me, of being a whole, being a whole creature. So this really shifted my perception.
Speaker 1:Also, something very important, because I'm going to talk about it afterwards is during these long periods of meditation where you get, when you sit for a long time, you have a lot of pain come up in your body and you know when you get it. When you have illness in your life, there's a feeling of that. When you have pain in a certain area, injury, which I would obviously have a renown, and like any other human being and I'm talking about still during the time of the monk I found that the feelings in my body, particularly the pains and the tensions in my body, I would just sit with those and not move, basically Just let them be there. And what would happen over a period of time, with these sensations in my body and feelings in my body would gradually dissipate and the pain would get really, really bad at times and then it would dissipate and the dissipation of this blockage of hardness in my body that was just stuck as pain, as it started to move. So the pain would dissipate, or the illness itself would dissipate, or the injury would dissipate over, sometimes instantly, sometimes over a period of time which was dependent on how hooked up I was, in that idea actually.
Speaker 1:But the idea is that I didn't have such an identification with and the conditionings, if you like, of our life, of my life, which I wasn't so strongly identified with, would pass instantly as the pain came and went where, the other ones would take longer. This is a game, something I didn't understand at the time, but only in hindsight and as those pains and sensations arose or became more obvious in my body as I sat quietly to meditate. So the thought process that was held within those pains what I mean by that is the memory, the memory or the ideal that was held in that tension in my body would release and I would have understandings come to me of what that pain was telling me about me basically, and what I was doing to myself. And some of it was childhood stuff that would show up, but most of it was what I was doing to myself over the many years as a monk, and so, as this was releasing from my system, the interesting thing was, obviously I could still remember these things, but my association with these things and the feelings of these things would dissipate these ideas and ideologies. They would dissipate to a point that I had no reference to them anymore. They meant nothing to me and they no longer formed a part of my identity and therefore, in the end, I was just left with nothing more than it's always like when you break down all of your belief systems and all of your ideas to such an extent All the body is allowed to do this in its own natural healing process, which is what I learned it was.
Speaker 1:Then what you're left with is a clean slate, in a sense and I don't mean that is any in any mystical form or any hierarchical form at all. It really shows how ordinary we are, how in our natural state we are functioning as a very intelligent organism that has the capacity to feel and understand itself in a very different way to the thinking process that we impose as we think of as our understanding of ourselves. So when the understanding comes out of the organism, out of the body that you are itself, it's a very deep, sensed understanding, a sense of real knowing, rather than when there is the ideas about ourselves, how we could be, how we should be and so forth. It's not deep sense, it's not a knowing. It's superficial, to be honest. It's actually something that leaves us, whatever we know about ourselves or think about ourselves that we've learned from outside of ourselves doesn't have that same stability, that same real full body sensation to it. It's more of a surface feeling or a surface understanding of ourselves that leaves us in a state of confusion or a state of questioning ourselves all through our lives. We're never really quite certain because it doesn't really quite fit how it should be, how it could be. And it's also how it should be and how it could be. It's something that someone else has taught us. Even though we may have learned it so long ago, we don't remember that someone else has taught us and we think that those ideas and those thoughts are, in fact, our own, when they're not. They actually not come from us, not come out of us, but being imposed upon us, and so this is left to me. I just threw that in.
Speaker 1:By the way, this left me in a bit of a conundrum because I didn't. I finally, after seven years of being a monk, I didn't relate to it at all and I just left. Well, I was actually kicked out because I created a bit of disturbance before I left in questioning everything, but I just left, and I left in a very peaceful way. I wasn't like, oh, I'm losing something. I just felt as I went back into what I now understand is real life, what we deal with in day to day life.
Speaker 1:I went back into real life and I found that I went back into real life with a very unjudged, nonjudgmental, very unopinionated condition where everything to me, particularly in the area of pain and illness and distress in people, it all was perfectly fine Because I understood that it was the way that person is and the way I was, and obviously still in as a result of what I've been through. Even though we can become very strange and very difficult to be around because of what we've been through in our life. It's still completely natural that we're in that condition and we should be in that condition because of what's happened to us. And so in this way, it became very clear to me that no condition that we're in is wrong or bad. It's just not yet fully integrated or understood, not fully healed. And why? Because we have reacted to the pain and the feelings in our body.
Speaker 1:And so I went back into society with an understanding that I realized. At first I'd understood something quite unique, and it had had a phenomenal change on me of freeing me from a huge amount of ideas and beliefs about myself and the world, which left me with a receptivity to the world and myself. And this I really started to understand was a much more healthy way to operate, because I was able to now receive people on a very sensitive level, like I, was able to use all of my senses, or all of my senses were able to function freely in seeing someone, in hearing someone, in smelling someone, in a feeling, someone's presence, through my own skin, on my own skin and deeper, because I was more receptive rather than perceptive, rather than having opinions which I was seeing the world through. I was having that freedom from that. I was then finding myself very, very sensitized to everybody around me, and so I started up a healing clinic at the age of 28, after being a monk, which I gradually found, on the basis of what I understood then to be the integrated body-mind connection, rather than having mind and body or mental conditions and physical conditions as two separate issues. I had seen very clearly for myself that these are not separate issues, that we are not broken up into all these parts that the psychs and even the spiritualists, which I previously was, tend to do, that we are actually one whole integrated being and there's no great mystery to it, other than the mysteries that human beings, over other animals, have imagined into existence and then try to plum the depths of. But there's not really any depths really to those mysteries. They're just a moustache. They're just, in a way, they're just an imagining, so I'm going to leave it. That was how I got started and I started working as a.
Speaker 1:I went back to being a masseur, which I was before I was a monk or one of my professions and but my massage was very different because that was when I started to discover how, when people came to me with problems, illnesses or physical injuries, I just could not see them as being in any way unhealthy or damaged, and more I was receptive to their whole body and their whole system as just being a conundrum to themselves where they've actually not finished resolving something in their life. And if it was deep, then it was held as a memory. And if it was deep memory, with all sorts of pain and maybe even traumas associated held in there that were expressing themselves in the physical conditions that I was working with in their body. And as I worked with these physical conditions in their bodies, I got more confirmation on what I'd experienced as a monk for myself, because as I massaged or worked deeply into certain areas of the body I'm talking, I was very busy. I had a very busy clinic, so after you know, thousands of people coming through my clinic at that time I was it would become very, very clear and self-evident, because when I worked on a certain area on all these people, they would talk about pretty much the same topics of their life. And if I worked on a different area it would trigger other topics in their life, so and they would be the same in all those people, or very similar.
Speaker 1:So you know, what I was noticing was that we were holding particular memories and particular traumas in, in, in associated areas in our body.
Speaker 1:So a very simple thing If our shoulders were tight, we would talk about I would release tension from their shoulders and they would talk about the weight of the world on their shoulders, the burdens in their life, or the burdens of a particular man or a particular woman. And if I worked on their you know, middle back, they would talk about a completely different set of issues. So I started to see this that memory is not a mental thing, but rather something that we hold as tension in our body. And it's the fact that we are unable to understand how to feel that in our bodies, because we've got become such thinking creatures that, without feeling that, we're unable to heal that for ourselves. And so I then continued in my life to help people. Some 30,000 people in the next 20 years came through my clinics and my meditation retreats, where I was helping them understand how to basically how to feel again, how to feel as a body again and in that way activate their own healing process. So I think that's enough. Is that enough of an introduction, do you think?
Speaker 2:Absolutely Okay.
Speaker 1:Because you have other questions.
Speaker 2:I love it. I love it. So there's so much in there. I really want to explore what the thought process is, because I can really see that right now in our, in Germany, we say zeitgeist. The thought process is a big problem, maybe, and a big hindrance, whatever. But what I would love to do in the beginning is to go through some examples, because that's I really love that so good. Let's say, low back pain. I'm coming to you, I have low back pain and Then you said, okay, now I can, maybe you will trigger my low back with some massage and maybe I, maybe a thought process is starting and I have thoughts and emotions expressing something. So but Give us the example of the low back pain. What teams, what different planes of perception of yeah, reactions are experienced in your clinic, in your experience?
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, there's pretty common lower back pain. So, essentially, when when we look at the body as a whole, particularly from the yogic tradition that I come out of, by the way, I don't really use that, but just to give, because people know a lot about this nowadays the eastern philosophies of Coming into the West, whether that's a good thing or not a such a good thing I I'm not so sure, but at least we're knowing about these things is that different parts of our bodies? Well, they're used for different things, so therefore they hold tensions for relating to those different things. So, for example, the lower back is Often something which, when a person talks about burnout or a person talks about we have some sayings, like in Australia, which is a sort of Compared to Europeans, a cruder type of language.
Speaker 1:There's one other saying about when you get a sore back and call it shag is back, and if you don't know what shag is, is because that's an English term. It's a sore back from having a sexual imbalance. Yeah, well, use it because you have so much sex, but the sexual imbalance can cause this pain in the lower back. Yeah, so or so they have this terminology. The other is burnout, and burnout, in other words, for a human being, the lower back and the lower energy. I don't mean lower, as in Inferior, I mean lower down the body, yeah, but the deeper, lower energy set areas of the body Very much related to our physical, how we show ourselves in the physical world and how strong we are as a, how grounded we are in our physicality. Yeah, so if we're a little bit heady we tend to be disconnected from our body and so most of the tensions and problems are in our, in our head. But also our body weakens, whereas we tend to be very, you know, very much into our life on a physical level. Then we're testing, we're pushing the boundaries of our physicality and so it's very common for our lower back Hip area to become strained.
Speaker 1:So I will tie the lower back into the hips because very often the pelvis and the lower back, the lower back injuries or problems tend to begin as an imbalance in the in the pelvis area and the and the tensions in that area. And so the pelvis is to do again with our sexuality on one level, as many things it's to do with, but I'll bring sexuality into it there, because we have our sex, our major sex organs there and our major sexual Feelings and sensations start begin there. Yeah, and so when the pelvis is rigid and the tensions are there, then sexually we may have with. We will find that there would take, will be tensions sexually. Yeah, and so this comes obviously totally connected with the lower back I shouldn't say obviously, but it is totally connected with the functions of the lower back.
Speaker 1:And most lower back problems are there because of either some sort of suppression or imbalance in our sexuality or some sort of Extreme pressure that we're putting on ourselves in the Physicality of our life. Yes, so we're working too hard, we're thinking, yet we're pushing. We could be working too hard on the computer, but because we're working too hard, the mentality of Burnout still really hits our lower back. You know, we can really exhaust ourselves Physically, yeah, and so that physical draining of energy, that also that imbalance of our sexuality, our Securities around expressing ourselves into the physical world as a human being, you know, how can I be a man, can I be a woman or am I, you know? And of course that too comes back to our sexuality. Yeah, so how physical can I be? So the physical fact of our sexuality I'm talking about here, the physical facts of our Robustness as a man or a woman.
Speaker 1:He is very much tied up with our lower back, so people would come and see me and I, yeah, massage their, what I would always work that whole area in the past, yeah, from there, basically, look upper legs right through to their. You know, they're back there, the whole back actually. And but to help, because it's all Interconnected, I would not just work on one area, and this, and what would happen was I would it would become very clear to me if there was what I was picking up in them, whether it was sexual or whether it's just purely Exhaustion from the, from the role they play as a man or the role they play as a woman, and try to keep up with the demand on a physical, practical level. Yeah, so this would be I would massage that in order to get them in touch with the feelings Around that area, and people would then start to talk to me out of those feelings and it. That's where I would get this very good clarification of where they were at, yeah, and in whether it was, whether it was more related to their sexuality, more related to their, you know, burn out issues, and so then I would help them understand a better approach to that just by talking to them as I was working on them, and Understand what their body is telling them, how it's not happy, you know, and how your body is telling you that you've got problems in this area. But your, your expectations, your mental expectations are Overriding those feelings and those problems and you're trying very hard to be the person you think you should be, but this isn't showing you that you're failing, not because you're wrong, but because you have a deeper Understanding yourself that you need to access, yeah, and need to get in touch with.
Speaker 1:And so when the whole picture was brought together of massaging the body the Manipulation of the spine, if it was out that, the realignment of the pelvis, if it was needing it, which generally it was, along with getting them in touch with the gut feelings of that area and and their own personality and their own Thought processes, because of that way of feeling, they'd have their particular thought processes in reaction to sexuality and reaction to I should work harder, I should be strong, I shouldn't have this weakness and they start to get upset with themselves because I have when all these thought processes Take into account, when the feelings behind that are taken into account, and when the physical expression of this in the body is dealt with, then you've got a big picture of the health. Yeah, and so this, all these three things together, I found very important the feeling, the cognitive understanding of their own behaviors, and the physical, the repair of the physical, the current physical damage. When those three things came together Then it was a more complete picture of what I then turned as the mind body in. The mind body connection I'm not meaning a separate mind, but that the way in which one's thinking, feeling, is going on in the body will have very much an effect in that body. And all three things coming together I would get the results and that very, very good result.
Speaker 1:So consequently, particularly you're talking about, you know, back in the early 80s, yeah, I was a phenomenon in that sense. You know, now it's not a phenomenon, now it's common but more common. But back then, back those days, it was very, very new and I was the, I was the only one doing it at first. So I was pioneering this whole area of how the whole approach to health Was not working very well, to both mental and physical health was not working very well because it was all disconnected and Specialized, so you know they'd learn about one tiny area which not understanding it's, it's a relationship to another area.
Speaker 1:You know you learn about a mental state not understanding even how to feel, or the, or the deeper trauma that created feelings in a person, or the, or ultimately the, the whole physical condition. So when that whole, it whole condition came back together and I was treating it as a whole, in that sense a holistic way, as time went on I saw I had to go further and take it even further, which we'll talk more about when I talk about meditation retreats. But whilst I was able to help people in that way, I continued to do that and it worked to a point, yeah, but to a much bigger point than what I have been working before. Definitely easy for me to help with physical armaments in a physical injury because of the whole approach would be, you know, treating the whole condition brings about a resolution of it. But we'll take that further with it as we talk on.
Speaker 2:Yeah, beautiful. So let's take a second example, but right now let's do, let's guide us through a natural meditation process, through, maybe, the example of I'm sitting and I have neck pain. A lot of people have neck pain, so how could a process look like with the physical sensations, the Senses, feelings, emotions, thoughts, and how should what a good people approach Neck pain as a signal from the body?
Speaker 1:okay. So are you suggesting I guide a meditation, or are you suggesting no, no, Example how it could look like yeah, so I'm no no Good, because we don't want to impose too much idea.
Speaker 2:That's how this should be. That's the problem. That's exactly right. It's it's. It's not the way you are saying that it could be. Maybe it's just idea to play with, exactly so I'm glad you said that.
Speaker 1:I'm glad you said that, because that this is where the meditation that I'm now sharing with the world in general is Very unique to any other meditation that's ever been being Understood in history at least, that has been commonly not, yeah, and that is because it is an Insight out approach as opposed to technique meditation, which is an outside in approach. So traditional meditations have an approach of we're going to achieve this experience, this result, we're going to become enlightened by this process of the way we think, the way we act, the way we behave. So it's a whole in position of ideologies become involved in that meditation practice. And so then, when they actually meditate, I'm there actually starting with a full process, whether it be watching the breathing or whether it be observing their thinking which, by the way, it's impossible, but I explain that later yet and so, whether it be Whatever it is, they're starting out with an intention to achieve a certain result, which is a goal, orientation, and this immediately puts pressure on you to be something different to what you already are. So what? What is immediately overlooked here? What is immediately overlooked as soon as you use a meditation technique to to achieve a certain experience, which you can, of course, but it's just a fabricated experience, it's not the experience of you as you are. So that's the thing that's being overlooked. Is that real but really natural meditation.
Speaker 1:The inside out approach is to simply Sit still. Sitting still is very effective because you're sitting still a long enough, being still long enough to start to Experience naturally what the condition of your self as a body, self, as a whole self is already in. Not to change that condition, not to set out to be any different to the what you are, but to find out from your physical self, from your body, find out how you are, and that becomes your meditation. As you said, we don't impose any ideas of how it should be. So you, the example you gave me was a pain in the neck, so I've got a pain in the neck to work with.
Speaker 1:So what I would say is there is a mistake in the mind body understanding of mind body connection. There is a mistake, like the originators of many of them in brought in the idea of okay, we get in touch with this, we're causing our health issues through the way we're thinking. So that's wrong, we've got to change the way we're thinking and so, and then how do we help that? We, we're going to do some creative visualization to improve in our condition. So this is all an attack actually says all misunderstanding, a superficial understanding of the body mind connection in.
Speaker 1:In my view, it's it's, it's wrong, it's a mistake and it doesn't work because it's actually overriding the truth of yourself as you are and trying to impose an alternative Truth, a lot of yourself, to make yourself feel the way you're supposed to feel according to society, according to psychology, is starting to a tradition, according to your particular environment that you've grown up it. So we say, yeah, this is good, because making people happy when they're sad, well, no, that's not good. If you're sad, then you need to be sad. You just don't have a depth of understanding or depth of contact in yourself with that sadness to appreciate the significance and the value of that to you as a unique individual. Yeah, you are an individual and what is made you up as an individual is a lifetime of things that you've been through that no one else has been through. Yeah, so your meditation is about you.
Speaker 1:So how can I tell you how you should be? How can I devise a technique To help you? I'm only going to divide if I devise a technique and teach you a technique of meditation. I'm simply brainwashing you. I'm I am hypnotizing your form of really Teaching you a form of really self hypnosis. I'm helping you to escape the way you are and to enter into a divide, a state that you created through a technique. This is self hypnosis, is not meditation. And this is something I realized is a month, big shock, oh my god. I spent seven years hypnotizing myself and creating all these amazing experiences that were fabrications.
Speaker 1:So what would I say to a person is just sit quietly with sick physically still, whatever condition you're in is the condition that is correct for you you, that is your natural state, your individual natural state. There is nothing incorrect about that. Why? Because it is actually perfect in the sense that you have come into that state as a result of what has been imposed or affected you in your life and your body is expressing perfectly that condition or the effects of that condition is not in anybody else, it is in you and that is showing how perfectly the body is expressing the stresses that have come through on upon you through your life. So how can that be wrong? Whatever state you're in, it may be extreme, if you've been badly abused, that you may be a very angry and disturbed person. Yeah, that isn't so. You being an angry and disturbed person, how can you say that's wrong? It's not wrong. You should be. Yeah, you should be an angry and disturbed person because you've been abused yeah, so let's say that disturbance is lodged in your neck and this lodgment in your neck of tensions that come up all the time.
Speaker 1:You think these tensions are wrong, they're bad, I don't want them there. They're not wrong, they're. They're the communication of your whole system to express the effects and to reveal the effects that life has had on you, even though you don't like it, and give you an opportunity to heal and resolve those effects. You may not be able to change what's happened to you of course you can't but you can definitely. You can definitely respond to the way you are and, in this case, the example in our neck. You can definitely respond to that and be receptive to that and give that a chance to fully reveal itself from within you by meditating in this very natural way, which is the meditation that the body does naturally, which is the body is always trying to get out of the system Any damage or any effect that has occurred along the way it's always coming back to its healthiest, optimal state. Yeah, and? But how it does that? It has to purge or it has to heal itself. All these damages, whether they're physical, obvious damages, or whether they are imbalances of tension in areas that are really harmful, really hurtful to you now even affecting your view of yourself and your thoughts, and these tensions in the neck will be there for these reasons.
Speaker 1:Now, the neck is a lot to do with A number of things, but basically our ability to see the whole picture of our life, to see in every direction, not just with our eyes, but to actually turn our net. Our ability to see, perhaps see the picture of another person. I'm in conflict with a female and I'm a rigid person. I'm rigid in that, so I can't really see her point of view. Yeah, so I start to stiffen up in the left side, because that's about the female side arriving conflict with a male and I can't see his point of view and I find it very difficult to understand why he treats me the way he does and it disturbed me greatly and I don't know how to see it and I don't know how to communicate with him about it. So I start to. I start to become defensive and tight in the right side of my neck. Conversely, if it's about me as a male, or me my female side, my femininity or my masculinity. In the same way, if I'm a little bit blind to that and some disruption or some dis you know, imbalance in that area, then I find myself also tensing up in those areas of my neck. So that's just a very that's just to begin with.
Speaker 1:By the way, this as I work on a human being, or you work on yourself, or you come back into contact with attention in your own neck the first thing is to have the right approach, which is this is not wrong, this is not bad, this is hurtful, it hurts me. My neck might be causing headaches and all sorts of problems because I'm unable to see things clearly. So the headache is also to do with not being able to see something, either about myself or about my life. It's, it's a. There's a blurriness, is a confusion. Yeah, eyes. So the neck affects our eyes. You know all the nervous system that comes up through the neck is is attached to all these sensory functions and attached to, ultimately, part of our brain. Yeah, it's, it is a part of our brain function. So it starts to show us how important this area is.
Speaker 1:If it's got problems and it really fogs our thinking, it really it really causes a conflicting way of being. So when we have neck tension, the basic thing is it's a sign that we are conflicted. We are in conflict with ourselves or in conflict in relationships with others, yeah, or in conflict with the world. And why are we in conflict with the world, others or ourselves is because we don't really understand it. Yeah, it's not really making sense to me and I don't like the way it is now. Why don't I like the way something is starting with myself? I don't like having a sore neck. Why don't I like having a sore neck? Because I don't really.
Speaker 1:I haven't really felt it long enough, gone to the depths of the feelings and information that is held in that tension that has to come to me from me has to come out of my body. Out of this tension as I let it dissolve, it will come to me what this is about. Yeah, not that you should have this a goal. This is not a goal because it might come to you as a result of sitting with tension in your neck and just letting it be there, just feeling it as a physical sensation in your neck, not analyzing, not trying to work it out this is not what I mean. It must come to you Out. So it might happen when you sit for meditation and you're sitting with your neck and then you feel this tension in your neck and just say, with the tension, it's there for a reason. I don't understand it yet. That's why it's there.
Speaker 1:But my first point of understanding begins with the feeling of me. That's the first point of understanding ourselves as a person. The only way I know myself is to feel myself. I have to feel myself. Yep, what I think about myself is not necessarily correct, but what I feel is true. So I feel that. I know that I'm tense, I know that I'm in pain, so I'm feeling that. And as I'm feeling that in my neck, I'm also changing my attitude in the very approach to that which is, I have to feel this in order to understand myself, not because there's something wrong with me, but because there is something that needs to recover.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's actually something right about my deeper intelligence that is making me feel this conflict in my neck, because something I'm not seeing clearly in my thought process or in my world is causing tension, that my body is picking up, but it's too subtle for my thought process because the sensitivity of the body is super, super subtle. We pick up on everything around us all the time and we find this information difficult to process. And this is another reason we have blockages in our neck, because we pick up so much information through every part of our body and then we have to process the information through feeling it in the different parts of our body. Yeah, and that sometimes it's very difficult for that information to process and the amount of information that's, in a sense, available to us, because we're reacting to feelings in our body mentally, we're reacting to ourselves mentally, and I'll put the mental at this point down to the head area. No, no, it's not purely isolated to that, but I'm just going to use that as a part of how we function. Then we find that we're not so receptive to these things because of the way we're reacting to ourselves and that information is being stopped.
Speaker 1:It's the flow of that information through the neck area is getting jammed up in our throat and our neck rather than coming all the way through into becoming a more a part of our thought process, yeah, our cognitive thought process. Actually, you know the frontal lobes of the brain to do with cognitive thought processes. So it needs to be a holistic, you know, movement of that energy. But we don't allow that to happen. So we know this is not right. I don't like the way I'm feeling. So this creates, if you like, a traffic jam of information in our, in our neck, and we just won't allow ourselves to see the truth of ourselves because we're trying to be something, according to our society, that doesn't fit with us and it doesn't fit without our actual condition. Yeah, so we have conflict with ourselves.
Speaker 1:This is incorrect. Yeah, we're not understanding that we are an individual. Yeah, and that, as an individual, if I can be receptive to all of these things, I'm picking up in myself and learn to listen to myself. I will then learn to trust myself. I will then be able to be guided by my body and the intelligence of my body, which is far superior, actually, to the intelligence of our thinking, far superior. You won't influence this intelligence, but you will influence a thought process Very easily, just with a frigging advertisement, you know. So it's so superficial, it's so stupefied compared to the actual intelligence that is there as an animal, as an animal knows.
Speaker 1:Something is wrong, something is not correct about what you said, but I don't quite get it. Why don't I get it? Because I'm not allowing that process through my neck. So our net is a big area of tension, as you probably know, which is probably why you brought it up as an example. It's a big area of our tension, which is one because of our conflict, but the bigger picture a little bit bigger picture is because it's a part of our whole movement.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we talk about movement. Movement is internal and external, and there's the movement of life that we are is massive and very complex. Yeah, it's not just some central point in the brain or a mind or a soul, it's a massive organism that's got so much connection going on. You cannot really say which is the center of me. When my knee hurts, that's the center of me. When my head hurts, that's the center of me. Yeah, depends which is screaming out, which part of me is yelling out the loudest. In this case, when the neck is really giving you trouble, that becomes the central focus on you, from within you. That becomes the central point of view. Yeah, and so listen to it. It's there.
Speaker 1:It's being annoying for a very good reason. The intelligence of your body needs to become cognitive as well for you to fully process what your body is at odds with and what you are at odds with at a deeper level than what you would normally think about, and therefore live a life of confusion. So go easy on yourselves when you're talking about meditation. It's not a goal-orientated thing that is saying there's an end product like enlightenment or some superior being that we can become. To me, this is just harmful. We'll talk about this later. This is harmful because it interferes with the intelligence of life, which is a. To me, is just a process. There's nothing wrong with me to begin with, and that's what I'm trying to communicate here. There's nothing wrong with you because you are a German or an Australian or Indonesian and you are of certain behaviors. You have those certain, those problematic behaviors because of history, sure, and because of your history. Well, that history is your history, but that history doesn't need to be your history, other than on a mechanical level, when you identify with it and associated with. I'm a German, I'm an Australian. This is when it becomes a problem.
Speaker 1:Then you lose your sense of yourself, of a living organism, that you are part of the whole natural world that you are. Yeah, the body is nature. Yeah, we're not, and so when we're disconnected from ourselves, we're disconnected from nature. We want to walk in the bush, to be connected with nature. We forget that. Wait a minute. The origin of our disconnection with nature is to disconnect from our bodies, because that is part of the natural world, that comes out of the natural world. Where, as a spiritualist likes to think that we come from some other world into these bodies for some sort of adventure. Okay, they're allowed to think that, but to me, there is no evidence of there's evidence that we are part of nature. The body is made up of the same stuff, and so an apple tree grows apples and the planet Earth grows humans. Yeah, and it's very complex. So we are part of this earth, we are part of it, part of this whole natural world.
Speaker 1:But when we get too caught up in our thinking and think we should be something better, something more, that's when we start to create all of our conflict with one another. Yeah, and mostly conflict with our natural selves. Our natural selves does not have any feeling of being lesser or greater than anybody or anything, because I see you in a condition that is perhaps more declined. My neck might be, my neck may be relaxed and your neck may be in tension. Oh, does that mean I'm a superior being? You know it's ridiculous? Of course not.
Speaker 1:You're going through something which is relevant to your processing of a life experience which I have not had. So if I had had the same life experience as you, I'd be feeling the same as you, yeah. So how can you possibly be somehow inferior for the condition you're in Mentally or physically? It's just doesn't make sense. If I'd been in the same difficult situations you've been in, I would be feeling pretty much the same and struggling with pretty much the same. You know process.
Speaker 1:So what I'm helping people, what I want to help people do, and I hopefully am helping people do, is to be receptive to that process. That is unique to you, yeah, and not understand. And understand is not just unique to you, because all of us are going through some process of our life experiences coming out and becoming difficult for us and then us having to have a correct way to approach those so that we can receive those life experiences rather than judge, criticize and try and be different to that. But see that, well, this is unlike this because of my life experience and I can develop through this, I can process this. It doesn't make me a better person, it just means this is just my path. You know my, what I'm going through, and it doesn't make me I'm not a better person at the end of it, because I was the person I was before I ever started, when I was a baby. I was absolutely perfect.
Speaker 1:So, anyway, I've just chucked a whole lot of stuff in there, about a bit more than just the neck, and I wanted to emphasize it's very important to not be. You know I'm a German. You know, I know in Germany that my friends are German and my actual, my bloodline is German. Yes, I know I don't have immediate, I don't have the conditioning of a German. Of course, I don't really have the conditioning of Australia neither.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but I know that the conditioning of German is that you know there can be, in generalizing, jesus man, they can be pretty tough on themselves, yeah, and very, very, you know, guilty and for things that are not anything to do with them as an individual, you know, but very much to do with the people in their history, yeah, and it's very, very sad because these people are, are, you know, any culture has its problems and those problems are not helpful to the individual. Yeah, but it's up to the individual to process those problems when they come up and understand this is not me, it's an effect on me. Yeah, and how to process that effect to leave you ultimately free of that effect so you can come back to the person you were born to be, not the person you were taught to be or indoctrinated to be? Yeah, and this natural approach to meditation is letting your body guide you. It's an inside out, don't you know? There's no goal orientation, because there's nothing to achieve. You're already whole as you are.
Speaker 1:There's and this is the big con of the mystical professions and the spiritual you know, religious professions is to make us think there's something inadequate about us in the first place and that we have to do something to improve on that. Now, later on in the talk, I think we're going to talk about that and the fallacy of that, but at this point I think the neck is very important to you, or the, or the back is very important to you, or the shoulder is very important to you, because that's something in you. If it's troubling you, you, I will guarantee it, I'll put my name on it. If you've got trouble in some part of your body, this is your best friend. This pain is your best friend. This is your personal enlightenment, yeah, is when you can get to the stop fighting your pain and start to be more receptive to it. It's not there to harm you. It's there as a stuck part of your process of living as a human being, but you just need to get that moving again. Hence, movement is very good, yeah.
Speaker 2:So yeah, there was so much in there. I don't want to expand on the German history thing, but that's something I I'm into in the last couple of years pretty much and I can really feel how my body has pros has to process so much of the history. That are pretty deep levels we have to go through at one point, but that's that's heavy. It's not that obvious, maybe not the superficial level, but that's processing too and that absolutely takes takes time. It does. It's a big big thing.
Speaker 1:And so much. You know that's heavy enough. You don't then need to bring down some artificially formulated technique or belief system that says oh right Now, on top of the fact that you're a German or you're an Australian, you know you or whatever you also are inadequate and sinful and you need to atone for all of that. You know like, oh my God, no, this is all bullshit. Yeah, but it's very powerful. It may be untrue about the individual, but it still has a very real effect. Just because something's untrue, it doesn't mean it won't destroy you.
Speaker 2:This was part one of the podcast with Matthew Sultan. If this was useful for you, so first feel it through, then leave us a review on Apple on Spotify and share the podcast with your friends and colleagues. Thank you for that and for now, enjoy your body, enjoy yourself. I'm Tim.
