Speaker 1 · 0:02Deep down, our emotions want to be acknowledged, expressed, and accepted. But opening to raw emotions like fear, anger, and grief can be the last thing we want to do, even though it can bear the most healing. This is the paradox of mindfulness. How do we open to what most of us are trying to get rid of? Welcome to the Mindfulness Exercises Podcast. May this be a source of inspiration and motivation in your mindfulness practice and teachings. In this episode, Sean Fargo, founder of Mindfulness Exercises, speaks with Dr. Gabor Mate on Compassionate Inquiry, a psychotherapeutic approach that is now used by thousands of therapists, physicians, and counselors internationally. The Compassionate Inquiry Method evolved out of Dr. Mate's experience, working in family practice, palliative care, and with those suffering from addiction. He is also a renowned speaker and best-selling author, known worldwide for his expertise on addiction, trauma, childhood development, and the relationship between stress and illness. Dr. Mate's process of compassionate inquiry gently uncovers suppressed emotions at the root of illness and addiction, helping us open to what's here and now with courage and care.
Speaker 2 · 1:57Dr. Gabor, welcome to our call. Thank you for joining us today.
Speaker 3 · 2:02Thank you. A pleasure to be here and an honor to be asked. Thank you. Absolutely.
Speaker 2 · 2:09I often will describe mindfulness with the phrase caring curiosity, which has a lot of parallels with compassionate inquiry. I'm not saying they're exactly the same thing, but the caring and the compassionate or and then the inquiry and the curiosity are very similar. We often will explore these emotions like anger with this caring curiosity or this gentle awareness or this non-judgmental moment-to-moment awareness by exploring it the body, sensing it physically and kind of getting at the what of it, like what does it feel like? Where is it? And we'll get into as much of that nuance of the visceral sensations as possible. And we are not all trained therapists or counselors. And so my encouragement to folks in this program is that if you want to get into the why of things or the stories or the associations or linking to childhood, that you know, just do so knowing that it can be a very slippery slope if you're not a trained therapist.
Speaker 3 · 3:37If you carry that attitude of what you call carrying curiosity, there's not much danger. You're just curious. I'm not so afraid to trigger people or people will go down the wrong way. You know, yeah, ideally have somebody to talk to, but I just don't think it's as complicated or as hazardous as all that. And as long as you can maintain what you call caring curiosity, you're pretty safe, I think. That's what I would say.
Speaker 2 · 4:06You know, when you talk about compassionate inquiry, typically it's framed in terms of a didactic framework where you're compassionately inquiring with someone else about their experience. Can you share a little bit about how you may encourage people to use this compassionate inquiry on themselves without a guide? Is there sort of an altered framework or some key points that you'd like to share for people to be able to do that kind of work solo?
Speaker 3 · 4:46Well, ideally, when we work with people, it's to help them absorb the approach so that they can do it with themselves, so they they can fire you. The essence of it is very simple, which is that nothing that's inside you, no matter how you feel about it, is there for the wrong reason. Everything about you has arisen for a good reason. So the depression, well, that depression was there for a good reason, it helped you survive, and so everything that you may question or loathe about yourself, even the self-loathing that you might experience came along for a good reason. So, therefore, the method is simply to be curious about everything. We can even approach self-loathing with compassionate curiosity. And if I'm say working with you or anybody else, if I can model that compassion for you, then at some point you'll be able to start modeling it for yourself. So it's not a question of getting rid of stuff or working everything out, it's a question of inculcating an attitude of compassion at inquiry. Compassion means that you're able to receive it without judgment, and curiosity means that you want to find out why it's there, and this is true whether it's an illness or a feeling or a reaction or anything. And I don't so much teach this didactically. I mean, I do there's some didactic teaching around it that people can certainly learn, but it's more a question of working with people, and people see in practice what it's like. It's a matter of practice rather than theory, but the theory is simple, it's all there for a reason, it's all there for a good reason, and that there's nothing wrong with you. This is just my particular take on it, it's not like it's reality, it's just what I've distinguished in terms of when I talk about compassion, what do I mean by it? So, passion means to suffer, and calmness means to suffer with, so there's the passion of Christ, the suffering of Christ. So, in a certain basic sense, when somebody else suffers, we suffer. I mean, I mean, you see a dog being beaten in the street, how do you feel? You suffer when you see a child being mistreated. So, compassion is to suffer with, and that's an inborn capacity of human beings, it's never not there, although often enough it's completely blocked. So, that's what I call ordinary human compassion. When I say ordinary, that's not a pejorative, I just mean that it's there. That's the first level, and basically it comes down to somebody suffering. I wish they weren't, because it hurts me to see somebody suffer. The second level is what I call the compassion of curiosity. Now, if somebody's suffering and you want to help them, it's not enough to feel bad for them. You also have to do some inquiry or why are they suffering? What's going on? So there's a lot of people out there, uh you know, one of my subjects is addiction, and a lot of people feel bad for people who are addicted, but they don't actually ask why. They make assumptions that this person is just making a bad choice, or they got this disease, but they don't really inquire. So the compassion of curiosity says, Well, what about this person's life? What happened here? What's going on? If they're violent, if they're angry, if they're sad, if they're ill, why? So that's the compassion of curiosity. The third level is what I call the compassion of recognition, and this was simply my experience in the practice of medicine, but also in life is that there's nothing about anybody else that isn't in me as well. So when I was working with these really benighted street dwellers in Vancouver with HIV and their hepatitis and their drug addictions, well, the differences between them and me were obvious in terms of class and clout and education and all that. But if I was really honest with myself, that hungry ghost, that empty self that just wants to be fed from the outside all the time, which is what the addiction is, that characterized me as well in significant ways. And I played it out through my work and through my shopping habits and so on. So that's the compassion of regulation when you realize that you're not different from these others. And when I talk about this, people come to that part of my book about my compact disc addiction. People sometimes, oh, this dude turned me off. How can he compare himself to you know? I think they have a problem. The differences are obvious, it's the similarities that are interesting. I would lie just like they would, I would manipulate just like they would. I would pursue the habit despite the harm that it caused to myself and others, just like they would. That's much more interesting than the differences. So that's the compassion of recognition. And interesting enough, when I tell them about my patterns, I'm talking about my downtown East Side patients with their HIV and their heroin habits. They never said that's ridiculous. They said, Oh dog, you're just like the rest of us, aren't you? And that's the whole point. We're all just like the rest of us. We're all just like the rest of us. That's the compassion of recognition. By the way, that's where the judgments come in, because that's what it's really interesting. Because when you explore the judgments, you'll find out that's exactly how much you're like that person that you're judging. So once you have the compassion of recognition, you're no longer up here and there down here, and you're looking down on them. It's no, it's two people engaging equally. The fourth level is what I call the compassion of truth. No, you may think on the surface of it that it's compassionate to protect people from pain. Not necessarily. It's compassionate to protect people from avoidable pain. If you can protect somebody from avoidable pain, it's compassionate to do that. That's ordinary human compassion. But sometimes the truth actually really hurts. That's why we protect against it. That's why we're afraid to grieve, because we're so afraid to accept the loss. So when you work with people mindfully or therapeutically or whatever way, you're not being compassionate if you stay away from asking questions that might bring up pain for them. You're not asking the question ever to bring up pain, that's manipulative. But you're also not avoiding a question, even if it might bring up pain. So that's what I call the compassion of truth. Because people just want to know the truth. Like, what was your experience when you were grieving? I mean, you would just the truth of it is what really was so healing for you. Oh, yeah, there it is. So that's what I call the compassion of truth, and then there's what I call, maybe for lack of a better phrase, the compassion of possibility, which is when you see a suffering being, which is to say, when you see another human being, do you see only their suffering and their dysfunction, which is a response to the suffering, and the defenses and their reactions, or do you see the perfection that they are underneath all that? The true self. That's important because none of us can see ourselves without a mirror outside of a spiritual experience. We can't see ourselves without a mirror. Well, if somebody presents with dysfunction and say addiction or reactions or negativity of any kind, and all I do is they mirror their own view of themselves, I'm not helping them. But what if I mirrored back what I do see, which is their possibility, which is not in the future, it's in the present. No, they get to see themselves differently. No, needless to say, if you're gonna be a mirror, guess what you're gonna have to do? You're gonna have to do a lot of self-cleaning, otherwise, you'll be a very murky, smudgy mirror. And that's of course where the compassion for the self comes in as well. So that's what I call the compassion of possibility, and those are the five levels.
Speaker 2 · 14:02Beautiful. You know, as mindfulness teachers, obviously, I think that's the goal is to bring this caring curiosity to our students as much as we can, to teach from this place of compassion, to not go in trying to fix anyone or feel like we're better than them, or to separate ourselves from common humanity or this worldview that we're separate, but rather like really sense into their suffering, sense into their pain with this curiosity and sense into your own heart, and you know, get your ego out of the way, get this wanting of status to notice these things with carrying curiosity, but see if you can really connect with them from the heart.
Speaker 3 · 14:57Paul again, if I may interrupt, yeah, yeah. When you say get your ego out of the way, well, good luck with that one. It's not a question of getting it. I mean, I know what you're saying, but I would phrase this somewhat differently. It's not a matter of getting the ego out of the way, notice when it is in the way, because it's gonna show up. And there's a lot to be learned when it shows up, a lot to be learned about yourself. So it's not like I've got to get my ego out of the way, it's more like notice when it shows up, and be curious about that too. And it may show up more with one person than another, it may show up in one situation more than another situation, and usually that means that it's sensing a threat. And so for me, it's always a matter of just inquiring. Yes, I know what you mean. Ultimately, you don't want your ego to be in the way of your relationship with the other person that you're interacting with. Absolutely, I agree with you, but getting out of the way is kind of a coercive way of phrasing it from my perspective, it's more like noticing when it's there and being curious about it.
Speaker 2 · 16:10Yeah, and perhaps we can take this moment to mirror in a way, because I feel like today I'm feeling more vulnerable than normal. I feel like there's things going on in my own personal life that are challenging. I'm also nervous to speak with you because I highly revere you and I I want this to go well, and I want this to offer as much value as possible to others.
Speaker 3 · 16:42Well, if you're willing to be vulnerable, what is it about talking to me that makes you nervous? And by the way, where is that showing up in your body? Is this okay for me to ask you that?
Speaker 2 · 16:52Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 3 · 16:55Because you know, you're teaching everybody here along with me. What is happening in your body?
Speaker 2 · 17:00Um, yeah, there's a little bit of tightness in my chest. Okay, there's a bit of heaviness in the belly. Okay. I do think that uh when I said those words, you know, get the ego out of the way, that normally I don't phrase things like that. I'm really appreciative that you picked up on that language, and that's a part of your compassionate inquiry is to pick up on language and mirror that back. So I appreciate you bringing that up.
Speaker 3 · 17:29Is there a part of you that feels um bad about having put it that way? A little bit.
Speaker 2 · 17:38Um, I mean, I think that there's a little bit of um well, if I'm the teacher, then I need to phrase things in a way that's um say wiser or more accurate and more uh indicative of what mindfulness is. It's not about getting rid of anything, it's about noticing.
Speaker 3 · 18:05Okay, so if you're the teacher, which you are, and if you face things not in the most ideal way, one time or another, what is the implication of that? You mean the emotional implication, like internally, of my perception? Yeah, what is your perception? I have to get it right.
Speaker 2 · 18:28What is you know what's behind that that there's um some imperfection?
Speaker 3 · 18:37Well, that's a big headline for you. Human being has imperfection, yeah. When was the first time, Sean, or how the far does it go back to sense I have to get it right, otherwise there's some negative consequences?
Speaker 2 · 18:54I think there was a perhaps middle school, there was a sense that I needed to transcend uh what I perceived as a lot of the imperfections around me.
Speaker 3 · 19:11How much unconditional acceptance did you receive as a young child?
Speaker 2 · 19:16Unconditional there wasn't a lot of room for emotional authenticity.
Speaker 3 · 19:26Okay, so you had to really wait carefully. So here's what I noticed about your speaking style it's very deliberate. This is not a criticism, I'm just noticing. Yeah, like I gotta get it right. So I think it goes way before middle school. If I'm authentic, I might not be accepted. That's what I'm suggesting. Might have been a dynamic that you've experienced long before middle school. So here we are, and you're an accomplished mindfulness teacher, you've got all these students that are willing to learn from you, and assuming they're not crazy, there must have some good reason for why they're willing to learn from you, and yet it still shows up. That oh me, maybe I didn't phrase something the best way possible. And all I'm suggesting is just notice that with compassion. And I don't know if I phrased everything perfectly in this conversation, and I certainly can't promise you that I will. Will you forgive me if I don't phrase things?
Speaker 2 · 20:27Yeah, yes.
Speaker 3 · 20:28Well, thanks. Then let's mutually grant that to ourselves as well, okay, is what I'm suggesting.
Speaker 2 · 20:34Yeah.
Speaker 3 · 20:35Thank you. Well, thank you.
Speaker 2 · 20:40You know, in our exchange, you think you asked for permission if it was okay to ask or to inquire. And you know, obviously, it's important when we're curious about others' experience, when we're compassionate, it's important to create a container of safety and rapport and let people know that you're not there to attack them or fix them. But I'm curious if there are a few rules of thumb that you employ to help create that container of safety and to help that level of comfort during the exchange, and to also avoid, you know, maybe re triggering people or getting into areas that are too intense for them or overwhelming, if there's different rules of thumb that you have to be safe in that process.
Speaker 3 · 21:39Sure. Well, first of all, it has to be an invitation, not a demand. And there's a difference. If I meet you at a dance, and if I invite you to dance with me and you say no, there's no consequence to it. But if I demand that you dance with me, and if you refuse, that means there's going to be some consequence. I'm going to punish you. There's a huge difference in an invitation and a demand. So it needs to be an invitation. And not only the initial is it okay to ask these questions, needs to be an invitation. You have to keep reiterating the invitation. Is it still okay? Is it still okay? The person you're talking to needs to be in the lead that way. They need to be able to gauge for themselves. Number one. Number two, you can't have an agenda. I mean, you can, but it's gonna get in the way. If you have an agenda for the other person, see the reason they're in your office in the first place is because at some point in their lives, somebody had an agenda for them that had nothing to do with their needs, but with the needs of the person whose agenda it was. So if they show up to work with you and you have an agenda for them, guess what? You're putting them back in the same situation that they came from in the first place. Which means if you have an agenda, notice it for God's sakes. Don't say I shouldn't have an agenda, because the fact is you're gonna have one. Just be curious about it. Okay, I got an agenda. Along with that, when you're working with somebody, if there's any tension inside you, that's about you. So I always teach my students, wherever there's tension, it requires attention. Because when working with people, there's that which we say, but then there's the energetic exchange that people actually pick up on on a deep level, even if not consciously. If there's tension in you, you're gonna transmit that to your client. Unless you attend to the attention. So tension always needs attention. Also, I always ask people, what would you like to get from this exchange? Like, what is your goal? What's my goal? What's your goal? What you said about triggering, I'm gonna quibble a bit about that. Because people may get triggered. And I got no problem with that. What's wrong with being triggered? Now think of the metaphor of the trigger. I often teach this. The metaphor of the trigger. If you have a weapon, how big a part of the weapon is the trigger? Small, very small part. What else is there? There's ammunition, there's an explosive material, there's a mechanism to deliver the ammunition. So we could worry about the little trigger, or we could actually say, Oh, you just got triggered. Well, what you know, not that we deliberately set out to trigger people, that's manipulative. But if in the context of a conversation somebody gets triggered, then we can explain, yeah, I gotta look at myself. What did I do here? Did I take a misstep? Did I do something inappropriately? Did I intrude on them? You know, I mean, that's just important to be aware of that. Having said that, just because you get triggered doesn't mean there's anything wrong. It's a great opportunity. Now, what do you want to do? Focus on the little trigger, or do you want to look at what ammunition and explosive you're carrying in your body that you've been carrying all your life? So, triggers I don't worry about so much. Not that I deliberately set out to do it, not that it's not my responsibility to be respectful and mindful and compassionate and present. Yes, it is. But having said that, triggers in themselves are really interesting entries into a person's inner life. We can make people curious, even about oh, you got triggered there, or what happened. Nothing wrong with triggers.
Speaker 2 · 25:55Thank you, Gabor. Thank you so much for your time today. It's just been an honor, just personally and professionally. Thank you so much for your generosity and for reflecting back to us what we need to see with that love. If I could just invoke some prayer for your well-being, Gabor, and for your wife, for your health and spirit. Really just wish you well and just have a lot of deep, deep gratitude for you.
Speaker 3 · 26:32Thank you. I think thank you again. It's a real pleasure to work with you, Sean. And um, thank you, everybody, and perhaps we'll see you again.
Speaker 2 · 26:40Sounds good. Thank you, everybody.
Speaker 1 · 26:44Thank you to both Dr. Gabor Mate and Sean Fargo for that eye-opening conversation on compassionate inquiry and its real-world application. This episode is an excerpt of two longer interviews with Dr. Mate, presented to trainees in the Mindfulness Exercises Mindfulness Teacher Training Program. Find out more about that program at teach.mindfulness exercises.com. And to learn more about Dr. Mate, his best selling books, and the compassionate inquiry method, visit Dr. Gabor Mate. That's drgabormate.com.
