Speaker 1 · 0:00What do you do when strong emotions arise? Do you express them in a healthy way? Or do you ignore or suppress them? Strong emotions are part of our human experience. Some can be painful or frightening. Others carry an energy we enjoy, so we hold on, feeling empowered by our resentments, anger, or depression. All these reactions are completely understandable and normal, but not appropriately honoring or expressing the truth of our emotions can lead us to both physical and psychological pain. With mindfulness and self-compassion, we can develop the capacity to remain present and express them in a healthy way, even in the midst of overwhelming emotions. Welcome to the Mindfulness Exercises podcast. May this conversation be a source of inspiration and motivation in your mindfulness practice and teachings. In this episode, Sean Fargo interviews Gabor Mate, a physician, best-selling author, and renowned speaker, known worldwide for his expertise on emotional health and its impact on our physical and mental well-being. Gabor Mate teaches that each of our emotions have a role to play, one that can ultimately lead us to a more mindful, compassionate presence. We'll explore the role of healthy anger, the myth of compassion fatigue, the importance of saying no, and why healing our relationships just may be the most important spiritual work we ever do.
Speaker 2 · 2:05Dr. Gabor, welcome to our call. Thank you for joining us today.
Speaker 3 · 2:10Thank you. Pleasure to be here and an honor to be asked. Thank you. Absolutely.
Speaker 2 · 2:16I hear you talk about rage and anger a lot. Do you feel like if you have a pie chart or percentage of different emotions that people typically suppress, would you say most of the time it's say rage or sadness or fear? Or is it even possible to separate those?
Speaker 3 · 2:35Well, it's interesting. There was a neuroscientist, his name is Dr. Yak Panksap, who looked at the neuroscience of emotions. Affective neuroscience, he called it, affective neuroscience, not effective, affective neuroscience. And he distinguished some brain systems that we share with other mammals, some rudimentary but essential brain systems, and he capitalized them just for nomenclature's sake. And each of these brain systems were associated with certain brain chemicals and certain circuits in the brain, and they were very much intermingled. But there was a circuitry for rage. He called it R-A-G-E, Rage. There was also circuitry for panic and grief. He called it panic grief, capital panic slash grief. There's one for fear. There's one for lust. There's one for seeking. There's one for play. And one or two others. And each of these are necessary for human life. Mammalian life, actually. Now the rage system isn't an aberration, it's part of our apparatus. It shows up, it gets activated when we're threatened and our boundaries are threatened. You want to find out what rages? Try to mess with the bear cubs of a bear mother. You'll find out what rages. It's there for a good reason. We have a system for care, C-A-R-E, which makes us care for one another, especially for the young of the species. Without that, mammals don't survive. If the adults didn't have a care system in their brains, no infant would survive. We have a panic and grief system, panic grief, which is what the young feels when the care is absent. They feel panic, they feel sadness. Now, what I find is that most commonly repressed are the rage and the panic and grief. No, when you repress anger, healthy anger, you're actually suppressing your immune system. Why? I could go into the science of it, but in a nutshell, mind and body cannot be separated. And when you look at what is the role of healthy anger, is to protect your boundaries. It's to make sure that something that shouldn't intrude on you doesn't. That's emotionally or physically the case. If I were in the same room with you, if I were to attack you, you should mount a rage response. Oh, you can't do this to me. And you might do the same thing if I was emotionally intrusive. That's to keep out what is unhealthy. In fact, the role of the emotional system in general is very simply let in what's healthy and nourishing and keep out what's not. That's basically the role of emotions. Now, what is the role of the immune system? Trick question. It's to keep out what's unhealthy and let in what's healthy. It's the same as the emotions. In fact, the immune system and the emotional system are part and parcel of the same apparatus. When you're suppressing rage, your healthy rage, I'm talking about, there's such a thing as healthy anger, then there's unhealthy anger. When you're suppressing healthy anger, you're suppressing your immune system. Documentably so, physiologically so. But this is where therapy and inquiry comes into it. So most commonly, it's what I see suppressed is anger. And of course, if you look at even the language, like we call depression this mental health disorder because of chemicals, nonsense. Look at the word depression. What does it mean to depress something? It means to push it down. What do we push down? We push down our emotions. Why do we push them down? Because it's too dangerous to feel them when they would threaten the attachment relationship. So the pushing down of healthy anger can lead you to autoimmune disease or cancer, neurological disease like ALS. They've done studies. Even with people with ALS who express anger, they live longer than people with ALS who don't express anger. I could talk at length about that. There was a study of 2,000 women in the states over 10 years. Women who were unhappily married and didn't express their feelings of unhappiness were in those 10-year periods four times as likely to die as those women who were unhappily married, but they talked about their feelings. So the repression of healthy anger and unsadness and grief. It undermines your physiology. I could go on about multiple sclerosis, fibromyalgia, in all of these conditions, what you've got migraines for God's sakes. Meet anybody with migraine, they got a lot of suppressed rage and sadness, of course. If your parents need you to be happy, you'll put on a happy face. Yes, everything is okay. And then you go through life, and everybody thinks, What a nice guy you are, what a nice person you are, always joyful, always cheerful. And then they come to your funeral and they wonder why is it that the good die young? The good die young because they suppress themselves. If you look at the source of the word resent, the French sentier to feel and re is again. So to resent is to feel something again, something that's an unconscious feeling, and now you're feeling it again. And if I repress my healthy anger, if I'm in a relationship with you and stuff happens, you do stuff that triggers my healthy anger, but I don't express it because I'm afraid of not pleasing you, I'm afraid of losing the relationship or whatever, I'm gonna resent you. So there's an interesting correlationship between repressed anger and resentment because I repress my anger so as not to lose the relationship, but then I'm gonna resent you, which means I'm sabotaging the relationship. When there's a no that wants to be said, you can choose guilt or you can choose resentment. That's your choice. I'm telling you, whenever there's a choice between guilt and resentment, choose the guilt every time. Go for the guilt. The resentment is poison. Okay, now that guilt is just a childhood survival mechanism. It's what I call the stupid friend. Choose that guilt. I actually tell this to people next time you feel guilty, have a party, invite all your friends, celebrate. Hey, I feel guilty. I must have done something for myself for a change. It isn't hard to say no. You find it hard to say no, and you find it hard to say no because in your childhood, that's how you survive by saying yes when you felt a no, but you have to say a yes, and that's how you survive. This difficult is saying no and the guilt you have, that's just childhood stuff. I mean, you don't say no, you feel angry at yourself, you're resentful of the other person. That's much worse. I'm telling you, whenever there's a choice between guilt and resentment, choose the guilt. Go for the guilt. It's hard, but go for it. You'll be a lot healthier for it. Eventually, the guilt will give up, by the way. Eventually, it'll give up. So, the healthy anger, when you tell me to get off your foot, gab or get off my foot, that protects you. The other anger has to do with that. Like the Buddha said, when the monk has anger, the monk knows that he's got anger. Now, if you can be mindful and then know, I have anger in me now. What do you do? When it's over, you have some time, then you do the inquiry. And the more often you do the inquiry, the more mindful you'll become. Also, you do your mindfulness practice, such as you're learning in this group. And the more mindful you become, the more you'll notice the anger arising in you, then you don't have to act it out. When we get overwhelmed, we lose it. But that's the whole point. We do the practice so that we do not lose it. We do the mindfulness that so we were aware when the anger is arising within us. We do the practice of doing the inquiry afterwards. So maybe the next time, or the time after that, or the time after that. It's not going to be so powerful that it takes us over. So that's all. It's not a question of judging ourselves for it, it's a question of learning from our experience.
Speaker 2 · 12:20Yeah. You know, the more we practice mindfulness, the more we'll notice that anger arising. We can meet it as it's arising more and more, and notice the reactivity and meet it, and more we're able to choose an appropriate response. A lot of people, or at least myself, will suppress certain emotions, and we'll have this judgment of the emotion that it's uh right or wrong, or and then sometimes we'll hold on to emotions that it's like good or right to feel this, and I'm gonna hold on to this sense of righteousness, and sometimes we'll hold on to anger as we feel like it's the right thing to do, or same thing with grief, like we'll get caught in this cycle of feeling this way because we might judge it to be good or right.
Speaker 3 · 13:20Well, you know what? I would probably challenge you on that one. I don't really believe that people hold on to emotions because they think it's right, I think they hold on to emotions for deeper reasons than that. Like anger is an energizing emotion. People might just like the energy of it. Healthy anger is an expression of strength, false anger is an illusion of strength. But for people who lack a sense of their own strength, the illusion of strength may be more preferable. So, in other words, I don't think it's an intellectual judgment that this is good or bad. I think it's more how it makes you feel and what it does for you on the body emotion level that makes us hold on to. Also, of course, if I'm angry, I get to be right. Eckhart Tolle, the spiritual teacher, has got a really funny shtick about a duck. You know, two ducks are swimming in the pond, and one of them swims too close to the other one. So the first duck will ruffle their feathers and squawk a bit, and the other duck will move away. Now, if that first duck was a human being, he would say, Oh, that guy, he's always coming close to me. Why is he doing that? I bet he's gonna do it again next week. I can't stand that guy. Ducks don't do that, they just ruffle their feathers, they express what it is, and then they go on with life, you know. We human beings, we hold on to it because we're holding on to an identity.
Speaker 2 · 14:50So, would it be more fair to say that perhaps it feels good, feels right, rather than an intellectual assessment or judgment, but it's more of an emotional feeling of it? Yeah, I would put it that way.
Speaker 3 · 15:04Yeah, the thing with healthy anger is it's got a specific role, protect your boundary. Once it's done its job, it doesn't have to stick around, does it? It arises when it needs to. If I'm holding on to it, I'm getting some payback. What's the payback? I get to be right and I get not to examine myself, which is uh for a lot of us, that's a huge payoff. I don't have to take responsibility, I'm a victim, she did it to me. So there's a lot of uh egoic payoffs. This is where mindfulness comes in, because if you can notice yourself doing this without judgment, or let me even put it another way, it's not a question of doing it without self-judgment, because uh, even the judgment is an automatic process, you're not doing it. Do you actually sit there and decide I'm gonna judge myself right now? No, you don't. You notice even the judgment without judgment. Oh, I'm judging myself, so everything becomes a matter of compassion and inquiry. It's not a question I shouldn't judge, but oh, I noticed the judgment. What's that about? I never advise anybody not to judge for the simple reason that nobody judges actively. Do you ever decide I'm gonna be judgmental right now? No, it's usually more of a reaction, it's an automatic thing, right? Yes, you're not judging, the judging is coming up spontaneously in your mind. Now, how can you tell something that's spontaneously come up not to come up? So, this is where for me the compassionate inquiry comes in. Now, if you phrased it by saying when judgment arises, instead of identifying with it, be curious about it, that's how I would frame it. Because the judgment is just gonna happen, it's automatic. You don't do it any more than you breathe. You can no more not judge than you cannot breathe. Because the human mind, that's just what it does. It formulates opinions, it has emotional reaction to an opinion, and what a judgment is is an opinion with a negative emotional charge. There's no active decision on your part to do it, it happens for all of us. So does the judging of the judgment happen for all of us? So, what you do is you notice it. There it is. That's all. So don't work at not judging it, but notice the judgment. Just notice, okay. There it is. Don't say to yourself, I shouldn't be doing this. Say to yourself, this is happening. Oh, I notice there's a judgment about somebody else in my mind. Oh, I noticed there's a judgment about myself for having a judgment in my mind. It's happening for me right now. I'm not doing it, it's happening for me right now. Okay, now when you say I notice that it's happening for me right now, who's the eye? Because you're not doing the judging, it does itself, but you're doing the noticing. That's a conscious practice. The judgment is not conscious, it's automatic. The noticing, that's what you're doing. The noticing is a practice, it's conscious. The judging is automatic, it's not conscious. You're aware of it, but you're not consciously choosing to do it. The noticing, you're consciously choosing to do, right? So, what you need to do is to strengthen your awareness. And you strengthen your awareness just by noticing, that's what you're doing. Now, the more you strengthen your awareness, the less automatic those judgments will be, and the more quickly you'll notice them and let them go. So, the thing is to strengthen your awareness, which is what you're doing. Now, that could be very rich material for self-awareness and self-knowledge. So, I'm always very curious about people's judgments. So, don't judge yourself for judging, just be curious about the judgment. It'll always tell you something unresolved about yourself. Let's see if you really care about yourself. Then instead of judging yourself for having judgments, you'll notice all the judgment and you'll care about yourself enough to be curious about it and say, Well, well, okay, what is this really all about? And inevitably, what we're judging in somebody else is always something that we're rejecting in ourselves, inevitably, a hundred percent of the time. Because you might notice something about somebody, you might even have an opinion about it, but that's not the same as judging them for it. You can have an opinion, for example. I can have an opinion that so-and-so is doing something that's harmful to themselves or other people. That's a fair enough opinion, and it may be accurate, maybe accurate, may not be accurate, but it's an opinion. But if that opinion is associated with some negative charge, like I don't like them for it, and I make them wrong for it, then they're bad people because they're doing it. But that's about me, that's not about them. So the caring curiosity will be care about the person, and we'll be curious about why they're doing it. By the way, it's a very difficult state to get to. In fact, the closer you are to somebody, the harder it is to get there. I have a lot easier time forgiving Hitler than I have than I have forgiving my wife for forgetting to I don't know, do something, you know.
Speaker 2 · 20:56I'm curious, like as someone who's in your role, like how do you take care of yourself so that I personally have the tendency to merge energies, and so I'm working on that. I'm taking classes on that. And what do you mean by that? Sean, I tend to lose myself into the energy of external emotions, or I will dissociate on a bad day. On a good day, I feel very present and you know, I feel like there's healthy boundaries, and it's certainly improved over time, but there is this tendency to merge and to lose myself into others, and and I know a lot of mindfulness teachers they tend to be on the more like empath side of things, and a lot of us will talk about empathy fatigue.
Speaker 3 · 21:48I would rephrase that, sort of interrupt. There's no empathy fatigue. Empathetic and compassion is the way we're meant to be, that's our nature. Why would we get tired of being our nature? We get tired not because we have too much empathies, but because we don't have enough for ourselves. So we keep giving and giving and being out there and out there and out there, and we don't take care of it. Your question began with how do I take care of myself? And that's exactly the point, is that when we don't, we don't have enough empathy for ourselves. So what we get tired of is lack of empathy for ourselves, not our empathy for others. That's not going to make you tired. But if you have empathy for yourself, you can have boundaries. And if you don't have boundaries, you don't have empathy for yourself. So I always rephrase that it's not compassion fatigue, it's lack of compassion fatigue, lack of self-compassion fatigue. That's what makes us tired. Thank you.
Speaker 2 · 22:39Yeah, I was informed it's not compassion fatigue, it's empathy fatigue. So now this takes it a step further into just lack of self-empathy, lack of self-compassion. Thank you. Exactly. You know, I think a lot of us need these systems or practices in place to remember, to empathize with ourselves, bring compassion to ourselves. And you've been doing this for decades in some pretty high energy situations. So I'm wondering if you can share any words of wisdom around being in the role of a mindfulness teacher, helping others. What have you seen, or what have you experienced that works well for reminding us to bring that attention to ourselves or ways of working with those energies that we may have?
Speaker 3 · 23:40Sure. So I divide that into two categories. One is where you're not saying no, so that when there's demands on you that you censor too much, you don't want to do them, but you still say yes, you don't say no. I wrote this book called When the Body Says No, because if you don't do that, your body's gonna say no in a form of illness or something. So one aspect of practice is your capacity to say no, and I can say more about that later if you want me to. But where do you not say no? And that shows up in two areas. In fact, you know, it's an exercise I recommend for people. It shows up in personal relationships, it shows up in work. You know, you already have so many clients, somebody really wants to see you, and you feel so committed to helping them, despite the fact that it's going to be too much of a burden for you, you don't say no. So, no is a very important aspect of self-care. And I think what you're intimating is that that's been hard for you. It's certainly been hard for me. So that's one, okay? In fact, it's a huge one, so there's that category. Then there is actual practices to take care of yourself. I'd put those into two categories as well. One is just the personal self-care. I swam two kilometers this morning, and I'll do that for three or four times a week. And on days when I don't swim, I do some other kind of exercise. For me, that's really important. May not be your idea of self-care, but something that involves your body and your body's need. Because let's face it, we were born to walk out there in nature barefoot, not to sit in rooms. So something that involves your body, it's just really essential. It could be yoga, exercise, whatever. So there's that for me. Then it's obviously how you eat, what kind of food you put inside yourself. This would be fairly obvious to anybody. How much sleep do you get? How do you rob yourself of energy? Do you sit on the internet a lot? Do you aimlessly sit about on the net? And then two hours have gone by. Which wasn't self-care at all, by the way. It was zoning out, it's not the same thing. Zoning out and self-care are not the same thing. Which shouldn't mean that you shouldn't zone out, but if you're gonna zone out, you should zone out consciously. I'm gonna zone out now for half an hour. Okay, fine, do it. I'm talking about the unconscious, compulsive zoning out for me. Then there's the yoga practice. I also I love hot baths, so I do that. And until I was shocked to read that Hitler loves hot baths. So I think maybe I should start having hot baths, I don't know. But I decided not to. So I lie in the bathtub and I read my Hitler biography, but that's something I do. So that's the personal self-care, whatever that means for you. Listen to music, that's important for me. I should say that every once in a while I do a psychedelic reset. Like last week, I spent a day with mushrooms. I do that every few months, it just resets my nervous system. You have to have the space for it and the safety for it. I'm not recommending it for you, I'm you're asking me, so I'm telling you. So I do psychedelics every once in a while, but the other side is relational, my marriage. Those of you that are in relationships, that's the most important spiritual work you ever do. I'm not saying not to sit on the cushion, never mind doing the psychedelics, I'm not saying not to, but where the rubber really hits the road is in your relationship, and it's in your relationship that you're gonna find out just who you are. So what has characterized my marriage is we're both committed to the truth, and that really means looking at ourselves. Sometimes we have to be dragged, kicking and screaming by the other person to look at ourselves, but that's the ethic. So looking at yourself honestly in the context of relationship is really essential, really essential. There's even a book I'd recommend on that for those of you that are interested, is called The Presence Process by Michael Brown, who in some ways turns out to be a bit of a I won't characterize him, he's a Trump supporter, he's a South African guy, but he wrote this wonderful book called The Presence Process about how learning about our reactions and our opinions of others and are always about ourselves. Or there's a book by Harville Hendricks called Getting the Love You Want, and it's about how we marry or get into relationship with what he calls our imago, which is kind of a conglomerate of our emotional relationship with our parents. So basically, when you get into relationship, guess where you're going? Back into your childhood hell or your childhood heaven or whatever combination of the two may have been mixed in your parents. So this is where you're going to really grow up. So I think working on a relationship is really crucial. And if I had to let go of everything else and keep only one, in my case, that's the one I'd keep. No, not everybody's in a relationship, and you don't have to be, but if you are, that would be my advice.
Speaker 2 · 29:20Gabor, 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 · 29:55Thank 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 · 30:02Sounds good. Thank you, everybody.
Speaker 1 · 30:07Thank you to Dr. Gabor Mate and Sean Fargo for that reminder about the significant impact our emotional well-being has on our physical health. This podcast is an excerpt of a longer interview with Gabor, presented to trainees in the Mindfulness Exercises Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Training Program. Find out more about that program at teach.mindfulnessexercises.com. To learn more about Dr. Mate and human development through the lens of science and compassion, visit Dr Gabor Mate. That's Dr. Gabormate.com.
