Welcome to Joy Lab!: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Joy Lab podcast, where we help you uncover and foster your most joyful self. Your hosts, Dr. Henry Emmons and Dr. Aimee Prasek, bring you the ideal mix of soulful and scientifically sound tools to spark your joy, even when it feels dark. When you're ready to experiment with more joy, combine this podcast with the full Joy Lab program over at JoyLab.coach
Henry: Hello, I'm Henry Emmons and welcome to Joy Lab. And,
Aimee: And I'm Aimee Prasek, and we are here together working on our element of inspiration for this month of January. Here at the podcast, we're doing it and even more so, I'd say, at the Joy Lab program. So inspiration doesn't get a whole lot of attention. when it comes to mental health, but it is a powerful element and it is something that we all crave.
Inspiration is understood to be both a motivational state and a complex [00:01:00] emotion, so it usually shows up as a new idea or creative insight that kind of arrives to us so we can't force it and it feels expansive and connecting at the same time and it's full of energy to propel us forward. So again, I think we all want this.
We're wired for inspiration, to really see something new, to create something better. to feel this kind of drive for purpose and meaning. And I'll say being open to all of that takes a lot of courage. I think inspiration requires us to do some surrendering, really, to give up some control over what we think our own set plan might be or what we're grasping onto and to make space for something else, something new, something different.
And that is just not always so easy. It takes a lot of [00:02:00] courage. So that's what we're getting into today. How can we summon up courage and in a way that makes more space for inspiration? And we're going to lean on, I think, would you call it a framework, Henry, for courage? Okay,
Henry: a way of, a way of working with that, let's say.
Aimee: Awesome. Okay, so this is a way of working with courage from author and teacher Parker Palmer. He calls it courage work. And Henry, you've actually worked through this framework with Parker,
Henry: Mm hmm.
Aimee: I thought if you could walk us through kind of pieces of it so that we can get a better idea of what it is and how we can apply it into our lives, that would be awesome.
And those of you in the Joy Lab program, just to note, this is some wisdom, this is a framework that actually sits really nicely with your experiments for this month. So, Henry, let's start off with the basics of Courage Work and how you got into it.[00:03:00]
Henry: Happy to. And before I even do that, let me just say that if, if any of you are interested in this, either already or by the end of this, this episode, check it out. You, I think you would love it. Courage Work is just so enriching and it can work on so many different levels. The place to go to find out more is the Center for Courage and Renewal, but it's just a fabulous way of working with things internally. So, I first learned about Courage Work, gosh, a long time ago, um, when I attended a talk
by Parker Palmer, and he founded the Center for Courage and Renewal. So, turns out Parker, was a graduate of Carlton College, which happens to be in the town where I live. And several years ago, he was invited to the college to give a keynote address.
I heard about it. I knew about him because of a book that [00:04:00] he wrote called Let Your Life Speak, and it's just one of these small, nicely bound, beautiful, inspirational books that had just a huge impact on my life. And so, when I heard he was coming, I did not want to miss his talk. Now, this happened at a time in my life when I was about to start a sabbatical year, something not often done by physicians. But I had just received a Bush fellowship that was specifically intended to give physicians in the middle of their careers an opportunity to take a sabbatical- a year away, away from their medical practice and immerse ourselves in learning something different than we'd learned in our training that might enlarge and enrich our work going forward. So I had already chosen three things I wanted to focus on. One was more effective natural approaches for [00:05:00] mental health. Second was how to integrate mindfulness skills better into the support of mental health. And then the third was to help health professionals prevent or recover from burnout. This was motivated in large part because I had already been struggling with burnout, even though I was still pretty early in my career. So if you've listened to many of our episodes before, you might have heard me speak to my ambivalence, my deep ambivalence about, oh gosh, I'm telling you, about a career in medicine. And, as I look back on it, it was just there from the very start. I, I, I wanted this choice to be right for me, but it just wasn't. I didn't resonate with modern medicine as it was being practiced, as I saw and learned it being practiced. I was so much more interested in things like [00:06:00] fitness, nutrition, mind body skills, the stuff that we then called holistic medicine. So in my training, I found a few ways to dally in these topics, but frankly, there wasn't much time or energy to do that.
So I just had to keep going kind of suppress it and try to stay up with a massive amount of learning that was required, which I can tell you was most definitely not holistic. So I was also drawn to spirituality and to people's stories and what was going on at a deeper level on the inside. I imagine that's why I ended up in psychiatry. It's kind of hard to understand, all the choices we make when we're young, but I'm sure that was a big, a big driver. And I'd hoped that I'd, I'd find room for those things in the practice of psychiatry. But when I got to that training, I found out again, that the topics that felt richer to me [00:07:00] were mostly squeezed out of the curriculum.
You know, psychiatry was trying to be just like the rest of medicine, which was mostly about disease and medications or procedures to treat disease. Nothing wrong with that, by the way. It just didn't resonate for me.
When I look back on it, I realize how resilient I had to be in order to make it through all of those years of training with my heart not in it. I also have come to realize that being highly resilient, while it's a great asset, it does have its drawbacks, because you can go down the wrong path for a very long time before burnout or depression or something else wakes you up and makes you consider the possibility that you should take a different path.
Aimee: Yeah. We've talked about [00:08:00] doing some more episodes on this. there's a really important reason why resilience is one of our elements of joy.but there's a lot of other elements along with it, right? That can, nurture that journey of resilience because on its own, resilience doesn't mean it's going to be joyful or happy.
Um, so I want, I want to highlight what you said for a moment about burnout. I think it's interesting because there's a really common component of burnout that is related here, related to just what I was noting too, and what you were noting about the downsides of resilience, I think. and we don't talk about it a lot when it comes to this conversation of burnout, which really just gets stuck into this definition of just working too hard. I'm just working to the ends of my capacity, which can create burnout. But this other piece that is really common, it's described as having feelings of low personal accomplishment. So we work really hard, [00:09:00] but we don't feel effective. Which can lead to a kind of learned helplessness, a state of learned helplessness, where we feel like nothing we do is right or right for us at work, and that it's not producing anything positive.
And when we're stuck in that, the stress and depression can really surge in that state of learned helplessness. And with that component, that component of feelings of low personal accomplishment, burnout can get really gnarly. You can get really stuck in it.so we need to do more on burnout as well, conversations around those, but if those of you are listening, are thinking that you are unique in your burnout, I would just like to say, welcome to the very large club and we can do something about it.
We are getting into that here and we'll do some more later.
Henry: Aimee, I, as an aside, I just thought of this, research that I came across when I was, [00:10:00] recently when I was studying physician burnout, physician, specifically for physicians, and what they said in this, their findings was that, having a sense of meaning and purpose, which is kind of like, feeling that there's some personal accomplishment, I
think, in what you do. That, that, that's a really important component, but in order to be enough, you only need it in about, about 15 to 20 percent of the time, in other words, you don't have to, like, nail it. It doesn't have to be the perfect job or the perfect career, but you do
need a little.
Aimee: a little goes a long way. That is, that offers freedom. That
it's the only way it could be.
Henry: yeah, I found that to be really helpful.
So, anyway, back to Parker Palmer and Courage Work. So, the book of his that I mentioned, Let Your Life Speak, included his own personal story of depression. And he wrote about it, and he speaks about it so [00:11:00] honestly and beautifully, that it's just, I found it really moving. And I remember one concept from the book, I think he called it When Door Closes or When Way Closes, and it had to
Aimee: Hmm.
Henry: do with listening to what we think are our failures, or when we have hit a wall like I had, and you just can no longer see a way forward when you are stuck. And it seems as if that particular path has been closed to you. So you have to find a doorway that's open and one that leads perhaps to a different path. That's where I felt I was in my career. Door closed.
On the outside, I think it looked like I was doing fine. Maybe even looked like there was personal accomplishment I could
feel good about. But on the inside, I knew I just couldn't continue like this. Now, I was only [00:12:00] seven years into my career, which was the definition of the Bush Fellowship for early or for, for mid career
Aimee: Does that say something about turnover and burnout? Everybody's fried at 15.
Henry: well, it said something about me. I jumped on it the moment I could. so it was still kind of early, but I felt like I was working very hard in a system whose role for the psychiatrist felt way too small for me personally. And something in me just said, no, enough. I am not going to go any further like this. So the Bush Fellowship, frankly, gave me kind of a graceful exit and a chance to find that door that was open to me, like a more authentic path. Now back to that lecture that I attended. I think it was about 25 years ago, almost exactly, Parker talked about courage work, which he had started initially in order to help school teachers [00:13:00] working in the K through 12 public school system who I found were struggling with burnout just as much as health professionals, by the way, and oddly for a lot of the same reasons. So in his talk, though, he spoke aboutthis program that was all geared toward professional renewal and I loved it because it wasn't focused on stress reduction like so many programs were and, and still are, but it was really focused on taking a good deep look inside through something called deep listening. By doing soul work. And I tell you, this was just all music to my ears. So, listening to this lecture, he used a phrase near the end that just made one of these proverbial lightbulbs go off inside of me. He was trying to sum up his talk and he just said, basically, what we're doing here is we're working with the inner life [00:14:00] of teachers. And I knew right then, in that moment, I wanted to start a program called The Inner Life of Healers.
Aimee: I love that. maybe this is the obvious. Henry, this light bulb moment. Did you feel like that was inspiration kind of knocking?
Henry: Well, in retrospect, yes, I think that's what it was. And it's not like this happens to me all the time, by the way. That was kind of a rare and exceptional thing. But it was funny to me, the degree of certainty
that I had. This was right. That, there just was no question. There was no, none of my usual hemming and hawing and, internal debate about the pros and cons and all of that.
It was, it was just like, okay, this is, this is it. this is what I'm going to do. Yeah. So after that talk, I did something I never do. I waited to speak with him. After his talk, I [00:15:00] went up to him and told him,what I was interested in. And, and he listened, very politely. And he suggested that I, if I was really interested, I come to one of their trainings. Now, to that date, they'd never trained any health professionals. although the work, the purpose of the work is professional renewal. It, it doesn't really matter what profession you're in. It just cuts through all of that very, very quickly. It's really just about being a human being and being authentically yourself in whatever it is that you're doing. So that's what really drew me to this work. It's that notion of listening to true self. Your authentic inner voice and maybe that is kind of the equivalent of inspiration, at least for me is, you
know, that's sort of what I'm looking for when I don't have it. And when it's there, it's honestly, it doesn't even seem like that big of a deal.
It just feels right. You know, it feels true. [00:16:00] Now, good therapy, of course. course can get us there too. but I think there's just something precious to me about this, this kind of work, this courage work, at least in that time of my life. I, I, and I just knew that I could not do this all alone.
I couldn't figure this out all by myself.
And one of the beautiful things about the model for courage work is that all of this reflection and introspection, it's done in a small very intentional community that exists only for a short time and only for that purpose, which is just super freeing. I think
Aimee: Yeah.
Henry: so for the next couple of years, about every 3 months, I traveled to Washington state, went to a nice retreat center, spent several days with the same 24 people every time we met.
We met eight times, long, extended retreats. And again, other than myself, everybody was an educator, but that just that professional veneer wasn't even [00:17:00] there from like the very first session. We're just people being open and vulnerable with one another. And, just briefly, I'll describe the rhythm to this work that I just fell in love with. So the days were divided roughly into four, maybe five working sessions. that each lasted maybe an hour and a half to two hours, and each one had its own topic to work with. Typically, the leaders would open a session with a reading or a poem or a story, and then often a few teaching comments or instructions for the, for whatever activity was going to follow. Then the group might take some time to do some personal reflection, maybe journaling or drawing, or just sitting by yourself quietly and thinking. Typically, that would be followed by some small group sharing, just a group of three to five people where everybody would get a chance [00:18:00] to speak. And then from there, the discussion would go to the whole group.
And so it was this, this rhythm that felt like breathing almost. It's like the in and out, you're going inward, then you're going outward, then you go inward again. And it was just, I just loved it. And I also loved how much emphasis they placed on learning to listen deeply. So I just learned so much more about genuine listening than I had through any of my other training. There is an art to letting another person speak what is really true for them while you, the listener, are not holding any judgment. You're not even trying to help them and you're, you're learning not to get caught up in, in reflecting how this relates to me and my story, so it
just focused on the, the person who's speaking. You know, as the physician and a lot of other [00:19:00] professionals were trained to, diagnose a problem and fix it. And there's a place for that, but that is not genuine or deep listening.
So it was really powerful for me to see what happens when someone is given the space to speak from a deeper place. And it's, you're held only by the attention and kindliness of the people. listening to you. So I came to see courage work as soul work, which is just something I love. And I learned that to approach this thing we call the soul requires a different pace and different methods from how we approach most of our lives. For me at least, it's best approached indirectly, like through a poem or a story or music or art. And it needs its own space, and there's a different relationship with time. The best way I've [00:20:00] come to think of it, this kind of relationship with the soul, which to me is the real core of courage work, is that it's kind of like creating a deep friendship, a lasting friendship. It doesn't usually happen by chance. It might at the start, but over time it's got to be nurtured and cultivated in order to become something really beautiful.
Aimee: Hmm. Soul work. Thanks for sharing that. there's a couple of pieces in there. First you're bringing up all of this wonderful, conversation on listening deeply. We have a great episode on that. So I'm going to put that in the show notes where we dig into kind of listening deeply 101 practice.
So if that's really stirring your soul, that might be a great place to dive in next. I think also, what's coming up for me is that when we're talking about courage I think that concept usually shows up in our [00:21:00] mind with tenacity like G. I. Jane, hard, like go after it kind of stuff. And that's just not how courage shows up most of the time, I would say, or at least all the time, obviously.
I think courage is really about so often our inner work rather than those outer charges.So next episode, we'll actually share a Dialogue With Your Soul experiment. Dialogue With Your Soul is the fourth experiment that we do in the Joy Lab program and we want to share it with you all as a taste of the program.
So those of you who are not with us in the Joy Lab program to kind of get a taste for itand also as a tool to tap into your courage in this kind of more seemingly subtle, but super powerful way. So to close our time today, I want to share some inspiration from Parker Palmer, some motivation to do this important work.
Here it is. [00:22:00] "Anytime we can listen to true self and give it the care it requires, we do it not only for ourselves, but for the many others whose lives we touch."
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