Unconditional Healing with Jeff Rubin

Harold “Hackie” Reitman is one of the most interesting and multi-talented folks I've ever met.  In his very “out-of-the-box” career, Hackie has been a distinguished orthopedic surgeon,  a professional heavyweight boxer, an author of books and screenplays, a filmmaker, and an advocate, mentor, and entrepreneur for the neuro-diverse community.  With all that under his belt, Hackie is humble, self-effacing with a great sense of humor, and I came away thinking someone should make a movie about this guy’s life because it’s so fantastical.

 As a teen, Hackie developed some skills in basketball and boxing and after high school was accepted into the six-year medical program at Boston University.  As a first-year medical student at Boston University, Hackie entered and won the prestigious amateur Lowell New England Golden Gloves Boxing Championship at heavyweight, with all four wins coming by knockout.  He was then offered a very lucrative contract to box professionally but turned it down to return to medical school, (and boy, is there a great story behind that)!

 In 1987, Hackie’s only daughter, Rebecca, age two, required emergency surgery for a brain tumor and it turned out to be a life-changing event for both. Hackie made a pact with God that if Rebecca survived, he’d return to boxing at the then “way-too-old -to-be-doing-this” age of 38 and direct all his prize winnings to children’s charities. (I vaguely remember at that time the media frenzy about “the Boxing Doctor” and his unlikely career change at age 38).  Rebecca survived and Hackie went on to fight 26 bouts with a record of 13 wins, 7 losses, and 6 draws. Most impressively, Hackie was knocked down, but never counted out in any bout.   

 Hackie went on to become the founder of a media company, PCE media, and wrote, produced, and directed the movie, “The Square Root of 2”, a full-length film starring Darby Stanchfield from the hit show “Scandal”. The film is based on Rebecca’s struggles with learning disorders while pursuing a mathematics degree at Georgia Tech University. After her graduation,  Hackie discovered that Rebecca was diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome, an illness with which he was totally unfamiliar even as an M.D. So of course he studied up and wrote the book, “Aspertools: The Practical Guide for Understanding and Embracing Asperger’s, Autism Spectrum Disorders and Neurodiversity.

Hackie became a huge advocate for the neuro-diverse community, arguing that our brains all work differently and one size does not universally fit all.  He is the founder of the neuro-diversity website DiferentBrains.org. which is a repository for his various advocacy, mentoring, interviewing, and video projects dedicated to bringing the neurodiversity community and education into the mainstream. 

Peggy Horan launched her career as a masseuse at a time when a massage was associated with prostitution rather than contributing to one’s health and well-being. She is highly regarded as a pioneer in the profession which has exploded from those very early days into a multi-billion dollar industry. Peggy began her career at the highly regarded Esalen Institute and has continued her work there for over 50 years, refining her techniques and practice of presence-based awareness methods into a genuine healing discipline.

Peggy views massage as a gateway into the emotional body rather than just a way to feel better physically. In this episode, we discuss:

• Initiating a session
• Healing from the inside
• The importance of reflection
• Tuning into a clients’ needs and reactions
• The importance of establishing boundaries in a “giving” profession
• The transference of energy
• Measuring success

As part of her desire to bring massage to the mainstream of everyday life,  Peggy has written “Connecting Through Touch: The Couple’s Massage Book”. Disguised as a how-to book, Peggy has crafted a compendium of the principles, environmental factors, and mindset that enables loving touch and intimate communication between partners. 

 Please join me in conversation with one of the living masters of the art of massage.

We all want to want to feel safe, comfortable, and free of stress. That’s universal. However, without venturing out of our so-called “comfort zone”, we grow stagnant and soft, and unable to handle setbacks and adversity.  What’s more, as we know from personal experience, we need a certain amount of manageable stress to grow and learn and prosper. 

In this episode, a talk I originally gave to the Healing Circle early in 2021, I discuss moving beyond our comfort zone using a model first developed by a Russian child development psychologist almost one hundred years ago.  

With that model as the basis, I discuss: 

• How we, as adults, can apply it when learning new skills and become aware of when we are indulging in comfort to the extreme
• How we instinctively seek our comfort zone in the way we dress, eat, and entertain ourselves
• Why seeking help from others, whether it’s with a teacher, a therapist, or a Healing Circle is often essential for moving into the learning zone
• How the right amount of manageable stress and fear always accompanies the acquisition of new skills 

I give examples from my own life, and how my spiritual teacher knew instinctively when his students were making a nest out of his teachings to reinforce their ego,  and that it was time to shake things up.

This episode is about one young woman’s coming of age while battling a chronic illness  (Lyme and tick-borne infections in this case) and her journey of self-discovery.  Allie Cashel is a Lyme disease warrior, advocate, and author.  I also was diagnosed and treated for Lyme in my own healing journey and encountered many of the same obstacles that Allie describes,  so I was very interested in having her as a guest on the show.

 With chronic Lyme, one needs to be a warrior because there are so many unnecessary obstacles put into one’s path. Did you know that doctors can lose their license to practice medicine if they have the audacity to treat Lyme with alternative methods, including prescribing antibiotics for more than 30 days?  My own Lyme specialist had to put non-Lyme diagnosis codes on my scripts so he could prescribe antibiotics for months at a time. That’s because for many illnesses an extended antibiotic regimen is not questioned, yet for Lyme, it is.

 Allie speaks of her shame, being unable to share her symptoms and illness with even her close friends lest they think less of her. This is often the case with so-called "invisible" illnesses.  In Allie’s case, a major debilitating flare-up in the 12th grade resulted in a highly rated infectious disease doctor accusing Allie of not being sick,  but having a mental regression to an earlier age to get her mother’s attention. This same highly acclaimed doctor accused Allie’s mom of being a horrible parent for trying to cure Allie of a "phantom illness".

 Allie eventually used these obstacles to write a ground-breaking book and start a non-profit dedicated to Lyme advocacy and resources.  Her journey is right in the Unconditional Healing wheelhouse, of using adversity and illness as a source of self-discovery and honing of character.

Erika Berland is a senior teacher and meditation instructor in the Shambhala Buddhist lineage and is an expert in applying somatic education and practices to the art of meditation.  Somatics, in case you’re not familiar with that term, is the field of study which explores our internal perception and experience of the body rather than the external objective sense of it, that say, a doctor might assume.

Erika’s new book “Sitting, the Physical Art of Meditation” explores this topic in great depth with chapters devoted to different parts of the body. Our wide-ranging conversation includes guidelines for both old and new practitioners including:

• The four postures of meditation
•  How to use the natural forces of gravity and anti-gravity in the body to create ease and restore vitality
• How to use visualization and imagery to support one’s practice
• Adopting a mindset of curiosity and discovery versus one of judgment and analysis
•  Identifying those areas of the body where we tend to hold and store tension
• The practice of aimless wandering through the body, letting sensation and “feeling what we feel” guide us

Please join us as we explore the subtleties and intricacies of the body as a support for the ancient practice of meditation.

Discipline is often misunderstood, or rather, it’s only partially understood.  It is normally associated with orderliness, efficiency, organization, and completion of a specific task.  While of course it can be all of those things, very often we lose the sense of the journey aspect, and solely focus on the end-goal, on what we’re trying to achieve. 

 This unfortunately leads to short-term thinking, and often times the end-goal is short-lived, whether we’re talking about loss of weight or achieving fitness or calming our mind.  The problem comes in when we engage mindlessly, like running on a treadmill while reading a book, or trying to achieve the perfect yoga pose without enough attention to how we feel. In genuine discipline, we employ mindfulness and a sense of joy and freedom to the particular activity in which we are engaged.  We focus more on the journey, the feeling, and less on obtaining a specific result.  Of course, the result we are striving for is an important aspect of motivation, but if it becomes our sole raison d’etre, we sell ourselves short.

 In this episode, based on a talk I gave at a Healing Circle meeting, I discuss how to use discipline as a journey inward, and not just focused on achieving external objective goals alone.  This is very much the way of meditation, of mindfulness practice, where the goal is to slow down, to be still, with a vivid sense of curiosity and self-discovery. But this approach can be also be applied to any disciplined activity that we take on as a regular practice, be it dieting, training for a marathon, or a Pilates regimen. However, we have to be willing to let go of expectations about what we might discover. We might encounter discursiveness, or fickleness, or boredom because we’re so addicted to entertainment, and discipline is “anti-entertainment”.  

 I also discuss the importance of not being too gung-ho at the beginning of a new disciplined activity. This can lead to an all-or-nothing approach whereby missing a day or two becomes an opportunity to berate ourselves, rather than as part and parcel of the discipline journey itself. Genuine discipline is a journey with a longer-term vision at its core. When entered into with an attitude of curiosity and exploration, we just might find that personal growth and inward transformation enhance and deepen our original goal many times over.

 And after you listen, check out our next Healing Circle here.  It’s free and you’ll find like-minded folks with whom to practice meditation, listen to teachings, and share the journey together toward unconditional health and well-being. 

 Also, you can join our Unconditional Healing Facebook group here.

With this podcast, I’m excited to introduce a new theme, namely, conversations with experts in disciplines and issues that are in a simpatico relationship with Unconditional Healing issues and themes.  I can think of no better way to start than by bringing on the leading spokesperson and thought leader for aging-related issues in the United States and many other countries in the world, my good friend, Dr. Ken Dychtwald. 

Over the past 40+ years, Ken has emerged as the foremost visionary and original thinker regarding the lifestyle, marketing, health care, economic, and workforce implications of the age wave. He is a psychologist, gerontologist, and best-selling author of 17 books on aging-related issues, including his most recent one, What Retirees Want: A Holistic View of Life’s Third Age, (an Amazon #1 bestseller in both the retirement and business marketing categories). Ken was the executive producer and host of the highly acclaimed PBS documentary, The Boomer Century: 1946–2046 which aired over 2,000 times on PBS stations nationwide, and his new Public Television special is titled Life’s Third Age, which is soon to air nationally. 

In 1986, Ken created Age Wave, a firm created to guide companies and government groups in product and service development for boomers and mature adults. His client list has included over half the Fortune 500, and Ken has consulted with every U.S. President since Jimmy Carter, (excepting our last president with whom Ken makes clear he had no involvement whatsoever). 

I could go on and on with superlatives for Ken, but you can check him out for yourself here. 

In this episode, we discuss Ken’s engagement with the Human Potential Movement in the 1970s at the famous Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, and then discuss his involvement with the holistic health movement, a term he and his colleagues coined.  We also discuss his transition to working with older adults on the Sage project, which eventually led to Ken’s prescient warnings about the coming age-wave of the Boomer generation that would affect almost every institution within our society.

We also delve into Ken’s work trying to eradicate Alzheimer's, the 21st century’s scourge of the aging population, and there is some positive news on that front. 

Disappointment might seem, on the surface, to be a strange topic for a podcast about healing. But at the beginning of every great difficulty, we face a profound disappointment.  We are not getting what we wanted, or we are getting what we don’t want.  Either way, we are disappointed. 

But how we respond to that disappointment holds the key to what happens next.  The typical reaction is to move on quickly, sometimes pretending or denying we’re even disappointed.  Or we just “solve” it by reciting affirmations that we don’t really believe like, “It’s so good this happened” or “This is all for the best”.  Others around us often offer similar platitudes, not knowing what to say in order to help us.  While those affirmations might be true in the long run, we actually have to go through the painful situation of being disappointed to reap the benefits. 

In this episode we’ll investigate disappointment from the inside out, seeing both its painful aspects and its beneficial ones. We’ll explore: 

·      How disappointment cuts through our need for constant validation
·      How a hopeful attitude differs from its more future-oriented cousin, ‘hope’ 
·      What the sports world can teach us about being totally present
·      Why a “couldn’t care less” attitude can become our saving grace

In the end, disappointment reveals much about our general attitudes, and how we operate in the world.  It has much to teach us about being authentic, being kinder to ourselves and others, and how to become, as Chogyam Trungpa once said, a “grain of sand” able to make a proper cup of tea.  

Lauren Marcus, a gifted and immensely talented stage actress and singer, was three days from starting a Sondheim show when she noticed the bald spot.  It was only a bit later that she lost all her hair and was eventually diagnosed with the auto-immune disease, alopecia, an illness affecting almost 150 million people worldwide.

Lauren bravely, and with raw vulnerability, recounts the pain of losing one’s identity, the crux of the matter whenever we receive a shocking, unexpected loss.  

We dive into  the psychological issues that arise at such a time:

·      Dealing with intense emotions like anger, and the need to give ourselves permission to feel whatever arises without guilt or judgment
·      Living in uncertainty, what Zen practitioners call “not knowing”, and what Lauren calls “living in the gray”
·      A phenomenon known as “cancer-shaming",  when one appears bald in public without having that particular disease

But we also discuss the “blessing” aspect of facing immense difficulty:

·      The shining through of one’s true character and resilience in the face of adversity
·      The natural growth of compassion in one’s heart, and the increased ability to empathize with others 
·      Finding new ways to express creativity and the ability to go forward

 There’s also magic in this episode.  Lauren awoke one day from a dream, with “the hook” of a song playing in her head.  With the dream seemingly coming from her future self and the realm of unconditional health, Lauren eventually fleshed out the entire song and recorded it with her band.  Calling it “Funeral”, she dedicated it to anyone going through an immense change in their life.  (It’s so good).

 We’ll go out of the episode on the song, so be sure to stick around to the end.  And then check out the music video of “Funeral”,  which can be seen here.

 Find Lauren at laurenmarcus.com and @laurmarcus on Instagram.

Hope and fear play a huge role in our lives.   In fact, they are prime motivators and affect almost everything we do.  However, both hope and fear are future-oriented and when we obsess about either one, we lose sight of the present moment.  In addition, we often forget that hope and fear are not separate, that one invariably accompanies the other.  We hope for a particular result, and we fear that it won’t happen. Or we fear a particular result and hope that it doesn’t transpire. 

Thousands of years ago, an Indian philosopher and Buddhist teacher, Nagarjuna, presented a teaching on the “Eight Worldly Concerns”, a set of four dyads of hope and fear that still hold meaning for us today.  In this episode, a public talk I gave in Los Angeles in March of 2020,  I use his teachings to point out both the benefits and pitfalls of relying on hope and fear for our actions, and also offer several ways to overcome our incessant reliance on them in living our lives. In truth, hope and fear are simply mental fabrications. When we forget that, when we are incessantly focused on what might happen, we are not fully present and unable to live in the light of truth.