Real Self-Care with Dr. Pooja Lakshmin

Have you ever put on a face mask, expecting it to solve all your mental health problems? 

 

That seems… unrealistic, but that’s what self-care marketing tells us: get your self care right, and all your difficulties will evaporate.

This week, Dr. Pooja Lakshmin breaks down what “self-care” actually means when we’re living in a complex, capitalistic world. It’s an exploration of grief, burnout, and exhaustion, and what it takes to care for yourself inside systems that repeatedly ignore their part in your suffering. 

 

After leaving med school to join a wellness group that turned out more cult-like than liberating, Dr. Lakshmin went on a journey to heal herself.  Along the way, she founded Gemma, a women’s mental health organization, and wrote a book called Real Self-Care: A Transformative Program for Redefining Wellness (warning: crystals, cleanses, and bubble baths not included).  

 

In this episode we cover: 

• Why self-care doesn’t work
• Does looking for your own answers mean you have to do things alone?
• Accepting help as a bid for connection
• How Dr. Lakshmin’s definition of boundaries can help you practice real self-care
• The difference between eudaimonic and hedonic well-being
• How hope is different than optimism

Related episodes:

For more on systems that fail us and what to do about it: Rage Becomes Her (and by “her” I mean US) with Soraya Chemaly

A fantastic discussion of the “wellness movement” and what it means for chronically ill folks: Living with Chronic Illness: A Conversation for Everyone with a Body with Sarah Ramey.

 

Notable quotes:

“Hope is different than optimism… Hope is something you can build. It’s a practice. It’s a skill.” - Dr. Pooja Lakshmin

About our guest:

Dr. Pooja Lakshmin MD is a psychiatrist, a clinical assistant professor at George Washington University School of Medicine, and the founder and CEO of Gemma, the women’s mental health community centering impact and equity. She has spent thousands of hours taking care of women struggling with burnout, despair, depression, and anxiety in her clinical practice. Her debut non-fiction book, Real Self-Care: A Transformative Program for Redefining Wellness (Crystals, Cleanses, and Bubble Baths Not Included), is out now and available in e-book, hardcover, and audiobook narrated by Pooja.

About Megan: 

Psychotherapist and bestselling author Megan Devine is recognized as one of today’s most insightful and original voices on grief, from life-altering losses to the everyday grief that we don’t call grief. She helms a consulting practice in Los Angeles and serves as an organizational consultant for the healthcare and human resources industries. 

The best-selling book on grief in over a decade, Megan’s It’s Ok that You’re Not OK, is a global phenomenon that has been translated into more than 25 languages. Her celebrated animations and explainers have garnered over 75 million views and are used in training programs around the world.

 

Additional resources:

More from Pooja Lakshmin

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
When I first started on the faculty at George Washington University,
my mentor took me out for lunch and she was like,
coulda I have one piece of advice for you. You don't
have to answer your phone. You can let it go
to voicemail and then listen to the message and then
decide what to do. And that was an AHA for
me because that was like right after medical school and residency,
and at that time we had pagers and so it

(00:20):
was like, you know, your pager brings you answer it.
It's like this hyper vigilant fight or flight, you know
kind of thing. And I was like, oh, okay, your
boundary is in the pause.

Speaker 2 (00:32):
This is it's okay that you're not okay. And I'm
your host, Megan Divine. This week on the show, psychiatrist
doctor Posia Lashman on real self care, which does not
include bubble bass or crystals or any of the things
that get sold to us in the name of wellness
settled in everybody. All of that coming up right after
this first break before we get started. Quick note, while

(01:01):
we cover a lot of emotional relational territory in our
time here together, this show is not a substitute for
skilled support with a licensed mental health provider or for
professional supervision related.

Speaker 1 (01:10):
To your work.

Speaker 2 (01:15):
Hey friends, Okay, burnout is a big issue. Burnout in
your job, burnout in your relationships, burnout in the like
constant one more thing of daily life. Right, and what
is the one thing that always gets pushed as the
cure for burnout or other mental and physical health issues.
That's right, it's self care. Take time for you, have

(01:38):
a bubble bath, nourish yourself. Now, I am clearly being
snarky here because I do actually like many of those things.
But this idea that, no matter what is wrong, self care,
preferably of the bubble bath and scented candle's variety, is
somehow the answer, rather than like you know, actually addressing

(01:59):
the conditions that are having you feeling exhausted and burned out.
This is a really big problem in the wellness industry,
this tendency to oversimplify and sidestep the core issues that
actually need attention. This week on the show, doctor Puja Lakshman,
author of the book Real Self Care and founder of GEMMA,
a women's mental health community centering impact and equity. Now

(02:23):
long before she wrote a book on the problems with
self care. Doctor Lashman was a burned out, overwhelmed medical doctor,
just finishing up her residency, the life that she'd built
for herself, her marriage, a career in the medical field.
All of these outward markers of success were beginning to
feel toxic and unsustainable. Now she tells the story, she

(02:46):
says she blew up her life. She left med school,
got divorced, and joined forces with a women's spiritual wellness
community dedicated to women's empowerment through sexuality and orgasm. And
that worked for a while, and then she realized she
had traded one oppressive, punitive, restrictive community for another. The

(03:07):
wellness movement was just as toxic as the medical industry.
And on top of that, she realized that she'd used
a focus on wellness and empowerment as a way to
avoid her own grief and her own depression. And that's
what a lot of people do, right when things get hard.
We look for something that promises empowerment and freedom. The

(03:28):
problem is, obviously, that you cannot wellness your way out
of grief. You cannot wellness your way out of stress
or burnout or toxic situations, or even just a life
that doesn't fit you anymore. Bubble bass and chanting mantras
are not going to fix it. So one more time,
Pousa left the life that she'd worked so hard to build.

(03:50):
And when she left, she felt depressed, suicidal, and just
adrift in the world. And what she found in the
time after she left that wellness community and really sad
in the truth of her life and her own needs,
was that the answer wasn't in leaving her profession as
a psychiatrist. It was using her position as a woman,

(04:11):
as a doctor, and as a person of color to
explore the oppressive systems that keep us burned out and isolated. Now,
we cover a lot of territory on today's show, including
why simplistic wellness movements can never fix what's wrong, why
boundaries are the secret to basically everything, and what real
self care care that acknowledges and addresses the systems in

(04:34):
which we live is a wellness movement we can all
get behind. Now you will get a lot more of
Pusha's story in her book, Real Self Care. So if
you're listening and you find yourself saying, like, wait a second, wait,
what happened a few times in the show, be sure
to pick up her book Real Self Care wherever you
get your books for the whole story. Now, one last

(04:55):
thing before we get into the show. A brief content note.
Doctor Lashman uses drowning as a metaphor for emotional overwhelm
a number of times in the show. If you have
lost somebody to a water related incident, Hi, me too.
Common metaphors can be a lot. All right, onto my

(05:16):
conversation on Real Self Care and the systems we live
in with doctor Pusha Lakshman. Okay, I am ridiculously happy
to have you here with me together today. We have
been rambling before we started officially rolling, and just like
sidebar thing everybody, I had to make myself focus on

(05:37):
the questions that I have for Poosha today because we
have so much in common and so many good things,
and I love her so much even before we get
started with this conversation. So anyway, all of my gushing aside,
I am so so happy to have you here today
in this space with me.

Speaker 1 (05:55):
I am so excited to be here with you, Megan,
Thank you so much for having me.

Speaker 3 (05:58):
Now.

Speaker 2 (05:59):
When we were getting set up, I said, I don't
like to ask sort of the traditional repeated questions when
somebody has a new book out, And I'm going to
break that rule just this once, because you start your
book with what you call a snapshot from a traumatic
and transformative time in your life. It's not just the

(06:19):
story that you tell in the beginning of your book though.
Like when I was doing my research on you, I
was looking at your website, which is gorgeous, by the way,
and that story is actually really prominent on your website
as well. So since you start there in so many places,
it feels important, and I wonder if we might start
there with what happened, yes, but also why it felt

(06:40):
important to center that particular story.

Speaker 1 (06:44):
Yeah, I'll start with sort of the what. So we're
all on the same page. So right now, in twenty
twenty three, I am thirty nine years old, and I
am a psychiatrist. I specialize in women's mental health. You know,
I take care of patients. I wrote a book. I'm
like a professional person that is vaguely normal. But about

(07:05):
a decade ago, in my late twenties, I blew up
my life. So up until that point, I had sort
of lived kind of like the cookie cutter Indian girl
one and a half generation thing. My parents are immigrants
from India and my dad's a doctor, and so it
was like I did all this stuff. I followed all
the rules, you know. I went to an Ivy League college,
I got good grades, I was valed victorian. I went

(07:26):
to medical school, became a doctor, got married, and then
I was in my second year of psychiatry residency at
a prestigious program, and it was kind of like I
checked all the boxes and I was like, Okay, now
I'm allowed to be happy. How do I be happy? Right?
It's actually funny. At that time I was reading Greshien
Rubens The Happiness Project, right, Like, I was literally like

(07:48):
I were happy happy right, yeah, and like a narrator
like it didn't work because I had designed my whole
life based on other people's values. And that was the
personal bit. The professional bit was that I was training
to become a psychiatrist, and I was in the system
where you know, naively, I went into becoming a doctor

(08:08):
thinking that I was going to be able to help people,
and I found that the problems that people had in
their lives were largely above my pay grade in that,
you know, I could prescribe zoloft, I could prescribe psychotherapy,
but I couldn't solve the housing crisis, the cost of

(08:30):
living crisis for an unhoused man that comes into the
VA and needs housing, or a woman who has like
three PhDs and is at home raising four kids and
feels stuck in her life, and you know, she's not
able to be employed outside the home because she doesn't

(08:51):
actually have the work experience, right, and the job market
won't account for that, right. All these sort of like
structural barriers that you can in therapy. You can get
treatment for your depression or anxiety. But when the world
is so deeply broken, and when our government and our
systems aren't built for taking care of actual human beings,

(09:16):
I felt very let down, and I was really angry
because I felt like I was like sort of sold
this spilt goods, Like if you follow all these rules,
then you'll be happy anyway. So I just broke it all.
I blew up my marriage. I moved into a wellness
commune in San Francisco that was focused on female orgasm
and sexuality and meditation and spirituality. I quickly after that

(09:39):
dropped out of my residency, and I spent two years
with this group and professionally. It was really transformative for
me because I got to work at the Wretgers Neuroscience
Orgasm Lab where they put people in fMRI machines and
look at their brains. Only one of two labs in
the whole world that do this, so that was really
cool and I learned a lot during that time. But

(10:00):
what came out by the end of it is that
I realized that I was just running away from my
problems and that there's just as many inconsistencies and hypocrisies
in the quote unquote spiritual world as there are in
mainstream medicine. And ultimately, you can't outsource your problems. You
can't outsource your decision making, Like you just have to

(10:22):
do the hard work in your own life and there's
no shortcut to that. So I left the group, and
I was really depressed, nearly suicidal, you know, went back
on antidepressants. Was so privileged and lucky to be able
to get back into therapy and have access to a
psychiatrist and all these things, and then did face like

(10:43):
the hard, really really hard thing of coming back to medicine,
sort of having to admit that I had failed and like,
here I was crawling back, coming back to being a doctor,
and then building my career, and then you know, fast forward.
I graduated residency, came on the faculty at George Washington University,
this women's mental health practice, started writing for The New
York Times, and like that's how this book, Real Self

(11:04):
Care came about. Second part of your question, why do
I focus on that or why do I put that
up front? It was a really deliberate decision for me.
Part of it is defensive in that it's kind of like, hey, look,
this is it. This is a story, like right, Like
it's a wild story. I've been in psychoanalysis, Megan. You

(11:25):
know this, but your listeners might not. Psychoanalysis is the
really hard core type of therapy where you're on the
couch and the analyst is behind you. I've been in
psychoanalysis for seven years. My analyst actually is retiring in December,
which is very sad. I had to grapple with the
fact that I was a physician with this group, and
I when I was very deeply entrenched in their dogma,
like I was a proponent. Right, that's hard and sucks, right,

(11:50):
And so I think part of it was like I
just want to acknowledge that, but I think the next level,
and probably the more important one, is that I've had
to do so much work to bring compassion for myself,
and that every single person that knows about this time
in my life, all my friends that stayed with me,

(12:11):
and then also like new friends who learn about it,
no one is ever like oh my god, wow, like jeez,
They're all just like wow, I kind of understand. I
kind of understand why that happened, you know, like that
kind of makes sense. I think that there's a lot
of snark around like wellness culture, and I get that,
but I also think that, like we need some compassion

(12:33):
because it it happens to smart people. And the reason
that it happens too is because we're not finding solutions
in the places that are supposed to be giving us
the solutions. So there's a reason, right.

Speaker 2 (12:48):
Yeah, Can I jump in for one secare?

Speaker 1 (12:50):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (12:50):
Because I think there's something.

Speaker 2 (12:51):
Really important here. And if people haven't read that whole
story or read your book yet, but you totally should
because it's awesome. I want to pull one thread here,
and like the summary is so like you did everything right,
as you said, and you know everything that a good
immigrant person is supposed to do in med school and

(13:13):
all of these things and studying happiness and getting really
disillusioned with the systems that you encounter from the inside, right,
Like you don't always see the machine when you're outside
of it, but when you're inside of it, you're like,
holy crap, Like I can't fix what's really broken. And
what's broken is not my patient, it's not my client,
it's the systems they're working in, right, And so that

(13:36):
disillusionment to me is this I'm gonna put words in
your mouth here, so you correct me if I'm wrong,
But like there is a longing for connection and community
and realness, like can I address the root of what
I'm seeing show up at my patients and my clients
in my life? Right? And I think this longing for

(13:57):
realness is what makes a lot of people dive into
quote unquote wellness communities. Two things that I want to
pull out here. One is you said that, like your
experience in this wellness community is sort of like hot gossip, right,
Like it's this really tabloid could be this like really

(14:19):
tabloid fiesta talking about this, And I really love that
you claim it and you own it. And you put
it front and center, because like the things that we
put front and center, they don't have fangs to them
anymore if we're talking about it in like real, human
centered ways. So one, I love that, and two I

(14:41):
love what you just said about bringing some compassion to
people who find themselves fleeing one system and jumping into
the arms of another, just to find that it's the
same toxic system with flowier robes.

Speaker 1 (14:59):
Right.

Speaker 2 (15:00):
So those I think those two pieces. One that like
what I hear in that story from you, and one
of the reasons that I wanted to lead with it
is like, there is this longing for realness, and sometimes
we fall into holes longing for realness, only to find
out that these are just as fake. And so I
there's something about community and empowerment in that story, which

(15:24):
is one of many reasons why I love how you
center that that longing for like realness and community. Does
that feel accurate for you or am I telling my
own story and study yours? No?

Speaker 1 (15:37):
I think that's right. I think, and I think in
particular the realness. I think the realness is the seed
and then the community, and that's sort of the meaning.
And then the interesting bit is that how it can
get twisted, right, and you can think that you have
that and then come to understand that it was not that.

(15:57):
And for me it took years. That's there even really
know that I did not have it. I left the
group devastated, right. I didn't leave the group making them
the bad guy. I left the group devastated, right, And
then it took years of years and years to really
understand what was going on. So you know, in how
you describe that, Megan, the thing that stood out to

(16:19):
me too of what you said sort of jumping from
one oppressive system to another one. And the reason that
I think that that happens is when you skip the grief, right.
I think I wanted to skip the grief, right. I
didn't want to feel the grief, but it came right.

Speaker 3 (16:36):
It always does, that's what it want, right.

Speaker 2 (16:40):
Yeah, how does that grief show up for you? I
love how you just frame that, like we skip from
one system to another system as this like a solution
to the grief we fail, or the pain we feel.
But you can't bypass that stuff because it will come back.
What's that grief thread for you?

Speaker 1 (16:58):
Yeah? You know it's interesting because I think for me now,
the way that it's showing up is in being an author,
like this whole this is my first book, right, And
we talked a little bit before we started rolling about
what it feels like to be an author launching a
book in the world. And I think the way that

(17:19):
I'm holding that grief right now is in this understanding
or trying to make sense of, like how do I
put real self care out there with the understanding that
a self help book is not going to fix all
your problems? Right, This is not a panacea, This is

(17:40):
not a matter of kell. This is just a beginning
of a conversation. Right, This is just a very micro
step of the conversation and acknowledging that and then also
being able to hold obviously all the work and heartache
and stress that goes into the endeavor of creating some

(18:00):
thing and knowing that you're just kind of one person.
But I think the way that I think of it
now is that almost like the grief is almost always
with me, for better or worse. What I took away
from that time in my life is that I wanted
to be somebody who could talk about these larger systems

(18:25):
and could talk about women's mental health and wanted to
be able to reach people outside of my office or
my zoom room. Now, so that means by definition, I
have to be working with these oppressive systems, whether we're
talking about media, whether we're talking about capitalism, right, just
all this stuff. So now it's just part of my job.

(18:46):
In some way, it's a different part of my job.
I kind of feel more in touch with it, Like
it's less of like a huge dark pit and more
of just like obviously at a much lower volume, but
it's just kind of like there in different ways.

Speaker 3 (19:03):
Yeah, I mean it's like it's it does.

Speaker 2 (19:04):
I mean, it's like it gets all of you, gets
a seat at your table.

Speaker 1 (19:08):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (19:08):
Yeah, right, And if.

Speaker 2 (19:10):
You are going to do this work of being a
voice for better or worse in a wellness industry, a
mental health industry, a whatever it is industry, that it's
only real if you're also doing the work. I love

(19:30):
that you said a self health book is not going
to solve systemic problems. And it's also not going to
solve grief. It's not going to solve overwhelm, it's not
going to solve unequal burdens like all of these things.
But there's something that I want to pull out and
what you said I have. There's a line that I
have highlighted in your books, one of my favorites, and
it says, if it's somebody else's answer, it can never
be your solution. That idea that is really really common

(19:53):
in the wellness speaks sort of self help world of
all of your answers are within Sometimes the way that
I hear that or interpret that is you're on your own.
There is no help for you. Don't go to anybody else,
don't lean on anybody else. The answers are within you.

(20:15):
You figure it out. Having been a child who was
like encouraged to become everything, but given no tools to
figure out what everything could be. That whole message of
the answer is within you. You don't need anybody else
to find it. Feels mean hm m m. That sort
of seems to be like the antithesis of what we

(20:38):
might be looking for in our questions, which is a
sense of community and connection and companionship while we're looking
for answers, right right, yeah.

Speaker 1 (20:47):
Because in some sense these questions that we're asking, or
that you know, the searching is also a bid for connection.

Speaker 3 (20:56):
Say more about that searching is a bid for connection.

Speaker 2 (20:58):
I love that. Can you say more about that?

Speaker 1 (21:00):
I was giving a talk yesterday and we were talking
about why it's so hard for women in particular to
accept help, Like you feel like you can only get
help when you're drowning. If things are fine and your
neighbor or things are like maybe not fine, but they're like, yeah,
you're okay.

Speaker 3 (21:14):
Right, under control, under control.

Speaker 1 (21:16):
Right, And your neighbor says, hey, let me drop off dinner.
You're like, no, no, no, it's fine, I got it.
It's okay. We don't need the handout, right. What if
instead you interpret that offer from your neighbor as a
bid for connection. This is your neighbor saying, hey, I
want you to be part of my village, right, I'm
offering a gift so that we have this connection. So
I was thinking, there's this, there's a parallel process there around. Hey,

(21:40):
I'm struggling in my life. I'm like looking for answers
in one way or another, and I'm reaching out to
my support system to kind of get some tools. And
it is about connection. And so when somebody says it's
all inside you, you can experience that as a rejection, Like, yes,
It's true, it is inside you because ultimately you do

(22:01):
have the answers, and like we're humans, we want to
be learning and growing in connection with everybody else and
in a community. So I think that's very true. And
I think like so much of this kind of like
self development work, if that's what we call it. I
don't know, I hate that word.

Speaker 3 (22:20):
Sure, but let's use that for sure.

Speaker 1 (22:23):
So much of it is learning how to navigate relationships
and interpersonal spaces, right, and even in real self care,
Like that's where we're talking about boundaries, self compassion, values, power, Right,
It's all about in relation to the people that you
care about or the people that you're responsible for, and
then how do you navigate your needs versus somebody else's

(22:43):
or your wants and someone else's and then what happens
in that in between space. I'm on a thread here,
but I think that when we center it on you're
the only one who knows. And when that's the language
that we use, I think that that does come across
as cruel and could be like need as isolating.

Speaker 2 (23:04):
Now, yeah, it's such a contradictory message, right, Like all
of that sort of wellness language around those two ends
of the spectrum, right, like reach out and get help,
feel connected, like have these authentic relationships, but also do
it all yourself and don't look at anybody else for
the answers and only you note like, Okay, which one

(23:26):
is it?

Speaker 1 (23:27):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (23:27):
Which one is it? I love that you brought boundaries
in here, because boundaries are one of my favorite things
in the things in the entire world. A conversation about boundaries,
and like, boundary work is relationship work, and relationship work
is about that. Yes, all of the answers are mine
and they are in me, but we also need connection
and relatedness and sometimes we need lights in the woods,

(23:51):
right to show us where we're going, Like there's there's
so much in there and what There's this whole section
in your book about boundaries, And the question that I
have for you about boundaries is like, what is it
about boundaries? Claiming a boundary, stating a boundary, making a
boundary that feels so dangerous to us a lot of

(24:13):
the time?

Speaker 1 (24:14):
Great question? Can I first share my definition of what
boundaries are to me at the end? Okay? Awesome? So
when I talk about boundaries in the book, I give
an example of the little aha moment that I had
with boundaries. So it was this has been in twenty
sixteen when I first started on the faculty at George
Washington University. My mentor took me out for lunch and

(24:36):
she was like, Poja, I have one piece of advice
for you. You don't have to answer your phone. You
can let it go to voicemail and then listen to
the message and then decide what to do. And that
was an AHA for me because that was like right
after medical school and residency, and at that time we
had pagers and so it was like, you know, your
pager brings you answer and it's like this hyper vigilant
fight or flight, you know kind of thing. And I

(24:56):
was like, oh, okay, your boundary is in the pause.
You let it go to voicemail, you pause, and then
you decide. You can say yes, you can say no,
or you can negotiate. A boundary isn't always no. A
boundary is the pause. And then sometimes it's the front
desk and they just have paperwork and it's like, oh,
will come at the end of the day. And sometimes
it's a patient that you know, someone who I know

(25:18):
if she misses a day of her stimulant, she has ADHD,
she's gonna like, that's gonna be bad. Let me call
in the refill, right, You use your judgment, right, So
that's the boundary for me. The boundary is the pause.
I think it's uncomfortable because in that pause, as women,

(25:38):
you feel every the other person's feelings, right, You feel
their disappointment, you feel their anxiety, You feel that, and
then you feel your own anxiety. You're bracing. It's like
the waiting, the slowness, and then having to actually feel
that you might let somebody down and not meet their expectation.
And then after that, if you you say no, or

(26:00):
if you do negotiate and have some questions, then of
course is the requisite guilt, right, and then you have
to sort of deal with that. But you know, I
think when I'm sort of teaching about boundaries, I always
like to remind people that with boundary setting, there's two
parallel processes. There's the actual operations of communicating the boundary,

(26:22):
which we know kind of like the best practices for that,
like be clear, be direct, don't over explain, YadA YadA YadA.
But the other side is the other person's feelings, and
you can't look to the other person to take care
of you. You have to have a separate lane, whether
it's like a therapist or a trusted friend, or you
know someone else that you can go to hold that piece.

(26:45):
You can't look to get permission and care from the
person who you're setting with the boundary with, especially if
that person is someone you've never set a boundary with before.

Speaker 2 (26:59):
Yeah, and boundaries like boundaries go against cultural conditioning, especially
for women around I have needs that might not match
your needs, or I don't like what you're doing. And
there's something that I teach a lot when people are
going through usually grief related to death. You know, if
somebody asks a question like a personal detail, like how

(27:22):
did they die? And sort of the internal process we
go through is like it's impolite to tell them none
of your business, right, even though I'm uncomfortable answering this
question and this relationship does not warrant that level of detail.
I am going to override my own needs because this
is what's expected of me. There's something in that act

(27:47):
of even before you voice a boundary, recognizing that your
needs have value, right, and that you're allowed to take
up space. So you wrote part of learning to set
boundaries is internalizing the fact that you do have limits
and that there's nothing wrong with that. It's such a
simple sentence, but it is such a foundational thing that

(28:09):
we're taught, especially as women, as like your needs, whether
you're grieving, whether you're just living your life, whether you're
like deciding whether you want to go to med school
or not. That in order to put a boundary in place,
you need to value yourself enough to recognize that you
have needs in the first place. I feel like that's

(28:30):
really the root of what you're talking about when you're
talking about self care. And this works within systems, which
I love that you attack. This works within interpersonal relationships,
this works within loverships, like this works in everything. In
order to truly care for yourself, you have to believe
that you're worth caring for. So how does that almost

(28:54):
that requirement that in order to care for yourself you
have to believe that you're worthy of care no matter
what is going on in your life.

Speaker 1 (29:01):
Like.

Speaker 2 (29:03):
What does that look like from where you sait? Maybe
not necessarily in your own life, but like that framing
of this work, Like I feel like, Okay, I'm going
to get lost in myself here, but like that that
pause to use your language that you just used, that
pause being the boundary to me, that pause is this
ongoing practice of valuing myself enough to know that I

(29:25):
deserve to find out what I actually want so that
I can then say yes, no or maybe yeah.

Speaker 1 (29:32):
You know. The funny thing that as you're describing all
of this, I'm finding myself wanting to loop back to
grief because when I do this work with patients, grief
is one of the first things that comes out. And
I mean like little g grief, but like when you

(29:54):
kind of get it and take it in and you're like, oh,
I deserve to give myself the pause. I deserve to
take the time to stop and think and feel. The
first thing that comes is like, Wow, how many years
have I spent not doing that? And like how devastating
that that can feel. You know, most of my patients

(30:17):
are somewhere between late twenties to like early fifties, right,
so it's a big range. But like whether you're in
your thirties or whether you're in your sixties, there's still
that grief that comes with when you understand like, oh
my gosh, I've spent so much of my life putting

(30:37):
myself at the very bottom of the list. I think
like that that's the thing, actually that I see a
lot of Hey.

Speaker 2 (30:54):
Before we get back to my conversation with doctor Pusha Lakshmin,
I want to talk with you about getting help inside.
Pusha and I have spent a lot of time talking
about finding support that actually serves you, and honestly, it
is not easy to find, especially if you're looking for
somebody who understands grief. We get a lot of messages
from people wanting to speak with me directly, and we

(31:16):
used to say no because I simply didn't have time.
But now we are saying yes for a limited time
and a limited number of people. To apply for one
of the grief consultation spots on my calendar, send us
an email at support at refuge in Grief dot com,
or use the contact form at megandivine dot co. And remember,
if individual work with me is out of reach or

(31:37):
that waiting list gets too long, you can join me
every single month for a live Q and A at
Patreon dot com. Backslash Megandivine. You can join me every
month for a live Q and A at Patreon dot com. Backslash.
Megandivine details on both options for skilled grief support in
the show notes. I've spent so much time lately talking

(31:58):
about my phrase is the everyday grief that we don't
call grief. And this is a really good example of it.
It's like, as you start to become aware of how
much of your life you have lived for other people
and not for yourself, there is immense grief in that, right,
all of those wasted years, all of the things, all

(32:19):
of the life you haven't gotten to live because of
this stuff. And this is why, like I say that
all self work is grief work, Like all work that
you do for your own self development involves grief.

Speaker 1 (32:34):
I am on board with that. Even with self care,
it's like, you know, you have to first understand and
recognize that the systems have let you down, and then
also in the values bit of it, making the hard
choices of like well what am I really going to
prioritize what's really important to me? And there's going to
be things that you have to let go, right, And
there's always costs to boundaries. Right. The pause, I think

(32:59):
is available, but the no is not available for everybody.
And even if the no is available for you, there
will be a cost, whether that's financial, emotional, and there's
grief in that.

Speaker 2 (33:11):
I love what you just said is that the no
is not available for everybody. Tell me what you mean
by that.

Speaker 1 (33:18):
I guess I think of it in terms of my
own life experience, which is kind of in this rigid
medical system where you for so many years you feel
like you don't have a choice. You have someone to
have a head of you that says you had got
to be two in rounds at five am, Right, that's
what you gotta do. There's a patient that needs X,
y Z, that's what you got to do, right. And
so you might have no's available to you in the future, right,

(33:40):
But in the current present tense, if you want to
stay in that machine, which again that's a choice, right,
But do you have student loans? Right? How much of it?
And I've talked about this publicly before. I didn't have
student loans, and so that was also something that enabled
me to say no and leave. If I had had

(34:02):
student loans, I wouldn't have been able to make that
choice and write like that would have looked very different. So,
and you know, when we're talking about like race and identity.
When a black woman says no in the workplace in
corporate America, she's going to be penalized more than a
white woman. Well, right, all those things are true, and
so that's that's what I'm kind of speaking to when

(34:23):
I say no is not available for everybody. But I
do think the pause like the pause is, and so
you can take that pause and then understand why you
can't say no. And I'm not saying that that's fair.
There's going to be grief with that.

Speaker 2 (34:39):
Right, there's so much in what you just said. We're
going to get into systems in a second, because I
know we've mentioned that a lot, and some people might
be like, right on, taken down the machine, and other
people might be like, what the heck are you talking
about with systems? So we're going to get there in
just a second. But I love that you just said
the no might not be available, but the pause always is, right,

(35:03):
which is a really cool way of looking at this.
When I'm teaching and talking and helping people figure out
how to get their racist uncle to stop making racist
comments at the dinner table, or how to get their
sister to stop trying to set them up on blind dates,

(35:23):
when it's only been like four months since their husband died.
Like when we're trying to get somebody to stop doing
something that makes us uncomfortable, there is a cost to that.
There is a cost to a boundary, and sometimes that
cost is too high. Sometimes you do need to bite
your tongue. But making that a choice for yourself understanding

(35:44):
in that what I to use your language, that pause
right to say here is a thing that I do
not want, that is not in my best interest? What
is the cost benefit analysis to speaking this right now?
And is it worth it?

Speaker 1 (35:59):
Right?

Speaker 2 (35:59):
You want to state a boundary in a situation that
would be dangerous for you, And as you said, you
know for certain people, certain populations. You know, if you
are a black woman in corporate America, pushing back against
an inhumane system is going to cost you your job

(36:22):
or something right in more ways than somebody else might.
So that sort of cost benefit analysis is really important.
And this is such a comp like all of this
stuff is so complex to me. This is why these
simplistic wellness movement things can never fix what's wrong, because

(36:45):
there's just so much other shit involved. There's so much involved,
Like you cannot just choose yourself and have like be
one and done. That's not always true, right. One of
the things that I love about you and love about
your work in all the ways that it shows up,
is like you ignore knowledge the systems in which we
all live, and that nothing is as easy as the
bumper sticker wellness movement wants us to believe, or that

(37:09):
the sort of pathology based medical model wants us to believe.
Like they're both wrong. Human life is so much more
complex than that. And I love that you are not
only willing to speak into that gap, into that middle place,
but do it with something for us to hold on to.

Speaker 1 (37:29):
Well, I'm blushing right now. I don't know if you
can tell, but thank you, Megan, I really I appreciate it.
And and you know, I think that's that's like this
tightrope that we're trying to walk, because I think it's
so easy to veer into cynicism and hopelessness.

Speaker 2 (37:45):
Right.

Speaker 1 (37:45):
Either you're like want in that woo woo wellness like
love and light, or you like, you know, listen to
NPR and like are you know the world as shit?
To be fair? I do listen to NPR, and I
love MPR, but like I think there's a middle ground,
and so like the work I think is to how
do we say as much as possible, never one hundred percent,

(38:08):
There's always going to be days where you just all
you can do is doom scroll, But how do you
stay in a position of agency? And that's one of
the reasons that I also founded GEMA, which is my
women's mental health community where we're trying to kind of
bring the systems in and talk about the systems and
educate about social determinants of health and also provide real

(38:29):
coping skills. And so whether it's like through our emails
or whether it's the what's app threads or that we're doing.
We've just started doing courses for clinicians and for mental
health providers, right, because I do think that part of
this is like actually educating people in our field, like
having a nuanced approach and understanding so much is broken
on the outside but there also are It's not a

(38:51):
panacea like the wellness world says it is. It's actually
it's just an invitation, right, Like we've been talking about here,
a bid to connect with yourself in a different way,
a way to engage with a realness. Right, we're talking
about this realness right, and acknowledge that that's messy and
it's usually not linear, right, just like grieve Right, It's

(39:14):
like it's messy and there's layers and you have to
take a leap of faith too because you don't know
really where it's going to go. You just have to
trust that it will kind of lead you to the
next place.

Speaker 2 (39:32):
Yeah, I love that you brought up Gemma because it's
in my notes to link Gemma with a different kind
of community, right, or a different kind of community building,
a different kind of connection personally, professionally, as leaders, all
of these things.

Speaker 3 (39:46):
It's like it's that false.

Speaker 2 (39:49):
Binary, right that you either are like in the medical
model trying to fix stuff through that direction, or you're
in the whole wellness world and you've got answers over
here and if you don't follow them, then you're a fail.
Your failure inherent on both ends of that binary. And
I think one of the things we sort of think
is like, well, crap, if there's no if all of
the solutions are in me as we talked about before,

(40:11):
and there's no one answer, then there are no tools,
then there is no structure. And honestly, if your choice
is between a broken system that has some answers and
some structure and some things for you to do, versus
the great gaping void. You're gonna choose the faulty structure.
And again, like one of the things that I love

(40:32):
about what you're trying to do with a book, with
your speaking and with Gemma is like, okay, how about
option three, which is the messy middle of the spectrum,
not a binary, where your truth is the truth that
matters and only you can say what that is. And
this is true in grief, this is true in relationships,

(40:54):
this is true in all parts of life, even the
joyous parts. Like only you know what that is, but
that doesn't mean you're alone in it. It doesn't mean
there's nothing you can do to access it, or to
support yourself or to have guiding questions for it. And
to me, like if I had a soundtrack, this would
be like when the clouds part and the you know,
the angels sing, like this is this is our role

(41:15):
as providers, This is our role as as writers in
this space, as leaders in this space, is to be
like there are other people swimming in here with you,
and there are things that you can try, and there
are tools that you can try. You aren't in this alone,
even while at the very same time all of this

(41:37):
is yours. I love that there's a word in your
book which is totally related to this. You wrote about
you demonic well being, and I hope I just answered
that correctly, you demonic well being. It's really rare for
me to come across a word I don't know because
I'm very much a smarty pants. So that was exciting.

(41:57):
If I have to go look up a word when
I read, I'm like, oh, I love this person forever. Okay,
So you tomonic well being. First of all, I want
you to define that for everybody who did not go
rushing to their to their stuff to look it up
the way that I did. But how does that apply

(42:18):
to work, to personal life and to what we just
talked about about? That like messy middle thing where there
are no answers and you're your own answer, but everybody's
here with you, Like, can you summarize that for me?
Or can you? Can you no pressure at all? But
can you catch all of the balls that I just
threw it? You?

Speaker 1 (42:35):
Yes, let me try, Let me try. So you Tomonic
well being is in contrast to hedonic well being. Okay,
So hedonic well being might be a term that people
are familiar with that is like pleasure centered happiness, right,
things that feel good. Whereas whereas you tomonic well being
is meaning centered well being. So that's a life where

(42:56):
you are connected to your purpose and you'll or activities,
your choices line up with your internal values, with what
matters most to you. When so you look at your career,
when you look at how you spend your leisure time,
when you look at how you interact with your family
or how you build your family, all of that, like

(43:17):
you're able to point to your reasons why, you're able
to point to what it means, you've spent time thinking
about that and deliberately choosing how you structure things in
your life. Again, as opposed to hedonic well being, where
your well being slash happiness is kind of focused on

(43:39):
experiences that make you feel good. Right, So like vacations right.

Speaker 3 (43:45):
Right, I love.

Speaker 2 (43:46):
There's something that you pointed out in the book where
you say hedonic which is happiness, positivity, and pain avoidance
versus you demonic, which is striving to do what is
meaningful even if it is hard to achieve, right, and
this idea that if you do everything right, you're gonna
have this pleasure filled, joy filled, always on vacation lifestyle.

(44:06):
But inherent in that is avoiding pain, running away from it.
And I think this is one of the one of
the false promises of the wellness movement, is that if
you do everything we say, if you do your jade
eggs and your facials and your mantras, then you will
be perpetually happy and perpetually positive. And if you're not,
then you're failing. Right and man baked into that is

(44:28):
the avoidance of pain. Yep, you're not able to feel
the stuff. Yeah, yeah, same, same, Like nothing is allowed
to hurt you if you are in your protective ball
of white light.

Speaker 1 (44:39):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (44:39):
Such trash, Such trash. There's something so much more real
about that. You'damonic, which is striving to do what is
meaningful even if it is hard to achieve, and inherent
for me, and that is like, Look, life has pain
in it, it has grief in it, it has ouch points, and.

Speaker 3 (44:59):
That is it's just the nature of life.

Speaker 2 (45:01):
And we can connect in that and we can work
with that and all of those things. Like I feel
like I should have something similar to that statement boiled
down briefly to tattoo on myself somewhere. Now we have
mentioned systems a lot, and I know we're rounding the
corner towards our time here, but I think this is

(45:22):
an important little piece to put in. You wrote that
self help traditionally does not acknowledge the systemic barriers that
women and people from marginalized groups face. We must shift
away from commodified versions of wellness, which continue to uphold
and perpetuate inequitable systems.

Speaker 3 (45:38):
Of power.

Speaker 2 (45:40):
Who I feel like we could do an entire other
show on systemic power systems and how they impact wellness
and health and all of these things. But there's one
piece of this that I want to pull out. So
much of your work addresses women. In your book, you

(46:01):
quote Sylvia FEEDERICI, who when asked to define the word women, said,
quote to me, it's always been mostly a political category.
I don't think that we can separate the wellness movement
from women and the women's movement, whatever that means. But
your definition of women feels a lot broader and more

(46:26):
inclusive than we sometimes think about. So can we can
you tell me how you use the word women, because
it's in your work so much and so often.

Speaker 1 (46:35):
Yeah, this is a tough one for me, I think,
because I think woman is sort of still the default word,
and we talked about this, We've talked about this internally
at GEMMA quite a bit, so, a women's mental health platform,
and it's sort of like, do we want to use
that word? What's the other word that we use? And

(46:56):
I think it's very easy also to get caught up
in the politics and polarizing nature of the words that
you use, when in reality, I think the solution is
more about the conversations that we're having and the dialogue
that we're having. And my co founder at GEMMA, doctor
Cally Cyrus, she is a black queer psychiatrist. She's just

(47:18):
awesome at everything, but particularly around this type of thing,
around like, well, how do we talk about stuff that's
hard to talk about right? And you know, when you
write a self help book, it's not usually a given
that you'll have a chapter that's about identity, privilege and

(47:38):
systems of oppression, which is one of the first chapters
in my book. And I think I really wanted to
signal upfront that I want to be as inclusive as
I can and that even in like the most sort
of like vanilla, if we say version of the word woman,

(47:59):
there's so many diff different shades of privilege. Right, Are
we talking about white women? Are we talking about brown women?
Are we talking about queer women?

Speaker 2 (48:06):
Are?

Speaker 1 (48:07):
Right? And then what's available to you when it comes
to resources, when it comes to choices, and where you
fall in that line. I'm not really answering your question here,
I think that, and that's on purpose because I don't
think I have an answer, right. I think it was
like I wanted to the state that it was hard

(48:28):
and like it's a question that I'm still working on,
and also like acknowledge that I don't want it to
just be a given. I wanted it to be something
that we think more about. And then I don't have
a better word yet. And so that's the one that
I'm going with.

Speaker 2 (48:44):
You are actually answering my question because a lot of
this work is about addressing the brokenness of systems and
the polarization of language and words and othering and all
of these things and not being able to see that
our grief, our joy, our losses, our wellness, they don't

(49:06):
all look alike, and we don't all have equal access
to finding the answers for ourselves and the labels that
we have, the systems that we have, we outgrow them
a long time ago, but we still have to use them.
In the book, you say you inclusively mean all people
who suffer under the oppressive conditions that have been typically
associated with the female sex, which includes queer folks, trans

(49:29):
and non binary people, intersex and age ender people. So,
you know, I wanted to pull this in because so
much of the language around self care, around wellness, and
even for me, around grief, Like talking to men about
grief is a really taboo thing for men to talk about.

Speaker 1 (49:48):
Right.

Speaker 2 (49:49):
We can't talk about self care, we can't talk about wellness,
We can't talk about personal agency and sovereignty without at
least giving a nod to the constructs that we interact with,
the systems that we bump up against the limits of language,
the inclusive, exclusive nature of words like it's just like

(50:11):
it starts to get really really mucky, which I think
makes a lot of people shy away from a lot
of these conversations, right because we start to be.

Speaker 1 (50:21):
Like a crap.

Speaker 2 (50:21):
I need words to hang on this and again coming
back to me so much of your work is about.
It doesn't matter if the language is messy, it doesn't
matter if there's not a clear solution. What matters is
that we are here together.

Speaker 3 (50:37):
In this mess.

Speaker 2 (50:39):
And there are some lamp posts, some light posts in
the forum very often of questions that will help you
and investigate this for yourself. What does inclusivity look like?
What does what does the system look like? For you?
Where are your pause points in your boundaries that are
available or not available? Where is the grief in the

(50:59):
life that you didn't get to have because you didn't
know this self care was an option for you.

Speaker 1 (51:06):
Yeah, yeah, And that's such a it's a much kinder
way to think about this conversation. I was talking to
somebody a couple of weeks ago who was you know,
admitted that she does reiki right, And I actually in
the books talk about how when I was pregnant with
my son, I went to do crany and sacral therapy.
I just really liked the room, I liked the woman.

(51:27):
I liked getting to lay on the bed with a
nice soft pillow. Right. So it's like, you have to
know what you're doing it for, right, And she was
waiting for me to condemn her and like just be
like oh my gosh, and it's like no, like let's
think more about it, Like what does it do for you? Oh,
like you're setting boundaries. You go once a week, that's
a specific time where you are unavailable for any work calls.

(51:49):
You are kind to yourself during that time period. I
don't know what's happening with like the actual energetics of
the reiki, Like that's a separate thing. But can we
do more of this? Like maybe it doesn't to be
the reiki, but the structure, the containment that you built
in your schedule for this, that's great. So you know,
we get a long way with curiosity, I think, and

(52:10):
I'm just trying to model that for myself too, like
just you know, as as and also in this space
of like providing more questions, providing new language, providing a
different way for folks to engage with their own minds
and think about their lives, but also not pretending that
I have it all figured out and like I'm some

(52:32):
sort of like zen person who's up on a mountain
like just like totally blissed out. No, not at all.
I'm on zoom calls and I am drowning.

Speaker 3 (52:42):
Also thanks, also thanks, It reminds me.

Speaker 2 (52:46):
It reminds me of where we started in our conversation together,
when we were talking about your time in that particular
wellness movement and looking back on it and trying to
have some kindness to yourself and to see the details
of that experience. Yeah, well, there's some problematic stuff in there,
but the longing and the containers and the space set aside,

(53:13):
like you were looking for something and maybe that wasn't
the answer, but the looking is important, and having that
orientation of kindness to self is really important. And thank
you for modeling that here in our time together and
in your book, because there's a whole section around kindness
to self, which is a whole other topic, because being

(53:35):
kind to yourself is one of the hardest things in
the world to do sometimes. But we don't have time
for that today. So I want people to go and
find your book and listen to you speak so that
maybe you'll get into it with them. But the last
thing that I want to talk about for us together
is a topic that you have written about, and we
will link to it in the show notes along with
everything else. But hope, my friend trying to end everything

(53:59):
on hope here, and I know that you've written quite
a bit about it. Knowing what you know and living
what you've lived, including what you're living right now as
a person inhabiting the author role in this way for
the first time, What does hope look like for you now?

Speaker 1 (54:18):
So you know, hope is different than optimism, right, Optimism
is like glasses half full. Hope is like, yeah, the
glass fight have a leak in it, but I have
the problem solving capacity to fill the leak. And what
I've learned actually at GW where I train and I'm
on the faculty now, is that hope is something that
you can build. It's a practice, it's a skill, and

(54:39):
there's actually reliable things that people who call themselves hopeful
turn towards. And so that's you know, your relationships, right,
we were talking about being in community, really leaning on
your people, like the people that you really trust. Problem
solving actually, like use that pretty frontal cortex helps with

(55:03):
hope because it takes you out of that drowning feeling.
It gets you into action. I know that's a little
bit counter to grief and allowing yourself to feel, but
sometimes that problem solving is a nice distraction, the little
bit of a life raft when you're drowning too hard. Right.
And then there's identity. And then I use the word

(55:25):
identity to mean, like, what parts of your identity really
have you feel like you belong So as much as
I as much as I've had a conflicted relationship with
being a physician, for better or worse, being a physician
is a part of my identity and it does mostly

(55:46):
give me hope. I love the qualifiers, but I think
another place is like if you're part of a spiritual community,
if you have a churst that really some really you're
connected to. Yes, that's relational, but that's also part of
your identity, and that helps with like sort of like grounding,

(56:09):
with reminding you that you have a place in the world.
So maybe what I'm pointing to you here is that
in this kind of conceptualization as hope as a practice,
what can you do to help yourself remember hope? For me,
a lot of that is tied to belonging right, belonging

(56:31):
to yourself, belonging to a community, belonging to these larger groups.
So the takeaway is it's something that you can embody right,
there's actual real things that you can do, like who
do you talk to? Who do you go to? Right?
What are your practices? All of that might not be
second nature. Right. What might be second nature is just

(56:54):
to sit there and doom scroll. But when you think
about hope as something that you can actually act, it
puts the agency back in you too, because it's not
just like, oh I feel hopeless, woe is me? It's like, Okay,
how do I go look for hope? What do I do?
Who do I talk to? What's a reminder for me?
Maybe I should get to that meeting. Maybe I should

(57:15):
go volunteer next weekend. Maybe I should take my kid
to the Science Museum because he you know, like whatever
it is.

Speaker 2 (57:22):
Two things that I love in that One is this
idea that hope isn't passive, right, and also that it's
not like some ephemeral, floaty thing that there are actual
it's something that we talked about earlier, right, like there
is no answer other than your own truth, and here
are some skills and some tools and some practices and
questions that might help you uncover that. And like I

(57:44):
just heard you say that hope for you sort of
falls within those same that same mechanism right, that it
is something that you need to own for yourself, and
there are some practices that might help you looking for it.
And the second thing that I love because this is
how I feel about it, and I'm biased towards myself,

(58:07):
but like that, hope is relational, right, It's not an
if then like endpoint thing, right, Like I have hope
in the world suddenly getting better. No, it's like, well,
the world is currently a mix of awesome and terrible,
and who is with me? And how do I draw
hope from my identity and my connections and my relatedness?
And I super super love that because I am all

(58:31):
about the relatedness. Now, I'm going to link to your
essay on hope that you did for Oprah Daily because
there's also a whole element that we don't have time
for today about hope and anger, which is obviously also
one of my very favorite things in the show, Notes everybody.
I'm also going to link to our episode with Shariah Somali,
author of Rage Becomes Her, because I think I don't
know if you know her work Pusha, but you and

(58:51):
Soraya have some really cool overlaps in so many things.

Speaker 1 (58:56):
I'm absolutely a fangirl of hers.

Speaker 2 (58:58):
She is the Yes, we love her if you're listening
to this, or we love you okay so much here.
There's so much in everything that we talked about, and
I love that, Like this is very meta of me
right now, But like so much of what we talked
about is complicated, right It's complicated. It's complex, and being

(59:21):
able to speak about that with skill is a work
in progress for all of us. So thank you for
picking up all the balls that I threw at you,
and I hope that I picked up as many that
you threw at me that we got. I'm going to
link to your book in show notes obviously, I'm also
going to link to Jemma. But is there anything else

(59:42):
that you want people to know about where to find
you or what you I don't know what message you
want to leave them with before we wrap up.

Speaker 1 (59:49):
Yeah, well, I'll just say thank you Megan for having me.
This was just such a lovely conversation. It was a joy.
It was a joy to be here for folks that
are listening. Yes, please buy my book. I'll say it's
super directly, Please buy my book. There's also an audiobook
that I narrate on Audible, so if you like to
listen to your books, that's available and check out Gemma.
We also have a substack that's called Therapy Takeaway, so

(01:00:12):
that's a nice way to get a free little weekly
dose of therapy in your inbox. Not therapy therapy, but
you know.

Speaker 2 (01:00:21):
Disturper notes, disclaimers, and substack is not a substitute for
therapy with a supervider, right exactly.

Speaker 1 (01:00:31):
Yeah, it was such a pleasure. Thank you so much
for having me, Megan, and I can't wait for the
next time because I know there will.

Speaker 2 (01:00:36):
Be there totally, totally will be all right. Thank you
so much for being here here on this show and
in the world and everybody. I know there was a
lot in this one, but I think that this is
one of those episodes that I super encourage you to
share in your friend groups, in your whatever your relationships are,

(01:00:57):
because there are so many starting points for interesting conversations.
And remember that the whole point of this show is
to encourage you to have these kinds of complex, complicated,
nourishing conversations in your own lives. On that note, please
stay tuned for your questions to carry with you coming
up right after this next break each week, I leave

(01:01:28):
you with some questions to carry with you until we
meet again. Now, you know, it really struck me in
my time with doctor Lakshmin was just how interrelated everything is.
I mean, this is how my mind actually works.

Speaker 3 (01:01:40):
I always feel.

Speaker 2 (01:01:41):
Like I'm looking for the puzzle pieces and how they
fit together. But the ways that spiritual bypassing and this
emphasis on the answers all being inside of you just
take care of yourself. Like how prevalent that is when
we are talking about grief specifically. It's literally everywhere. It
is baked into our ideas about health and resilience and
what is expected of us as support people when we

(01:02:04):
know that somebody's going through a hard time, right, we've
learned this thing that we're supposed to cheer people up,
encourage them to look within. It's all one cloth, isn't it.
I mean, it's why I talk about the stuff. It
doesn't just matter when you're grieving a death. It matters
when your life isn't feeling very good to you. It
matters when you're tired and you're feeling lonely. It matters

(01:02:25):
when you're feeling ground down by the weight of the world.
It matters on an ordinary Tuesday when things just aren't
going the way you planned. Shifting the conversation on what
real wellness looks like, what real self care looks like,
what real community and connection and support looks like. That's

(01:02:45):
really powerful work, wherever you apply it. Aspousha says, finding
your own edges and your own boundaries, giving yourself that space.
That is a simple, though granted, not always easy, way
of exploring the entire system, the entire puzzle. Right, if

(01:03:08):
you have to choose just one thing, spend some time
with those boundaries and what real self care and real
connection might mean for you. Okay, I can clearly go
on about patterns and interconnections and overlaps and all of
that stuff, but how about you what stuck with you
in this conversation. Everybody's going to take something different from

(01:03:31):
today's show, but I do hope you found something to
hold on to. If you want to know how today's
show felt for you, or you have thoughts on what
we covered, let me know. Tag at Refuge and Grief
on all the social platforms so I can hear how
this conversation affected you. Follow the show at It's Okay
pod on TikTok and Refuge and Grief everywhere else to
see video clips from the show, and use the hashtag

(01:03:54):
It's okaypod on all the platforms, so not only I
can find you, because I do go looking for you
can find you too. None of us are entirely okay,
and it's time we start talking about that together. It's
okay that you're not okay. You're in good company. That
is it for this week's show. Remember to subscribe to

(01:04:15):
this show and leave a review please. I have seen
a lot of great comments about the show on social media,
but there hasn't been a single new review of the
show on Apple Podcasts since season two. So I would
love it if you a post a review there and
keep doing it on social because I love to see
them everywhere. Coming up next week, Malkiadavitch Cyril. Now that

(01:04:39):
name may not be familiar to you yet, but if
you are the slightest bit interested in grief as a
grieving person or as a movement leader, as a human
being with human relationships, next week you are going to
meet one of the most brilliant people I have ever met.
Follow the show on your favorite platforms so you do
not miss an episode. Want more on these topics. Look,

(01:05:03):
grief is everywhere. As my dad says, daily life is
full of everyday grief that we don't call grief. Learning
how to talk about all that without cliches or platitudes
or simplistic dismissive statements is an important skill for everyone,
whether you're trying to support a friend going through a
hard time, or you work in the helping professions, or
you're a human being having a human life which is

(01:05:25):
not always easy. Get help to have those conversations with trainings,
professional resources, and my best selling book, It's Okay that
You're Not Okay, plus the guided journal for Grief at
Megan Divine not co It's Okay that You're Not Okay.
The podcast is written and produced by me Megan Divine.
Executive producer is Amy Brown, co produced by Elizabeth Fouzio,

(01:05:46):
Logistical and social media support from Micah, Post production and
editing by Houston Tilley. This season's intern is Hannah Goldman.
Music provided by Wave Crush and background noise provided by
my neighbor across the backyard fence who has been powerwashing
his house for the last three days.