Hey fellow genters, dozer spirituality with a twist. So we've been doing a very kind of jin and tantra bit of like mixology. We've been seeing what happens when you take the uh eccentric genius type psychologist Wilhelm Reich's ideas, especially his idea of the emotional plague and we've been combining that with things from Daoism and Chinese medicine to see what happens when we give a little shake, a little mix up to these two sets of ideas. We kind of give them a little blending. And uh today we've gotten to the point where we're going to be talking about the heart and the emotions of the heart. things like joy and bliss versus feelings like maybe depression or mania. So those kinds of things. Um and that'll be the next piece of what we're doing as we kind of explore all these different ideas. But before we get into it, if you could do all the things that people ask you like every single time you click on a video or whatever like this,

do it. Just do it.

Which is like, subscribe, share a video if you're into it, right? And uh that will bring a little bit more uh joy to all our lives. We all need a little bit more joy and it will help us have the joy of escaping from under the clutches and the oppressive powers of the dreaded algorithm and our tech overlords. Okay,

let's keep it real. I mean, the content that we are making is not standard. This is not the normal thing, right?

For better or worse, that's true.

For better or worse, that's true. So, if you're listening to us, thank you for for listening and understand that my guess is you are kin to us, right? You are you are in a similar mind state of Eric and I and what we find interesting and what we are passionate about. So, I'm sort of breaking the fourth wall, if you will, at this moment. So, hi. Hello. You know, bing bing bing. Hey, you. That's right. Um,

but that puts you probably in a very small percentage of the population. And what I mean by that is that I think most people generally like for things to be very clear, very concise with nice tight boundaries. Therefore, it's very uh easy to delineate what is or is not, you know, good for me, what is or is not on my path, whatever that path might be. The much more interesting and far more difficult path in my opinion is one where these boundaries are way more blurry and that line of like what is good and not good. Yes, of course there still is lines of good and not good in terms of other, you know, making other people suffer, you know, whatever. Um, doing, you know, evil things, right? Harming others, harming yourself. I'm not talking about this, right? But it's this like ethically dubious stance that stands outside of the cultures need for control that often is um passed on to us, you know, from our families and everything else that people try and intentionally break these habits, break these chains, break this cycle and try and think for themselves. and not just think for themselves in terms of what is good or not good, but what is actually going to be beneficial for your life and not just for your work life, but for your personal life, for your energetic life, and if we can even dare say your spiritual life. And so, this is what interests us and this is what, you know, turns us on, if you will. Uh, and this is what we're sharing. So, if you're here with us, you know, we always say it, but thank you for listening. And uh we want to challenge things that you think because we are always being challenged for things how we think and we share what we find interesting.

Yeah. I think all this stuff is just adds more fuel to the old spiritual fire, right?

Yeah.

The inner heat as the tantrics might say or the dowists might say, right? Build up a little more inner heat and see what gets burnt away.

Yeah. All right. Well said. Um brief preliminaries. If you haven't heard the previous episodes, I'll do this in the briefest way possible. The emotion emotional plague idea from Reich is this really fascinating concept. On the one hand, it addresses like what happens when a culture goes completely off the rails. These ideas get toxic like a plague and spread through a culture. So for us, this has been part of our uh 2025 America what the hell series. We've been trying to figure this out, right? Sharing ideas to help each other figure it out. And William Reich talks about this in a little book called The Mass Psychology of Fascism. Uh but there like what you were talking about Daniel on a more post person personal level this is always also really valuable things to consider the emotional plague and related ideas because they're relevant for people who are looking for things like freedom or authenticity or dare we even say enlightenment right real psychosspiritual growth on a personal level because overcoming these things the emotional plague or you could say conventional truths or mundane conceptions and appearances if you want to be a tantrica or a da ist or a zen person or maybe like a little sufism in your life. Uh you know this is what you need right? This is what everybody's going to need in order to like be able to grow and develop oneself. So probably I would argue whatever true and genuine kind of path of self-discovery you're you want to be on some way or another this question is going to come up right emotional plague and how do you transcend it? All right so well you said like part of what you wanted to say with this already so we're on to the fire phase unless you have more you want to add to this. No, I think the last thing I I used to not believe this, but I I actually believe it more now than I think I ever have. And that there are far more people who are seeking now than ever before. And I don't mean that by sheer volume for our rational thinkers, which is me. I'm speaking to the rational part of my brain that needs to hear it. Yes. There's more people now than there ever have been before. So there will be more of everything now than there ever have been before. Yes. Captain Obvious, let me get my cape out. Uh, but I mean percentage-wise, I believe genuinely that there are more seekers now percentage- wise than there ever have been previously. And I say that not because I have any uh, as they say, evidence to back this up because I don't know how you'd even qualify uh, one who is seeking versus one who isn't because I think everyone's seeking something. But I think you understand what I mean uh by people who are you know seeking I say that because the amount of control cuz you know uh guest we used to have on the show uh Mary Kay Ryan used to always say everything has a light and a dark side to it. In reality everything has a light and a dark side. And so as more people are seeking the light, if you will, there is going to be an equal and opposite reaction towards that motion. And the amount of opposite reaction to that now on a mass scale is very high. The measures of control and surveillance and influence i.e. propaganda is higher than it has ever been. And it is across all sort of platforms. It is amongst people. it is, you know, whatever that means to me they're pushing against something. And, you know, regardless of where people fall on the political spectrum, they could still be seeking. It's a is still this is a possibility. you know, um it would stand a reason in my mind that the press back against these people seeking outside of society is growing so much so that the mechanisms of control have to become even stronger. And so that's how I uh come to that conclusion.

Yeah. I mean, I wonder what I think about that. I don't know. But in any case, what I do think is that like you know the opposite of like kind of a spiritual freedom is like authoritarian practices, right?

Yes. Yes.

So, and the authoritarian practices are in a struggle. It's, you know, they're not obviously going to like totally seize the day. So, it means there are people who are resisting.

And I think if you're doing that, you're doing it from a spirit of like I want individual freedom and I want individual expression. I want individual creativity,

you know? And so I mean from that point of view there's a real struggle right and if it was all like all the all the momentum was just on one side then the struggle would already be over but it's not it's happening because there's enough people going wait a minute

no I don't I don't want you know uh I want I want space and freedom and again individual development cultivation and so on. There's enough people saying that. Yeah. So yeah, that's a this is a very optimistic episode for the firef face for us in the heart because in Chinese medicine, the heart and dowoism, the heart is associated with the fire of life, right? The passion and the energy and the creativity. All right. Well, okay, good. Seems good. We're all set up to go into it. Uh and you and I are feeling probably a little fiery. We were both on retreat over the weekend and we had a good time. So our joy and fire is doing pretty good today.

Uh good timing on this particular thing. Auspicious timing as the Tibetans would say very auspicious. Um and actually you know what bliss day was just on Sunday and I don't think we talked about that but we had a massive Sunday

for our retreats. [...] it didn't occur to me that was wheel of bliss day.

There we go. Okay.

And that was true.

That was true. I told you there was a portal open.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We were talking about that you know it was a very we were just off mic. We were talking to like like uh before we started recording about just what a powerful day that was for both of us. We both got our our our associate hats on straight and really kind of like got in the spiritual mojo really good. So, all right. Yeah. Yeah. I had forgotten about that.

Brilliant.

Oh, there's there's truth in these things.

Yeah. Damn right.

Start taking a ride and you'll be surprised where it'll take you, right?

Find there's all kinds of like weird pathways that you didn't know were even there. Mhm. bruise in the universe. Okay. All right. So, the heart dowist thought, fire energies or fire phase energies, however you want to call that from uh the positive side of this and it's really like the dominant emotions. So, it's very interesting. We've gone through these different organs and their different energies and emotions and this is the one where there's the most interesting thing because they really talk about joy or if you want to get to the like even higher frequency joys right you can call that even bliss right so these are the positives of these things so I suppose part of the question for me when I was thinking about this was um you know what's the status of this within the culture right do we have a problem around these emotions and for me what always comes up with this is I studied when I was back in grad school, I was doing my my TCM education and I was studying with a a Chinese medical doctor and Dowist. Uh I'm very grateful to um for him spending time trying to help me and a couple of other students back in the day which was Master Shangley Wong, Dr. Wong. And his observation was there's kind of a problem of joy in the culture. and he was surprised, you know, and this maybe has come up on the episodes before, I don't remember, but he had come from uh China in the 1950s, you know, older guy, you know, already established person by the time I met him with his practice around Chicago, but trained in China, relocated here. And growing up in those times in China, it was like incredibly chaotic, you know, and I think even within his own circle of people, there were betrayals and, you know, all kinds of toxic stuff that happens when you have a a system collapsing, right? And so much chaos, right? So he lived through that. And I think when he was coming here, he thought, well, all the people here should be pretty cheery and, you know,

should feel good. And he was like painfully shocked. And it's a weird question as to why, but he definitely like thought, okay, this is a real problem. You know, there's a kind of like an epidemic of a certain kind of joylessness. And you know, maybe it's the first place to start exploring why we think that might be. We might have different reasons around this. Uh that's the purpose of this episode to talk about this. And then how do you recapture the joy once you sort of start diagnosing the problem?

And I I kept thinking like, well, there's a lot of like burden that people feel.

They feel financially burdened. They feel professionally burdened. A lot of times they feel like burdened kind of like on a day-to-day basis, you know, and that those burdens are kind of like a killer of joy. They do lead to some of the other emotions we've been talking about, feelings of, you know, anger and frustration that we talked about in previous episodes or feelings of despondency and sadness and grief like we talked about the episode we recorded before this one. But that was sort of what resonated with me at the time. Of course, we can explore other things, too, but I I'll throw it back to you, Daniel. What do you think about Dr. Wong his observations and all that.

You know, I I don't do it too often, but I have to give a uh a shout out to my uh former partner. Uh so hopefully she's listening, but I doubt it. Uh but if you are, hey, hey, how's it going? Uh and she was asked uh something a question a while back. They said, "What would you do if you could live forever?" And she said, "I don't want to live forever." And they said, "Well, why not?" She goes, "Because I'm going to have to continue to work and continue to produce and I don't want that kind of responsibility forever."

Yeah. Yeah. And I just thought, you know, I thought that was a really profound observation and I think that is in the heart of what you are saying is that in in particular in this culture and this has been mimicked or mirrored or repeated by my teacher Andre who said it's very difficult to be here because you have to constantly make money. You have to pay this. There's so many things that you need to pay for that you're essentially more of a battery than you are of a person, you know. So like you know hearkening to the matrix or something like this and that kind of drive to produce it puts a lot of pressure lots of pressure and then you know we're fighting inflation and rising costs and you know societal uh you know upheaval and things like this. It just sucks the [...] joy out of the damn thing. You know what I mean? So

yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And there's like this fear component too and you can kind of like scratch the surface with people and I feel a lot of times it's like hidden underneath like the decisions that people make and we can explore it a little bit more as we go but you feel like there's not a lot of like support to the floor right if that floor gives through you feel like man where's the bottom if I start falling.

Right. So you can get yourself to some position where okay I feel stable. I feel a little stable, but you sort of know like it's not that solid. Like the struts and the supports aren't necessarily holding this up that great. And if one of those, then the whole thing might go bang and like fall down. And people feel it, right?

Even when you're in that position of stability, you know?

I I saw a chart, forgot where I saw it, but it had a list of all these countries and the amount of uh annual bankruptcies from medical reasons. uh like Great Britain, Spain, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Italy, Germany, donuts all the way down. United States 50,000.

Oh, wow. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Like, yeah.

The bottom that you're talking about. Yeah. There there I mean there it is. It's right there. I mean, and you know, that could happen to any, you know, it's a it's a car accident, which is not even, you know, something you can control. That has nothing to do with if you went to McDonald's yesterday or not. That's just did some idiot run a red light.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And maybe they hit and run you and maybe they're gone and now what's going to happen with that, right?

Yeah. Um Yeah. That feeling, you know, sometimes, you know, I stage these things in my mind. I sort of talk about like different places where people at you know and some people are struggling to pull themselves up to that point of stability and that's a certain problem to have in life right and then but then even if you get to that place of stability man you just don't feel like this floor is that solid like we've been talking about and then you know you feel that threat and I don't know if like for someone coming like you know again my teacher Master Wong Dr. wrong coming that you know you don't know that till you're here right you don't feel that kind of insecurity it's a very particular thing to feel

and I don't know if people from the outside can really look at that you know so I I thought about that a lot like over the years and I've known people who come from other countries and initially they're like woo they feel good and they realize oh my god this is really fragile

you know my life is like surprisingly fragile so I saw that too you know it's interesting because maybe it's like you and your your Daniel Capricorn energy we sometimes talk about because you but like I think if I go back to the very first episodes you know we were recording during the pandemic and it was always this thing about like the work problem too that's been a repeating thing

you know how do you get yourself into some position and I mean that's what your your former partner

said so eloquently right

this problem

so yeah um then different levels of this some parts of this uh you know to my mind can you know and I think we would agree with this clinically can be really deep depressions, right? And those have a very unique quality and obviously we have a depression problem like in the country, right? That uh is epidemic on some level. Um and those can be really deep. But I think the other more subtle point would be like what's sometimes called like the apathetic depressions

where people feel kind of like okay, I'm going through the motions. I'm going through the motions and yet you know that you don't have that spirit of like joy there. you know, I'm able to get through it on a daily basis,

but you just don't feel that devivve, if you want to be French or something. You don't feel that fire,

right?

Um, and you know, one of the people that was a big influence for me in like the Chinese medical world, Dr. Leon Hammer,

would use like the line from like Henry David Thorough, this feeling of like lives of quiet desperation,

you know? So, you know, you're not if you're depressed, that's a certain kind of problem, but also there's this kind of flatness problem, too. Okay, I'm through the motions, but I don't feel that that uh fire energy kind of joy and happiness. I know when you think about that. Yeah.

What's the name of that guy? Flat Steve or Flat Phil or

Flat Stanley?

Yeah, there you go. Flat Stanley.

The kid thing where he mails himself and I do know that, but I didn't tangent it. Yeah, Flat Stanley.

Right. So, there you go. Here's like an old kids book where like he mails himself through the mail.

People like he does. Yeah. Flat flat standing. Uhhuh. Yeah. Yeah.

Um I suppose on the other side of this can be the feeling of uh unhealthy aspects of this. So that could be feelings of like manicness or hyperactivity kind of things that people can feel um when you get sort of this opposite polarity. You don't feel the you know it's not so much like even that you're lacking joy but you feel kind of frenzied or kind of manic. Now, if you have real diagnosible mania, that's one thing obviously. But, you know, this idea of being in kind of these hypermanic states, you know, where you feel like you're always in this kind of overly young, revved up kind of stuff, you know, but that's not entirely enjoyable either,

right? You rev up those energies and, you know, if you get to the physical part, your heart might be racing around and you feel like you can't sleep and you're restless and agitated and these kinds of things from the opposite point of view. Mhm.

So I mean these are kind of like polarities that will kind of pull you away from the joy thing and like different directions. You got more clinical thoughts on that or

you know that that is just reminding me of like a serotonin hit, right? That maybe people don't experience that kind of mania in their life, right? But if we look at like what are the what are the nitrous boosts of our day? Caffeine for sure, one of them. Um

revs up the heart, right? Exactly right. Yeah. Uh you can look at um Rolin. You could look at uh what's the other one that people like to use study with for focus? I forget what that one's called.

Oh um for some reason it's like it's not hitting me, but yeah.

Yeah. Right. Um you know, Viveance uh you know Yeah. Know whatever. Yeah. But you know, stuff for like ADHD kind of medications that are just basically like high dose.

Yeah. Speed essentially, right? And then um dopamine.

So you know what you'll get from scrolling on the phone,

social media interactions and things like this. Short-term bursts are our little addictions.

You know, um this to me is like a a very practical microcosm of this kind of mania, if you will, that definitely affects the heart.

Yeah. I feel like I'm less maybe dopamine negative than sometimes the way it's presented in the culture, but it has to be directed towards true exciting interesting experience, not just like funneled off, not to have that yang energy funneled off into like rando, you know, anxietydriven kind of behaviors or something like

At all.

And that's what it was. Two medical folks who couldn't come up with that [...] Sorry folks

with the tip of my tongue, but I was like,

"Yeah." Yeah.

Um, at all, duh. Yeah. Which like does act like it just jacks the heart rate up and kind of discombobulates things internally, right?

But these are these are um these are methods for dealing with flat Stanley. You know, these are methods for dealing with flat affect. These are ways in which that you could introduce um elements of boosting the heart literally sometimes in the case of caffeine but these other ones as well right so there's an acknowledgment of a underlying sadness of a lack of heart fire on one hand and therefore there's all these antidotes on the other hand that people don't even probably realize that's what they're using it for. They're using it to like stimulate excitedness in order to try and stoke joy, but really you're you're you're putting a a highpowered fan on a very dimly lit flame.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's uh Yeah. You're giving like a a whoo to something that really the more logical thing would be like, "Let me turn up the lighter."

Right. Yeah. So, it's a can of hairspray on a lighter, you'll get a quick pop.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

But you're it's going to be burn the can of hairspray is going to be burned out.

Yeah. And eventually like the lighter like you know is going to you have to turn up the lighter at some point or another or put more juice into the lighter, right? That's that's going to have to play itself out.

I wish I could I wish I could ask the audience. I hope they understand the analogy that we're making currently. But and if we're not I'm going to make it just a little bit more clear. What I'm saying specifically is that people's hard fire is generally very low. Generally low in life because of the reasons that we've been talking about, Rob, a joylessness, infinite kind of work, a more flatter kind of an affect. And the opposite side of that is a very quick kind of nitrous boost to your flame as if we were to take uh hairspray to a lighter. It's bright. It's quick like coffee, like aderall, like rolin or whatever, you know, some kind of upper, some dopamine, social media, phone interaction, something like this are are general addictions, the gambling, you know, especially for for young men. Now, um these kinds of things are are a quick burst, but they are not sustainable a at least not in the way that you know you would think they are for your own sense of edifica, for your own sense of joy, right? And they're not sustainable in terms of their willingness to burn out your wallet in the process. Like you cannot purchase joy and I hear people I can hear the the audience being like, "Well, what about what about you know?" Yes. I mean, do things make you joyful? Of course. Who doesn't love to get a new blank? But that unl that that the response that you get from that new blank is not going to be the same response that if you get a new blank tomorrow and it'll be even less the day after that and the day after that till eventually the new things ain't going to do it for you. And you need more and more and more kind of stimulus in order to to wake up that hardfire. But it's not going to be woken up through external mediation. It never will. Not for any length of time anyways. Well, okay. So, the next thing I put on Well said. Yep. I get it. Right. I suppose like the next thing I put on the docket because I was thinking a lot about with my retreat over the weekend, I was thinking a little bit about Roomie, one of our favorite folks for this little podcast, certainly like a spiritual important figure for me. And I was also thinking about our last episode and the whole impact of like interpersonal conflict and relational conflict on the heart too. I think deserved a comment and a mention. So I just put it in my jottings down for what to talk about here. And uh you know this is like a deep subject matter. is probably one of my pet subject matters that I think about a lot which is like how do you make healthy relationships with people and save the heart sort of the pains of like heartbreak and separation and all these things. The basic principle in like sort of the daist Chinese medical world will go you open up your heart you make a connection with like they'll say even like your spirit translates through your heart right you open up the heart you make a connection with the heart spirit of another person you have that kind of bond and entwinement and then if uh those relations you know go ary and people get heartbroken there's a collapse of the heart more inward on itself in kind of a self-protective way Right.

Sometimes in the Chinese medical and dowist world, this will be like the paricardium kind of rushes around, you know, the wrapper physically around the heart, you know, protecting the heart physically, but also the thing that prevent like tries to protect the heart psychologically, right? And so, you know, to like sort of try to like shield and kind of um hope with some of those uh more difficult emotions, the paricardium goes into hypervigilance, right? Sometimes in the Dowist or Chinese medical metaphor, this is like the ministers rushing in to try to like help the empress. We all rush into the center and things collapse into the center as opposed to going outwards in this yang expressive way. It turns inwards, right? And the paricardium and the heart collapse in themselves and things get very tight, right? And uh I was thinking about this because we had um episodes we did on sadness and grief and this subject matter came up and I was like it's really a similar set of questions when you start thinking about the heart, right? like heartbreak and how that affects people and like to my mind I think this is just a very powerful question that I think you have to ask yourself in terms of your life and then you know how these questions are handled like within the culture itself but let me throw it back to you Daniel first before I go along you got stuff to think about with that

well I I don't remember if I'm making the story up or not so but I could share it anyways I think there was a friend of mine who actually got parag paricarditis which is the inflammation of the paricardium after he uh found out some information about a girl he was dating that happened to her or that she did when she was in high school. That would be very I don't want to give the details away, you know, but let's just say she probably was a bit more promiscuous in high school than some would like and they were dating in their early 20s and and he found out about what happened and I think it involved some of his friends. This is before they started dating and then and then he found out about it and then probably within the next month or so ended up getting paricarditis

which is kind of like

clinical. Yeah.

Yeah. Which and you know is uh you know an inflammation or or can be infection sort of if you will of the paricardium which Eric just said sort of wraps around the heart. So sometimes you can get uh very sematic responses to even little even heartbreaks that you wouldn't imagine like no one they didn't break up then but it it elicited a a physiological response.

Yeah. And there is the idea and I forget the Japanese word for it. I always do like it's ts u b ko or some other combination of things but it's like broken heart syndrome where that actually the physical change of the heart is like observable right if you do like an MRI or something like that you can see that the shape of the heart is distorted or something because of this pressure right and yeah I think clinically you see patients like this I remember again similar to what you were talking about with uh your friend there was a patient he always comes to mind with this but he had like had gone into like even the emergency room cuz he was worried. He thought am I having like heart pains like in a way that's I should have concern about my cardiovascular health and uh you know what you might call like a sternal pain syndrome was diagnosed like the big bone in the center of the chest uh and uh when you really like took it apart what really had happened was he had gone through this divorce

that had been very painful for him and it was like

two years passed but he obviously wasn't over it you know it was he was still as you would say sematicizing like feeling that pain of those events, it was still there for him. And it was like, okay, so this is our Chinese medical diagnosis, right? You know, somehow you have all this tension locked up in this, you know, very, you know, deep kind of part of yourself like in the heart itself and in Dowist Chinese medical thoughts so connected to the mind and the emotions,

Especially those of love and connection.

So, you know, anyways, like you know, that's a kind of a not unusual thing to clinically see, right? M

you know or like any of us in our lives probably to experience too right I usually like kind of share this with students and I can't remember if it's come up in our episodes or not but I had sort of the first love of my life Susan and we were together from our teens into our like kind of mid20s and I can remember at uh the time when we were separating I didn't know anything about Chinese medicine never occurred to me in ever that I cared about Chinese medicine didn't think about acupuncture didn't give a [...] about this at But I can remember like being at uh my folks house for some reason and they were out of town and I was going through this separation and we had done it in a way that a lot of like people uh do and people maybe in the age do. We dragged it out as long as possible to be as painful as it possibly could be. So we did that. You know it happens. But I can remember like staring in front of the mirror, 20some year old me, 24, 25year-old me, and just feeling all this pain through my chest and what later on I would learn are acupuncture points that are related to the paricardium and the heart

and just being like and like trying to dig my nails in. And I literally had the thought like cuz I grew up in the same house with my grandma, I thought I should just take one of her knitting needles and just like I didn't want to hurt myself. I want to just open this up. So, I wasn't trying to like stake myself or something,

but I was like thinking I would just jab this knitting needle into these points and try to break this open. And it makes me laugh every time because I didn't think of acupuncture even for like a second even with that. But intuitively, you know, we've a lot of us have had those experiences. We're like, "Oh my god, this really I can feel the physical aspect of like we obviously we all know we call it heartbreak, right? So anyways, I thought that was an important thing to bring up too. And um and I don't know what that means in terms of our whole cultural relationship model, but you know, there's something in that that I think is important to like talk about. And you know, this is such a a weird set of subjects because there's so many ways that people want to handle their personal lives and relationships. We all think about this in different ways. uh for me I think really influenced by my spiritual beliefs tantra and roomie and the things that I think are important uh we've had episodes about this before I'm really interested in what Esther Perau calls the uniqueness model of interacting with people where the main thing is to really find the people that you deeply emotionally connect with those always don't have to be like physically intimate relationships but you want those connections in a certain sense it's finding the people that you karmically close with, you might say karmically entwined with and you foster those relationships and you know my critique and I know Esther Pel's kind of an interesting person. and she's one of our relationship experts we reference right

here and there you know um that you know that's sort of the philosophy I tried to take out into my life and at the same time I realized that like this isn't the dominant paradigm of our culture our our culture is much more what Esther Esther Pearl calls a uniqueness or an exclusivist culture

yeah exclusivist where you know your main thing is just to like all your all your eggs are in the basket of this one person and you can't spread your connections around and again not even just physically or sexually or something even emotionally that's a little bit taboo in the culture and uh again I I've wrestled a lot with what I think about what that means. I feel like in some ways I'm in the similar headsp space to like an Esther Pel um where like there's some kind of problem I see within that. Now, we'll all address this problem and try to see what we think it means in our own way, but you know, I could say that this has been a, you know, we all have our own, as they say, like zen coons in our life or zen riddles are things that life presents us as things that we wonder about.

Yeah. Very common statement, Eric. Everyone says that.

Yeah. Uh, well, hos Roshi, I really held back from snapping back at that, Daniel. I took a deep breath. I was inclined to snap back. But see, this is love of the heart for each other. Okay. So, the thing is a Zen riddle is one of these like uh what's the sound of one hand clapping? They have these Zen riddles, right? And uh my Zen teacher in my 20s, Hosak Roshi, said, "Yeah, I can give you a riddle from the Zen tradition that's sort of your own a spiritual puzzle to meditate on, right? You use it as a tool." Um but and I was going to explain this, Daniel. I just didn't get a chance but in any case um you know he says the ones that are come up from your own life are the most powerful ones.

So my point is I think this has been a big thing for me to have to think about because this question of uniqueness is sort of to the core of uh what I think is important in life and I'm you know kind of uniqueness person and a non-uniqueness culture. So, I'm looking at it kind of from my own perspective and we all have our own perspectives on this. Um, but I the thing that like I I wonder about and again we don't we think about these things each in our own ways even between the two of us Daniel but you know a lot of these relationships the problem is is they're going to blow up a lot of them

right and then they're going to blow up a lot of times in ways that are really ugly

or really damaging. And when you start thinking about that relative to the heart, you know, you get a lot of people who are going to have these things of like, oh man, I need like self-p protection. And then, you know, kind of like the imagery, the the paricardium rushes in like the ministers to like protect the empress, right? Everything rushes to the center in this way, in this protective way. And and I don't know what to think about that, but I wanted to bring the subject matter up because I think a lot of people might be walking around stuck in these sort of like heart semihe heartbroken things. You know, it can be like the acute version of that you'd say medically like your friend from back in the day with the paricarditis or something.

But you know, the whole idea is that this paricardium could kind of close and kind of do this self-protective thing and it gets kind of stuck, right? And then it's hard to let those kind of expressive heart type energies come back out again. It's a real problem. So, any let me throw it back to you. What do you think about all that stuff?

Yeah. No, of course. Well, I mean, we've, you know, worked on this together in clinic when I was in school.

And it's it's definitely it's out there for sure. Sometimes it's more palpable than other to to some people than to others. Uh, and I could say that like, you know, I I want people to understand we're not specifically talking about relationship as in like romantic relationship that this can happen amongst friends. This can happen amongst family. This could happen even without anybody else being involved. You can have your heart broken over not getting into a particular college you want to get into or you know it doesn't necessarily have to be romantic um idea ideas that you had that are different now you know or even some uh situations in life a loss of a you know a loved one or you know friend or something like this loss of an identity you know loss of your country for some people. All of these things can totally cause some aspect of yourself to rush in and protect some other part of yourself. And if there is not space for grief, right, this is where the the the grief comes in. This is the the metal element that we talked about a few weeks ago. If there is not a space for grief, then you don't let it go. You actually don't grieve it. You don't move on. And that that paricardium stays protected around the heart. You stay shielded. And as time goes on, that shielding becomes harder and thicker and much more difficult to work through because you start to it starts to affect your mind, right? So, um, and Eric, you know, you could pop in anytime you feel like, but the the mind and the heart are very similar characters, same word in in Chinese, shin x i n. And they're they're saying they're describing the same thing. So, they're describing mind and heart is the same. And so, as this paricardium protects the heart, right? Protects the most sensitive feeling part about our being because the heart is all about feeling. That is where the mind lies. In many times people say, oh mind, body, spirit, right? We have a mind, body, spirit approach. Well, they say brain, mind as in brain, body as in body and or heart as in body and then spirit is the you know sort of I don't know you want to say esoteric view of something that cannot be named. But in in this case they're talking about shin and the heart same as shin is the mind. So when something affects the heart it affects your mind. So as years of unprocessed grief go unprocessed, you begin to change your perspective and make decisions based on a overprotected and overguarded heart that are made from fear, the water element that we talked about uh a week ago or so. And so now you have this kind of like weird cycle that you have essentially like, you know, pieces of a broken heart held together by a very uh toughened exterior that you really need to grieve actually. And doesn't necessarily have to be like this big grandiose thing, but they need to be acknowledged or at least you need that the space to acknowledge them so that you can live in a space of connectivity, of sharing your light, if you will. and not being moved back into the water element or allowing the water element to control the fire where you're living you're you're deciding and living in a more fear-based place. So, this is kind of like and I and we see this really all the time. At least I I feel like I do.

Yeah. I don't know like I'll say I got so many things within this range of conversation I find so fascinating about all of this. Mhm.

I almost say like I don't know what it means if you look at human beings, right? And uh you know how human beings bond from the heart, right? I don't disagree that you have to be able to grieve things out, but I also don't what it means if you have like a whole way of life where there's these constant choppings and these bonds are constantly being broken. You know, I don't know what that means in terms of even like saying I'll just keep grieving these things out and grieving these things out and grieving things out. I don't know the answer to this, but I really wonder about it very deeply because I think there is something in the culture of like bonds get broken really easy in this culture. People chop.

You know, people cut and they cut

seriously, right?

And I don't know what it means in terms of the heart mind connection, you know, that part in heart mind and shen or spirit things with people. I think it's a culture that on some level there can be real deep bonds between people that I think you know are mutually agreed are deep but people will still cut you know for whatever the reasons that they have and I don't know what that means if you keep doing that over and over and over again what that means in terms of the what that does to the heart and the shen you know and I guess if you even get like in terms of like human history or something you know you would really and again I again I think from a uniqueness paradigm. I'm putting on my uniqueness hat with this but you know there's like kind of two sides to the question. One would be like, you know, we have a culture that's very much built on the idea of like uh I'll be with somebody or I'll be with a group of people for a certain amount of time and if I cut I cut, right? And uh I think some of that I wonder to myself whether that's a bit naive to think that you can keep cutting these things without having an impact on the heart and the shen, right? Mhm.

You know, so that I wonder about um because you have things where there's real deep interconnectivity and almost like alchemy between people in the roomy sense and those relationships get lost and I don't know about that you know um and so you know that I question uh you know that kind of thing of like the constant cutting or you know the Esther Pel thing would be the opposite of that kind of the mating and captivity idea when she talks about romantic relationships where people are with the same person over and over again, but there isn't room to have connections with other people involved and then people go kind of flat, right, from that point of view. So, I wonder about those things from the point of view of like, you know, you're operating within like a structure or a system now, right? These are sort of the rules of the society in which we live. These are the rules in which you function. It's a system, right? And then you have to look at like, okay, so what are the ups and downs of this system, right? And that does connect you a little bit back to that emotional plague idea because when you talk about emotional plague, you're talking about social systems. So, I don't know. It's a it's a tough set of subject matters. I wonder about a lot. I can see again if I'm looking at from like my own kind of again, I like that uniqueness idea. You make these connections with people. I wonder on both sides of that. If they're constantly being cut, you're losing valuable connection with people and it's kind of heartbreaking. And like how often can you do that over and over again, right? That's kind of odd for a human being to do that again and again. That isn't the way people have always lived, right?

You know, remember what room what room said?

You break your heart until it opens. But, you know, no one's saying that's ideal,

There might be better ways of doing that, but I think he I when I think about him with that, I think he's being realistic,

you know, like you don't know the room story. He has this deep bond with like Shams of Trees, right? And they have whatever their profound connection is. And then the way the story goes, it's a not a socially approved relationship. And there's

even aspects of the story where maybe members of Room's own family like actually murder the Shamsa Tree to cut him off from this profound connection. And you know, Roomie is an inspiring person in the sense that he grows from that, right? He becomes this very profound being that we're still talking about hundreds of years later, right? 500, 600 years later or whatever it is.

But it's not the easiest way to roll up, you know.

No. Um or like you run the risk of things going potentially flat. That's sort of the more like longer term relationships and how do you keep that vibrant or something like that.

Anyways, I wanted to bring these things up because they're they're systems questions, right? These are the systems that, you know, we've evolved to function. But anyways, I think they're things worth thinking about, especially when you start thinking about like heartache, right?

Heartbreak. I mean, I think we all know people like,

"Okay, here's a six-year relationship. Here's a sevenyear relationship. Here's a three." And they just keep they keep getting cut over and over again. So, that's one set of problems. And then the other side being, okay, maybe I'm with the same person for 30, 40 years, but how do I keep my heart fire from going kind of flat? So, anyways, I think that relates back to the heart in kind of a profound way. So, I wanted to throw it out there. Mhm.

Um, anything about that more before we go on to maybe other factors real quick?

No, we'll go forward.

Okay. So, um, the things that popped into mind to me and these are all pretty tough subject matters. You know, in Chinese medicine sometimes they talk about internal causes, the emotion, the dowist idea that the emotions and how they impact the body and the mind, you know, and that interconnectivity between the two. uh they'll talk about external causes like infectious disease and uh if we look at our thing now we've been constantly speculating on what's going on in the now and some of this would be like sort of the co thing that swept through

and how many people had maybe weird kind of damage to the heart that happened you know because we all got so exposed to this bizarre thing

that did so much potential damage to the heart and we brought it up before I think like I can remember 2020 seeing some of the people who really struggle with COVID, they were sick for weeks and weeks at a time. They had a lot of heart symptoms afterwards and that was like not an uncommon thing.

Yeah. Well, heart heart and lungs,

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But, you know, like they'd go to like do their normal workout and all of a sudden they're having like tacoc cardia and palpitations like what happened to me? You know, that was definitely like 2025. So, you know, I've been trying to bring that up with the different systems we've been talking about as we're going through and that seemed like that happened to people too and there a lot of cases like that. And then the controversial vaccine question too, which we don't want to [...] deal with that past a certain point, but you know, whatever it is that around this whole set of experiences could have been damaging to the hearts of people. The idea is in the emotional plague and Reich's concept, what damages the body damages the mind. What damages the mind damages the body. So you can flip that script in two directions. And uh so anyways, it's worthwhile thinking about because a lot of this stuff is happening in the aftermath of these, you know, major historical events that we're living through. And it came up some episodes ago. I don't know what the I think you brought it up as a thing or I don't even know how it played itself, but like we don't talk about CO anymore.

Nope.

Right. It's all well that happened that you know, but all the stuff that that induced that sent like a shock wave.

Yes. the culture, you know, like in the Chinese medical world sometimes we talk about heart shock, a traumatic

event that was a trauma.

That's a trauma,

you know. And

I mean, if you talk about

lost and the fear that it induced and how the whole thing got so chaotic. I'm sorry. Yeah. Go ahead.

Yeah. Know talk about it with somebody now and you're going to get a a potent response, you know, one way or the other. you know, generally more conservative people are going to fall on the lines of like they, you know, the vaccines and blah blah blah, you know, and on the other side is going to be like the lockdowns, the people with idiots and, you know, all the death. So like regardless of what irritates you about it, we can totally you meet in the center and say like, well this was a traumatic event for sure. One that was not grieved at all, just brushed under the rug and blamed on somebody else and move about your day.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. However you want to like process those things through. And it was I can't remember when we did that episode. I don't know if that was like

We do episodes every year on on in the second week of March occupying one hour of our time to say

it's March again. Do we do it? I can't remember.

We've done it every year.

Oh, good for us. We keep bringing it back.

I I I'm not letting it go. I mean, it was a massive turn. That's probably the biggest event, you know, that 911.

Um, you know, because I don't know, you know, what else there would else in this lifetime? What else in this last 30 years

like 2008 was a big deal you know but

but but that but that was a big deal as it was a there wasn't a day you know there was you know I mean the market crashed on a day but that you know home prices were affected for like four years after that that's a long period you know the dot burst of 99 but again if you're not in the market you're feeling it but not re not like totally

disaffected 911 affected everybody.

Yeah. And you get to like co it was like the it rippled through the entire world. I mean in the United States for 911 and the it rippled out but this was like hey this is going everywhere.

And I guess that's your example of like whether you think of it as like sadness and grief or just the whole thing of like processing something through just what that means to process something through. This would probably be called like psychologically, psychosspiritually like unprocessed material, right? This thing hasn't been processed.

No,

it's sitting there just at the at the heart of things.

Oh,

at the core of things, right? Just there.

And I don't even know what it would mean like to have that process through even, you know, I don't know what you would even do because you have to come to some kind of it's not even an individual question at this point. It's kind of like what's the social reality around that? And we have no [...] social reality.

We can't come to some shared understanding of anything,

right? What's the acceptance?

Yeah. It's all fractured,

I mean, yeah, there's there's people who wear masks still that are not necessarily immune compromised. They just feel better wearing a mask.

I'm not going to say don't do it. If that's what you feel is better for you to do, then it's a free country. You go for it. You're not hurting anybody. Wear it. No problem, you know. Um, and people who are upset about vaccines and people who are upset about I mean there's heartache amongst all of the sides,

you know, everybody can agree that they are not happy.

And like again using that that little word like unprocessed or something,

right? No one has any consensus of like what any of that meant, right?

I don't know what that means within the society and culture when you do emotional plague. you can't come to some sh it's like getting through Vietnam or something you know and eventually say you know what this is how we think about this retrospectively

I mean I guess you could say the Iraq and Afghanistan wars so close it's like that you have to come to some consensus reality you know if you want to make a culture like a person right

yes

yeah okay so I think yeah it's worthwhile that we talk about that when that pops up and we've been trying to do it in these episodes I got One last thing. We don't have a lot of time left, but I think I'd be remiss if I just didn't bring it up. We have a like a podcast called Jin and Tantra. Some of that's going to have to do with sexuality. And I think we're in that situation of having to address questions of like sexual violence, sexual abuse, at least

bring that up, right? Whenever that's appropriate, too.

You know, one of the things when you talk about the heart, um, is that, you know, the heart and the emotions connect into your human sexuality, too, right? And if you're a victim of sexual violence of some type or another, sorry, my voice getting a little tired at the end of this long day. I've been talking a lot. But um when you get to those kinds of things, it tends to kind of like cut that connection.

Between like the heart center, you might say, and that's those parts that connect into sexuality and positive ways. It puts a cut, you know,

whether that's, you know, sexual violence, sexual assault, and you know, the different ranges of what this goes through. So I think that had to be mentioned in a jin and tantra context because that's something obviously that's so important and it kind of like from Reich's point of view it kind of like creates a cut too. He talks about that you know it it isolates sort of this more more spirit mind as you were saying shin center the emotional openheartedness center that gets cut off from sexuality and obviously part of like the tantric world is trying to heal that problem. a conversation with a student with a couple of people on campus in different ways about this and I don't want to even say what they said verbatim but you know this whole issue of like we're in the midst of like the Epstein thing dragging on and on and on right was still no resolution to that and still with that undercurrent of feeling like you know a lot of people will feel who can empathize with the kinds of people who went through those kinds of situations right

uh women who've been victims of sexual violence or children who's been victims of sexual violence and still like it won't get definitively resolved and we won't we can't get the consensus reality again of what that means so that you can start to feel like okay there's a healing that can happen within that it's unprocessed still using the language you were using right it's not processed

and if you happen to be an individual who's been through those kinds of experiences then you're like okay we still can't acknowledge on a collect ive level the foulness of this the you know the horrificness of this you know and like process this through now it just sits there right

and as far as emotional plague stuff goes well that's sitting there like a tumor or something that's like cancerous right it's just sitting there like a [...] cancer

and eventually you have to like excise it out

you know to heal it up so anyways I thought that was important to say something about right for our podcast yeah Yeah.

All right. That's all I had in the docket. Anything else you had, Daniel?

No, I think that's it. I think the um you know, one of the things to mention, you know, maybe in closing here is that like when when you have good heart fire and you're passionate about something that has a like like fire, like the element of fire, it wants to spread. It wants to connect. It wants people to see it. like a lotus flower like any kind of flower like a rose or something like because roses are often you know associated with love and love from the heart right you know

the red flowers yeah

yeah like it wants to be seen it wants to be shared fire wants to spread in the negative way in a forest fire you know people's passions want to be felt why because people want to feel other people's passions in in general you know look at speakers throughout the history, you know, good strong aators. I'm not going to go I'm not going to name some of them because there's no need to give those people's names any more air time than they already have, you know, but people who speak passionately, even if it's vile [...] you can see the passion in their speech. Again, even ignorance has passion. Passion is just passion. It's not uh, you know, it doesn't necessarily always mean it's not always compassionate. It's just passionate. But people like to feel that. And so I feel like when a you know someone's heart is well balanced and they have a good enough heart fire, the desire to be around other people, the desire to share, the desire to create is a natural you know uh outpouring of this kind of inner joy. And uh I I you know I we we you know talk about a lot of the kind of pathological signs of these elements when they're disregulated. I I want to just you know point out ones when they are well regulated and and that's kind of the one that I find to be uh a question that I ask people in the clinic all the time.

Yeah. I mean I think for again we talk personal on this little podcast. For me, I'm a big believer in like this p path of like the tantras or this path of like a roomie or this kind of thing. You know, one of my favorite quotes within this that made me think this was right for me was uh and it's in the context of the Buddhist tantras like tantras for passionate people,

right? It's a way that you express your passion and use it in a way that's spiritually constructive for yourself and then the others, right? That you can connect with in this way. Okay. So, I'm a really big believer in that, you know, this idea of allowing the heart to be open and then to connect to those people that are of like karmic significance and we all can help each other blaze more and more. I really believe in that, right? And uh so I mean on a personal level that's I think why I've gravitated towards those spiritual paths that like have that at the heart, right?

Whether it's a kind of a roomy philosophy, haha, I wasn't even doing that on purpose. It just naturally plunks out. are uh the tantras or some of these things that have that passionate quality. Um and Reich this is love, creativity, joy, pleasure, right? That I think that thing those are very powerful things and then you know the more that these energies can be cultivated then the whole principle is the more you're able to feel sort of the spiritual bliss of things and that sort of is the fuel of spiritual growth overall. So that's the pitch of the show on some level or another.

There you have it.

Good closer. All right. Yes. Yeah. Well, as always, Eric, gracias, mucho.

Thank you so much.

Stoos, thank you for listening. Thank you for tuning in. Uh we appreciate everybody. If you made it to the end of the video, good for you. Your attention span is uh like that of a refined wine. Although, I don't think that has paid too much attention, but you know what I'm saying. Uh like, comment, subscribe, share our work, hit us up, jin and tantra@gmail.com. Send the love, send the thoughts, send the uh send the other things, too. Uh you can hit us up on the gram, the Jinatra podcast, or of course, leave a comment here. We'll try and get back to you. Uh when we can, we definitely love hearing feedback from everybody. You know, we genuinely love to share what uh what brings us passion. This is a an example of our heart fire being shared with all of you. So for Eric, this is Daniel. We'll catch you guys in the next one. Peace.