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James ‘Fish’ Gill on Falling in Love with Humanity
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In this powerful episode, Scott Schwenk is joined by heart coach and author James “Fish” Gill to explore radical compassion, conscious communication, and the deep human longing behind even the most painful behaviors. Together, they unpack what it means to attune to our own pain and longing, recognize the humanity in others, and transform rupture into connection. From grief to traffic rage to childhood wounds, this is a soul-deep conversation on how we begin to fall in love with humanity—starting with ourselves.
James ‘Fish’ Gill - Heart coach, yoga teacher, author and transformational teacher
James ‘Fish’ Gill is a heart coach, yoga teacher and transformational facilitator based in Perth, Western Australia. He supports individuals and couples to grow mutual understanding and emotional intimacy in any moment of upset, rupture or conflict, in all the relationships that matter most. The conscious, heart-led communication approach that Fish transmits to his clients has a broad reach internationally.
Fish has supported individuals, couples, businesses, and community groups to regrow trust, connection and understanding in the face of conflict, complexity and change since 2008. His warm, compassionate style draws on his experiences as a facilitator, educator, yoga teacher, actor and loving father of two young adults. You can learn more about his work at https://www.leadbyheart.com/ and on Instagram @james_fish_gill
Scott Schwenk - Master coach, spiritual teacher, culture architect
Scott Schwenk’s teachings, courses and private mentoring guide leaders, seekers and creatives to explore their deepest selves in service of thriving on all levels of being, both individually and relationally.
Host and creator of the podcast The Choice To Grow, Scott is known for his hugely popular courses and workshops with OneCommune.com, Younity.com, Wanderlust Festivals, and Unplug Meditation, Scott has been catalyzing the inner evolution of others for decades: helping them to grow, transform obstacles into opportunities, and find Love within.
Scott spent several years living and studying in a meditation monastery which introduced him to the core body of Tantric meditation traditions which continue to flow through each of his teachings. Scott continues to study and teach from two key Tantric lineage streams.
Apprenticeships in leadership development, meditation and philosophy training, shadow work/shadow resolution and spiritual awakening are all part of Scott’s development into the thought-leader that he is today. He continues to refine his offerings studying and practicing with key innovators at the leading edges of human development.
Scott’s teachings support the entire person to not only progressively recognize, stabilize and embody our inextricable oneness with the source of creation (Waking Up), but also to resolve the wounds of the past (Cleaning Up), continually expand our capacities for wider and more inclusive perspectives on any moment (Growing Up) and creatively and joyfully participate and collaborate with all of life as a loving thriving human being (Showing Up).
You can explore Scott’s courses, workshops, retreats, training and master coaching at https://scottschwenk.com and can find him on Instagram @thescottschwenk.
"Scott Schwenk is a deeply skilled teacher and healer, with a rare and authentic gift for helping people create positive inner change in their lives."
~Sally Kempton (aka Swami Durgananda),
Master meditation teacher and author of Meditation for the Love of It and Awakening Shakti.
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Transcript
Introduction to the Podcast & Guest
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome to The Choice to Grow. I'm Scott Schwenk. Through these dialogues, we'll explore fresh perspectives and discover practical tools for navigating a thriving life that adds value wherever we are.
00:00:14
Speaker
I'll introduce you to innovators and creators from across our world who embody what it means to cultivate growing as a way of life. Let's prepare together.
00:00:24
Speaker
Take a deep breath in.
00:00:28
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Hold the breath briefly as you soften your shoulders and soften the soles of your feet and palms of your hands. Then exhale like you're releasing tension and setting down a heavy burden from every cell.
00:00:41
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Ah. Now let's dive in.
00:00:49
Speaker
Welcome, everybody. I am thrilled to join with you and with my next guest for The Choice to Grow. The Choice to Grow is an opportunity to look at our pathways forward, our tools and our moments all as opportunities to grow into the best person that we can become.
00:01:11
Speaker
My next guest is somebody that I started following a couple of years ago on Instagram and I started by listening to his reels. James Fish Gill, he goes by the nickname Fish as his last name is Gill, which I think is cute and fun, is a heart coach, yoga teacher, and transformational facilitator based in Perth, Western Australia.
00:01:32
Speaker
And he specializes in conscious communication, conflict navigation, and relationship repair. And from my research, his work focuses on some key principles, conscious communication, radical empathy, transforming conflict.
00:01:46
Speaker
How about that? holding multiple truths at the same time, self-validation, expanding compassion, and individual
Concept of Awakening & Awareness
00:01:55
Speaker
transformation. So without further ado, with all the joy in my heart, welcome, Besh.
00:02:01
Speaker
Thank you, Scott. It's really wonderful to be here with you.
00:02:06
Speaker
So one of the questions I'd love to ask you is maybe a bit out of the box.
00:02:13
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I'm very sensitive to transmission of how it feels to be around a person. And it seems like you are as well. I experienced through your reels, through your communications, the presence of a form of wakefulness.
00:02:27
Speaker
And I'm very curious from your seat, when you hear the term awakening, what does that mean to you?
00:02:40
Speaker
I think. To me, awakening might just be a willingness to look, a willingness to look beyond the bounds of what's naturally visible to us about about ourselves and about all others.
00:03:00
Speaker
Yeah. I think it can be easy to get caught up in the surface level, the way life presents, the way people present, the way we present.
00:03:12
Speaker
um In terms of conscious communication, you know, I use the word conscious to denote consciousness. that what we're striving to do in this practice is become aware of that which we're normally unaware.
00:03:31
Speaker
So bring into our field of awareness that which normally lies outside. And some of what we'll be discussing today is
00:03:45
Speaker
our contributions to relationship rupture that we never thought we were making.
00:03:54
Speaker
the The ruptures and the escalations that we have been unconsciously creating and sustaining that we never thought we were.
00:04:07
Speaker
um so for me, I think in terms of the work that I do, awakening really just means a willingness to look.
00:04:15
Speaker
Which is a vulnerable thing, right? It's a vulnerable thing because with it's safer not to look.
00:04:24
Speaker
Seemingly. Yeah. yeah yeah yeah I love that you say the willingness to look. In my experience so far at this stage, and this body's 53 according to my driver's license as of a ah week or so ago.
00:04:39
Speaker
The way you frame it as a present tense, as opposed to something that I had happened that I'm looking over my shoulder and remembering and describing. Probably both of us and many people listening could with prompts, come up with memories of moments of awakening type experiences where my point of view expanded and I, as you say, saw things that I didn't recognize before.
00:05:05
Speaker
But in what you're saying, I hear a tool and a practice of cultivating capacities to continuously widen my view beyond my historical conditioning.
00:05:17
Speaker
Does that sound like... yeah but youre yeah i think Yeah, I think it's so beautifully articulated.
Significance of Self-Attunement
00:05:24
Speaker
um We have moments, often incredibly painful moments. Maybe some people kind of experience awakening through deeply joyful moments as well.
00:05:38
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um But in my experience, the most profound moments to facilitate the kind of expansion that we're talking about are moments where we are
00:05:50
Speaker
wrecked, wrecked by life, like like annihilated, um where everything we thought was turns out to not be, everything we thought we had is burnt or dissolved or stolen from us or or walks out the door and never comes back.
00:06:08
Speaker
So... Yes, there are those moments, but what I feel those moments present is an opportunity to to view life through a different lens. And I think it's about the willingness to continue to look through that lens that just got presented.
00:06:24
Speaker
So the lens that's been presented to me in in what I've walked through, in the pain that I've been through, is really just the question, what's the humanness alive right now?
00:06:38
Speaker
What's the humanness in me? What's the humanness in them? And for as long as I look through that lens, the notion of someone's a victim and someone's a villain has to dissolve.
00:06:54
Speaker
And I'm just... willing every day, every moment of every day to keep looking through that lens. And I train people in how to look through that lens and for the benefit that it brings their relationships.
00:07:05
Speaker
And I train people how to train people how to look through that lens. But I never get a choice about whether anyone does look through it. I can't generate willingness in anyone else.
00:07:18
Speaker
I can just offer the lens. I say, look through this and tell me, if you don't love what you see, throw it away.
00:07:27
Speaker
Yeah. Was there a particular life circumstance where there was a rupture for you that was so pronounced in your memory that you go, that was when the penny dropped and I really began to see in a new way, in the way that led to what i teaching and providing and wishing to continue to develop and cultivate that myself?
00:07:52
Speaker
I've got so many, Scott. There are so many. And, you know, I've got a beautiful, very close friend of mine who was a Chinese medicine practitioner. And I turned to him for support at one stage. And he said, you know, fish, there is such a thing as grief fatigue.
00:08:11
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So, you know, there was a bunch of things that happened over a bunch of years that that are difficult to make sense of. One of them. one One that just kind of arises for me right now is that I was in a ah very beautiful beginning of a relationship, romantic relationship, and she and I were travelling overseas um and her ex-partner, who had been very distressed about their separation, found out about us and took his life.
00:08:44
Speaker
And he did it very violently. He did it very violently and she received the call when we were together in India. And I i still the ah still picture this so vividly. We were on a rooftop in this beautiful part of um Jaipur and you ah She took the phone call that in which she found out that he'd taken his life very violently and she collapsed on her knees and cried. And I never saw that particular woman again.
00:09:20
Speaker
i saw the woman then who was just immersed in the most profound grief. And um then we returned to Australia and were geographically separated by COVID for years Nine months, eight months, during which I tried to love her better and back into relationship. and And then she met someone else and and disappeared.
00:09:45
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So it was very, just a profoundly complex, yeah, that situation. it just brought up enormous grief for me. um and a helplessness.
00:09:57
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I think part of mine part of my journey
Practicing Self-Attunement in Daily Life
00:10:01
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has been to touch profound grief and profound helplessness. You know, as ah as a straight white 52-year-old
00:10:14
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neurotypical, um educated, you know, you can list my privileges. it can take quite a long time to list all my privileges and I'm used to a level of agency in my life and the most profound moments of growth for me is when I've been left on my knees.
00:10:33
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and
00:10:37
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If you're able to say, because that's really not a lot of years that's passed from then to this moment, Where do you find yourself as you reflect on that with me now?
00:10:52
Speaker
I can still touch the grief of it.
00:10:57
Speaker
I've really had to learn how to attune to myself, to my own grief and longing. that is still alive related to that situation.
00:11:12
Speaker
um The reason I had to become so good at attuning to myself is that no one else was there with me, no one else can actually get it.
00:11:21
Speaker
That's been a beautiful thing to realize because when you think of it, any experience in our life, no one else can really get. So it's a very useful thing to be able to offer ourselves the deepest sense of attunement, like a sense of, yes, fish, of course, I'm right here.
00:11:41
Speaker
yeah I've got every idea of what you're going through. You have every right to still be grief-stricken. look what look at the beauty of what you were longing for look how magnificent that is look at the depth of your pain yes of course that's what i mean by self-attunement um there's a lot of complexity from a certain lens in what you said about your process for people who may be still more oriented towards viewing the world rationally um may have not
00:12:16
Speaker
newly associated with something that's related to faith or or spirituality and may not have necessarily looked into what we call the shadows of our psyche.
00:12:28
Speaker
When I hear you talking about this, I hear you really mirroring what sounds familiar to me, which is a capacity to As though I was caring for another who matters to me or choosing to make them matter to me, bringing my awareness and energy around that being only it happens to be my body.
00:12:47
Speaker
And I'm just wondering how you for the ready start to describe this process when there doesn't seem to be another human being to jump on the phone, zoom or in person with to meet oneself in practical ways to begin to.
00:13:04
Speaker
Yeah. I think it's pretty simple for me. I when i i mean, i in the 15 years of facilitating the work that i facilitate on the planet, I've just discovered the power of self-attunement that when, mean, you know, maybe, Scott, you can think back at a time where there was some human being in your life that showed up completely in a moment for exactly what you were experiencing.
00:13:32
Speaker
You might not have had a lot of it, Many of us human beings on the planet haven't tasted that very much, and some of us have maybe never tasted that. But there might be a moment where like a kind grandmother or a best friend or a um really connected parent or ah sibling actually was right right there with you, just wholly present.
00:13:54
Speaker
Just, yes, Scott, of course, this is what's happening for you. And um'm I'm right here with you. I'm right here in what you're going through. um So that that sense of attunement that we long for, that might otherwise we we might otherwise call loved,
00:14:11
Speaker
feeling loved um the power of being able to actually bring that to ourselves because in the heat of conflict, which is what I work, I work ah work in the in the hottest, most painful moments of inter into interpersonal conflict, they are the other person whose attunement we want has zero capacity to attune to us because they're already in their upset.
00:14:38
Speaker
They're already fighting for their right to be attuned to. So we need to be able to generate it for ourselves. Otherwise, we're screwed, basically. if we're If we can't generate our own self-attunement, we can't attune to others and we can't lead
Emotional Data Ownership & Conflict Resolution
00:14:52
Speaker
repair.
00:14:53
Speaker
so The two simple parts of it for me when I ask my heart what's happening, which is really the process of attunement, what's happening and and how can I be present to what's happening, I just break it into two parts.
00:15:08
Speaker
What am i really longing for? and And I use the phrase tender heart because it just mate makes my inquiry softer. What's my tender heart longing for?
00:15:20
Speaker
What am i what am i yearning to feel? What's my ache? but's make What's my deepest wish? What I want to feel.
00:15:32
Speaker
So that's the longing aspect. And then the other aspect is the pain that's alive in me. So what what pain is alive in me? What emotions that are that I kind of, what emotions want to be recognized?
00:15:47
Speaker
So once I can feel into some pain and some longing,
00:15:53
Speaker
then everything just shifts slightly. And I'll give you a kind of a very everyday example of this. I was in traffic the other day, stuck in traffic. I was on my way to meet a friend and I love being punctual because it's one of the ways I feel like I can honour someone is by being prompt.
00:16:15
Speaker
Um, and I was stuck behind a couple of cars, one in each lane that were driving 10 kilometers under the speed limit. And I was naturally, because I've got a mind like everyone, I was naturally just like, what the hell?
00:16:32
Speaker
but Like, where did these people learn to drive? Like what morons? Like but that's where my mind naturally goes. Fish, I never say these things out loud under my breath in the car in Los Angeles at Only every day on the way to the gym in the five minutes it takes to get there and back.
00:16:50
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, um I make a point of illuminating that because a lot of people make the assumption that because I've been working in the realm of conscious communication for 15 years, I must suddenly magically be not having those thoughts.
00:17:05
Speaker
But my mind, what I call conflict mind, is always active and particularly in a car, particularly in traffic. So there I am thinking, what morons?
00:17:17
Speaker
and And then I just, and I was ah at a red light, you know, getting really frustrated. And then I just stopped and I said, look at how frustrated you are, Fish. Of course you are, because you're really, really wanting to be on time and in connection with this person that you that is special to you.
00:17:36
Speaker
Belonging. Yeah, you you want connection, you want a sense of ease and and you've got this frustration and like impediment, like you have every right to be frustrated.
00:17:50
Speaker
And something shifted in me because now my attention goes from thinking that I'm surrounded by morons
00:17:59
Speaker
recognizing that i'm content that i'm that i'm that frustration and disappointment and ah longing to be in ease is alive in me.
00:18:10
Speaker
And it's as simple as that, really. You know, if I could go more deeply into it, but it's really as simple as me saying to myself, usually out loud actually, I'm so frustrated and look at how much I want to be there already.
00:18:26
Speaker
And all I'm doing there is not only I attuning to myself by actually saying, like, by recognizing the experience that wants to be seen, also owning the experience. it's not It's not about them.
00:18:45
Speaker
I've got no data to suggest they're morons. The only any data that tells me they're morons is frustration in me. So why don't I just own the data?
00:18:56
Speaker
The emotional data, I'm frustrated and I'm longing to be there already. That's got nothing to do with other people. So, you know, it's a powerful practice because, one, I already get sort of attuned to. I already feel like some some need just got met in me. I just got recognized.
00:19:15
Speaker
And also, if I was to communicate with those drivers, now I'm not going to just like knock on their door and say, why are you such a moron? So i won't I won't be in the practice of amplifying pain on the planet.
00:19:29
Speaker
That would just be a projection in my frustration anyway. Yeah. This simplicity of meeting oneself, meeting myself, is obviously the main underpinning of your ability to to teach to teach teachers who teach teachers and other people how to do this work. Because if i um what I clearly hear freshly, and I love hearing things freshly, is that When I can meet me consistently, especially the parts i would normally judge.
00:20:02
Speaker
Yeah. I now can meet you. However you might be. Yeah. With skillful boundaries probably in place. Yeah. One of the things I'd love to hear you touch on is how.
00:20:18
Speaker
Um, what I can't look at in myself sets me up to have flimsy boundaries and walk away feeling like I'm carrying somebody else's contracted energy.
00:20:31
Speaker
That I don't have to do that.
00:20:35
Speaker
Yeah. I can care. I can be attuned to their grief, but I don't have to carry the weight of another's predicament. Yeah. We have this natural, so yeah I work in the realm of relationship rupture.
00:20:53
Speaker
Just just briefly say what rupture is for those who who it's a new psychological term. Yeah. I mean, I love, I've got to use certain terms and then we have to dissolve the jargon-ness of them.
00:21:12
Speaker
Rupture or or upset, just rupture is just a moment where there's some upset. some I think upset is actually a more skillful word because it includes it includes me and you sitting in a cafe and me wanting to talk to you about something but not feeling like I can.
00:21:31
Speaker
That's indetectable to you and to others around us, but it's still relationship upset. still um It's still a moment of disconnection or... or um you know, the relationship not being fulfilled upon.
00:21:49
Speaker
um So what was I going to say? So I work in the heat of conflict and,
00:21:59
Speaker
you know, I'm inviting people to, on the one hand, let's say my left hand, do the process I just said. It's like every moment of upset,
00:22:12
Speaker
i'm goingnna start to I'm going to start by recognizing instead of believing all my analysis, all my judgments of people, or all the labels I've reached for, all the pathologies I want to apply to them, which, by the way, the Instagram world is just offering pathologizing like it's going viral. Like just reach for a label for someone.
00:22:36
Speaker
It'll make you feel better overnight. well so Only it doesn't. In my left hand, well, I think it does it validates our pain, but it doesn't lead the world towards unity. It leads the world deeper into divisiveness. Separation.
00:22:53
Speaker
So in my left hand, I'm just going to hold my own pain and longing. Like what what was i what was I longing for in this moment and what's the suffering that's alive and just really attuned to those two things.
Compassion through Multiple Perspectives
00:23:05
Speaker
In my right hand then, When I'm ready, if I'm ready, I'm gonna start to attune to the heart of the other, in which it turns out there's also pain and longing.
00:23:20
Speaker
Now that's what lies beyond our view naturally. We don't have access to their pain and longing, particularly in the heat of our battles. Actually what we do, Scott, unconsciously, is if you and I are in conflict,
00:23:39
Speaker
and you've said or done something and I've felt the painful impact of it, I have access to my beautiful longing and my very real pain, but I don't have access to your pain or your longing because my senses aren't wide to your experience.
00:24:00
Speaker
Like I'm having my experience, you're having yours. So in the absence of being able to connect effortlessly to your experience, I make the two following assumptions.
00:24:13
Speaker
One, because I had such a beautiful longing, because my intentions were good, the pain that you're experiencing, that shouldn't be there.
00:24:26
Speaker
It shouldn't be that. you shouldn't You shouldn't have felt criticised. I wasn't being critical, Scott. but wasn't being I wasn't being selfish. I had this beautiful intention and and the problem is over there with you that you can't see my intention. You just took it the wrong way.
00:24:41
Speaker
your Your pain is the problem here. It shouldn't be that. yeah So we're in the process of actually dismissing each other's pain in favour of our longing, always in conflict.
00:24:54
Speaker
That's the first thing I do unconsciously is I dismiss your pain that I don't think you should have had. The second thing, because we've been in a conflict and you've done a thing and I felt the emotions, that the hurt or the the doubt or the confusion or the rejection of what you said, because I feel that pain, I make the assumption that, well, you did that thing and it brought me pain, so you wanted my pain.
00:25:26
Speaker
You were being uncaring, unloving, ah nasty, hurtful, insensitive, controlling, manipulative.
00:25:39
Speaker
So I take my very real pain and I make the conclusion that you wanted my pain. Hmm. that's That's an assumption that's always incorrect.
00:25:52
Speaker
Like in the 15 years of human working with humans, every time guide one person into feeling the deeper longings in the heart of the other,
00:26:07
Speaker
even behind the hurtful things they did, we always, always, always find something more human then they wanted our suffering.
00:26:19
Speaker
And that that can feel like a real stretch if you don't understand the power of that practice and you just see it for the first time. It sounds a bit like I'm just condoning hurtful things. I'm saying, well, people just didn't mean it.
00:26:38
Speaker
But actually I'm asking us to hold our pain and their deep belonging in equal measure. Because both are components of the truth. Just like I'm all asking us to hold our beautiful intentions and the unintended pain that we evoked in others in equal measure.
00:27:00
Speaker
so Yeah, go. I don't know if you've come across this, but physiologically, there's some research to to suggest that you're talking about holding two or more perspectives at the same time, that holding two or more perspectives at the same time, i.e. my pain and longing and your pain and your longing really could be four perspectives there.
00:27:23
Speaker
I come out of the hind brain that is fight, flight, freeze. And I come into the executive brain where I'm able to have a wider perspective on how my actions now may play out over time with you and with others and make skillful, healthier choices that are inclusive of all of us.
00:27:43
Speaker
Yeah, complete it's a complete shift in perspective, a complete expansion of awareness that happens in that moment. And you're right, they are the four perspectives I'm inviting every human being on the planet to consider in every moment. That's all I do, really.
00:27:59
Speaker
i mean, we we then work with how to how to use that in communication, which becomes quite nuanced. But really, my question for the planet, if there was one thing that i that is my legacy,
00:28:13
Speaker
is what's my longing, what's my pain, what's their pain, what's their longing in every moment? And once we actually let our awareness expand into that view, what we find there is profoundly human and evokes a radical compassion. Like I'm not asking you to make yourself compassionate.
00:28:37
Speaker
I'm actually saying when we take this view, you will notice you are compassion. It comes online and like you're talking about, it comes out of the kind of limbic system into this expanded social, human, considerative um capacity.
00:28:59
Speaker
And so in you know when it for in order for us to be able to do that, we have to create some safety for ourselves.
00:29:12
Speaker
If we are stuck in our reptilian um response, if we're stuck in just like absolute panic and fear and shutdown and fleeing and we can't expand.
00:29:28
Speaker
It's like, you know, it's like asking something that's in a shrinking phase. It's like making it wrong for not expanding.
00:29:38
Speaker
So we have to create some safety in order to take that perspective. And the way that we create safety is through self-attunement, saying, let's start with my pain and my longing.
00:29:50
Speaker
Let's recognize the pain I'm in right now, the fear I'm in, the hurt I'm feeling, the anger, the ah sorrow, the unfathomable sorrow.
00:30:01
Speaker
And let's also notice what my beautiful heart was really aching for, what was I really hoping to feel. And as soon as I start to attune to my own experience, my pain and my longing, now I start to feel a little bit more able
00:30:18
Speaker
a little bit more capacity comes in and then in time I might start to be able to think there's another human being over there in this upset between us.
00:30:29
Speaker
And they are also having an experience which consists of pain and longing. And I wonder what happens if I start to inquire there.
00:30:41
Speaker
Nowhere in this conversation are we saying what they did is okay.
00:30:48
Speaker
and This conversation is about where did the action arise from? What's the humanness that was being expressed unskillfully, if you like, through that thing that brought me pain?
00:31:11
Speaker
so simple and so powerful and it could seem really confusing for a listener who hasn't yet had the practice but i can see the ah practice a simple practice of walking around practice when things do feel relatively safe and do feel relatively together in life that day, that hour, just perhaps be noticing people from a park bench or driving in the street.
00:31:38
Speaker
Hmm, let me just imaginatively sense, what is this person's pain? What is their longing? What is my pain and my
Manipulation, Control, & Collaboration
00:31:44
Speaker
longing? Can i hold both at the same time without expecting a particular result?
00:31:50
Speaker
Yeah. I have, you know, in the cohort of humans that I coach and in the cohort of humans that i train as coaches, um you know I'm getting constant stories back to me. People saying, this is, it's totally changed how I see humanity now. i mean, this is, you know, the book is How to Fall in Love with Humanity.
00:32:15
Speaker
Really, it's get it invites us to see the humanity beneath everything that everyone has ever done. Us, our closest people, and the people that we consider the most hideous villains on the planet.
00:32:31
Speaker
Not condoning any of it, human behavior is deeply unskillful and causes enormous pain suffering everywhere, every day. And it's arising from such humanness, from the depths of grief of humanity and from such a tender longing.
00:32:50
Speaker
I'll give you an example of a funny story because, you know, I speak to my daughter about this all the time. She's 25 and don't train her. We don't look at the tools, but we have conversations in the realm of longing and pain in the heart of all beings all the time and so it's kind of become a lens that she's willing to look through sometimes as well and i went to pick her up the other day we went to do some pottery on a potting wheel um the other day the other night fine beautiful so i picked her up from where she's living and
00:33:24
Speaker
We were driving up the street and as we drove up the street, some random person is walking past us on the footpath, just near the car, and he just flips the bird. He just holds his middle finger up directly to us and, like, right right at us as we drive past.
00:33:44
Speaker
And we just both burst out laughing because, like, I could take that. I could take that so personally. I could be like, what the hell is that guy? Like i'd even I could even stop the car, wind the window down and say, what's your problem, buddy?
00:33:59
Speaker
Yeah. that It would be very easy for me to react with that kind of volatility ah of of the feeling of disrespect that arose in me, a feeling of like anger and hurt actually. Yeah.
00:34:14
Speaker
But also I could look through the lens of humanness and I can realize that there's a person who's clearly are angry and hurt at the world or or out of some some circumstance that's alive for him right now.
00:34:31
Speaker
And what he's longing for, like I might just see his behavior as malicious, but then if I get more curious, what's what's flipping the bird a longing for?
00:34:41
Speaker
Can you feel that? what's what's For me, it's the longing for he actually doesn't feel seen or heard and yeah and has has to use more force to get a minimal experience of being seen and heard.
00:34:53
Speaker
Yeah. So one of the most profound parts of this approach that I've discovered is that underneath what appears to be malicious intent, there are there were three core motivations that that I'll speak to just briefly. The first is very well expressed by this guy with his middle finger pointed at me or you know presented, is that we as human beings in our in our most difficult moments, in our most painful moments, we want our pain to be seen and expressed.
00:35:31
Speaker
We want it to be expressed. You know, if I walk into, I often walk through doorways and and hit my shoulder. I don't know what that's about. But if I'm not quite present in my body, I'll kind of walk into doorways.
00:35:44
Speaker
And there's always like an ah expression. It's the same thing. If someone flips the bird at me in traffic, I'm often like, what the fuck your problem? like So there's natural human longing to be expressed in our pain.
00:36:00
Speaker
If I stub my toe, I'm like, choose certain expletives.
00:36:06
Speaker
um So some of the most painful things that happen on the planet are a natural expression of pain, no not condoning how it happens. the The dropping of bombs is an expression of pain, not condoning the dropping of bombs.
00:36:25
Speaker
The second deeper explanation tender longing that might help us go deeper than maliciousness is that we often want our pain mitigated.
00:36:38
Speaker
We want to get out of hey And any addiction is a longing to get out of pain. i If I drink four beers a night, it's because I like the the ease that comes compared to the loneliness or or boredom or sorrow that that not drinking might it bring me.
00:37:02
Speaker
um The same with deception. When we deceive in relationship, and I'm not condoning deception, it's deeply painful. I've been deceived and I've deceived.
00:37:13
Speaker
When we consider what's underneath deception is longing to mitigate risk of transparency. So we choose to reveal that which is safe and we choose to conceal that which feels risky.
00:37:30
Speaker
Another way to consider what we might call manipulation, looking through this lens, what is manipulation or control, a longing, what pain are we longing to get out of?
00:37:44
Speaker
The pain of feeling out of control, the pain the pain of confusion, the pain of powerlessness. So, you know, if I'm working with a client who accuses their partner of being manipulative and controlling, one of the things that we're working on is is asking, I wonder what that person is wanting to control towards.
00:38:08
Speaker
What ease, what certainty, what stability are they longing for? And I may discover it as the as the partner to this person that when I get that actual sense of their real motivation and their longing,
00:38:22
Speaker
I'm actually on board with the longing and may be able to collaborate on other strategies that are more healthful for all of
James' Personal Growth Journey
00:38:29
Speaker
us. Exactly, Scott. That is the very essence of this work is that once we uncover someone's deeper longing, we will be ah an ally with them.
00:38:38
Speaker
And because we're an ally with them in getting that longing fulfilled, they will be open to working with us in terms of more skillful strategies.
00:38:50
Speaker
Mm-hmm. So if I could get out of my car and and go to this guy who flipped me the bird and say, i love the fact that you want your pain recognized.
00:39:04
Speaker
I can't imagine what you've been through and how could we more skillfully go about that? He would probably be less offensive and more soft with me.
00:39:15
Speaker
no Depending on how we approached it and spoke to We were like, what the F are you talking about? And more of the same, I'm remembering a story. don't know if you came across this wonderful book during lockdown by Roshi John Halifax.
00:39:31
Speaker
um where she talks about five edge states called standing at the edge. And she talks about compassion as and with a counter for, so to speak, of empathy.
00:39:46
Speaker
And she talks about being online for something in New York City. And there was a woman who was seemingly crazy and acting out near the line. And she did what she understood at the time. She looked right into the woman's eyes and she offered all of the vastness silently.
00:40:03
Speaker
Yeah. And she had a learning point that actually that became problematic. It was more intimacy than she could continue to support this person to metabolize.
00:40:14
Speaker
Yep. So time and place. And I'm just saying all this for those of us, maybe none of you listening, maybe just me who, are recovering codependent and who may, hear some of what James may be saying or I have said is, well, just get out, you know, get out of the streets and just go look for people in pain and just go ask them, may I validate your pain? That's not what we're suggesting necessarily.
00:40:39
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah, actually, what we're really doing is just bringing loving awareness to pain and not needing not needing to do anything with it. It's not ours.
00:40:50
Speaker
Their pain is not ours. It's not to be fixed. It's not to be rationally understood because emotions aren't rational. It's not to be compared against anything as valid or not valid.
00:41:03
Speaker
It's not to be diminished or dismissed. It's not to be ridiculed. It's not to be carried. It's to be brought loving awareness to. So if we imagine just our attention as like a light and I'm just going to illuminate your pain,
00:41:19
Speaker
even if you're not ready to have it illuminated, I'm just going to hold it in my loving way.
00:41:27
Speaker
And that simplicity of what you've offered, and I know that we have one more point of the three core motivations, I'm going lose that one, that simply being able to with practice, this is a developmental practice, this is not like on or off.
00:41:41
Speaker
I see myself growing it over time and sometimes falling back. But I don't have to say something to you because energy really communicates. We feel it when we walk into a room, what the energy of a room or a place feels like.
00:41:56
Speaker
that in my practice of coming from loving awareness authentically and not needing to look good for it, your nervous system at some point can pick that up.
00:42:10
Speaker
Yeah. And maybe just enough to take the edge off of your body's experience enough to be able to say to me what i but you need to hear. Yeah.
00:42:22
Speaker
That's right. My ability... in in ah In a conflict between me and you, assuming you're just gone offline because you're in the upset and your capacity to lead repair is zero, which, you know, when I train people, I'm like, we have to assume that the other person's capacity is zero because if we don't, we're in resistance to the moments where their capacity is actually zero.
00:42:51
Speaker
Um, in order to lead repair, I have to bring my loving awareness to my experience plus your experience. And when I start to do that, everything, everything changes. i actually amplify your capacity for compassion towards me by validating your experience.
00:43:09
Speaker
Yeah. So no way. At some point in the way, or some point I'm imagining this work you do. Maybe this is more of the subtle stuff down, down the road with the coaches.
00:43:21
Speaker
You know how the maybe you've noticed, I've noticed in me and others that the ego is always looking to look better. So it starts to go, look at I'm providing such a space for others.
00:43:34
Speaker
I am providing this loving, you know, that needs to be seen through that like love is loving through me. I don't own a shred of this. I'm only one piece of really bad news away from finding this out freshly for myself.
00:43:48
Speaker
Yeah, it's you're so spot on, Scott. There's a point in my nine-week program where people start to move out into their life applying these tools, being able to hold my pain and someone else's deeper longing and bring that into communication.
00:44:07
Speaker
but What a beautiful non-oppositional offer instead of I'm the victim, you're the villain to say I've got pain and you had tender longing. And to be able to bring my longing and your pain, I'm going to recognize the unintended pain I created for you while I also honor that I never wanted that pain for you.
00:44:27
Speaker
So as people bring these these those two pathways into their communication with other people, they invariably get met with resistance or unwillingness to start with.
00:44:40
Speaker
And then they come back to me, arms crossed, going either it doesn't work or my person's an arsehole because they didn't respond with love to my love.
00:44:51
Speaker
And so that's the ego doing exactly what you said. Look at me being the better person and look at you not being as good a person and screw you, the problem is you.
00:45:03
Speaker
So that's the ego loves to weaponize conscious communication because I'm going to i'm going to seek repair and you're not willing. And so that leaves me recognizing that, yeah, I'm right.
00:45:16
Speaker
I am the victim and they are the villain. So we just go straight back into the story. So part of the development that people go through is how do how do we maintain loving awareness on us and on all beings all the time?
00:45:35
Speaker
Practice, practice, practice. Self-attunement is how I see it right away. like
00:45:42
Speaker
to put myself on the map, you shared something. um I won't go back into childhood, but i've had plenty of acute childhood experiences. Uh, and yet wasn't until the, the developmental therapist, I started working with 10 years ago saying to me, wow, you had a lot of really intense experiences of abandonment and neglect.
00:46:03
Speaker
And I said, I did. I thought I had a normal childhood, normal born in the seventies, grew up with a single mom to divorce parents sort of situation.
00:46:14
Speaker
Right before COVID in 2019, October, my mother died after a 12 year battle with cancer. Six months later, my father, who hasn't been with her since I was seven, who is a born-again Christian in South Carolina, stopped speaking to me and to this day has not spoken to me.
00:46:36
Speaker
Yeah. When I first, it started because there were two phone calls during COVID that he was salty on every topic and the most silly, minute to who's sitting in the president's office of the United States.
00:46:51
Speaker
Yeah. And I exited both phone calls and finally up to second, I wrote a long text like, what's up? Like, this seems out of character. I got a very short letter back.
00:47:02
Speaker
via email. It's not any of the topics we've been discussing. It's your, it's my agonizing in my heart over your chosen lifestyle as a homosexual. and And that I will not, even though not everybody has kids who is straight, I will not have biological grandchildren. You can't understand possibly what it's like as a parent to go through this.
00:47:23
Speaker
la And then of course we can both be more compassionate to one another. Love dad. Well, I wrote the letter her back. Were I sitting where I'm sitting today with you, i wouldn't have written the letter the way I wrote it.
00:47:39
Speaker
It wasn't accusatory. It was what was more like a CV of all the experiences that I hadn't really discussed or discussed in a while and the nature of how trauma sticks around until it doesn't.
00:47:50
Speaker
Yeah. And I'm certain that it was my letter putting him in touch more deeply than he could handle with his own pain prior to my even being born. His father died when my dad was eight of a heart attack, never got over So I'm sure that that letter made it so hard for him.
00:48:11
Speaker
And had I been able to meet him in these ways, it would have been a different story. I wrote another letter just a few months ago that's from this place.
00:48:23
Speaker
Yes.
00:48:26
Speaker
haven't heard anything, don't expect to hear anything. yeah And I'm still practicing in in the in the kind of non-local, connecting to him and and just offering, like, I have no idea what your pain is like. I love you and I care about you as a living human being.
00:48:43
Speaker
May you be happy. May you be free. Yes.
00:48:49
Speaker
Yes, amazing. I mean, you know don't we just look back on life on things in life wishing that we might have had access then to what we have access to now?
00:49:03
Speaker
And it sounds like you've started to be able to really feel into the validity of his pain even while you can also hold your beautiful longing to be just self-expressed as you are, to be authentically you, you would never have wanted your um identity, your soul and your life choices to leave your dad feeling negatively impacted.
00:49:36
Speaker
yeah And it turns out in reality there is unintended pain there for him, which now you can start to recognise that that's real and valid. And you could probably also recognize that while he is some of his communications with you and some of his parenting of you might have left you feeling upset, dismissed, unrecognized, judged, criticized, unsupported, behind those actions and words of his have been some tender longings that you just didn't have access to.
00:50:17
Speaker
No, didn't have the emotional maturity to even sit with if I did see them at that time.
Humanity's Pain & Global Healing
00:50:23
Speaker
Yeah. But the thing is, Scott, you know, what I want everyone on earth to realize is that this, my work is not founded on what we should do.
00:50:32
Speaker
It's not like, oh God, we should have. And why didn't we? It's we've actually quite literally scientifically got zero access to the experience of the other.
00:50:45
Speaker
In the heat of the moment, we've got zero access to that experience. And so it really is a practice of can I start to expand my awareness again for the 10,000th time to this new reality where I can recognize that there's a richness and a nuance and a validity to my experience and this same richness and nuance and validity to some other coexisting experience over there.
00:51:15
Speaker
We literally don't have access to it. And we're in the practice of bringing access to it. um So I just love that you have been able to stand in that place with him now.
00:51:31
Speaker
We don't have agency over whether they ever are willing or not. We can only create the conditions for their willingness to arise, which and those conditions will be you to keep either communicating or just kind of energetically transmitting that his pain, whatever it is, is real and true and is worthy of love.
00:51:55
Speaker
And his deeper longings, even behind the shittiest things he's ever done, also need to be recognized. His goodness, the essential goodness in what he was longing for, also will always receive your love.
00:52:10
Speaker
In order to do that, once again, I'll stress, in order to do that, in order to bring our loving awareness to their pain and longing, we have to start with ours. Otherwise, it feels like we're, like you were saying before, it just feels like we're tending to the heart of another and foregoing our own needs.
00:52:28
Speaker
I want to jump into that for a second and then I want to for sure... get this third core motivation. um So I've noticed, and this was a big aha for me, I was recently in Lake Como with a mentor in a five-day small group program, very intense.
00:52:47
Speaker
I did not see that there were aspects of my character that were continuing to relationally try to be the hero to be worthy of love.
00:52:59
Speaker
in small ways, in big ways, in in so many different ways. And it wasn't huge movements, just mostly like subtle things. Oh my goodness.
00:53:11
Speaker
Wow. Like who who who can possibly
00:53:18
Speaker
flower under those circumstances if i'm in that box of needing to be a hero there's no there's no door into that box i just need to be right you need to be wrong or i need to be the healer and you need to be the broken yeah yeah i love that reflection and that's something that i have to confront all the time and my facilitators are invited to confront all the time when we think we are the bringer of something to someone. It's like we're already in a dynamic that's not that's not going to evoke healing.
00:53:55
Speaker
um I had ah ah had a beautiful, in the writing of my book, in the editing of my book, I had a very beautiful moment. The first edit came back from the publisher, very skilled editor, you know, professional editor, came back with all this fantastic feedback, restructuring that really worked, precise rewrites.
00:54:16
Speaker
But then also there was a point at which they had said, I've changed the voice of the book from we to you. So I'd written the book saying we as humans have these tendencies.
00:54:32
Speaker
We will notice this. We will tend to do this. We haven't been aware of this. So that's really precious to me in the work that I do. I'm standing in it with everyone because guess what? I'm a human being. And if you know my life, you'll see that I create unintended pain in relationship all at home.
00:54:50
Speaker
So I'd written from the voice of Wei and she said to me, you, the voice you in your book will be much more authoritative. It's going to give people much, much more of a sense of trust in your authority, in in what you're offering as if you've been through it and as if it's if it's resolved, so it's reliable.
00:55:09
Speaker
And I got back to her and said, I will not tolerate that and and changed it all back to we. And it was quite a time-consuming process because it was critical for me to recognise that I am in the midst of relationship ruptures all day, every day.
00:55:32
Speaker
I'm caught up in my conflict mind perspective, like that I'm the good person and someone else is the shit person all day, every day. Um, so we need to be able to kind of recognize,
00:55:45
Speaker
It's humanness that we're talking about and it's in us all. And even even even those that are giving me orders to drop bombs right now, that's also, I also know the dropping of bombs in me. I've never had access to weapons, you know.
00:56:03
Speaker
But at certain times in the midst of my pain, if I did have access to an arsonry, then i I may well have used them.
00:56:14
Speaker
So, yeah. Yes. So I think that's that's so important because of the non-separation. And that might sound like some highfalutin awakened perspective. The non-separation between you, me, and all beings, including the biosphere, including the animal kingdom and bug kingdom and mosquitoes and cockroaches, all are non-separate.
00:56:41
Speaker
And so whatever can tenderize me to that non-separation at no point do I go, I really want to harm my pinky finger on my left hand.
00:56:52
Speaker
Yeah. And at no point have I heard my woke up in the morning and heard my thumb and my forefinger arguing about who's more important. Yeah. Yeah. But there's a, there's, and we don't even question It's just, but it's like this natural, of course it's all one body.
00:57:07
Speaker
Yes, but so is everything else. And, So how can we offer and practice that recognition
00:57:17
Speaker
yeah more deeply, more frequently? Yeah. And that's why the title of my book, Me, resonates so strongly, How to Fall in Love with Humanity.
00:57:28
Speaker
That might sound like I'm saying go and be in love with everyone on the planet, but I'm actually saying how to how can we recognize the humanity in each of us always?
00:57:40
Speaker
Can we tune into the humanness that is alive behind the things that we're doing and that others are doing, often very unskillfully? And to keep bringing it back to that particular lens, the way that I invite people to contact our humanity and the humanity of all beings is, can we see, can we hear in the background the beautiful, tender, magnificent longing And the absolute suffering, like the loneliness, the heartache, the grief, the terror.
00:58:19
Speaker
And once we can start to hear longing and pain behind everything that anyone has ever done since the dawn of time, we just open because the alternative is that we're casting out our humanity and theirs.
00:58:37
Speaker
and And healing has never happened in the absence of love. Healing only ever happens when pain is met with love. Any form of healing, any modality is meeting pain with love.
00:58:53
Speaker
so um So it might sound naive, the notion of falling in love with humanity. I just made a T-shirt that says, in love with humanity, and I've already had a couple of people look at me like, are you being fucking crazy? ah Yeah.
00:59:09
Speaker
its um not looked into the world, like how naive, how how toxic your view. um But really, it's just like, let's let's start by bringing loving awareness to to the humanity in everything that's happened.
00:59:27
Speaker
Well, I promise you who are listening, you know, this may sound like a stretch where you may be in this given moment this week period of your life. I'm as ordinary as dirt, and I've seen tremendous growth through practices like this in the capacity to fall in love with humanity. So keep faith, keep faith.
00:59:47
Speaker
James, what is the third core motivation? Yeah. I'm on the edge of my seat. Yeah, so number one, and remember, this is this is just, I'm inviting us all to look beneath what we might what we might call malicious intent, and we've all got a lot of a lot of data, a lot of evidence for the things that happen in the world to us and to others that clearly appear as malicious.
01:00:14
Speaker
But my invitation is let's look a little more skillfully. Number one, just to recap, number one was what pain were they trying to express? Number two, what pain were they trying to get out of or mitigate or avoid?
01:00:32
Speaker
So number three it's my favourite thing. What pain of theirs were they wanting me to taste such that if I tasted it, they might start to feel more attuned to and less alone in their suffering?
01:00:55
Speaker
So, you know, people say to me all the time, but Fish, people are doing, are consciously doing things to create suffering on the planet. Like you can't drop a bomb on a community of a thousand people and and and say that it has a loving intention.
01:01:14
Speaker
But when we really tune in, the suffering we want for others is our quest for attunement. Mm-hmm. Like none of us ever wake up in the morning thinking, how do I make someone suffer?
01:01:30
Speaker
But there are many moments where we might wake up in the morning thinking, how do I get them to taste my suffering so that I can feel as if my suffering finally matters to them so that I have hope in the relationship that the suffering is not going to continue?
01:01:50
Speaker
Yeah. like give you Whether that's at the level of country or at the level of you know spouse or boyfriend or girlfriend. I mean, on a very personal level, you know it might be relatable to your listeners. Have you ever received a text message from someone and thought, yeah I'm just going to let them stew for a few days?
01:02:10
Speaker
Why? Because we've been stewing for a few days. We've felt unresponded to and we want to give them a little taste of it. Have you ever not been invited somewhere by someone and then held your own event and then reciprocated by not inviting them?
01:02:27
Speaker
It's like, i just I just want you to feel what it's been like for Yeah. You know, we we love to think that we don't do those things, but they're everywhere actually.
01:02:40
Speaker
Question for you that I'd love to hear from each of my guests. Who have been your core teachers? I know that Payne has been one of your core teachers, but those who might have had like a human name, who've been your core teachers that have been really instrumental in your transformation, in your development, in your growth?
01:03:05
Speaker
Well, yes, number one, Payne. um And I won't put names to to those particular teachers, but they have banin ah have been women that I've been deeply in love with and have um acted in ways that he has evoked enormous pain in them.
01:03:27
Speaker
And their various reactions and responses to that have illuminated so a lot for me. mainly by leaving me heartbroken, cast out, villainised, rejected, ah misunderstood.
01:03:45
Speaker
So those those relationships and bless those incredible women and and the pain they've walked through in relationship with me, um that has illuminated, that has given me a deep experience of pain that has then had had me have to start to attune to my own pain and longing behind everything I've done in order to kind of, because they weren't available for achievement because that gone, um, but outside of that realm. And also, also I would include in that, um,
01:04:23
Speaker
various aspects of my, various people in my family um and and my children have illuminated some amazing things in me. um But then on a more kind of inspirational, um maybe professional or spiritual level,
01:04:41
Speaker
um
01:04:44
Speaker
yoga came into my life about 12 years ago. And now I see what I teach actually is the yoga of relating.
01:04:55
Speaker
it's just It's just being able to expand awareness into a me plus you, which really is sort of the essence of yoga is so is moving beyond the limitations of me-ness into us-ness.
01:05:07
Speaker
um So my beautiful yoga teacher, Tamara Graham, in here in Perth, some...
01:05:16
Speaker
so profoundly insightful therapists that I've worked with that have held me in the darkest places so I could bring light to the places I was terrified to even name.
01:05:28
Speaker
um But out there in the world, the work of Michael Stone, i don't know if you know Michael Stone, he has a podcast called Awake in the World. Hmm.
01:05:38
Speaker
He has been, he's no longer with us, but he has been a Zen meditation teacher and a yoga teacher and also a psychotherapist. So he really speaks to yoga as it meets relationship and humanness.
01:05:53
Speaker
So Michael Stone, Tara Brock, his dick is inspiring to me. I just, she just holds such a ah kind and loving space that everything gets recognized there.
01:06:06
Speaker
um Yeah, I'd say they would be my greatest influences actually. Thank you. The work of Esther Burrell. i When I hear Esther Burrell hold complexity, I just feel inspired by her mastery. She can hold incongruent truths and love them all in a way that I think just inspires freedom in me just listening.
01:06:35
Speaker
So she's a hero of mine. Yeah.
01:06:41
Speaker
There's a question that I'm going to be asking each guest, and it's relating to a favorite quote that I share with students for years from Shunryo Suzuki, who opened the Zen Center of San Francisco in the 60s, a very realized master who went through tremendous turmoil in his youth training as a little boy and a young man in the monasteries at that time.
01:07:06
Speaker
He said, many things, but this one stands out. Death is certain. The time is not. What is the most important thing?
01:07:18
Speaker
I've learned about this in another language. Um,
01:07:24
Speaker
um not remembering his right, his name right now is a theologian. Maybe it'll come to you. He talks about as your ultimate concern. We have finite concerns and the ultimate concern. book Whatever is our ultimate concern organizes how we see life and do life. So James Fish, what is for you sitting here today, the most important thing?
01:07:48
Speaker
My clearest, purest, simplest um interest or commitment is that all beings might be recognized for the very real experience they're having right now.
01:08:07
Speaker
That's it. That's that's the the greatest motivation of my work is can can we actually just for a moment, moment by moment, recognize the experience alive in all beings?
01:08:21
Speaker
just just the validity and recognition of this very real experience right now, the pain and longing in the hearts of all beings. Because, Scott, if every human being right now, right now, had our pain and longing attuned to, all abuse would stop.
01:08:42
Speaker
Like right now, all wars would stop. All neglect would stop.
Conclusion & Book Discussion
01:08:51
Speaker
the Because all of that human behaviour which escalates pain on the planet comes from, arises from pain and longing that hasn't been recognised.
01:09:02
Speaker
like Like the middle finger of the guy walking down the path is just the expression, the uprising of something that needs to be seen that couldn't have found a more loving way.
01:09:15
Speaker
So bringing loving awareness to the experience of all beings is my deepest motivation. And that will be my deepest motivation until my dying breath, because that is healing for the planet right here, right now.
01:09:27
Speaker
Not expecting healing of the planet to happen at the hands of some benevolent leader yet to come. It's actually happened right here, right now in every single moment of relating. and it's And it's each of ours to lead.
01:09:42
Speaker
Yeah. May it be so. Yeah. May it be so.
01:09:48
Speaker
This new book I'm very excited about, yours, Falling in Love with Humanity. Where can we find this book? How do we get a copy for ourselves?
01:10:00
Speaker
So if you go to my website, leadbyheart.com, you'll find a tab that says my book. And I've got a list there of distributors. At the moment, the publishing deal is Australia New Zealand.
01:10:15
Speaker
So anyone in the States or Europe, for example, will need to order and pay for the postage from Australia internationally, which might, you know, that prevents some people from accessing the book. But fingers crossed, I um eventually get a US and Europe publishing deal as well. So it just makes it much more accessible.
01:10:37
Speaker
But if you Google how to fall in love with humanity, you will naturally um come across the options. So, yeah, there are some options that offer international shipping and some options that offer only Australia, New Zealand shipping.
01:10:52
Speaker
So just choose your international one if you're outside. Yeah. I hope you, I imagine you will. I couldn't imagine people hearing your voice and not wanting you to record an audio version of the book in your own voice.
01:11:06
Speaker
I hope so too. I've had a lot of requests for that actually. I highly recommend getting hold of this book, even if it seems like the shipping is more than the cost of the book itself. I have one of my students who I sent to James, who's a sobriety coach out of the UK,
01:11:24
Speaker
and who's done some work and I've seen wonderful transformation in this being and her capacity to show up on the heels of really tremendous suffering in her own family to be able to bring forth more of this into the world with her clients and her friends and her family. So really, I encourage you to check it out. We'll put the links that James mentioning And anything else you'd like me to include, James, in the show notes, Fish.
01:11:50
Speaker
I keep wanting to call you James. That's about it. Yeah. Is there anything? Yeah, there's one little final thing I kind of want to touch on, you know, because it relates to your story with your dad, you know, because we left we left that story hanging with you, having now expressed his this remarkably, what I imagine to be like a remarkably expansive and compassionate communication to him. And then and now you're left with like,
01:12:19
Speaker
Crickets, like no response. and And one of my facilitator trainees was talking about this the other day. She's had the extraordinary courage to to reach out and express love and gratitude towards the father of her child, like after 10 years of no contact.
01:12:39
Speaker
and received a message back saying, don't ever contact me again. So we can we can bring this this expansive compassion to people and be met with almost like either just withdrawal or silence or downright sort of hatred, right? So I just had this insight the other day because I'm considering this all the time because we have to because it happens so often.
01:13:06
Speaker
And I realised that the realisation I came to is this, the practice of holding compassion for all beings will be threatening to those of us who have found sanctuary in hatred.
01:13:23
Speaker
So hating on someone or hating on communities of people is compelling for us as human beings because it offers us sanctuary.
01:13:34
Speaker
It offers us validity. It offers us protection. And all over the world right now, people are standing in the in the sanctuary of hatred.
01:13:46
Speaker
And I'm saying, let's bring loving awareness to the longing and pain in in the hearts of all beings. And I get hate messages on Instagram saying, how dare you?
01:13:58
Speaker
because what someone is perceiving is that I'm threatening their safety as if they have to somehow step over some personal boundary or condone some hurtful behaviour, and it's safe to hate.
01:14:14
Speaker
It takes enormous courage to love in the face of our pain. And so anyone who... who even considers the path of radical compassion, I bow to you. it's It's extraordinary the courage it takes.
01:14:32
Speaker
And it's ongoing. You know, what I didn't mention was at this recording we've had, and most of you in the world will have known about it, major fires in Los Angeles, life-threatening, structure-threatening.
01:14:43
Speaker
Just one of the fires was larger than the entire island of Manhattan burning down. Just one of the fires. And in the midst of this, and I was prepared, I was alerted to prepare to evacuate by the local officials.
01:14:58
Speaker
This very same week was the week of my birthday. And to not hear from my father that particular week. aye I felt pain about that.
01:15:10
Speaker
i I didn't lose myself in it. I didn't avoid it either. And I used it as an opening. I'm choosing to use it as an opening to have tenderness towards the similar experience that is so common across the world for so many people.
01:15:25
Speaker
But my point is that, at least in my own life, certain key elements that I need to meet with loving awareness, it's not a one-time meeting and then it's done.
01:15:36
Speaker
It's layer by layer and the willingness to just keep showing up for however long it takes. Yes.
01:15:46
Speaker
Spot on. It's a day by day thing. We can't just click it and leave it. You can't just activate it and then be constantly active. I'm wondering if I could just read a short passage from my book to close.
01:16:01
Speaker
ah Please do.
01:16:04
Speaker
Rupture is everywhere. The world walks a path of widening division on every level. Geopolitical unrest, global political rhetoric and ruptures between nations, races and religious communities rise like a king tide.
01:16:21
Speaker
Our adversarial political and legal systems model an us versus them, winner a versus loser approach to resolution, while our opinion-driven social media interactions invite us to judge, condemn, label and dehumanise the choices and actions of others we know we know little or nothing about.
01:16:43
Speaker
Served a curated diet of entertainment and news through our devices that indulges our personal preferences, Our need to have the world ah way we want it, as opposed to the way the world actually is, only strengthens.
01:17:00
Speaker
When we do seek support to understand why our personal and professional relationships can feel strained, painful, one-sided or unsafe, we have instant access to an ever-growing list of pop psychology terms peddled by countless influences that encourage us to pathologize anyone who has either done us wrong or feels wronged by us.
01:17:27
Speaker
Without the skills to lead repair, we see conflict as something to avoid, retreat from, or defend our hearts against. We learn to distrust, disconnect, and stay stuck in the hurt that people's behavior brings us.
01:17:42
Speaker
We cling to our conclusions about others and about humanity, unconsciously blinded to the contributions we make and unable to steer our relationships back to safety, mutuality, and peace.
01:17:56
Speaker
It's no wonder that loneliness, the result of sustained relationship despair, has been identified by the World Health Organization as the next global public health epidemic.
01:18:10
Speaker
We have become estranged. We've fallen out of love with humanity. So the problem is real and we're suffering, all of us. The planet is populated by billions of people all longing and suffering and we have work to do.
01:18:29
Speaker
And no work is ever lost. That's what I've noticed. Every little of effort, even if nobody seems to be watching, is connected to the global nervous system and makes a difference.
01:18:42
Speaker
Every little bit of effort.
01:18:45
Speaker
it Fish, it's been an absolute pleasure to be with you. I could talk with you for hours and hours. There's so many topics I could imagine opening up, such as in the body, the addictive nature of the chemical combination of conflict and so on. So there's maybe we bookmark down the road to revisit and open another chapter here together.
01:19:10
Speaker
Yeah, like let's. Because the the story I'm inviting us to tell about humanity is benign. It's that we're all just longing and suffering. That's the whole story.
01:19:22
Speaker
and it's And that doesn't give us the same chemical hit as I'm the victim and they're the villain. that's That's addictive. It's the greatest addiction, I think, on the planet.
01:19:34
Speaker
It's out of control. um So, yeah, let's talk again. I'd love to. Wonderful. Thanks, sir. Thank you so, so much.
01:19:45
Speaker
Loving the episode? Click to follow, like, and share it as widely as possible. Want to go deeper with the choice to grow? Explore the show notes. You'll find links there for going deeper with our guests, as well as how to work with me in the work of waking up, growing up, cleaning up, and showing up.
01:20:05
Speaker
Thanks for listening. Can't wait to join you in the next episode.