Cath Brew - Can the Body Help us Shift?

Trisha: 00:00:25

Hi, everyone. I'm Trisha Carter, an organisational psychologist and an explorer of cultural intelligence. I'm on a quest to discover what enables us to see things from different perspectives, especially different cultural perspectives, and why sometimes it's easier than others to experience those moments of awareness. What can we do to help ourselves and others to experience shifts when needed? Well, everyone today I'm joined by Cath Brew.

Trisha: 00:00:56

And Cath is a global LGBTQ+ consultant and coach. She supports parents, schools and businesses to navigate the inclusion of diverse genders and sexualities, cross-culturally. Cath also works as a shamanic practitioner. Did I pronounce that correctly Cath?

Cath: 00:01:16

Almost, shamanic.

Trisha: 00:01:19

Shamanic. Thank you. Helping people to find inner peace and to heal from emotional wounds like childhood pain, ancestral trauma, limiting beliefs, difficult relationships, and other sources of internal disease. Essentially, Cath is all about helping people to nurture well-being and belonging, both personally and collectively. Welcome, Cath.

Cath: 00:01:45

Thank you.

Trisha: 00:01:45

Hey, Cath. I'm anticipating that some of our listeners might be thinking, What does she do?

Cath: 00:01:51

Yeah, I have that same conversation with myself sometimes. Um, and, and also I, I kind of use air quotes saying spiritual guidance and with the work that I do because it's it is quite a loaded word. It was very loaded for me, many, many years ago I used to think it was all a complete crock of whatever. It's a very loaded word.

Cath: 00:02:16

And it's it's not it. People joke about it being woo-woo with the kind of spiritual side of things, but we all as humans, we all have this exploration with the world around us. And, and it doesn't matter where you're born in the world, like you might be a humanist who believes in the human spirit, like the human energy that we have.

Cath: 00:02:38

Or you might be someone who's a Jain or a Muslim or a Hindu, like wherever we're born in the world, we're all exploring this human state of what it means to exist in the universe. So I completely get if people are a bit freaked out by what I'm about to talk about, but just know that I was once to and I've got to a point where actually I couldn't deny the things that I was experiencing, and I thought, actually, I want to explore this.

Cath: 00:03:06

I don't want to be that person that pretends they know everything or um, is scared of something or actually and that's all fine. Like, if someone just isn't interested and it's not their thing, they've had some bad experiences. Absolutely fine. But for me, it's been a really amazing, transformative process with what I do and then helping with LGBTQ+ stuff, I help allies basically get their heads around what all this means because they're having to deal with it more and more, whether they like it or not, really.

Trisha: 00:03:33

And that's another world of difference. So this episode was actually triggered by David Livermore, who in his episode where I interviewed him, the part two episode, which was CQ Strategy, Where Shifts Happen and if you haven't heard that one, you can go back and have a listen to it. He referenced the book The Body Keeps the Score as a resource that could be helpful to people to dive deeper into their awareness and when I started looking into that book, it wasn't something that is in my area of expertise and I very quickly became aware that it is in my friend and colleague Cath’s area of expertise.

Trisha: 00:04:16

And so I want to talk with her about how we might gain awareness from our body, when our mind might be less aware and and sometimes focusing on things other than the cognitive or the intellectual components of culture might help us to make shifts and completely different ways. But we're sort of jumping ahead of ourselves here because like every other guest on this show, I have some questions to ask.

Trisha: 00:04:42

So Cath, first of all, what is a culture other than the culture you grew up in that you have learned to love and appreciate?

Cath: 00:04:51

Hmm, I think for me, because it's so profound with the work that I will be talking about around how your body keeps score and all these kind of stuff, it's because that's all about energy and the spirit and the world and the universe and all this stuff. For me, I would, I would say Aboriginal culture within Australia. So I didn't grow up within it.

Cath: 00:05:13

It's very different to my own non-Indigenous culture. But when I started working as an adult, I worked a lot for the National Parks and Wildlife Service and I was doing heritage management, but I started to work a lot with Aboriginal people and it was in that role but also in my own consultancy. And so this work was mainly the management of art sites and if we were on site we'd have to have an Aboriginal person there making sure that we were doing all the right things and it was a way of making sure that we had someone we could talk to as well and ask questions of and so this involved a lot of working

Cath: 00:05:53

also with elders to protect sites, but also creating walking tracks for the public to come and have a look at these places. But then also having a different access that allowed the elders to continue to get to the sites and actually have teaching for the next generation. So they were areas that they wanted to keep the public away from because they had a lot of artifacts or things like that.

Cath: 00:06:15

And so I got fascinated by things. So I remember being standing at an art site and saying to this man, I was like, Oh, I feel embarrassed now. But I said to him, I did that classic question of How old is this? It's such a non-Indigenous question of how old is that work. And he just looked at me and smiled and said, Well, he said it was here when my grandmother was a child and it was here when her grandmother was a child.

Cath: 00:06:37

And it was this beautiful, beautiful thing of time and space was very, very different that indicated about oral history. And I just and I smile because he wasn't telling me off. He was just answering it. But it was such a beautiful response. And I thought that that's really interesting. And I love I love that connection to landscape with them and and things like I walked and worked on a project where the Aboriginal community wanted a walking track between two areas.

Cath: 00:07:06

Now, culturally, it was against cultural law for them to be in that middle area or to actually be on that ground. So they employed our team to create a walking track aboveground between the two locations. So we weren't bound by cultural law, by and by being a board walk above the ground. They weren't breaking any cultural laws. And and I love this because it it showed the core that they understood the core of who they were.

Cath: 00:07:33

They understood who I was, and we were making a solution together. So that that was amazing. And just then to kind of side-tracked this links to the LGBTQ+ work I do in that I try not to actually use the word inclusion because it implies that other people, another people, there's like one person, some people are in, some people are out, the others must, inverted commas, conform.

Cath: 00:08:00

But as soon as you've got to do something or you've got to like have to include people, there starts to be some resistance. So I'm not saying that these inequalities don't need to be addressed, but any time someone is told that they must do this, your hackles get up. It's like, why would you do that? So. So I tend to talk about navigating, helping people to navigate diverse genders and sexualities because that's what they're doing.

Cath: 00:08:27

And it puts it at the heart of the ally. They're the one struggling, they’re struggling. I know how to be a lesbian that’s like what my life is, but it's much more about them being an ally, learning. It's softer and it's ironically more inclusive.

Trisha: 00:08:42

Yeah. Oh I love that.

Cath: 00:08:43

So it all it all links the working with Aboriginal people helped me to start to see between the lines I guess is what I would say. And it's very much about the intangible space, the how we make meaning, what are we reacting to in the world around us? How do we exist in the world? Why do we react to what we do?

Cath: 00:09:03

How do we interpret the world? That's all my question. So it was a no a no brainer really, that once I arrived in the UK, I started to work in heritage interpretation, which is all about not what happens, but why things happened. So I'm the person that writes and I still do. This is another thing I didn't add into my bio, but I still do it now that when you go to museum, I'm the one that writes and designs what you read and you learn about as you walk around right on that design, those experiences.

Trisha: 00:09:32

So yes, it's.

Cath: 00:09:33

All it's all it's all part the same stuff.

Trisha: 00:09:36

But yeah, yeah, there is. And I imagine you're probably writing those things to help people see those different perspectives at any given point in time. And yeah.

Cath: 00:09:47

And helping them understand massive concepts. So one of the things I struggle to write about, but I do is geology like it's space and time in ways that it's hard for the human brain to comprehend. So yeah, it's I love it and I'm fascinated by the world around me. It's all to me, it's always about being interested, but also be interested like be interesting yourself because that thrives often.

Cath: 00:10:09

You get amazing conversations but be interested in the world around you because there is so much out there.

Trisha: 00:10:14

Yeah. When we think about cultural intelligence, we think about that as being the drive component, you know, being interested in things. And I guess in my explorations at the moment, I'm focusing on this CQ strategy component, which is the awareness and helping people to make the shift, to see things from different perspectives. And so I'm wondering, I'm curious, can you tell me about a time when you have experienced a shift?

Cath: 00:10:42

Yeah, I think I think the one that stands out to me the most and probably is not what you might expect me to say because it's slightly different to a person doing something and then me reacting. But the first one that comes to mind is actually it's a moment that I truly started to trust my gut, my, my intuition, essentially.

Cath: 00:11:02

And so it was many years ago I was filling up my car with fuel near my work. I always paid my credit card. I didn't even think about it. But as I was standing there filling it up, I had a really, really strong feeling to not use my credit card and I was, ooh, that’s really odd and it was really high feeling high up in my chest.

Cath: 00:11:22

And it was like, Don't use? It was just this thing is like really strong. Don't use your credit card. And I, I ignored it because I always paid my credit card, never thought anything about it. Went back to work. That afternoon I got a phone call from the bank telling me that someone had just tried to put £3,000 worth of clothing on my credit card, and it had come from that service station.

Trisha: 00:11:42

Wow.

Cath: 00:11:43

And Exactly wow. And my my brain went, Oh, oh, that. Oh, like, that's interesting. And I suddenly realized that there was a connection between the two and there had been a cause and effect like that. That feeling had been so strong that I couldn't ignore it And it then then there was an action that came off that that was nothing to do with me.

Cath: 00:12:08

And I thought, Oh, that's really interesting, wonder what that was. And I didn't think much about it. Other than just, Oh, that was a bit weird like you do. That was a bit woo-woo kind of thing. But I did start to wonder what had I picked up? There was clearly something in the air like, how? I had no idea.

Cath: 00:12:27

And it then turned out that that petrol station, there were loads of people when you went on loan, there were hundreds of people who'd had problems at that petrol station. So I just kept that in the back of my brain. But it really shifted my mind because I had grown up thinking anything religious, anything spiritual, anything, whatever was, was basically, if I'm honest, I just thought it was stupid.

Cath: 00:12:51

I thought if you had a faith then you'd been fooled, that's what I thought. And so I get when people think this is woo-woo and it's Can I say bollocks? I don't know.

Trisha: 00:13:00

Yeah. No, I think you can.

Cath: 00:13:01

Yeah. Oh yeah. But, and so it's been a massive, massive shift for me to get to the point where I now work in this.

Trisha: 00:13:12

Yeah.

Cath: 00:13:14

Um, so, yeah, that really has to be the big shift I think for me.

Trisha: 00:13:18

Yeah. In a moment when you recognized that you had almost a skill or an awareness that you hadn't previously and that it was well-founded rather than.

Cath: 00:13:30

Yes.

Trisha: 00:13:30

Yeah, that.

Cath: 00:13:31

Was the oddest thing because then I was like, Oh, what else is what else am I going to pick out? Like it became quite exciting. I never thought about it being for work or helping people. Any, like, none of that was in my mind at all. It was just, What did I pick up on?

Trisha: 00:13:45

Yeah.

Cath: 00:13:46

What was that? That's weird.

Trisha: 00:13:48

If I could recognize something and tell myself it, what else am I telling myself that I might not have heard previously?

Cath: 00:13:56

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. And I was nowhere near accepting, like woo-woo stuff because I still thought it was sort of bollocks. But. But it because, and I'm a very stubborn person. So it was, it's a lot for me to have come over this. Yeah. But yeah, it was really quite profound, really profound.

Trisha: 00:14:15

You're probably very aware from your work, especially in the LGBTQI space, that the, you know, some people find it really hard to make the shifts to see things from other perspective. And that's what drove me to start looking into this, because there are some people that I've worked with who operate more on, you know, the level that you were talking about before you had your shift on that practical cognitive of thinking level.

Trisha: 00:14:46

And so they're not as good at stepping into other spaces. They're not as good at seeing themselves from the observer position. They're not as good at it, maybe recognizing when they themselves might have stepped into a defensive or a judgmental position or maybe when they're afraid, even in a different cultural environment and threatened or feeling unsafe. And so that can all build on their, you know, impact on their ability to build relationships or to work well in in situations of difference.

Trisha: 00:15:21

So I know that you work a lot in helping people to understand and increase their awareness of their own states. Physical, emotional, spiritual. Yeah. How do you help things? First of all, because that's the core of what we're talking about here today. How do you help people notice things physically? I mean, is the book correct? Does the body keep the score?

Cath: 00:15:45

Yeah, it's a really interesting question, part, the first thing I do is, is basically just let someone talk in the same way that a counsellor would is like, let's just listen to what, really listen to what they're saying. What are the words they're using, how are they describing things? And invariably it's all about emotions. They're talking about emotions that that they're uncomfortable sitting with.

Cath: 00:16:09

And so if we and in the introduction, I you were talking about me helping people who are emotionally wounded. So it's like if we don't process something, we feel it, like if you've had an argument with someone, it doesn't just disappear. You feel that anger or that annoyance in your your chest, usually for a long time afterwards. So I personally believe others might not, but I do believe that the body keeps score.

Cath: 00:16:34

So you might have heard people say if they've been in a really stressful situation, I'm not going to grow a cancer over this or I'm not going to grow a I'm not going to get ill because of this. So we we do get physically unwell because of of things that happened to us. So the analogy that I use often with clients is that it's like a glass of water that if you, a clear glass of water, you drop a bit of paint into it and the paint muddies the water and it drops to the bottom and it stays there.

Cath: 00:17:04

It's like it's kind of like a silt in the bottom. And if you then drop another paint in a bit of paint in later, it muddies the water and it settles and it sits there. If someone comes and shakes the glass, it all comes up and then it comes down again. And eventually, if you don't, if you imagine that those drops are the wounds, the emotional stuff that we do.

Cath: 00:17:26

Yeah, the pain. If we don't deal with that, it just builds up and up and up and and eventually you get to the point where it fits them, gets to the top of the glass and you explode. And that's like meltdown complete kind of breakdown, that kind of level. And so it's really important to to look at these things and actually deal with them when they happen or learn to release them.

Cath: 00:17:50

Because every time someone comes and shakes the glass, you get triggered again and say that that wound is uncomfortable and we mostly don't deal with it. We distract ourselves, we push it down, we go on holiday, we drink alcohol, we go shopping, we do whatever these things are. And I think this personally is actually one of the reasons that COVID lockdown was so difficult for so many people because they couldn't distract themselves.

Cath: 00:18:16

They couldn't get the external distraction of going shopping or whatever. So they had to sit with their discomfort. And so in terms of the body keeping score, we see this with epigenetics. So in shamanic practices, we call it ancestral trauma. But epigenetics for those who don't know, is the field of study that looks at how your behaviours and environment can cause changes that affect the way that your genes work.

Cath: 00:18:43

And they don't actually change the DNA sequence, but they change how your body reads that, that sequence. And so I just want to give you an example is that in October 2018, there was a study published in the journal Procedural Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in the US that showed how trauma from one generation can affect the next.

Cath: 00:19:03

And the study was based on the National Archives records of the Civil War in the US and and particularly on prisoners of war. And these the union soldiers who were held in Confederate prisons ended up having it. Well, it showed that those who had been connected to those ended up having shorter lifespans. So there were three groups there were those who'd been experience a particularly brutal prison.

Cath: 00:19:32

There were those who was less extreme, and then there were those who who had avoided prison altogether. Now, of the sons who live to at least 45 years of age, the ones whose fathers had been in the most extreme prisons, had a 9% higher probability of dying than those in the less extreme and an 11% higher probability than those who avoided prison altogether.

Cath: 00:19:55

And interestingly, the deaths were predominantly stroke and cancer and cancer is just cell change. I mean, this is what happens and I'm I'm not in any way suggesting that everyone's going to get cancer from their wounds.

Trisha: 00:20:08

No, no, no

Cath: 00:20:10

But I'm just saying that we know we get triggered by things. These things, they stay in our body and we need to explore them. We need to process them physically and get them out.

Trisha: 00:20:20

Yeah.

Cath: 00:20:20

So I just find that really fascinating. I just think we don't know the half of what our body does.

Trisha: 00:20:24

No, that's right. And that can pass it on to our children, which is the, the scary bit in that one. Yeah, yeah.

Cath: 00:20:32

Yeah.

Trisha: 00:20:33

If you're thinking of somebody who's facing a situation of difference. So in your work, it might be a teacher who's encountering a student who perhaps is coming out or a parent could be, in my work it might be somebody who is moving to another culture and they're finding that challenging, but they're perhaps perhaps denying the challenge. And so maybe going, oh, it's it's all normal here.

Trisha: 00:21:03

You know, nothing, nothing to see. We're doing fine. All good. But what might they how could they notice in their body that everything isn't fine?

Cath: 00:21:15

I think it's asking them some very it's asking well, it's asking yourself, I guess if there's no one else actually asking. It's asking yourself what you're really feeling like. Notice actually what that emotion is, is are you feeling a resistance? If you're feeling resistance, the discomfort’s with you, not the other person. So we often our body, in addition to keeping score, it talks to us.

Cath: 00:21:40

We know when it's telling us the message that our brain is thinking that we've got something sorted, but our body is saying something. Yeah.

Trisha: 00:21:48

Do we hear it?

Cath: 00:21:50

I often we don't we don't want to. You're not ready to and that's absolutely fine. But I think it comes, it's very easy to get caught up in that emotion and to keep going. So I tend to advise people to actually to listen to the emotion, not what the brain tells you afterwards, because the brain is always trying to keep you safe, basically.

Cath: 00:22:13

So it'll it justifies all your behaviours to make you okay. So if people are brave enough, which and I do say brave enough, because it's it's not nice, is that when you feel a reaction if if you know that you're on edge, it's just ask yourself what why my reacting like that.

Trisha: 00:22:30

Mhhmm.

Cath: 00:22:30

Where did that come from or why do I not feel like this with my friends? Why? Why does that actually come in in that interaction? What is that? That's actually making me uncomfortable. Yeah. It's very easy to blame the other person when actually it's all about us. It's all it's like I use the example often of you might walk past a homeless person in the street.

Cath: 00:22:54

You feel uncomfortable. You then blame them for making you feel uncomfortable. And you have all these reasons justifying in your brain why they shouldn't be homeless or I'm not going to give you the money or I'm not going to do whatever. But actually it's you that's had the discomfort and it's you that actually has to look at that.

Cath: 00:23:11

So it's it it it's very difficult to make people do it when they don't want to. If you're in a training environment, you can have a long conversation about actually having an internal conversation with themselves.

Trisha: 00:23:24

Yeah. And I think sometimes some people are better at that than others. And I know that that you have you actually have a resource that you've shared with me. And I will put in the show notes that if anybody wants to connect with Cath on LinkedIn, then she will share this observations diary with it. And to me it reads a little bit like body scanning and making observations.

Trisha: 00:23:56

Personally, one of my things that I need to notice sometimes I do and sometimes I don't until I've been doing it for a while is grinding my teeth and having a really tight jaw. And I'm wondering what other things you find as you talk with people that people notice when they actually make themselves do those observations?

Cath: 00:24:16

Yeah, it's often sometimes they're not aware of it. It takes someone else pointed out, but they're like, they're not quite nervous tics. But you, you start, it's almost like stimming you might start to repeat behaviours or you're, you're tapping, if you like, you're sitting on a train and someone's shaking their leg. Really fast.

Trisha: 00:24:34

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Cath: 00:24:35

That's usually it's like to me, that's energy that they're not comfortable in sitting in. That's there's not stillness that they're having to, to move and dissipate something. So yes, jigging a leg, it's talking really, really fast. Its consumption of like drinking things like coffee too much, all that kind of stuff. But it's also about feeling just sitting with yourself and realizing whether you're calm or whether you're on edge.

Cath: 00:25:02

And an a really good technique is that you can actually, if you are feeling it a stress is to actually and I think I actually talk about it in the resource is you you look at that thing with your eyes closed and and it's an NLP exercise of what colour is it, what texture is it, what size is it and start to give it a form because then it becomes something that you can actually deal with.

Cath: 00:25:29

It's like a physical thing essentially in your in your mind's eye. And if you do, if you can feel that, then you can actually also move it out of your body. You can imagine it being pushed out. So it's because I work energetically. I also work with somatic practices and things of actually helping people with their body actually moving stuff out like that.

Cath: 00:25:51

That NLP process, journaling is also really, really helpful if you're feeling something because often you don't know what you're feeling and when you and then you start to ruminate you, something goes round and round around your head. If you write it down, you have to give it words. So you might not necessarily know even where it is in your body or what it actually is, but you just you feel on edge.

Cath: 00:26:15

You just you've woken up, you feel on edge. Something's not right. If you just start writing like almost unconsciously, it starts to give it words, it starts to form it and it I do it myself and it's an absolute light bulb moment. You can just be writing anything that's coming out and then suddenly you just hit a moment.

Cath: 00:26:32

So, Oh my God, that's what it is and you understand it. But you don't need to say. You don't need to know. Sometimes it's just a soft, gentle exploration.

Trisha: 00:26:42

Yeah, one of the reasons I started on this quest, Cath, is because the CQ, in the cultural intelligence model talks about some of the ways to build your CQ strategy are things like mindfulness and journaling. And when I'm working with busy executives, engineers, I.T. Specialists, they're not really people who necessarily lean towards mindfulness and journaling. And so what I'm looking for is some other strategies that people can use.

Trisha: 00:27:16

And that's what I liked about your observation story because it's a little bit about scanning your body mentally. And I think too often people we're not discon… well, some people are disconnected from your body, so you don't even notice that like I was saying that I'm holding my jaw with tension. You know, some people don't even notice that they've got that crick in their neck or pain in their stomach or whatever that is.

Trisha: 00:27:39

Probably indigestion is another of those things that.

Cath: 00:27:42

Well, yeah, completely. Yeah. Know headaches there's a, there's a tension like which you get from clenching your teeth or being stressed generally. But yeah, I mean things, great things for people like that who are necessarily more attuned to things like this is, I mean, I'm you can see me now sitting my shoulders are up and up purposely because my legs, my hands on my legs.

Cath: 00:28:04

But just having someone, even if they're sitting in the traffic on the way home, just take three deep breaths and imagine your emptying your body out. Like just relax, visualize. And you start to realize where there's there's tension. Yeah, but it's very difficult to do that if we're always on our screens or we're always distracting us or ourselves or we're doing all these things.

Cath: 00:28:26

So actually.

Trisha: 00:28:29

I think in the moments of challenge when we're dealing with diversity, I think then it's difficult as well because we're we're in the moment. We're often reacting rather than thinking strategically or sitting about the challenge.

Cath: 00:28:45

Yes. And and what I would say in those moments is and I do this a lot, actually, with the LGBTQ+ work, because you are confronted with things that you might not like. Someone's just said something or you don't know how to deal with someone's emotion around something. And I always said to people that the actual the best is advice is to don't react in that moment.

Cath: 00:29:07

Your emotions come surging out really, really fast and then your brain kicks in and you're in defensive mode. And and actually the key and it takes practice. The key is to realize that actually it's not about you. It's you're having a personal reaction. And so in that moment, I always say to people, don't say anything, take a deep breath.

Cath: 00:29:29

That deep breath is multi valuable because it bides you time to get your brain into gear and start to think kind of clearly not, not so defensively. It relaxes your body; it gives you space to relax. And then it also gives them time to potentially keep talking because people don't like silence. They will fill that space. So they keep talking and then you actually end up finding sometimes you understand more about where they're coming from.

Cath: 00:29:57

And then often the best response after that is rather than asserting your own thoughts, is to ask an open question. Because if you ask an open question, it forces that other person to to justify or to explain their their statement. It also bides you more time because you don't have to fill the space and you understand more about why they think what they think.

Cath: 00:30:23

So from a an I was going to say an inclusion point of view, even though I don't like that word from that perspective, if someone has an issue and they're like, oh, well, I don't think same sex people should have to get married, that to me. And it feels like a personal thing. So I would do the breath and I'd say, Well, that's really interesting.

Cath: 00:30:40

Why do you think that? And then they might say something that then gives me it calms me down, gives me more information about how to answer that question. And it's an emotional separation that that helps handle a situation like that.

Trisha: 00:30:54

Yeah, brilliant, good strategy. And and one that you can have sort of at the top of your head for thinking about.

Cath: 00:31:04

Yeah, it really comes things down and I've, I've had some situation situations that have been fairly horrible where people have been very, very strong with their opinions and it's in that moment that you try and realize it's actually it's not about you. They, they've got an opinion for all of their own reasons. And, and in doing that, you’re and you're actually being really compassionate to that person because you're understanding that they have a different life experience to you.

Cath: 00:31:30

And there will be reasons that they think what they think and that's fine but that's absolutely fine. They don't have to think like me. But but it's it's let's then in that moment, it's about you trying to manage it. But then let's start to help break down what that is and understand it better to then help them or help you in your work.

Cath: 00:31:47

Trying to shift some perspectives.

Trisha: 00:31:50

Or the two of you to, you know, get on well enough so that you can work together or whatever is the outcome that you’re hoping for.

Cath: 00:31:57

I mean, I mean, a perfect example actually is my wife and I were walking through our village at home and it was just by the bus stop and it's late at night. And a man yelled out to us, he said, Oi! He said, are you two lesbians? And my wife was really like, I could feel that she what you're thinking this is going to be a problem.

Cath: 00:32:15

And I thought, Oh, this is in. I'm just going to see what this. And I said, Yes, we are. And then he said, Are you married? And I said, Yes. And I could tell my wife was, Oh, come on, let's just go, because usually that ends up know something else. And in that moment of pausing and actually interacting, he then went on to say, Oh, I think it's fantastic that you guys can get married now.

Cath: 00:32:38

It's so good. I love it. He said, You should have been like, you just did this huge, big positive thing. And we were screaming with laughter later. Because unfortunately the other the other option is usually, often what happens. But it was a really lovely little interaction and it was a really good exercise on just don't lunge forward, just wait, because if we'd come in or ignored him, he would have thought, Oh, that's a bit rude.

Cath: 00:33:03

Like we're the ones that have done the thing. So being able to stop that defensiveness and be curious but also safe, like we were walking away as we were, we were doing it. And I also happened to know that there was a camera there. So it was alright. But but it's just you get you practice it, you get better at it.

Cath: 00:33:22

It's quite hard to do sometimes when you're feeling got at. But yeah, it just shows. You never know what's, someone's going to say, why really?

Trisha: 00:33:30

And all you can manage is yourself in that situation.

Cath: 00:33:33

Yeah, completely. Yeah, yeah. And we had some the other day. We were talking to a man who was from a country. I'm not from a country that was generally doesn't tolerate LGBTQ+ people. And he just this was in the UK and he, we'd been talking to him and he looked at us and said he said, Are you two sisters?

Cath: 00:33:52

And my wife, she was like, Oh, no. And she got very busy very quick. And I just said, No, we're married. And I thought, I've, I've this is I feel safe here. I have no issues, I'm protected, there's no problem. And we were then went on to talk about loads of other things and then about a minute later with a little pause and he just looked at us and smiles and he said, You're my first, you're my first lesbian.

Cath: 00:34:18

So people like you that I've met. And he said, I'm really pleased to meet you. And we had this amazing conversation and there's such beauty that can come from things. And it's very easy if you're marginalized community particularly to expect the worst because you're you're slightly in a different defensive mode trying to keep safe. So you don't know.

Cath: 00:34:37

And so this is often my advice to allies is in your first question, give us a hint that we know you're okay with it, like it, even if it's just, oh, I'm an ally or I'd love to know, Could you help? Do you mind if I ask a question? Yeah. So because that's understanding how our bodies are reacting and our body will be telling us, though, like this is all threat.

Cath: 00:34:58

Threat mode.

Trisha: 00:34:59

Yes.

Cath: 00:35:00

That's what everything I do with the training and the work I do is is building that bridge. It's like the boardwalk with Aboriginal elders, building the boardwalk between my community and and allies, so that we see each other. We see the humanity in each other.

Trisha: 00:35:16

Yeah. What a lovely illustration. So a lot of your work has is, you know, effectively creating the platforms or creating the spaces that people can walk across, that people can experience themselves and get to know themselves a bit more deeply and recognize what's going on within them, and that you walk with them to navigate the challenges that they're facing.

Cath: 00:35:45

With the work I do, it's very much helping that person to get in touch with themselves that often. I find that I end up with people on my sofa who think it's their partner's fault and there’s discomfort and there's resentment. And a lot of the time that all that partner's doing unconsciously is actually holding a mirror up. And it's it's completely normal for us to to not want to look at ourselves.

Cath: 00:36:12

We look at ourselves as the last thing. And so, I mean, I meet a lot of women who have done life that is expected of them. They do school, college, work, married kids, all that that kind trajectory. And then in their late thirties and forties, they suddenly think, who am I? Who, who, who actually am I? And they've done everything in a way that they've done for other people and other people's expectations.

Cath: 00:36:38

So when they come to me, part of all of this, this energy work and listening to our bodies is actually listening to what their body is telling them about what they want, what's holding them back, what can we actually work through to help them reclaim a life and to be more in tune and and more aligned with themselves than they've ever been.

Cath: 00:37:01

And I do that in-person and online and so people I love it. It's so rewarding. And it's obviously it's not about me. It's not about me, but I just love it because I can see people change so much. They don't settle for things anymore. And it's partly because their bodies won't let them anymore, that they're so attuned to what's right for them that they can't go back.

Cath: 00:37:24

And it's not about it's not about being right in a relationship or not compromising. It was like, Well, I can't do that anymore. It's not about that. It's about being in control of your own mind, body and soul, essentially. So we can't change other people's behaviour, but we can change how we react to it. And this is the key difference.

Cath: 00:37:44

So we choose how we we react and what we react to and what we don't react to. And from that, then comes a really deep inner peace. Because you're not you're not being triggered. You're not therefore outsourcing your happiness to someone else. You're in control. You know what you're doing. There's a calmness, there's a stillness, and there's so much power and confidence and strength that comes in that as a as an individual, to get to that point is just wonderful.

Cath: 00:38:13

So so whenever you meet someone that's different from you, you don't you're not offloading your baggage onto them by the way that you're reacting. You're actually meeting them as a whole person and able to see them as a person. It becomes person centred and all of those biases of that person wears that clothing. So they must think that or they do that job.

Cath: 00:38:36

So they must do that. All of that disappears. And it's my actually my abiding my one message to everybody, when you meet someone that's different from you is to see yourself in every single person that you meet, because then you don't see all of your biases, you don't see all the other stuff. You just see the human in front of you who is trying to live a life and get through in whatever way they're trying to get through.

Cath: 00:39:03

And it might not be in alignment with your stuff. It might be very, very different. But the it helps stop our judgments it helps helps us just be stiller on the inside is that the word? More still.

Trisha: 00:39:17

Yeah.

Cath: 00:39:19

Helps you be more still.

Trisha: 00:39:19

So yeah, that's wonderful. Thank you Cath. I think there's lots to unpack here and yes, I think we may come back to some of it at some point. Thank you so much for your time today. I really appreciate it.

Cath: 00:39:36

My pleasure. Thank you for having me.

Trisha: 00:39:37

You're very welcome.

Cath: 00:39:39

Thank you.

Trisha: 00:42:22

Thank you for listening. You can subscribe or follow on your podcast apps so that you can be notified when new episodes are released. I'd love it if you'd connect or follow me on LinkedIn. I'm keen to hear your questions and thoughts. And please join us for further episodes of the Shift.