Discomfortable

Nail Polish   While attending the Nonviolent Communication training I mentioned a few weeks ago in Sweden, I met a fellow trainee named Max who was wearing nail polish on one of his hands. Though guys wearing nail polish is really no big deal these days, for me it was a mildly revolutionary act that I knew I needed to try.  I have been looking for ways to subtly announce my sexuality more overtly in my day to day life, but without having to literally say it all the time or start behaving in ways that don’t feel authentic to me. Not that nail polish on a guy necessarily means he’s gay, but it certainly declares that he’s not all that interested in adhering to the straight guy rulebook. For me, painting my nails represents a subtle way to force myself to reveal something vulnerable about my identity to the world that I can otherwise (and often do) hide. It didn’t require much effort, and once it was applied I was able to almost forget about it and behave as my normal self. But every time I interacted with someone new, I noticed as they noticed my nails. And though no one even so much as frowned (this was in Sweden after all), it forced me to confront my people pleasing urges and get comfortable with the ambiguity of wondering if people were judging me negatively (while not actually knowing for sure one way or another). I think this is just the first step in an ongoing experiment of challenging my conditioned norms and getting discomfortable with being more overtly “different” in order to ultimately just be comfortable being myself.

Compassion   This week’s episode is inspired by an ongoing debate amongst self-help gurus, social scientists, and psychologists about the relative merits of empathy vs compassion. To be honest, for the longest time I had no idea what compassion even was. I assumed it was just a fancy synonym for empathy. But after taking that 2-day self-compassion workshop with Kristin Neff and Chris Germer in April (as mentioned in my episode on Scarcity), I discovered that there is much more to compassion than I realized! One of the most common definitions of compassion is empathy + action. You feel what someone is going through and you endeavour to help them. The problem that some helping professionals have with compassion in this definition is that more often than not, on a person to person basis, most people just want empathy. This has definitely been my experience. When I go to someone and express some struggle, frustration, or pain that I’m going through, more than anything else I just want them to listen and acknowledge that what I’m going through is relatable and normal. I’ve found the same is true when people come to me with their issues as well, unless they specifically ask me for advice. While well-meaning, when someone immediately jumps into advice-giving, problem-solving, or trying to “make me feel better”, it usually feels like I haven’t been fully seen or understood and I’m left feeling a little unsatisfied and disconnected. What’s more, I think this kind of “action” or “help” is unintentionally condescending, creating the sensation that this person is holding themselves a few steps above me on the fictional hierarchy of human value.  To me, what people really crave in these situations is the feeling of connection and equality that comes from pure empathy. They just want to be seen, understood, and accepted in their times of struggle, with enough space to solve their own problems (which is ultimately the healthiest and most empowering way to learn and grow). After they have received this much-needed empathy, if they want advice or help, they can then request it explicitly. However, a lot of researchers warn that the downside to empathy is that it is very possible to experience emotional burnout if you are constantly empathizing with a lot of pain and suffering (which is easy to do in our global village where we are constantly exposed to the suffering of millions of people around the world). Our brain and body treat empathetic pain the same as firsthand pain, so it’s possible to get so overloaded by the pain of others that we trigger our instinctual freeze response or dissociate.  Fortunately, I think there’s a sort of happy medium. This episode explores a different definition of compassion as empathy + warmth, which essentially retains all of the benefits of empathy while reducing the danger of emotional burnout and avoiding the pitfalls of condescending “action”. I’ll leave you with a quote from Matthieu Ricard: Tania put me in an fMRI scanner and said, “Do your usual meditation,” which in my case was compassion meditation. After ten minutes she asked, “What are you doing? This is not what we normally see in the brain when people are experiencing empathy.” I explained that compassion is quite different from empathy, so she said, “Well, could you do just empathy now?”   I’d been in an area of Tibet that had experienced a major earthquake, and I’d recently seen a documentary about Romanian orphans. For an hour, I tried to resonate again and again with these terrible images. It was complete burnout.   When Tania asked me if I would like to return to my compassion meditation, I said, “Please! I can’t stand this feeling anymore.” The altruistic love and compassion meditation I then did was so different. I felt a stream of love going out to those children, embracing them. The fMRI showed that the effect on the brain was very different, too.

Excess Baggage   While I was traveling around the world with Remote Year, I took a much needed cleanse from all things cinema. I had lived, studied, and worked in the film scene since I was a child actor and it was a surprising and liberating experience to step outside of that bubble and discover that not everyone cares about movies that much. I didn’t even watch the Oscars… can you imagine!? But then one fateful evening on our second third month in Prague Lisbon, I made a joke at a party with my travel mates that would unknowingly lead to my ultimate cinematic masterpiece. I simply observed that one of our group members was sort of the “mother” of the whole group — like if we were a 90s sitcom she would be the overworked but endearing single mom raising a massive brood of hilarious and precocious children. The analogy stuck, and we spent the rest of the evening inventing and debating who everyone else’s characters would be in this fictional family sitcom.  We got through about half of the 50 person group that night. And then a couple of months later, when we were in Sofia, Bulgaria, our group had a talent show and I didn’t know what to do for my “talent”. I decided to finish the character descriptions for the sitcom and just read them aloud during the show. My bit ended up taking nearly 20 minutes, but I got through all 50 wacky characterizations and the reaction was pretty amazing. In fact, my travel companions liked it so much that demand started to grow for me to actually write the thing! One of my friends even came up with a perfectly fitting and perfectly cheesy 90s sitcom title for the show, Excess Baggage. But writing an entire sitcom starring 50 people based on an inside joke seemed like a ridiculous waste of time. And anyway, I was on a film cleanse, and that included writing films as much as watching them! Months later, when we were close to the end of the program in Latin America, people were still pestering me to write it and I started to realize that it really meant something to them. Over the Christmas break back in Canada, I couldn’t help but imagine different scenarios for the pilot and when I came up with a perfectly fitting idea for a pre-credit sequence, I decided to just start writing and see how far I could get.  When I rejoined the group in January in Colombia, I started writing in earnest and before I knew it, I was turning down paying jobs to focus on Excess Baggage. It took the entire month, but by the time we made it to our final destination, Mexico City, I had an entire pilot in hand. In fact, the script was an absurd 73-pages long, which at roughly one page per minute is actually the length of a short feature film. When I told the rest of the group the script was finished, it was decided that we would unveil it for the first time as a cold table read at our final farewell party of the entire year. On the night of the party, I thought we might get through 30 minutes of the reading but we ended up finishing the entire script. While I had hoped that it would be funny at best and worried that it would be dull and selfish at worst, the reaction completely blew me away. It turned out to be an uproarious community bonding experience like none other, in which everyone got their moment to shine. It revealed the level of trust, comradery, and connection within the group that everyone was so committed to their roles, so supportive of each other, and so ready to laugh and cheer and cry. It was one of the most memorable moments of the entire year for me and I realized after the fact that it was actually the most satisfying artistic achievement of my life! Which is crazy, because it was “just a joke”. But clearly, there was some magic to the fact that it had no commercial value, potential, or intention, and that it was not made as part of my conscious “artistic practice”. Yes, it was a joke, but a joke made for and about a very specific audience of people that I knew and loved, which also made it a gift. And it made me want to rethink my artistic aspirations so that they always come from this pure and naive community-centered place. As a gift to others rather than a gift to myself. Note: this episode makes more sense if you listen to my podcast about Remote Year first.

Nonviolent Communication   About a year ago, I listened to an audiobook called Nonviolent Communication, as read by the author Marshall Rosenberg, and it immediately struck a chord with me. So much so that I listened to it twice! (You know, before my free Audible trial ended). In his slow, silky southern(?) drawl, Marshall outlined a very clear and simple structure for communicating in a way that minimizes conflict and maximizes connection (in theory, at least). His ideas dovetailed so nicely with what I was already thinking about shame-free communication, that I immediately wanted to learn more. After some googling, I discovered that there are Nonviolent Communication (or NVC as most people call it) practice groups all over the world and I decided to try one while I was in Vancouver. And the NVC meetup did not disappoint! It was fascinating to watch these skilled communicators in action. After every session I attended, I left feeling as if I had just had a really great therapy session (while NVC is definitely not a substitute for therapy, if you can’t afford a real therapist every week, attending a free NVC practice group near you certainly wouldn’t hurt)! Check out the Center for Nonviolent Communication to find practice groups in your area. A year later, I’ve just completed a 9-day NVC Internation Intensive Training (or IIT) on an island off of Stockholm, Sweden. It was a fully immersive residential retreat where I spent every day and every meal practicing and learning surrounded by 50 other Nonviolent Communicators of all ages and skill levels. It was intense, emotionally draining, and highly insightful! I will almost certainly do another IIT in the years to come.  While I am still very much learning about NVC and how to internalize it and apply it to my daily life, I figured this was as good a time as any to do an episode that tries to explain what NVC is and how it works. Listening back to the episode, I already notice a few things that I mixed up (saying “I feel” when I really mean “I think”, for example), but if any of what I’m saying intrigues you, then I highly recommend you check out the audiobook, a class, or a practice group for yourself. This episode is also a fitting follow-up to last week’s podcast on Authentic Relating because there are many similarities between the two practices. Both classes made me realize that I haven’t been living my life with the goal of “aliveness” — that exciting, electric energy of really connecting honestly with other humans. That means I’ve mostly been what NVC practitioners might call “nice, but dead”. Note: this episode makes more sense if you listen to my podcast on Wisdom 2.0 first.

AuthenticRelating   First of all, I just want to take a moment to celebrate that this is the 50th episode of Discomfortable! Which means I’ve been doing the podcast for a whole year (more or less, math nerds). I want to thank everyone who is reading this right now, everyone who has listened to any episodes of the show, and everyone who has helped spread the good word (about shame, not Jesus). How am I going to celebrate? By doing 50 more episodes! My 50th episode takes place at an Authentic Relating training course I did a few weekends ago in Stockholm, Sweden. As someone who prides himself on being pretty authentic, I was surprised to discover just how inauthentic I felt in this group. A feeling of shame about not being deep, dark, and emotional enough came creeping back from my adolescence and I found myself getting overly serious in an attempt to fit in. It made me question my entire style of relating and connecting to people, and even the tone of my podcast — am I trying too hard to be funny, light, and entertaining all the time?? Fortunately, the answer to my concerns came directly out of Authentic Relating itself. I eventually realized that it wasn’t about trying to be any one thing, or about prioritizing one aspect of my personality as more “real” than the rest. What it really comes down to is just being as aware and honest as I can be in the moment about all of the different aspects of my personality and all of the different things I am feeling so that I can fully and effectively communicate my truth to people, so that I can be fully seen! I learned that I can just talk openly about my dark side. And my light side. And everything in-between, including my angst about not being “authentic” enough. I can just talk about it all as it comes up in real time, especially as it relates to the people I’m actually talking to at that moment — the very people I think I need to impress by being more “authentic”. That is Authentic Relating. And easily the most surprising and uncomfortable side of my personality to emerge in this process was my straight side! Though I originally came out as bisexual in my twenties, that side of me was quickly orphaned as too complicated. So I was completely caught off guard when one of the female participants noted that there was an attraction between us and I suddenly realized… she was right! Needless to say, I foresee a super awkward episode about this topic in my near future. As you can imagine, Authentic Relating is a very courageous task, but it yields incredible results. These Authentic Relating games or exercises very quickly created a strong bond or kinship among the participants, and it empowered people to say things they probably never would have shared with a group of strangers under “normal” circumstances. But the real challenge of Authentic Relating is that it isn’t meant just for an insular group or workshop, it’s meant to be practiced all the time, everywhere, with anyone and everyone!

Loneliness   Last month I went to Austin, Texas to fulfill a dream of mine to see Brené Brown speak live as the keynote speaker at SXSW. I actually tried to get tickets to the shooting of her Netflix special in LA in January, but both tapings sold out too quickly for me to get one. So this was the next best thing, and while the talk was a really satisfying reminder of some of her signature lessons, afterwards I suddenly realized that I was stuck at SXSW with no idea of what to do with myself next!  And as I wandered around Austin taking in all the insanity, I was overwhelmed by a feeling of loneliness. I’ve realized over the last few years that I don’t get lonely when I’m actually alone, I get lonely when I surrounded by people but I don’t know any of them. SXSW was teaming with fascinating people but there were so many of them, taking part in such a variety of different streams of the festival, that it never felt appropriate or welcome to just start talking to strangers the way it did at Wisdom 2.0, for example.  I realized that 10 days of alienation was going to be social torture, I needed to find a way to connect, and fast. But then a solution presented itself almost by chance. As I joined a line for free beer, suddenly everyone around me started spontaneously making conversation! I discovered time and again that as soon as you are inside the protective yolk of a line, it was suddenly socially appropriate to talk to strangers. But as soon as the line ended, the conversation politely trailed off as everyone went on their way and I was left drinking my beer all alone again. Fortunately, SXSW is all lines! Lines for drinks, lines for food, lines for panels, lines for events, lines for concerts, lines for “experiences”, lines for “activations”, lines “houses”, lines for everything! Whenever I wasn’t in a session and started feeling lonely, I would simply join a line — any line. And when that line ended (after exploring whatever it was the line actually led to), I just lined up for something else. Ironically, the solution to loneliness was there in the name all along: lines! Along the way, I had stimulating though fleeting conversations and connections with all sorts of interesting folks and even found myself in the odd concert or event that was actually super fun. It was so much better than standing around by myself all the time or just going home. That being said, SXSW wasn’t all loneliness. I attended some really amazing and inspiring panels, concerts, drag shows, and parties and even made a few new friends along the way. You can listen to an audio recording of one of the sessions I mention in this episode, Gangs, Entrepreneurs and Beer.

Wisdom 2.0   Last month I went to a meditation and technology conference called Wisdom 2.0 in San Fransisco. Though I had heard mixed reviews about this conference, I was pleasantly surprised by how welcoming and friendly everyone was. I quickly felt a sense of belonging and the atmosphere and size of the event were such that I felt comfortable talking to pretty much anyone. It seemed like a really caring, thoughtful, and conscientious community. And that is why I was so surprised when I went to the bathroom after a long day of sessions to find that someone had left the toilet seat soaking wet. Since all the other stalls were taken, I was left feeling resentment and disillusionment as I crouched down and grabbed a wad of toilet paper to clean the seat myself. While this is admittedly no big deal in the grand scheme of things, of all the events and all the crowds, it just didn’t seem like the kind of careless and disrespectful thing someone at Wisdom 2.0 would do. I felt kind of like I’d been betrayed! Like the spell had been broken and I saw this “enlightened” crowd for the hypocrites they really were. I found myself sinking into misanthropic thoughts about how terrible people were everywhere… But then I stopped myself. I was reminded of something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately — that everything has a reason. I don’t mean that everything happens for a reason, just that there’s a reason for everything that happens. Things are rarely as senseless, incompetent, or crazy as they seem. There’s almost always a valid explanation, a story, and once I understand that story, it inevitably changes the way I react to any given negative event. It doesn’t even matter if I ever get to hear the full story or find out what that valid explanation is, just knowing that there must be one is enough to help me curb my judgment, anger, and exasperation, allowing me to move on. And so with this new attitude, I stopped stewing, cleaned the seat, and went about my business. And as I stood up afterward, I quickly discovered that there really was an explanation! My theory was validated almost right away and I couldn’t help but burst out laughing right there in the public bathroom. This experience dovetailed nicely with a powerful meditation practice I did with a stranger later in the conference led by Jack Kornfield, reminding me once again that everyone has their reasons for who they are and what they do. You can actually watch that entire meditation session below and try it yourself with a partner (if you look closely, you can see the back of my head just after the 10-minute mark):  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ZI07aLfMXw The other sessions I mention in this episode are online as well, Ev Williams from Twitter, Joan Halifax & Micheal Pollan, the Parkland Shooting survivors, Jay Shetty, Chelsea Handler, and more.

Attention   I recently had a small shame breakthrough and I wanted to record an episode about it immediately so that I could help clarify for you the listener (and for myself) exactly what a shame breakthrough actually is. At its core, it seems to be about unearthing a large chunk of shame-inducing conditioning from your subconscious in order to confront the fact that it has no basis in fact, logic, or your own consciously chosen values. A shame breakthrough is about discovering a piece of ideology that you inherited from your culture or family at such a young age (or so repeatedly) that you took it for granted as an objective “fact of life”. This dogmatic belief became part of the very fabric of your world, as seemingly true and fundamental as the sun rising and setting. But if you really look at it, you discover that there’s nothing holding it up except shame.  It seems that as children we construct a view of the world based on what we see around us and what we are taught explicitly and also unconsciously by our culture and family. This includes what is “right” and what is “wrong”, what is “good” and what is “bad”, and who is “us” and who is “them”. Practical facts about the natural world, like gravity, mix with cultural opinions, like “race”, on seemingly equal footing. This becomes our “reality”, the “water we swim in”, the air we breathe. We are so immersed in our culture that it becomes invisible to us. And part of the glue that really holds all of this together is a terrifying unconscious dread that if we don’t learn the rules then the people we love, the people we respect, the people who protect us and nurture us, will reject or abandon us. And that feeling is called shame. The real trip is that every time I uncover a new aspect of my shame that I wasn’t previously aware of, I realize that not only have I been judging and punishing myself unfairly, but I have also been unconsciously propagating that shame into the world! That means I have probably been subconsciously shaming YOU. Shame spreads like a virus between the people we love, trust, and respect, so if you’ve been listening regularly and buying into what I’ve been saying, it’s possible that you picked up a bit of my shame as well. Sorry! At the core of this most recent shame breakthrough is the dogmatic belief that wanting attention is “bad”. My therapist helped me reframe my judgemental attitude about being an “attention whore” with the new perspective that wanting to “be seen” is a completely natural and healthy part of being human. It goes to show how powerful new perspectives are (especially in therapy) for revealing and demystifying our shame and dogma. Now I’m using self-compassion to learn to love the part of me that (for better or worse) desires to be seen. Though it seems paradoxical, I’m starting to think that the best way to positively change and grow is actually through radical self-acceptance!

Prison   A few months ago, I did an Instagram poll asking my followers if any of them had ever been arrested. A handful of people clicked yes, including myself. Then I asked if any of them had actually gone to prison, and only one person said yes. It was an old friend who I hadn’t seen in years. So I decided to reach out and see if I could interview him for the show, and I’m so glad I did! His story turned out to be a powerful example of the way a change in personal values can dramatically improve one’s quality of life and even lead to a sense of redemption after a “shameful” crime. My anonymous guest went from a life of seeking personal value through power, intimidation, and money, to finding a life of meaning through love, belonging, and radical honesty. His interview is a very candid, amusing, and at times chilling look at what day-to-day life is like behind bars in a medium security prison in Canada. We cover a range of topics from prison politics, to the prison slang that will lead to an instant fight, to coping techniques both effective and misguided, even what it’s like for gay and trans people in prison. Perhaps most surprising of all, my guest actually met his now wife in the process! We also delve into the pros and cons of prison as a system of punishment and reform, especially as it relates to privilege and the marginalized communities that are overrepresented in the Canadian criminal justice system. It’s clear that for some inmates, like my guest, prison can be useful, while for others it actually makes things worse. It seems that one of the major keys to successful reform and reintegration is the outside support that an inmate receives, which is ironic given that a lack of social support may be a big part of what causes some inmates to offend in the first place, leading to an endless cycle of recidivism. My guest provides a surprisingly humorous, honest, eye-opening, and thought-provoking look at an uncomfortable part of our society that many of us (perhaps willfully) know very little about. Update: when I think of this episode, the following quote from pioneering psychologist Alfred Adler comes to mind, from his book, Understanding Human Nature: “Picture an individual who has lifted himself above the difficulties of life, extricated himself from the swamp, and learned to take bad experiences and make use of them. He truly understands the good and the bad sides of life. No one can compare with him in this understanding, certainly not the righteous ones who have seen only the good side.” Note: this interview has been edited for privacy, clarity, and interest.

Scarcity   A few months ago, a listener from Europe reached out and asked me to do an episode about a topic that she described as “insatiability”, though she said it wasn’t quite the right word. The word in her native language doesn’t have an English equivalent, but after a back and forth it became clear that she was referring to that feeling we all experience from time to time of not being “enough”. For some people, myself included, this can be a persistent feeling of shame, “I’m not good enough”. I also struggled to find the right word for this episode. While it has a lot to do with shame, I think this feeling is also really rooted in scarcity. The feeling that there is only so much human “worth” out there in the world, and if you don’t hustle to get it, and get it fast, there will be none left for you. I think this ties right into shame’s message that humans exist on a hierarchy of human value. If you can be “bad”, as shame suggests, then others must be “good” and therefore better than you in some way, which puts them above you on kind of a ladder of human worth. This whole notion that people can be inherently “bad” suggests that there is a scarcity of “good”, as if there just isn’t enough to go around. This misguided belief leaves us scrambling to get as much “worth” as we can, either by creating it, faking it, or stealing it from others. But fortunately, there is another way to look at the world! I’ve been sitting on this request for months because I wasn’t sure I had anything insightful to say about it. But as always seems to happen, if I let a question linger in the back of my mind long enough it eventually bears fruit. What really inspired me to finally take a shot at it was a 2-day workshop I did last weekend on Mindful Self-Compassion. The course was designed and led by the Godfathers of scientific self-compassion, Kristin Neff and Chris Germer. It was a condensed version covering half of their pioneering 8-week course on mindful self-compassion. At its core, self-compassion is the realization that we can and should give ourselves the very same kinds of love, attention, and support that we would any other loved one, especially a child. This harkens back to my episode on family and my definition of adulthood (which I still haven’t achieved) as becoming your own parent. Like any good parent would do with their child, we should all be checking in with ourselves, showing compassion for our own pain, and offering unconditional loving-kindness to ourselves. I think I’ll do a separate episode at some point all about self-compassion, but if you — like me and my European listener — struggle with scarcity and unworthiness, then I’ll leave you with this affirmation I came up with during a self-centered loving-kindness meditation exercise Chris and Kristin taught us (note: the fact that the phrase “self-centered” is pejorative in our culture illustrates exactly why a lot of people never engage in self-compassion to begin with). This loving-kindness affirmation is not a thoughtless mantra to be repeated over and over again, instead try saying it slowly to yourself a few times when you need a reminder that the feeling that you are “not enough” is just temporary, illusory, and not actually your fault: “May I know that I am already everything I need myself to be.”