The oxytocin circling back to that comes in because it is the hormone of bonding and belonging it's what happens between a mother and child and so when the oxytocin is released we come into what Sherri Taylor called tend and be friend or calm and connect it brings a sense of safety to the brain and by the way this whole attachment cycle is Ok I'm home with someone who loves me and takes care of me there's a threat I go to them for protection I get the protection I get sooth now I'm ready to take a risk and go off in the world but another threat happens and I go back to my secure attachment figure did get comforted and protected again that's a cycle we feel safe we take a risk of something happens we get scared we come back we get comforted and protected I want to insert your question about their Lyme glad that you're broad. Taylor because we've seen the research about women have a greater tendency to tend and be friend and so is there a difference between men and women here because I think culturally men are taught to be independent in independent of that reaching out is there a difference so the biology underneath that culture is men do have more of a suppressant and it's a molecule that's chemically similar to oxytocin So it's true women have more oxytocin men have more of a suppressor what the vessel Presson does for men is it encourages them to protect So the woman is tending and be friending and the man is protecting the family now that can be expressed in various cultural forms where the men man defends the home or provides for the home and the woman takes care of the children it can be culturally expressed but it's based in our biology so does that mean so. When we talk about feeling safe. Do men have a little more challenge to to actually use this kind of exercise to be to feel safe do they have a bigger challenge men are socialized to be the protectors and the providers so they may actually feel a sense of safety from providing and protecting the family that's where a sense of safety might come from for them in order to feel safe we need to be able to acknowledge our vulnerability a little bit that we need to feel safe that we need to feel protected and in the culture that is harder for men to feel I don't think biologically it's harder for them to feel but culturally men are trained to not feel that are not let that show if they feel it and in fact there's some wonderful work being done now in the mind for self compassion protocol for men by Danielle and very Steve Heckman who are who are allowing their calling vulnerability to be the ultimate courage to be able to acknowledge what's really going on and bring compassion for there is the ultimate courage So yes we have some cultural conditioning to deal with. But I think nonetheless the biology is still we can use these tools to create a sense of safety so that the brain remains now plastic I'm just recalling I d.v.r. What a lot of things and one of the things I d.v.r. While I was away on a trip was a c.m.a. Awards these are the Country Music Awards and it's great to see him or her to. Go through the commercials because there are so many of them but and I'm not even through the whole thing yet but there was a song that Garth Brooks sang for the 1st time and even his wife Trisha Yarbrough I think is his wife was sitting in the audience she had not even heard this song yet and I don't recall the name of it but it was a whole song of how much he loved her and his feeling he could feel vulnerable because of her because she was the strength to allow him to feel that vulnerability I. People should just kind of through finance song somewhere because it was so powerful I was really shocked that a man would come up with such a song that is talking exactly about what you are saying Well I think what's important for resilience is that we develop our capacities to be with and work with any of our emotions and then even to work with any of the cultural messages or any of that internal messages that we might have about those emotions because when we can shift our perspective we're going to be more flexible and more resilient so just being able to look at anything that's happening and our reactions to anything that's happening and be able to shift gears that's really the key my my colleague Frankie Perez says. How you respond to the issue is the issue there goes and I am I want to go also to our our relationship with ourselves you know we talk about safety with you know finding others but also finding safety in the self-love within or for ourselves and it seems to me in one thing that you mentioned this is our home base this is where we can come home to that we don't have to depend on others always we we need to develop this within ourselves so there's a chicken and egg thing going on here it's true I mean the relational intelligence within a chapter is about developing a self-awareness self acceptance self appreciation self love that is the foundation of our inner secure base of resilience how that develops is back and forth in interactions with other people where we can take that experience feeling loved so we come to love ourselves it goes back and forth that's why I have relational intelligence within and relational intelligence with others because they really dovetail so I'm unthinking you say search out people who have healthy brains like hang out with them. That's very beneficial do you have any comments on the 2 levels one I included that in the book in the chapter on brain care and taking care of your brain and there are so many things we can do to take care of the physical brain exercise and sleep and nutrition and learning something new and a hanging out with healthy brains is one of those things because the brain stays more active engaged but we also know that that at a social cultural level that when we're hanging out with healthy brains people who have done their work so to speak and can be managing of their own experiences and resilience in their own experiences then we don't have to be defended or guarded or manipulated. Or on guard anything we can just be open which is the safest condition for the brain for learning every being resilient so. That's what you what you would recommend there is a lifestyle choice so to speak it's a lifestyle choice and if the 2 ice that prolongs life and now more and more research is showing that the people who have the best longevity are the people who are happy in relationships and in community when they're social connection we live longer. Ok aren't so developing in those in search of those and really being aware of when we are just around a lot of negative people doubts going to drag us down so they have too much of that in our lives may not be healthy so I've come up with sort of a metaphor my colleague illogical to me and I talk about this just like periodic Lee you clean out your house and e.u. Go through and recycle the things that you don't need anymore periodic Lee We have to prune our relationships as well if relationships are negative or toxic or make us feel smaller fires shamed it might be important to be able to prune them and cultivate relationships like you cultivate positive emotions cultivate relationships that are healthy for our wellbeing so with that that's really good advice that maybe not as easily kept so to speak because there is going to take some effort on our part well and it takes skill so the relational intelligence with others has a lot of skills of setting limits and boundaries communicating without shame and blame negotiating change in a relationship repairing a rupture coming to forgiveness there are a lot of skills we can learn that allow us to relate to people in healthier and healthier ways. I'm thinking that one of the exercises that you have it and repairing let's say a relationship is that just like me. Exercise which we can talk about in in a bit. I'm want to remind our listeners that I'm here with Linda Graham and she is a licensed psychotherapist a medication teacher and she publishes a monthly e Newsletter entitled healing and awakening to a life ness and wholeness and she has many many resources on her website and I suggest you look them up. And they are archived on our Web site go to lend them dash m f t dot net as in marriage family therapist m.f.t. Dot net or you can get there through the New Dimensions website New Dimensions dot org I'm just steamed well as terms you're listening to new dimensions. I'm here with Linda Gray and we're talking about resilience and she is the author of resilience powerful practices for bouncing back from disappointment difficulty and even disaster and Lynn I just mentioned before the break I mentioned when we are looking to repair let's say a relationship in this is always challenging and you have a wonderful exercise and it's called just like me and you get if you can describe that for us so many give credit to Mark common who wrote making peace with your mind because that's where I got the exercise again using that with his permission the idea is to overcome the sense of otherness or difference that might create a gulf between us and a person where relating to and relating that back to repairing a rupture. The most important thing in repairing our rupture is to prioritize the relationship over being right. When the relationship is more important than your position or your opinion or being right then you can focus on doing the repair with another person so just like me helps that because it cultivates our sense of common humanity just like me this person wants to be happy just like me this person has fears and disappointments just like me this person wants to be important in their lives just like me this person struggles with their own emotions what whatever works because then that creates a sense of commonality and common humanity between you and the other person and that's what allows to put the connecting to be more important than your own independent individual opinion there is so really we're just giving listeners a little flavor of some of these exercises and another one I want you to mention it was a story that you told that I really loved and I think it wasn't your client but it was someone else's client who has the name you used in the book was Shawn and he had he was. Plagued by negative emotions and then he was given an exercise of doing something before he even got out of bed do you recall this Oh yes of Carl's great and please so I actually thought I was my client and he complained about where he up in anxiety every morning so there wasn't that sense of well being and so I encouraged him to simply do whatever practice he wanted to do when he was home in bed waking up gratitude practice or mindfulness practice or hand on the heart but to not get out of bed until he was in a state of calm in a state of well being and he would say I mean it would he would wake up it would take an hour but then it took 35 minutes and then it took 15 minutes and then it took 5 minutes and one day he woke up in that state of calm so he had retrained the managing of his nervous system so I offered that story sim. They to say we can to use to do a practice when we repeat it many many times over time it will have an effect and not only then do we learn something that manages our experience so we can become more resilient but we learn that we can we learn that we can be a learner that we can train our brains to become more resilient and that's part of our resilience is to learn that we can do that and trust ourselves that we can do that and I think that this one is especially relevant to these times because there's a lot of pressure on us there is like climate change or the polarization of politics or terrorism or these you know just over and over we're just getting all this news just bombarded with news and this is a very good I thought practice to just practice this in the morning so that we don't wake up and we just kind of think oh another day I wonder what bad news is going to happen today well then I would also suggest because all those things that you mentioned are not just discrete individual stressors that we have to deal with it's it's a change in the whole system of what it means to be alive on this planet and so it generates a kind of existential anxiety and I think it's important that people come to a practice they come to their own values that has a larger spiritual dimension to it somehow we are part of something that is larger and vaster than we are and whether that's coming to the wise view are wise understanding of the Buddhist tradition that leads to wise effort we need some way to come to terms with we don't know we're not in control there's a lot of uncertainty there certainly impermanence and coming to terms with those realities of life so I've done some research on post-traumatic growth and we talk about that some in the book of being able to accept what's happened. Being and to be able to resource with other people and to be able to find the positive even in the midst of a difficult hard time because that gives us some breathing room it gives us a respite but then also finding the lessons of the silver lining the gift in the mistake and coming to a coherent narrative all this happened before here was the event here's how I dealt with it here's what I learned and now here's my life going forward this is what I learned because of that event not just in spite of it this is a new baseline for my life because of what happened not for certain So you're you're looking at your own. Time that you were successful. When you coped well. When you coped when you met the adversity well with some skill and some flexibility. So that's another one that you need to have ready for when when you need it then that that maybe you do some journaling about times in your life that you coped well yes that would be part of a coherent narrative and journaling is actually a very useful tool to help people cope with something is difficult because we get a little bit more emotional distance from whatever's happening but to open up to a larger spiritual perspective often helps people cope with these very very very difficult overwhelming experiences to know that there's something a larger holding them or there's some larger meaning and purpose even if we don't fully understand where is the curtain say it well to be curiosity that's that's what I go for is curious like well maybe I don't know enough in maybe you know that I'm curious as to how this is all going to turn out in its turn out well in the past and it's not mine to worry about but it's mine too to act in the moment with my center of influence into the mess I can to be a benefit and that's where I go I try to go there was a quote that I learned from. Clarissa Penn call estus through Jack Kornfield and it's something like we can't solve everything our task is to mend the little patch where we are. Yeah there you go there you go and that's good right mean that we say Ok we can get overwhelmed by the enormity of what's being presented to us but if we each do that little path those patches go over laffin I think it's important to see where other people are being resilient not just ourselves so Helen Keller said all the world is full of suffering it is also full of overcoming and when we look at examples of other people who are meeting their difficulties and their stressors with resilience with compassion and with reaching out to other people and being of service then we get Boyd in our own efforts to be resilient and compassionate and engaged so as again the common humanity that sense of being connected to other people as Mr Rogers used to say look for the helpers or the helpers and I'm reminded to of something he meant that you talk about in your book in your work and that has to do with. Attention and that that the where we put our attention this is foundational so I'd love for you to mention attention and how important it is where we focus so in order to be able to be resilient we need to be present and we need to know what we're dealing with and so that's come that's focusing our attention on one of the phrases I use in the book is know what you're experiencing while you're experiencing it. Because otherwise you're not going to know how or what to respond to so it's the basics of mindfulness of paying attention to what we're experiencing while we're experiencing it so that we can discern what possible options we might have in our responses to give an example or that somehow for us so here's one of the exercises that I also teach in the book and I got this one from Stuart I was in Dr who researches mindfulness and depression at u.c.s.f. Medical school and the exercise is visualization it's to of course feel safe and comfortable present in your body and then imagine that you're walking down the street down a sidewalk in your hometown some place where you feel comfortable and at ease and then you notice someone on the other side of the street walking toward you and you wave and you call out hello and it's no response you notice your response to their lack of response. Then after a moment they notice you and they wave and they call out hello and you notice your response now when there's a connection and it simply mindful attention to the difference in our responses because usually there is a difference in our response and when we feel connected we feel open and if we feel disconnected we might go into shame so it's simply paying attention to what's happening so you can decide how you want to respond to what's happening. Yes Yeah and we only have like like I don't know most of the millet. I want you to just say something about taking a digital vacation. Just because now more research is showing the impact of the overuse of our digital technology on our brain we're losing capacity is a concentration reversing a path that is of empathy we're losing capacities for solitude and reflection it's important to take a vacation from my digital devices to allow the brain to recoat and function the way it has evolved to function not with so much over stimulation from our devices Ok that's a big order thank you for doing that in capsule lady noun and you can look at more detail in a Linda's book so I want to remind our listeners I want to thank you so much Linda for being with us today thank you just you know a lot of fun great it was great for me too it was great to go through your book and find so many great exercises I've been speaking with Linda Graham a she's a licensed psychotherapist and meditation teacher and her website is lend Graham dash f t dot net Linda Graham Desh m.f.t. Dot net she is the author of resilience powerful practices for bouncing back from disappointment difficulty and even disaster and you can also get to our website by going to the New Dimensions website New Dimensions dot org I'm just saying well as times you've been listening to new dimensions this is program number 3662 New Dimensions radio has been making a difference on our planet since 1973 thanks to the generosity of our listeners. You too can help make a difference with a tax deductible donation or membership please visit our website New Dimensions dot org and just click the donate button you can also subscribe to our free weekly podcasts and find over a 1000 hours of audio dialogues in our searchable archive new dimensions is produced by New Dimensions radio in Santa Rosa California USA Our executive producer is Justin Willis Toms our post production editor is Lou Judson this program was recorded at Strawberry Hill Productions a full service podcast production studio in of auto California we sincerely thank all of you who have supported us by being members of Friends of New Dimensions as well as members of our affiliate stations My name is Dan Drayton on behalf of everyone at New Dimensions whose endeavors make this program possible I'm