Speaker 0 00:00:02 You were listening to right on radio, on caffeine in any 0.3 FM and streaming live on the
[email protected]. I'm Josh Webber. Tonight on, right on radio. I'll be talking with <inaudible> about her collection of meditation's on romantic poet, John Keats called Keats's odes in lover's discourse. The book emerges from necessity and lifelong attachment to Keats's poetry and drawing on experiences from her own life necessity and celebrates Keats is even as she grieves him and counselor own losses, all of this and more. So stay tuned to write on medium. Hello, on a Hickey. Hear me.
Speaker 1 00:00:56 Can you hear me?
Speaker 0 00:00:57 Yep. Um, see if I could a little bit louder. That's better. Yeah, that's good. Okay. On here, if you are ready with your first reading, you can go ahead
Speaker 1 00:01:14 Born and posed some of the most unrepentantly alive poems in the English language. It is possible that had he survived. He would have written no more quitting, had always been an option and he needed real money to support himself and his fiance, Fannie Bron. It is also possible that he would have kept writing and possible to that. He would have burrowed even deeper into the broken heart of his century, which he knew was reordering time and space and answer to the demands of a new and rapacious economic system. George Bernard Shaw saw in Keats the makings of a full blooded modern revolutionist. And if he didn't reach the barricades, he did belong on them because there was nothing Keats loved more than us. Those who know this is not all we are meant to be. His poetry is a record of that love and its wild inconvenient expression.
Speaker 1 00:02:19 It is a lover's discourse at once. Compassionate exacting in decent and pure keeps this odes. A lover's discourse collects six of Keats's poems known together as the great oats. I follow each ode with a short essay that is both critical and autobiographical. Although the autobiographical dimension will not always be obvious in that sense, the essays work like the oats oats, roughly speaking are poems meant to celebrate something or someone, but because they are written from a place of emotional, excess or ferment, it's easy for them to tip over into more private, thus Percy Bish Shelley's ode to the West wind, which connects the cycle of the seasons to the here today, gone tomorrow. Movement of revolutionary struggle. Also erupts into the furiously personal creed decor. I fall upon the thorns of life I bleed in writing about Keats's odes. I have tried to prop myself open to this same uneven traffic of literary and intimate concerns.
Speaker 1 00:03:25 This book then is a love story between me and Keats and not just Keats Keats himself was famously lovable. Despite having been born. He said into an unpromising morning, that sense of bleakness of having failed before he had begun dogged him. He was poor. He was short six inches below average and in ill health, once he began publishing his work was almost universally panned. He was temperamental obsessive and thin-skinned and his childhood, which was traumatic, left him nervous, morbid in the words of his brother, George, all the same, he amassed a small army of devoted friends. One of them called him the most lovable associate that ever lived in the tide of times of his death or perhaps their relationship Braun wrote. I have not got over it and never show when I say this book is a love story. I mean, it is about things that cannot be gotten over like this world and some of the people in it
Speaker 2 00:04:33 Very good. That was on a heanor sassy and reading from her new book. Keats's odes a lover's discourse. She's a professor of English at the university of California, Los Angeles. She's the author of the calamity form on poetry and social life utopia limited romanticism and adjustment. And the co-editor of the thinking literature series published by the university of Chicago. Press. Welcome to write on radio on eight.
Speaker 1 00:05:00 Oh, thanks so much for having me. I'm so excited to talk to you. Yes.
Speaker 2 00:05:04 So, um, right at the bat, let's just get into it. Um, one of the first things you notice by looking at ketos is the book itself. I it's a hot pink dust jacket, something I don't think I've ever seen before. Okay. Were you involved in the career process for coming up with the overall look and design of the book?
Speaker 1 00:05:21 Yeah, absolutely. So I fought really, really hard for this hot pink. You say you've never seen a book this color, but I'll tell you there's a book by an artist named David bachelor of an English artist. And he wrote a book called chromophobia, which means fear of color. And it's about the ways in which color can be perceived. Uh, you know, within the context of particularly postmodern art as decadent or excessively feminine or in one way or another anti intellectual. And so the book is trying to explain why people have a kind of fear of colors like pink or purple or fluorescent blue and to reclaim the idea of bright and garish color. So that book is hot pink and it's pretty much the same hot pink is my book. And so I wanted my book to be an homage to chromophobia because people respond to Keats's poetry in much the same way they thought it was garish and excessively feminine and over done. And so it's a, it's a kind of backdoor salute to David Batchelor's book, but yes, um, it is very, it is very pink. It is a very pink book
Speaker 2 00:06:26 And I love it for that reason. So, um, I'm always interested in an author's choice when, how they open their work. I think it gives you a sense of what occupied their head space going into their writing. And there's this quote from George open, the heart ceaselessly opens to three words, which is too little. What did you choose? This is his, how would you describe your relationship with Kate's?
Speaker 1 00:06:47 George often is a really important poet for me and has been for a really long time, both for the political content of his work and his life, but also for the particular relationship to love or the erotic that he again, sort of carries through in his poetry and in his life and also in his politics. So it was really important to me to preface the book with something from a contemporary or not contemporary, but a 20th century or 21st century poet. I didn't want to have anything too dated as the epigraph. I wanted something more modern and often seemed like a really natural choice. And those lines have always meant a lot to me, partly because they risk a certain degree of sentimentality. I think we assume that the three words are probably, I love you. And those are really, you know, for some of us very difficult words to say, and for some of us, very easy words to say, but they're certainly loaded. And so I wanted the book to begin with a certain kind of risk, the risk that we take when we tell somebody that we love them, right? That's always a moment of great terror and you don't know what they're going to say or how they're going to respond. So, um, and for me writing the book also felt like a moment of great risk because it's the most personal writing that I've ever done. So that's the, where, where the epigraph comes from
Speaker 2 00:08:09 In the preface of Keats's odes. You say this work is more like a series of meditations instead of essays. And what I liked about that is by saying their meditations, it frees you from having to substantiate every idea you have as if it's some kind of critical examination, you have some allowance to have your own point of view, to be idiosyncratic about it. Did this make it easier for you to write? Did it make it harder for you?
Speaker 1 00:08:33 You know, in some ways it made it harder for me because I'm trained as a professional academic and the, uh, the first two books that I wrote are very straightforward academic books. And at, at their best, I hope that the claims in those books are substantiated by evidence. And, you know, I'm very comfortable in the realm of providing evidence that I'm a little less comfortable, the realm of pure speculation. I like to know that I've backed my ideas up. And so for me, it felt again to go back to my answer to your last question, it felt like a risk to come out, swinging with a particular interpretation or a particular account of what a pull meant to me without necessarily taking the reader through the nuts and bolts of why this was why I was right in that particular instance. So it was freeing, but it was also freeing in a way that that made me very anxious
Speaker 2 00:09:25 In the introduction to ode, you provide the readers with stories about kids to give us a background of who he is. You tell us that you telling these stories about Keith, because they helped you love him. And for you, it's hard not to love other people's damage. Um, I wonder if you could talk about that, say, why do you think that is,
Speaker 1 00:09:46 You know, a friend of mine read the book when it was still in manuscript, my friend, Anthony Madrid, who's a really terrific poet and a dear friend of mine. And he responded, he gave me notes on the book and he pointed that passage out as one that made him very uncomfortable. And he said, you know, if you ask me, it's really easy not to love other people's damage except maybe for a weirdo like you. And he took it as a kind of, um, you know, as an, a front, right? Because actually there is something very perverse and very dangerous in admiring or wanting to preserve the parts of another person to whom we're close that are destructive. Right. You know, I mean, don't, we all want people, the people that we love in particular to be healthy and thriving and well not damaged. And yes, I think in a perfect world, that's true, but in my own life and I, and I suspect this is true of most of us in my own life, I've found it very difficult, not to be drawn to people who in one way or another, have a certain kind of vulnerability or a certain kind of fragility and on the most extreme end of that spectrum, maybe a certain kind of damage.
Speaker 1 00:10:55 So I wanted to be very honest with, you know, with myself about myself and particularly about what it is that draws me to Keats. And then of course what it is that has drawn me to other people in my life too. So it may, it may be a bad thing to say, but I'm afraid that it's true about me.
Speaker 2 00:11:15 You also say in the book that you don't like being called a writer and that you learn in grad school that good writing meant you're a con artists. I was wondering you talk about what you meant. Okay.
Speaker 1 00:11:27 Uh, sure. So I went to the university of Chicago for grad school. You're already laugh. Um, I went to the university of Chicago for graduate school and the university of Chicago is a place that has a reputation for extreme intellectual rigor. And I very vividly remember writing a chapter of my dissertation on, on Percy Shelley. And it was the first chapter of the dissertation I had where I really, really enjoyed the process of writing it. You know, I had written a couple of chapters before and it was like pulling teeth and it was horribly depressing. And writing this chapter, I felt really, really good. And I felt like finally, I was on top of the, the writing and the writing itself was giving me pleasure, you know? And so I very proudly turned it into my dissertation committee. And one of my advisors said to me, in response to this chapter, don't get me wrong.
Speaker 1 00:12:20 You're a really good writer. And it was very clear that that was intended as a kind of criticism. And I think that the substance of the criticism would be something like when you don't really know what you want to say, or when you don't really have evidence for what you want to say, you use style to kind of snow the reader. And I was very offended, you know, um, by this criticism because I had actually felt like it was so liberating for me to discover that writing could be writing in an academic register, could be a pleasure. So I carried that with me for a very long time. And I, and I still have a sense in the back of my mind that I may be believe that idea that good writing is a kind of con artistry, you know, um, I know a lot of good writers who are con artists in one way or another. So secretly, I think I may actually believe that to be true.
Speaker 2 00:13:18 So let's, I want to ask you about Keith now, one of Keith's favorite themes is the persistence of beauty and the ugly situations. Do you think that's partly why Keats has persisted even now, uh, this willingness to make vivid, the commonplace reality that we're just people and or animals that can simultaneously feel joy and suffering?
Speaker 1 00:13:40 Yeah, that's a, that's a really good way to put it. I do think that that is a big part of Keats's draw. And of course that truth was embodied in the story of his own life. His kids had a famously tragic life. He died 200 years ago today of tuberculosis at the age of 25, separated from everyone that he loved from his fiance, Fannie Bron from his family, from his closest friends. And he, you know, to the end really had a very passionate and very intense appreciation for the things in life that are beautiful. When he was dying. He had his, uh, friend Joseph Severn who was staying with him as a, as a companion and rent a piano. And he had seven play, um, the work of Joseph Haydn who, whose music, kids loved very much to kind of cheer him up and he read poetry and he read, um, you know, other kinds of literature on his deathbed again, till the very end. And so he's somebody who, even in his own life really embodied this principle that the love of beauty certainly persists within the most catastrophic, personal and historical situations. So I think that people, as soon as they learn the Kita story, as soon as they know anything about his biography, connect that or Intuit there to be a connection between those aspects of his life and those themes in his poetry. So, yes, I do think that's a big part of the draw.
Speaker 2 00:15:08 So later on, we were talking about, Oh, to a Nightingale, very end Keats ass in the last line, do I wake or do I sleep? And you come with the keys is looking for someone or trying to talk to someone. But I know earlier I actually noted here and I love this passage here. You talk about how your love for literature. You love this idea that the space here could imagine you and your blanket are anonymous. And then as you became more intelligent, more literate that you got frustrated that this literature cannot imagine you with this passage or this last line from key. So I was wondering if this, an attempt for Keats trying to imagine us or an audience who's looking into him.
Speaker 1 00:15:43 Yeah. Part of the pathos, I guess I would say in being, you know, a woman, um, being the child of an immigrant father, you know, um, having a certain set of political principles, all those things have estranged me in one way or another, from the literature that I really love best. And that's, you know, literature of the sort that keeps represents. And so w you know, when I come to that literature, I will always come to it as an outsider. And I think that there is no poem by Keats, including, um, ode to a Nightingale. There is no poem by Keats that I belong in. So if he's trying to talk to anybody at the end of that poem, he's certainly not trying to talk to me, you know, Keats kind of can't imagine the reality of someone like me. And he certainly can't really imagine the idea of a female literature professor.
Speaker 1 00:16:36 That's just a historical impossibility for him and an imaginative impossibility for him. Although Keats did think very, very highly of, of women in their intellectual capacity. So he famously said that he considered women, his equals, even though he really struggled to square that understanding with his secret belief, that women were also all goddesses. So, you know, I don't really belong in these poems, but I intrude into them as a reader. And I intrude into them as somebody who feels passionately attached to them. So a lot of the book is about me trying to describe that sense of being perpetually on the outside of something that I have such an extreme kind of attachment to. So I think that the thing about Keith's though is that he was a wonderfully expansive and humane thinker. So he is always in his poetry trying to capture as many varieties of human. And in some cases non-human and an animal experience that he can wrap his mind around. So it's not really his fault that he can't imagine me, but it is something that remains the case and will always remain the case about the poetry. You compare,
Speaker 2 00:17:50 Keats's poem, ode on a Grecian urn to a streets you would hope to avoid walking down. I was wondering, you could talk about that.
Speaker 1 00:17:57 Sure. So, you know, I have a slightly heretical, or, you know, maybe just surprising reading of that poem. I actually think that in contrast to the other roads, the speaker of that poem is not actually Keats. And I think the speaker of that poem is somebody whose opinions keeps really strongly objects to. So I think that Paul might be understood a little bit more on the lines of, of a dramatic monologue. So, you know, it's as though this could even be a piece of theater that keeps his giving us, and the reason keeps objects on my understanding, the reason it keeps objects to the speaker of that poem is that the speaker seems to believe that the images represented on the urn that he's looking at are merely exemplary of the beauty of human civilization. And if you actually read the poem, what's on the urn is a series of depictions of sexual assault.
Speaker 1 00:18:53 Um, Harold bloom, the, the very famous literary critic who died fairly recently once called that poem of a long portrait, like a one long protracted rape, you know, so very, very strong language to use for, from Harold bloom. And I think that's true. I think that's mostly correct reading of that poem. So the idea that you don't really want to walk down the street, you know, anyone who feels themselves to be vulnerable to any kind of assault, right? Physical or sexual, or, um, you know, verbal knows the feeling of making a quick calculation on the street, for example, of how safe one way home might be as opposed to another way home. And so the sense of menace and particularly a kind of gendered menace that I think hangs around that poem is something I wanted to capture in that line. And so for me, when I think about feeling, you know, menaced in a particular way, I think about having to walk down a street that doesn't feel safe or a street that feels like someone might be lurking somewhere within it to try and hurt me or try to hurt someone I love.
Speaker 1 00:19:56 So that's where that line comes from.
Speaker 2 00:20:00 I would regret if I didn't ask you about this, because I pursed out laughing, I've never heard this before, but can you talk about this interpretation of cases, ode on a Grecian urn from cath Burke about the fragility of the fragility of the physical form or body is turd, turd body.
Speaker 1 00:20:15 Yeah. Isn't that weird? Yeah. Yeah. Burke is just a, you know, deeply, deeply eccentric literary critic and deeply eccentric reader of poetry. And so the very famous line that almost concludes ode on a Grecian urn is beauty is truth, truth, beauty. Uh, and then it finishes that as all, you know, on earth and all you need to know. And so Burke has this, um, I think he calls it is a method of reading. That's his own method of reading that he calls joisting and, and, um, that's meant to be, uh, a callback to James Joyce, right? So it's, joisting not in the sense of rejoicing, but in the sense of James Joyce Singh and James Joyce, of course, is this famously scatological writer who also loved puns. So there's a lot of, there's a lot of turds and Joyce. And so Burke says something to the effect of, you know, he's going to Joyce with these lines and find they're hidden, they're hidden excrement, total meaning.
Speaker 1 00:21:18 And so he creates this pun on our, I mean, it's not even really a pun, but he plays on truth and turns it into church. And then he turns beauty into body. So you get his claim that the real meaning of beauty is truth, truth, beauty. His body is turd, turd body. And his belief is that the urn is a, perhaps a funeral earn. And that is what's in, it is human remains. So hence the idea of, you know, the body is being disposable or the body is being something that's been excrete it and then cast aside. So that's the Burke idea and it's, you know, it's very loopy, but it's very funny.
Speaker 2 00:21:53 Um, so you have an endorsement on the back of this book that says you are reinventing reading itself as a form of critical intimacy. I was wondering how that you felt about that and maybe tougher to say, but do you feel it's accurate take on your work?
Speaker 1 00:22:07 Oh yeah. I mean that, that, um, blurb or, you know, that description by, uh, cheek already is so deeply meaningful to me because that's exactly what the book is meant to be about. It is meant to be about love as a, as a critical practice and near the end of the book. I say something about, you know, my own feeling that what, what love means to me is the capacity to pay very close attention to something or someone, and to get something about that person or about that thing. Right. So, or as right as I can. And so for me, there's a very close relationship between love and criticism, because in both cases, you know, there's this attempt to see the object as clearly as possible to, um, see the object and the fullness of what it is, or see the person in the fullness of who they are. And so that was such an incredibly stunning, you know, account of the book for me to have reflected back at me because it was exactly what I had been trying to, to achieve. So I'm very, very moved by it.
Speaker 2 00:23:10 And my last question for you, I think this segues well into, I want to ask you, or talk to the audience here about your work with the university of Chicago press and the thinking literature series. I actually came across a YouTube video where you talk to a couple art authors who have released a couple of pieces. And I was curious, you explained this goal you have with the series you're, you're focusing on literary studies as his own mode of analysis, is that correct?
Speaker 1 00:23:33 Yes. Okay. Yes. So absolutely. So thinking literature is a series at the university of Chicago press that I co founded. And co-edit with Nancy doll, who is a professor at the university of Notre Dame and, and an extraordinary scholar. And we started the series almost by accident, but we came to it out of a shared conviction that literary studies in the last several years has in some ways moved farther and farther away from the study of literature. So it, you know, this is perhaps a bit of academic insider baseball, but it's become more and more common for scholars to Lee, literary scholars to link their work to sociological concerns or economic concerns, or, um, you know, um, broadly political concerns. And, and that kind of work can be amazing and, you know, just absolutely necessary, but it is a departure from a more conventional understanding of, of what it means to do literary criticism that's obtained for, for quite a long time.
Speaker 1 00:24:37 And so we were just starting to think that maybe there wasn't room anymore for the kind of books that had drawn us to the study of literature. There wasn't any room for the kinds of books that we loved, and that had nurtured us when we were, you know, little young, want to be literary critics. And so we wanted to make a series that actually moved literature and criticism, literary criticism, back to the center of the enterprise. And so that's where thinking literature was born. And, and those first two books that we published by Andrea Cadbury and Dora Zhang are absolutely the perfect, uh, examples of that kind of work. So we're very, very proud of the series. And we have another book coming up soon by, um, Mark Christian Thompson called phenomenal blackness, which should be out within the next year. And that we're really excited about. And then the third book that came out in this series by Craig <inaudible>, uh, you know, as splendid as well. So we feel very proud and very excited of this, about the series.
Speaker 4 00:25:38 I love it. That was my time to talk with <inaudible> about her new work is odes a lover's discourse on hate. Thanks so much for being here. This is great.
Speaker 1 00:25:47 Thanks so much. It was so great to talk to you
Speaker 4 00:25:49 And now this, and <inaudible>, so give us a quick overview of what your book is about.
Speaker 5 00:26:07 Um, my book is about stress and trauma and resilience, um, and it starts with stories, um, my own experiences with stress and trauma and many people that I have trained, um, and uses the stories to help, uh, Luminate how and why our minds and bodies do what they do and what they can do differently. Help ourselves find choice in the middle of stress and trauma.
Speaker 4 00:26:38 The title is what is the window? I mean, what is the window?
Speaker 5 00:26:45 So the window is a metaphor for the window of tolerance to stress arousal, which each of us have. And we start wiring our window while we're still in the womb. Um, while we're still not yet born. And we wire it throughout our lives, when we're inside our window, we can keep our deliberate decision making and, um, on online so that we can access choice. And that lets us make choices that match our values and goals. And when we're inside our window, we can also recover after we experienced stressful or challenging experiences. Um, everybody's window can be narrowed through their life, um, during childhood stress and trauma, during shock trauma events, like a terrorist attack or combat or rape, but it also can be narrowed just with everyday things like not getting enough sleep or, um, having to cope with, uh, tension in close relationships or even traffic. If we're not turning stress off, our window gets narrow. So the first part of the book kind of lays out the science, explain why this is, and it uses people's stories. Um, and then the second part of the book explains and explores lots of different ways that we can help our minds and bodies to recover so that our window can get wider.
Speaker 4 00:28:12 Uh, tell us about M fit that, uh, is, uh, um, well, what is it and a little bit about how it works?
Speaker 5 00:28:23 Yes. So, um, in my own journey through stress and trauma, uh, I come from a long military family and then served in the military myself and I had a near death experience while I was deployed in Bosnia. So by the time I got to graduate school, I was suffering from PTSD and chronic, um, physical illnesses and insomnia. And eventually I lost my eyesight and that whole process made me look for something to help make it better. And through that process, I did a lot of different things, tried a lot of different techniques, and I pulled them together in a resilience training program called mindfulness based mindfulness training. Um, the acronym is M fit what you said with, and we spent a decade testing and fit in high stress situations, um, offering it to men and women before they were deploying to Iraq and Afghanistan. I worked with neuroscientists and stress researchers, um, to look at its effect and the basic idea that basic principle that MC is built on is that when we can access choice stressful and challenging experiences are much less likely to be traumatic for our minds and bodies.
Speaker 5 00:29:41 So we're much less likely to have negative effects over the long-term in terms of our physical health or mental health. Um, and we've published the research from the studies, um, in top science journals. But the core idea is that where we are directing our attention has profound ripple effects to our minds and bodies. And most of us are directing our attention unconsciously. Um, and that's often what leads us to turn stress on and not turn it off in emphasis. Um, people learn how to direct their attention deliberately and direct it in ways that help their minds and bodies recover from stress and trauma so that they can widen the window.
Speaker 6 00:30:27 Talk about the thinking brain and the survival brain.
Speaker 5 00:30:32 So we, um, in the book, I talk about each two parts of our brain, um, and it kind of builds on the idea that was popularized by, um, Daniel Kahneman in his best-selling book, thinking fast and thinking slow. So the thinking brain is the neocortex, the part of our brain that's involved for deliberate decision making, planning and remembering consciously. And it's the thinking flow part. It's very conscious and it's effortful. And we know that our thinking brain is active whenever we hear that inner commentary, ourselves thinking and narrating and judging and comparing that all thinking raping, um, the survival brain is the evolutionarily older parts of our brain, and it is responsible for, uh, keeping us safe. So we know the survival brain, the survival brain is very fast. That's like, you know, kind of a constant fast it's happening automatically and effortlessly as unconscious.
Speaker 5 00:31:40 And its whole focus is to help with safe. So it's constantly scanning the environment, you know, to see if things are going to be safe or dangerous. And if it finds that things are stressful or challenging, it turns stress on. Um, and importantly the, the survival brain is also responsible for recovery. So, um, when the survival brain is active and doesn't feel safe, we're not going to be able to turn stress off. So a big part of <inaudible> is training us to be aware of the spinal range because it doesn't have that, um, narrative in Arkansas and then how to tour with it. So say for example, you're sitting in traffic, you're late for a meeting and, um, you can feel yourself starting to get anxious that you're going to be late for the meeting, or you're annoyed that you're stuck in traffic and someone cuts you off.
Speaker 5 00:32:34 All of that is challenging and the survival brain is going to get, um, find that challenging. And that's why we produces the anxiety or the irritation. If we spend that time, directing our attention to worry about the fact that we're lazy or comparing ourselves or getting angry at the person, cutting us off and thinking about that, it's only going to turn more stress on, but instead if we were to direct our attention to, um, noticing the blue sky or noticing, um, pleasant music and really listening to music, or even directing our attention to feeling our hands, touching the steering wheel, all of those things would be attention cues that would help the survival brain to feel stable and grounded. And so it wouldn't add any more stress on it might not fully turn it off yet, but it wouldn't be making it worse. So I know this sounds super simple, but, um, there is scientific evidence that shows that when we can direct our attention to these cues, that help the survival brain feels safe and grounded. This is what helps us build our region.
Speaker 4 00:33:43 It sounds like, you know, I was thinking as I read the book and you talk about mindfulness and meditation and even the warrior idea, um, that, um, it's kind of Buddhist and yet it's also very scientific. And I'm wondering if you had studied a little Buddhism or if this all came from the scientific studies or how that works for you.
Speaker 5 00:34:09 I initially found mindfulness meditation through, um, what is practices, um, personally. Um, but, and I spent some time in Burma actually, um, doing some intensive practice there. Um, but the thing is being able to notice what's happening while it's happening is not, uh, particular to any religious tradition. Uh, it's it's, there are religious practices in all of the different major world traditions to help cultivate this quality, but this is a quality that skin, the human mind, uh, it's just a natural way that our attention can be directed if we learn to do it. Um, it's actually more of a remembering of it because we naturally innate habit, which is most of us have wired patterns that are different from that. Um, but the emphasis is not what it's, because it also blends in, um, techniques from body-based trauma therapies that help the survival brain and the nervous system to get grounded. And reregulated after chronic stress or trauma. So it's kind of a blend of lots of different things from my past experiences and from my clinical training. Um, and as I said, this is something that innately our bodies already know how to do. It's just for most of us, we have conditioned ourselves to patterns, STEM block that in the process. And so part of it is helping us to become aware of the ways that we're kind of getting in our own way and then helping our system to do what it's naturally able to do.
Speaker 4 00:35:52 I'm thinking in particular of the year, because Dodson curve that you have in chapter five, uh, is it accurate to say that some stress is good?
Speaker 5 00:36:03 It absolutely is accurate to say that lid. Yes. Thank you for pointing that out. So the Yerkes Dodson curve looks at the relationship, um, because your readers are probably not looking at the chart right down. It looks at the relationship between, um, stress arousal, our perceived Jeff arousal and our performance. Um, and it's a U shaped curve. So the bottom of the curve, there's no stress arousal, but there's also no performance. And we all know that, like, this is one of the reasons why caffeine can help us get focused. It actually produces a certain amount of stress arousal, but why deadlines can help us get focused? So we need kind of a moderate amount of stress to get off the couch from our procrastination and get things done. And the optimal place in that part of the high point is at a moderate stress arousal. The problem is when we have stress arousal beyond that moderate level high levels or prolonged high levels, we can move over onto the other side of the curve and that's when it start cutting distress. Um, so being able to know where our bodies and minds are to find where our own optimal performance zone is, what our own moderate stress level is. That's a big piece of working with our systems, um, effectively, and that's what we teach in empathy. And that's what I live in.
Speaker 4 00:37:30 You can sort of, uh, overlay the fight flight or freeze, uh, thing with the, the bell curve of the Yerkes Dodson curve. Wouldn't you say
Speaker 5 00:37:47 You absolutely can. Liz that's right. Um, when we are at moderate stress arousal, we still have our thinking brain functions online. Um, so we have, we have turned on fight or flight, but it's not extreme yet. Um, but when we go over to the distress side of the curve, the fight or flight, uh, the stress around the levels get so high that our thinking brain function start to get degraded. And the further out, down that curve, you go to the place where, you know, the curve then touches back to the X axis again. Um, when it comes down to nothing you're very, very higher up than the level that's where freeze it that's exactly right. The freeze response is when our survival brain has perceived neither fight or flight as possible. And so it falls into this very helpless and powerless place. And that's where often we might clutch up, not be able to do anything. Um,
Speaker 4 00:38:49 Let's talk about sleep deprivation. You say to a study that says 28% of the us population suffers from sleep deprivation, which seems really high to me. And, uh, you also say that is, uh, a factor in stress, recovery and trauma. And, uh, I know for myself, they say I could stand, we use lose a little weight, you know, and they say, you've got to get enough sleep to lose weight. So talk about sleep deprivation and how it affects one going through stress and trauma.
Speaker 5 00:39:22 Absolutely. Chronic sleep deprivation is pretty a pretty big deal in our country actually right about that. And, um, chronic sleep deprivation happens when we have two weeks where we're not getting more than six hours a night. And for many Americans, six hours a night, they feel like they got a good night's sleep. But in terms of the experimental research that has looked at, um, the effect cognitive effects and emotional effects, uh, and the immune effect, and even the weight gain affects six hours a night, each night. For me, that is the beginning of chronic sleep deprivation. And it's, it has having negative effects on our cognition. It's making it harder for us to regulate our emotions. Um, it makes us more likely to not be able to pick up positive social cues or to take ambiguous cues and immediately make them threatening, which only turns more stress on it, makes it impossible to turn stress off.
Speaker 5 00:40:30 And that's H because we are our survival brain is not able to downregulate and it begins to mess with our hormones. So we produce more cortisol and we produce more of the, um, hormones involved in regulating appetite. And as a result, we tend to eat more and we tend to eat foods that are, um, when we really, really, we tend to crave a lot of sugar and a lot of fat. And so it can contribute to weight gain in that way, because it's, it's kind of the format to suppress appetite in stock. The hormone to make more appetite is accelerated and all of that can lead to weight gain. Um, and it makes us much more likely to catch colds and viruses. And it has been linked even with cancer it's carcinogenic over the longterm, um, because it suppresses our immunity that chronic stress from sleep deprivation.
Speaker 5 00:41:29 So we tend to think asleep, not a big deal, but it actually is a huge deal. And from the other side, we do a lot of our recovery functions when we are asleep, getting restful sleep. So, um, when we're getting at least eight hours a night, our bodies and it's restful, it's not like we're not up all night fragment our survival brain use that time to do a lot of it's deeper repair and recovery functions in the brain. It's pruning parts of the brain to help us with memory. So we're less likely to get dementia later on, and it's helping to repair tissues and organ systems. It's eliminating toxins. If people could just do one thing differently, I always recommend getting more sleep
Speaker 4 00:42:20 Is over, gone was stress because the sleep patterns are, um, people working overnight and, and staying up night. And you talked to them about, uh, uh, just grinding it out and pulling yourself up by your bootstraps and stuff like that. It sounds like we're kind of a mess with that situation.
Speaker 5 00:42:45 You know, you're, you're absolutely right lids. Um, I think that our collective window, the American collective window is very narrowed right now. And you know, it isn't, I think the sleep is a piece of it. And I think that we're in a world that's really constantly making us the on, and then we're not, we're not consciously choosing to do recovery and our culture very much values and thinks of being overworked and really busy as being kind of important. And that that's, um, it's really valued to constantly kind of be powering through. And then you add all the technology and the distractions that, that causes us. Um, and it becomes quite a toxic myth for our minds and bodies. And we're seeing that in the extremely high rates of addictions, um, opioid epidemic in our country, uh, the, the, um, problems with anxiety and depression, those rates are much higher than they have been over the last hundred years.
Speaker 5 00:43:56 Um, you're seeing it in the way that people are feeling really stretched thin, and no you're seeing it in the exploding rates of chronic diseases in our country. And we don't always think of these things as, um, we've seen in obesity, the weight gain. Um, that's when it's paired with the sleep problems too, like, and, and in the chronic pain, chronic pain is the number one kind of affliction that people in our country experience in chronic pain is a sign of, of a narrow window. It's just, we don't usually think of these things as related to stress or having turned stress on and not turning it off, but they are all. And that's why I wrote the book and why I try to connect some of those dots so that people don't feel powerless and helpless, that there are ways that we can make choices each day, little choices. Um, we might not be able to control a situation around us, but we can, we can always choose where we direct our attention. We can always choose our habits. Um, and habit change is not necessarily easy, but it's possible. And, um, I, I, I laid that out in the last day of the second, third parts read books. The second half of the book,
Speaker 4 00:45:16 Let's move to intergenerational trauma. You talk a lot about that. So what does it mean and how do we know if we have it?
Speaker 5 00:45:27 That's a great question list. Um, so intergenerational trauma happens when, um, we have parents or grandparents. Could you hear my dog barking in that moment? Sorry about that. Uh, the FedEx job caught, uh, truck to stop for my neighbor. And so she's to leave the neighborhood now. Um, so intergenerational trauma happen when we have parents who have narrowed window, um, from usually their own unresolved, chronic stress and trauma, and might be suffering this loss, you know, they might have just lost a loved one. They might be dealing with the effects of domestic violence or, or, um, combat, you know, after coming back from combat, they, they might just have mental issues, mental illness, um, depression or anxiety, or they might be suffering from a chronic disease. Um, and as a result, they have a narrowed window and that affects the wiring, the initial neuro-biological wiring of the children.
Speaker 5 00:46:43 Um, parents with narrowed windows create the social environment for their children, also wired narrow windows, um, because so much of our, all of our thinking brain and the important part of our nervous system that is in charge of recovery and in charge of social engagement and the way we relate to other people, our social wiring, all of that happens after starting in our last trimester of pregnancy, but then through our childhood and into adolescence. And so if our, if the family members that we're with are suffering, it will have implications on our own wiring. And then we bring those patterns and that into our own fault, and it can continue generation after generation that way. It also shows up in genes, um, in genetic expression. Um, and it isn't that our genes are our destiny. Um, but, um, there's been research, that's looked intergenerationally. Most of it's been done with rodents because they have shorter lives and they can like really keep their lives controlled to track the genetic expression.
Speaker 5 00:47:57 It's harder to do that with humans, but there have been studies that have shown how great grandfather might had one exposure to something from attic. It changed their metabolism. It changed the way that they related to stress. It changed their memory function and those same genetic expression changes ripple through four generations. So it might not even just be our parents. It might be that we're carrying the effects from our grandparents, our great grandparents. Um, it's pretty powerful to understand this, but then also to realize we can change those things. We can undo those genetic epigenetic changes and change them back in a different direction. It all comes down to repeated experiences. And that's what emphasis teaching how to direct attention in ways that give us new repeated experiences that help to undo that wiring and to create more beneficial wiring
Speaker 0 00:49:05 <inaudible> you are listening to right on radio on cafe at 90.3 FM and streaming live on the web at K.
