Cultivating basic trust and supporting deep healing

Session 4 Part 2 - Discussion

Guests: Gabor Mate and Hameed Ali

Disclaimer: The contents of this interview are for informational purposes only and are not intended to be a substitute for
professional psychological advice, diagnosis, or treatment. This interview does not provide psychological advice, diagnosis, or
treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or other qualified health provider with any questions you may have regarding a
medical or psychological condition.

[00:00:06] Alex Howard

Welcome, also, Gabor. Gabor, I know you have some questions to open us up in a little bit and to
explore with Hameed. So I'm going to hand over to you for a bit.

Gabor Mate
Sure. Well, thank you. So Hameed, as you know I've been following your work for many years, and I
really welcome this opportunity to put some questions to you directly. They're not in any order.
They're just sort of what occurred to me, what popped up this morning, what would I want to ask this
guy.

The first thing is about spiritual experiences of awakening. I've never had such a spontaneous
experience. It's not that I haven't worked at it. I've been to eight days silent or ten day silent retreats.
I've been to eight day sesshins with spiritual teachers. I've been to what are called enlightenment
intensives that are designed to help you arrive at a direct experience. And I sit there in frustration, and
I see these people popping and having these experiences, and me, you know, I'm just left in my mind.

My wife had a direct experience, not because she was asking for it, but it was a time when her and I
were having a really hard time in our marriage, and she was really suffering, and she somehow
surrendered to it. And all of a sudden, it was all energy. It was all unity. It was all love. It was all
perfection.

My question is some people just seem to be wired so they can have these experiences. I'm not saying
that we're not all wired for it, but for some people, it seems a lot more accessible. There seems to be
less in the way, or it opens up spontaneously. So to what degree is this an issue of temperament and
what you are just wired for? Like some people have them in childhood, not because they work for it,
but just all of a sudden it happens. What extent is it work that you do? And I'm curious about your
experience as well. Did you work for it? Did it all of a sudden just sort of happen for you? Is it grace or
is it grit? Which is it?

Hameed Ali
There are many questions in this question. It's a very important one. First of all, we need to know that
throughout history, most people who do spiritual work and practice don't get very far. And few people
become awakened. Some people have some experience, but not like awakening, not like being free
and liberated.

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I think that's partly that, in some sense, these days is a better time for it, because I think throughout
history, spiritual work, they didn't know much about our psychology, psychology of ego, and didn't
know specifically about trauma. As you know, as you've been doing this good work, spreading the
word about how trauma is so prevalent in society, I'm sure it was prevalent throughout history even
more than now. So any teacher, most of their students probably were traumatized, and the teaching
doesn't address trauma directly, doesn't address psychological blockage and resistance and
defenses, and doesn't address trauma. So as a result, most people don't get anywhere.

So I think knowing about how the ego develops psychologically and how much there's pain there in
the body, in the consciousness, that is repressed and the person doesn't want to see, specifically, like
in trauma, explains a great deal why many people don't have access, they have difficulty accessing
spiritual work, throughout history, not just now.

Now, I think it's getting better because we have more opportunity now for people to do spiritual work,
work on their difficulties, to open up, because, as you know, Gabor, much of the conditioning, the
psychological resistance is in the body, appears in the body as what Wilhelm Reich called body
armor. Body armor is tension around the body where all the repressed difficulties and pain and
conflict are there as tension patterns. Those tension patterns will obstruct the inner channels of
spirituality.

You talk about Kundalini and this and all that, they require inner channels that are all blocked and
clogged by this physical tension and its contents of psychological content. That is a big part why
many people don't have access to spiritual work and why many people don't succeed in awakening.
Only a few people succeed because repressed pain and intense trauma are so prevalent. So other
people don't want to deal with these things. The body has to open up. Your whole consciousness has
to open up to have deep spiritual experience, especially awakening. Awakening means you're free.
What are you free of? Free from all those limitations. If you're not free from those, you're not free. So
that's in general.

So in your case, why you're not having those experiences, I don't know without asking you very
specific, personal questions. But I will say, just like in the general case, there must be something
there, some armoring in the body. I remember you mentioned two weeks ago when I did the
meditation, feeling the body, that you couldn't follow the instructions of sensing the body, you tend to
your mind. Your mind is dominant. But the mind is dominant, partly it's habit, that becomes habitual,
but partly because it's difficult for us to feel our body because there are stuff there that's difficult for
us to feel. That will require both practice of sensing the body, being in the body, especially like
Reichian kind of breathwork. I do it in my work. That's always been part of my work. And that is why in
my school, I think we are more successful than most other traditional teachings in terms of people
having spiritual experience and awakening, because we do deal directly with those barriers.

And the other thing is, you know about inquiry and understanding, it's to inquire what is it in your
history, in your makeup, in your character, that obstruct the openness to spiritual... Because spirituality
is our depth. It's not something else. It is deep within us. If it's deep within us, how come it doesn't
come up to the surface? Something in the way.

So I will say you want to find out what's in the way, and that could be short work or could be work that
takes some time. For some of my students, they have those difficulties, but not as much as other
people, so they could go through it fast. For some people, it takes years and years and years, and I
have to send them to a specialized trauma therapist to work on their trauma before they finally are
able to have those openings.

Gabor Mate
The other question implied in my first one was, are some people just wired differently? Because it
does happen to some people spontaneously. And it's not that they went through a school, that they
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did rigorous practice. It's just something happens. I mentioned my wife's experience. I was talking to a
Hollywood actor, very well known. She said at some point she surrendered to a God she didn't even
believe in. So this spontaneous surrender that some people were able to do, not because by dint of
work, but just something in them... I'm asking, are some people more wired than others to have these
experiences?

[00:09:39] Hameed Ali

Yeah, I wouldn't say wired. It's more like the consciousness of an individual can be more ready or not,
have more capacity or not.

Gabor Mate
Okay.

Hameed Ali
Some people have more capacity than others to have that kind of access. And when you have that
capacity, there is grace. I mean, part of spiritual work is grace. Half of it is what you do, practice. But
even that doesn't do it. In all spiritual teaching, they know that at some point you have to give up. And
it is grace, something just happens. Our spiritual nature simply emerges because spiritual nature of its
own nature wants to reveal itself, you see. So if we are ready, open, we're not in the way, it will reveal
itself. And we call that grace. And for some of us, our consciousness has been, either through our own
personal history or something we imbibed from our culture or our parents, it could be a mental view
that blocks us from things, from maybe even believing I can't have it, that can stop you from having it.

Gabor Mate
And I certainly have that belief.

Hameed Ali
So if you have that belief, then you want to challenge that belief because it is your nature, spirituality
is your nature, is you.

Gabor Mate
Well, that leads me to my next question. I think once when we talked, I showed you this little booklet
before. This little book is, me, I read, this is the first four of the Diamond Heart series, lectures that you
gave, which I read. Over the years, I underlined, I highlighted, and then I copied out in my own words,
in my own writing that is, the highlighted parts, which is all, this is four of your volumes in my own
handwriting. And I was thinking, if I just keep reading it and underlining it and copying it out, at some
point, it's going to penetrate.

But then when I read it again, it's like, why didn't you say that before? Which, of course, you had said it
before. It's just, something in me... This is not 100% by the way. It's not like nothing gets through. A lot
of stuff gets through. But I still surprise myself when I read some stuff.

So speaking of spiritual nature, I don't know which volume this is from. I think probably from the fourth
one. But you say that aliveness of the spirit is something much deeper, more intrinsic, more
fundamental than physical life. And when I read that, I get this frisson of recognition. Yes. And then
three months later, it's like I've never read them.

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[00:12:44] Hameed Ali
Yeah, that happens a lot, even with my students. I teach them something. A few years later, I
mentioned something about another thing about it, so why didn't you say that before? I did! The first
time, it might have not landed.

You have to have a place for landing. Spiritual teaching needs a docking station. If the docking station
is not there, it won't dock, it won't land. But when they become more developed, more ready, more
understanding, and they hear it again, it seems like for the first time because they're getting it.

Especially it is not intellectual. It is an experience, you see. So at the beginning, they might have got it
intellectually. Then they forgot it. When they got the experience, they never had it, they think they
never got the teaching. That's a common thing I hear.

Gabor Mate
Okay. Then I'm pretty sure that many of our participants are familiar with this little book, Viktor Frankl's
Man's Search for Meaning.

Hameed Ali
Yeah.

Gabor Mate
He says in it, that everything can be taken from a man, but one thing, the last of the human freedoms,
to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's way. And he's saying this,
of course, in the context of a Nazi concentration camp. And I'm thinking, easy for him to say that,
because all I have to do is stub my little toe, and life is not worth living. What is it in a man like that
that allows him to come to that kind of knowledge? Whereas most of us get so frustrated and we're
so deprived of what he describes as choice, there's the reaction where there's the stimulus, there's
the reaction, not much gap between the two.

Hameed Ali
Well, I'm glad you brought up this example, Gabor, because this is one of my questions I was going to
ask you, which is, some people even under very traumatic situations like concentration camp and all
that's happening, he came out of it a better person, much stronger. So what is it about some people
who deal with trauma in such a way that doesn't traumatize them, instead they get stronger. For some
people, they just collapse. Most people in the concentration camp, they just collapsed and lost hope
and all of that. That's what happened for most people. But some people, no, they come out strong.
And so I was wondering, there needs to be a study about that. What makes a difference, because
that's very important, don't you think?

Gabor Mate
Well, I've thought about that myself, and you mentioned your own childhood polio. As you say, Frankl
comes out of it better. I might have come out of it bitter. It's quite a difference. I think...

Hameed Ali
Not just you. Most of the people who went to a concentration camp, they're hateful, or bitter, or
hopeless, or something like that.

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[00:16:13] Gabor Mate
Yeah, absolutely. So I think it has to do with the quality of early holding, how you were held, maybe
even in the womb, and in the very early years, where there's some trust, intrinsic trust in the goodness
of the world. I think that's when we developed this. And it's probably even preverbal, I would think.
But my guess is, it's not the only thing, but Frankl's early years, but my guess is that he was probably
very well held as an infant.

Hameed Ali
That would be my guess, too. I think, an important thing for openness to spiritual work, which is
something I discovered by working with my students at some point, that many of them had what I call
basic trust, just inherent, and some didn't. And people who didn't have basic trust, it was difficult for
them to open spiritually. People who had it seemed to open, to move easy. They get an experience,
and just like clockwork, it just works. For some people, it's like pulling teeth. And I think a big part of it
is the environment and the love and the holding, especially that you're being held in a way that
makes you feel safe, that you can rely on reality.

And my understanding of this, Gabor, is that we are born with that.

Gabor Mate
Yes.

Hameed Ali
We are born as a trusting... Look at an infant. They're trusting. They're not scared, whatever, at the
beginning, it's what happens that makes them scared, whatever. It's the reaction. So we come into the
world with some kind of a trusting. But then, that can be damaged, can be hurt, can be limited. It can
be whittled down, so we lose it. And I have a big segment of my work is how to deal with that, how to
go back, what hurt it, what limited it. So we can regain our basic trust. But it needs to deal with some
very difficult things in childhood.

You know, I'm wondering, Gabor, you talk about not having access to spiritual... You told me you never
have those spiritual experiences. But in your work, you say it's important to deal with trauma, to go to
the spiritual level. And I'm wondering if you don't have the spiritual experience, what makes you say
that? How will you know?

Gabor Mate
Well, when I read your work, for example, or the work of other spiritual teachers, or when I listen to
them, there's a big aha or yes in me for that. So that inner knowing is in me. I also know that even in
my work, when I'm doing it well or when I'm on, I do bring a certain quality of presence and
attunement and clarity to my work with people.

Hameed Ali
And you do experience it when you're working, something comes through.

Gabor Mate
Yes. I'm channeling something. I know that I am.

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[00:19:48] Hameed Ali
Yes, so why do you say you don't have the experience then? It comes through in your work I know.
Some people, it only happens when they're working. You do have some familiarity with it in your work.
Otherwise, it won't make sense to say that it's needed for trauma.

Gabor Mate
So that's a contradiction, for sure. It's only that, when you speak about it, it's not related to any
particular activity. It's just the quality or an experience that you have access to.

Hameed Ali
Because that has to do with a great deal of development, that for some people, for most people,
takes a lot of time, a lot of practice. For some people, it's true, it just happens spontaneously, naturally.

But one thing I want you to understand, for everybody to understand, is that for people who have this
potential experience of awakening, that doesn't mean they are free from all their pain in their
unconscious. It's still there. You have to work through your unconscious pain. There's no other way
around it. Awakening doesn't take it away. So many people talk about spiritual experience as if that's
it. You're free of all your pain, all your history. I have not met anybody who are like that. It still stays
there and appears as some kind of odd behavior or something like that, or difficulty in living their life.

And so in my case, I really worked it. It was easy to have spiritual experience. In fact, trauma helped
me get into spiritual experience, in some sense. But I also worked. I spent years and years working
through my conditioning, my conditioned patterns, my pains, my wounds, and all of that. And
because I have basic trust, too, I have some still level of basic trust, I was able to do it. But I've done a
lot of therapy, too. I've done Reichian therapy, all kinds of things before I engaged spiritual work.

And I think therapy is very useful these days. For many people, I think they should do therapy before
they engage spiritual work. We have in our school, we have a screening process. People come in, we
don't accept everybody. We tell some people, no, we think it's better that you do therapy first,
because otherwise you'd be wasting your time here. We think they need to open up, work through
some of their wounding, at least some of their resistance, some of their fear, before the spiritual
practice will really make sense for them to practice.

Gabor Mate
I have to say that for me, it's not that I've totally lacked those experiences, but for me, they've
occurred in the context of psychedelic experiences, which is not the same as a spontaneous
experience. But nevertheless, it does give you a glimpse. It gives you a sense of what's possible for
you.

Hameed Ali
Yeah, it gives you a glimpse. I had psychedelic experiences in the 70s, when I was in college. I took
LSD, mescalin, this and that, and I had spiritual, all kinds of ... But by sometime in the late 70s, I
stopped taking them. I wasn't interested. I stopped being interested.

And I'm glad I stopped taking them because I think continuing to take those, depending on them, can
stunt one's spiritual readiness and capacity. That's one thing I am concerned about people who take
them a lot is that, I've seen people actually where their brains get damaged in terms of spirituality. I've
known people who are spiritually open, and by taking ayahuasca over and over again, they lost it. Yes,
I have students like that. I confirm with my own experience. I'm not saying it happens to everybody,
but I'm saying, one needs to be careful.

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[00:24:24]

And I also think when the time you're going to die, and you're depending on the substances, meaning
you're changing your brain, not your soul, and your soul hasn't matured, hasn't developed, you
haven't worked through its stuff and you're going to die. Well, you're not going to have psychedelic
experiences afterwards. What's going to help you?

Gabor Mate
I have to say that, like anything else, everything's got its potential, positive and negative sides. And the
same thing is true of psychedelics. I'm not a psychedelic evangelist, but I have to say that in my work
I've seen all kinds of positive effects, even in the spiritual sense, and that depends on people's
capacity to integrate what they saw into their lives, rather than relying on the substance to keep
having that experience. In other words…

Hameed Ali
I've seen, as I said, in my case, it opened my eyes to a world I didn't know it was like that. And that
possibility. And one thing about trauma's relationship to spiritual work, or to bring up, in my case, for
many people, having a trauma closes them down, because they have to close down the trauma and
they don't want to be aware of it. That closes down the system. But it doesn't always have to be that
way. In the 70s, 60s I think, I had a traffic accident. I was crossing the street at night with a friend, and I
suddenly was hit by a fast running motorcycle. And there was some pain and all of that. I was on a
critical list for several days.

But the interesting thing, in the moment the motorcycle had me, I was gone. I was out of the body
and looking at the body. And I experienced myself as a body of light. I was a body of diamond light, a
body of light of various colored diamonds, each one with a different awareness, one felt like love, one
felt like compassion. So I recognized myself as that. And I was in the space of complete stillness and
silence, which is what most spiritual teachers want.

And I looked at my body in pain. What I noticed, I just moved into the body because I realized, that's
where I wanted to be, to bring love and joy to the world. And of course, there was a lot of pain. I was in
total pain. And I remember, I was laughing or crying, back and forth, and the paramedic ambulance,
they didn't know what to make with me. Why am I laughing and then crying? You shouldn't cry, you'd
be like a kid. And I was going back and forth.

But the interesting thing, in the hospital, when I was in the hospital, on the critical list, I had all kinds of
surgeries. They didn't know that I was going to survive. I just wanted to get out of the hospital, and I
knew I was going to get out of the hospital. And I wanted to get out as soon as possible, because I
look out and see the sun, the spring, I said, it would be wonderful to be out in the sun. I didn't want to
be in the hospital, and they were giving me some kind of medication and demerol, I remember, which
felt wonderful, but they stopped giving it to me at some point. But my feeling is that I wanted to get
out. And they told me I healed much faster than they expected. And all the time when I was in the
hospital, I knew I was going to get out. And now I felt all kinds of ease, trust and confidence. And that
changed my life. It changed my life, and that set me on a spiritual path. That was the beginning of a
more direct turn. It happened because of a traumatic experience.

The traumatic experience didn't result in me closing down. It happened by opening me up more. I
think that happens to some people.

Gabor Mate
So I would say it wasn't a traumatic experience. It was an experience that was potentially traumatic.
But for you it didn't turn out to be.

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[00:29:31]

But you know what, I would highly recommend car accidents because I had a very similar experience
once. I was driving my car near where we live, and somebody came up from behind a stop sign very
rapidly and hit me on the side at the back of my car on the trunk side. My car spun around, ended up
in the opposite lane, and there was another car very quickly coming towards me.

It was the most beautiful moment of my life, in the sense that everything slowed down. I was
completely alive, completely present. It was happening in slow motion.

Hameed Ali
So you did have a spiritual experience?

Gabor Mate
Well, I guess I did.

Hameed Ali
It was a transcendent spiritual experience. The mind slows down.

Gabor Mate
So the moral of this, people, all you gotta do is get into car accidents and you'll be spiritually
awakened, you know.

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