Finding Home With Greg Gentry and Guest Co-Host Jude Hung

[00:00:02] Hello everybody, welcome to another episode of the Thriving Adoptees podcast. Today I'm delighted to be joined by Jude and Greg. So Jude Hunt and Greg Gentry. And we're going to do something completely different. I'm going to do something completely different.

[00:00:19] Jude came up with this idea of, well Jude and me really, but I think she was the creative force behind it. Came up with this idea of doing like a special series. And so, Jude's going to be, is co-hosting, but actually she's properly hosting.

[00:00:37] I'm just the MC I guess. I'm just the MC, the intro guy here. And Jude came up with this idea of finding home.

[00:00:50] And the first person that she had in mind to be part of, to be interviewed on this special series of Finding Home was none other than Greg Gentry. And of course I haven't seen Greg for ages so it's great to have you both.

[00:01:06] And I'm looking forward to taking a bit of a back seat here. I'm thinking should I string up a hammock and just watch you get on with it? And it would help to have a hammock. But it's warm, it's really warm in Yorkshire today.

[00:01:26] Like spring has arrived. I don't know what it is in, it's like mid-60s and people are wearing shorts. Wow. Not just the postman. Not just the postman. British postmen have this thing about running shorts. Anyway, I'm waffling on. Jude. Yes, hi. Welcome to you.

[00:01:48] All right, well thank you. So I'm really excited to be interviewing Greg. One, because we're friends and I know you, I know your heart, I know a little bit about your journey.

[00:02:01] And two, because of the way you serve in the adoptee community with Adoptes Connect, with your fireside interviews. And I know that your presence, the way you hold space and the way you conduct these interviews touches a lot of people.

[00:02:24] And I think that they also want to get to know you a little bit more. And I've seen bits and pieces as a friend observing of your journey toward home as adoptees.

[00:02:39] We have a really unique lived experience of first starting life with relinquishment, then experiencing and holding space for two families. And we kind of live in that liminal space. And it's unique.

[00:02:58] And I think that it, through that we navigate trauma. We navigate loss, grief, right? These are aspects that we live with, that we contend with.

[00:03:17] And we try to, through those things, uncover and unravel and find ourselves our own identity and find home within ourselves and create home in life.

[00:03:30] And so I want to start off asking you, for you, what is home? What does home mean to you? How do you define home? It's been, first of all, thanks so much, Jude and Simon, for having me here. It's a big honor to speak to you about this.

[00:03:49] And I appreciate all your kind words. And home has been an elusive thing for me. And I think as I talk to other adoptees, it seems like that's, I won't say necessarily universal, but certainly widespread.

[00:04:03] And for me personally, it's been compounded by losses after coming out of the adoption fog. When my created family life became unstable and eventually unfortunately fell apart, leading to divorce and estrangement.

[00:04:23] Hopefully reconciliation is coming in that. But I will say that what home has meant for me kind of I feel like we think about home as being a physical place sometimes, right? Maybe that's an unsophisticated way of thinking about home.

[00:04:39] It's actually become a more sophisticated way of it for me in a way because the situation I found myself in led to me kind of being unrooted, physically unrooted.

[00:04:49] I wasn't, I was bouncing everywhere, but I felt wherever I was trying to settle, there was a part of me that wouldn't allow me to settle because I thought this isn't the final landing place for me right now because of circumstances in my life.

[00:05:03] This isn't where I want to settle. I don't want to settle physically, but I also don't want to settle in the sense of compromise or saying this is where I'm going to end up and this is my lot in life.

[00:05:13] This is how I'm situated. So we can talk about home as something inward. I know that's a big thing, a big thing. I think with you, Jude, of what does a person find inwardly that feels like home?

[00:05:27] I have to say for somebody who's been now displaced from my physical home with the loss of my family that I am looking for the permanence of a geographical physical location, at least as part of my definition of home.

[00:05:42] Because I feel that unrootedness too, not just inward unsettling, but also physically like I don't belong somewhere right now. That's coming to an end. I'm finding a better permanent place to be, but I've strenuously avoided, for example, saying that I live somewhere.

[00:06:03] You've heard me say often I stay somewhere. For the past two years, even before we were talking about this, I spoke about just saying I was staying places versus I was living there because living felt like a permanence that was too elusive for me.

[00:06:21] Was it something I was prepared to say that I was at that state of my life where I was going to be living somewhere?

[00:06:27] But now I am thinking I'm finding home, and it involves people, involves community of people and support, involves that inward maybe contentedness might be a strong word, but a sense of peacefulness and equanimity to a degree inside of me.

[00:06:44] And I think also there's a big spiritual component to it. I love that. So you're talking about inner and outer, which I love because our outer world really is a reflection of our inner world and so as you're finding community, right?

[00:07:08] And I think even a sense of home within. What does that feel like? What does home feel like? How do we know when we're home, right? Is it resonance?

[00:07:25] Is there kind of a goal? Because it seems when I'm listening to you talk, you're like, I created this home and it fell apart.

[00:07:33] Sadly, it didn't work out and you found yourself unrooted and you didn't want to settle. And so that tells me that you knew something, right?

[00:07:43] Like you were looking for something, something inward and you may not have even been aware of it. Can you talk about maybe that feeling that you don't want to settle? You want that?

[00:07:55] Yeah, you mentioned the word goal in there. That's really important for me from a philosophical and existential standpoint because this word sometimes used teleology and the telos, the goal, the end.

[00:08:12] The place you're heading to is a big part of this, right? It can be something that I think is transcendent in us as created persons.

[00:08:22] But there's part of us that will always have that longing and maybe we don't know where that ends up, but we have a direction. Possibly we get aligned to say I'm headed towards a focal point.

[00:08:34] I don't know what it looks like there, but at least I'm facing the direction of it. At some point in my life, I've gained enough clarity and done enough introspective thinking to say I know which direction I think that lies.

[00:08:47] And the goal, the telos, the end there then becomes a little easier to determine and you start to steer towards it and you make course corrections along the way.

[00:08:57] I think as you get there, then you have to figure out whether or not it's actual physical place or whether it remains completely transcendent in our lives and our lifetime.

[00:09:09] But we get closer to what that approximation will be. So for me, that is contentment enough to say I'm facing what I believe is the right direction and I'm making advances and I'm feeling more contentment in my life as I get farther along.

[00:09:26] Maybe I won't see in my life that I'm at this final destination, but I'll be feeling more of the home feelings as I get closer to it. So I hear contentment. I'm reading into it. Peace.

[00:09:41] Peace with self. And for me, home was about finding felt sense of safety and belonging. So that wherever I go, I can be my most authentic self in that moment because that does transform and change over time.

[00:10:01] You mentioned the elusivity of it, right? That it can be elusive and that deep belonging. We know, Hirath, right, which means a deep longing for something, especially home.

[00:10:17] And I love this Maya Angelou quote and Suara is going to squeeze it in. So the ache for home lives in all of us, the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.

[00:10:29] And I think that's Hirath, right? That ache for home that lives in all of us and that elusivity.

[00:10:39] Talk about that a little. I think that definitely stems possibly from our childhood, right? Like where we were in a home that maybe didn't feel like home and, you know, things felt elusive for us to be ourselves and maybe share a little of that with us.

[00:10:59] Sure. I think that I'll say, I believe it is a universal human thing for people to want that sense of belonging and that Hirath. And again, I'm going to use language of transcendence by that. I don't mean something splendid.

[00:11:16] I just mean that it seems to be part of our makeup coming from the ground of our being, source of our being that we're installed with these categories as ways of thinking and feeling and sensing and determining that.

[00:11:31] Yeah, something's not quite the way it should be or it's not finalized in a certain way. And it does manifest as this ache or this yearning for something that's beyond what we're experiencing right now.

[00:11:45] And it's a pull. So that's part of teleology, too. I think it's a pull towards that end point, even though you can't see it clearly along the way necessarily all the time.

[00:11:56] But with Hirath, for example, you know, speaking with other adoptees who often use that word, there's I think for us in particular, part of the solution normally would come for people who are kept as part of what the safety would have been and the attachment would have been in early childhood, right?

[00:12:22] From being born that wasn't there and makes Hirath even more of a compounded issue for us of something that's like extra superlative in the sense of we have even more things to deal with because even that initial security wasn't there.

[00:12:37] And I think that actually translates partly, I believe, to why it's difficult when you speak with non-adopted people to get them to entirely understand where you're coming from, because they've always felt that at least level of security.

[00:12:50] It doesn't mean that their home life was great, but at least there were certain elements of their humanness that were more intact than ours were when that rift happened, when that relinquishment happened.

[00:13:01] So I feel like the quote in particular, the emphasis on the aching part, it does apply across all of humanity.

[00:13:13] But I feel like for us in particular, for people who have been severed that we have that extra layer of sadness to it. There's more of an unrest to it. It's more of an uncertainty about it for us. Yeah, it feels more acute, I think. Acute, yeah.

[00:13:32] And I really am enjoying your languaging, your wording, because to me it reminds me in points to having that sensory awareness and learning to listen to our bodies and their guidance.

[00:13:50] Because I do believe that it is innate and woven into us to have this kind of searching, right? And this yearning.

[00:13:59] And I love to call my body my enchanted compass, right? So learning to listen to it. And it is what guided me home to self and to be able to create that in my life.

[00:14:12] And so in that journey, I have a feeling, I know the answer to this, but I want to ask, is there a place that you go or a thing that you do that makes you feel home in your body?

[00:14:27] For me right now, it's community and connecting with people who have similar experiences to mine. Because the physical part has been difficult for me in terms of negotiating all of that after post-divorce and moving back to an old state, say a new state physically, geographically.

[00:14:52] The settledness part, the place of most contentment for me right now, almost like the locus of where I feel that the most strongly is in the midst of people who...

[00:15:04] And it's not that you're sharing all the time about it with me, not just constantly talking about this necessarily, but because of the shared experience that underlies, the conversation or the tone.

[00:15:17] And again, this word contentment that I use here, and it doesn't mean you're fully satisfied with absolutely everything going on because I think we would agree there's a kind of a raw deal that's happened to us here.

[00:15:28] But at least in the midst of that to have the company of people, the cloud of witnesses, so to say, people that can understand that has been the place where I go to feel that way.

[00:15:41] So I reach out to people a lot, and I don't do that for selfish reasons. Like, I want to feel better. I'm going to reach out to so-and-so.

[00:15:47] I get the sense that that's what they need as well, and there's a reciprocity there so that I'm getting some of my needs met as well as helping them know they're important to me too.

[00:15:59] And then collectively that translates to me as a greater sense of where I'm feeling the home at this point.

[00:16:08] I do agree. I have found in the in the Adopt-E community support, encouragement. I think there is a sense of safety in the understanding that comes from that shared experience.

[00:16:27] And I think the validation of it, right? And affirmation is really helpful for just navigating resolving it moving forward.

[00:16:39] And yeah, that that belonging that creating a sense of belonging. I was going to say drumming because you drum and I have I picture you drumming and really connecting to a felt sense of safety and being very true to something within yourself.

[00:17:03] You want to share anything about that or how you feel when you drum or is that a place you go to?

[00:17:10] It's a complicated situation because I have I have certain technical physical limitations around drumming. I actually have injuries right now that in my fingers that are keeping me from being able to do a lot with it.

[00:17:24] I would like to say that I think probably it's natural for people to associate almost like a primal connection to drumming, right? Something very, very primordial and natural of this is the pulse, right?

[00:17:41] That's kind of what drumming is, is it a pulse or a series of rhythms that mirror what happens in life and you can make them can arrange them all different ways. You can speed them up and slow them down.

[00:17:54] You can mix them up. It's interesting because drumming, you know, we have this expression marching sound or the beat of your own drum or your own drummer.

[00:18:05] And we use that as individualism, people being off knowing their direction in life and not being discouraged or or thrown off the path by what someone else might be doing.

[00:18:19] There's also though an ensemble sense of drumming. So drumming can be done as an ensemble with people who are feeling the pulse the same way, experiencing it the same way.

[00:18:30] So these are this is the point of drumming circles, for example, or an ensemble where there are other musicians, people playing other instruments and contributing to the whole of that.

[00:18:41] For me, the greatest joy in drumming has even though mechanically it's been off doing a lot of things on my own because you're not playing with people all the time.

[00:18:50] When you contribute to a feel, meaning musicians are locking into a certain feel. That's one of the greatest, most rewarding things for me musically to be able to do is to provide that for somebody to be part of that as a pulse.

[00:19:06] Again, it's this primal thing, right? Because if you think of drums in certain contexts, ancient context, it's about life. It's about movement. It's about breath. It's about feeling and even with as sophisticated as music gets, it's still really about the same thing.

[00:19:27] It's healing. Drumming, you know, they use drumming for healing as well. And I was thinking, I play guitar and piano. So I was thinking about the release also that can come through music and even drumming, like you're not using words.

[00:19:46] I feel like the drums are speaking and expressing and releasing and you're pouring no language out into it and yet it's speaking for you. Yeah, you know. For me, this thing would be a little bit nerdy about it.

[00:20:06] The mirroring of a voice for me in drumming. So I'm always sub vocalizing what I think a drum part sounds like. It goes up and down. It's not just a series of beats, but there's intonation to it.

[00:20:19] And it's again, it goes. I like really upset about healing there. That's wonderful for that. I think it's because it connects so fundamentally with something that's so basically human.

[00:20:35] So how has your perspective of home changed over the years that you grew up with your adoptive family and create a home of your own? And now you're in search of home. So tell us this evolution and where do you think it's going?

[00:20:56] I don't think I was as aware of it as a concept when I was younger, because I just was there. I lived with my family and my parents grew up there.

[00:21:06] It doesn't mean I necessarily felt I fit in all the ways. So I was aware of that too as I got older that something wasn't quite the same.

[00:21:15] But I don't think I thought that it was escaping me the way it started to when I got into adulthood and when I was in relationships.

[00:21:27] Finally, when I was married for so many years. And I think the big thing that changed all of it was coming out of the fog because it was easy to keep my head down that whole time until then, not knowing something might be amiss.

[00:21:45] And then finally having all of that slam into me in really a single moment of coming out of fog, which was what it was for me. There was a buildup to it, but suddenly it happened. It was suddenly a precipitated event and everything fell away and felt very

[00:22:05] unfurled, like tenuous, like earth rolling under your feet sort of thing. So once I was about 52, 51, 52 when I came out of the fog, yeah, almost three years ago right now, I no longer felt some of the safety that I thought I felt before.

[00:22:29] And I realized things I had taken for granted about I would always have a place to live. I would always have this. I would always have these people in my life was stripped away and it became really uncertain that any of that was going to remain.

[00:22:42] And it all had to be built again on something new. So it really changed for me after coming out of the fog. And it's been undergoing refinement since then because there was also deconversion, deconstruction and deconversion of a religious tradition,

[00:23:02] but also a whole lot of training in that tradition and trying to make sense of what I knew from that and using that as some of the language of

[00:23:13] part of my own journey, figuring out what home actually meant for me. So I would say those are the transition times for me and I'm just coming more into it now. And even dialoguing with you about it really got me thinking about it more.

[00:23:30] I see Simon is going to ask something. I just wanted to say, I think for you and for me, our coming out of the fog kind of converged right around the same time as marriage is ending.

[00:23:44] And I had deconstructed my faith maybe a decade before but a lot of deconstruction. I think the beauty of coming out of the fog shifted me, I believe you as well, into our own agency

[00:23:59] in choosing what is home and what we want to create and how do we want to move forward in a much more empowered way, more consciously. So we got him in a pause and I saw Simon raise his hand.

[00:24:16] Great job, Jude. Great job. Great job, Greg as well. I just wanted to ask you Greg about the timing and the relationship between coming out of the fog and the divorce because that was a natural curiosity thing that came up for me.

[00:24:38] Yeah, so I think the decline had started before that. Before I was out of the fog there were signs that things weren't healthy. A lot of that was around my mental state and the isolation I was going through for a number of years of depression and then also in the pandemic phase.

[00:25:00] I was physically isolating and working in this room and staying in this room by myself apart from my family a lot of the time. And by the time we picked up as a family and relocated to another state, I was out of the fog and I was forming new connections, new relationships with people who were helping me understand it.

[00:25:21] And about six months after that relocation, I realized that I'd been confronted and offered an ultimatum about certain things which were in effect interpreted by me as you have to stop doing what you're doing.

[00:25:36] It's not that they didn't want me to heal as much as I could from adoption trauma, but it was like, you know, really like the way you're going about it. So these are the demands. You can't do this. You can't do this. You can't talk to these people.

[00:25:50] And you need to invest more in us than in what you're doing. And eventually that led to me saying I can't give up the things that I've now got in my life that were in a way things I'd always been searching and hoping to have.

[00:26:05] And the ultimatum was not something I could honor because it would be like trying to go back into the fog and act like my life now didn't exist. I was just going to somehow reverse it and go back to ways other people were more comfortable with me being.

[00:26:21] I just wasn't able to do that. So that was what precipitated my request for the divorce. And then it's just it was finalized after that. Wow. Yeah. Thank you.

[00:26:38] Yeah, thank you. I think having sat in circle at table with many adoptees that is a theme or I think a defining moment where we realize that we had been in essence abandoning ourselves or betray ourselves.

[00:27:00] And we felt that we had to help them throughout our lives to fit in or to keep something going and then to have a moment where we realize we can't do it anymore.

[00:27:08] And it sounds like that was that moment for you that you chose you in a really powerful way. And you had to consider the cost and consequence that came with it at a cost.

[00:27:21] You know, and yet it's, I think, having known you for a while that's really propelled you into your own evolving wellness wholeness. And, you know, greater sense of ease with who you are like greater wholeness.

[00:27:43] You know, so, and that, in my experience has such huge value in how I interact with life like how my life feels to me how I feel about myself. It was also a story of my trauma. So I discovered I wasn't healthy.

[00:28:09] I wasn't, I had broken a lot of relationships. I didn't know that I was inflicting my trauma on other people.

[00:28:16] That was part of coming on the fog too is that realization of why things have been breaking down the way they were part of that was just, I didn't know what I was doing wrong or by wrong.

[00:28:28] I don't mean I was intentionally doing something. I just didn't realize what I was up against and unfortunately that that did carry it out, get carried out of my family sometimes so I do take responsibility for that as well.

[00:28:40] Yeah, I think that is also part of that transition right like when I was in the fog. And everything was happening out here outside of me and I could look at it go. Well, this this this and this. And I was very unaware of my part.

[00:29:05] I couldn't see it. You know, I was playing all these roles and I couldn't see my part of what you know like what and how I sell sabotage or how I was, I was in a codependent marriage but it was all him right.

[00:29:20] I couldn't see my part very clearly until I saw the wound until and then I could see and then I could take responsibility, and then I could create change.

[00:29:32] Yeah, and so I really relate to that. Last night I got to sit and listen to an interview that you did with Elsie it was amazing. And you mentioned the adoptee ghost kingdom, right, the imaginary fantasy.

[00:29:49] And, and like imaginary friends and playmates. I did the same thing you know and I sat there and I was like gosh I did that quite a bit I lived in a real fantasy land as a child and I think that's because my home didn't feel safe to me, although it was safe, I can see that now, but I didn't feel safe in the world.

[00:30:12] Yeah, and so maybe, you know, I'd like to hear more about that because you called it your the adoptee ghost kingdom I was like oh I hadn't heard that term before and so do you mind sharing a little about that and your experience in your home growing up with that.

[00:30:26] Yeah, and I don't. Obviously that's not my terminology for it. I've heard it in the community. Brian Stanton talks a lot about it other people talk a lot about the ghost kingdom.

[00:30:39] And so I've appropriated that as what was it like to imagine people that weren't really present in my life. What would I want siblings to look like to be like, I had grown up with two older adoptive sisters were biological to my parents.

[00:31:04] And when I came to my parents at age 10 found out I was adopted. I felt this distance between sisters that never fully went away after that, because I was just, I thought before maybe there's something different maybe there's not.

[00:31:24] But not at a real level of consciousness of sophistication but when I finally found out we really were different. I never was able to recover some of that feeling of connection.

[00:31:35] So I think I started postulating as a young person around age 10 or so maybe even eight or nine or 10. About what do you think that people then would have been like, what would your real sisters have been like.

[00:31:51] So I started putting people in place of them that I would pretend were real people. And what would that connection feel like do you think how do you think it would feel that I wasn't asking myself that at an analytical level, I just, it was presented

[00:32:04] from my imagination as a way to again it had to do with, with whether I felt safe, as you said, there wasn't a question whether I was safe but whether I felt it.

[00:32:16] I have to say I probably didn't feel safe anymore. That was a pretty important distinction you made there that I think is coming across as I think about it now.

[00:32:25] I probably did that because I didn't feel like I would ever feel connected the way I wished I would. So maybe there were people out there like this that I was supposed to have been with so to say, and I would have felt that connection with them.

[00:32:40] So for a number of years they I talked to them, thought about them.

[00:32:45] And it's funny because I always thought this is kind of embarrassing why do I do this, and I started hearing people talking about IFS and parts and like the things that LC talked about last night and our friend Emma Stevens talks about in the gathering place and you know I've started to hear about

[00:33:07] people really did experience parts of their lives that way as separate characters maybe separate phases or stages of their own development. For me it was it was people that I imagined what they would be like if they were real with my life.

[00:33:26] Now you have had the opportunity to connect with some of your siblings, and greatly I think what did it. I guess in comparing did did the kid did you feel that connection did you. When you met them. Yeah.

[00:33:51] Yeah, I had very different experiences on the different sides of the family. So the maternal reunion felt very different than the maternal reunion for example. And there was a lot of honeymoon connection on my maternal side for me.

[00:34:09] And that wasn't the case, because I went in with more temperate expectations. Many years later into my paternal reunion and didn't expect quite the same thing.

[00:34:20] So, on my mother's side, and I connected with my half brother and half sister through her. And I threw myself into my that relationship with my sister, my sister was 14 years younger than me.

[00:34:33] And she was, she was excited. We were excited and it went through some of the same dysfunction because of my trauma playing out of my insecurity playing out.

[00:34:46] I broke times and say I got weird from it for a while. I even, I even was institutionalized briefly for it to come to partial hospitalization to work through feelings of abandonment like she wasn't paying attention to me the right way.

[00:35:03] What about this? What? So I found these things coming out of me that were very unexpected and I thought, I must just be a really bad person. And I didn't feel that sort of thing. Years later when I connected with some of my brothers on my father's side.

[00:35:21] They were very direct about, what's nice to meet you we probably won't be really strongly connected because our family doesn't connect very strongly. And so these things told me that, and I found out that it that it's, it's playing out that way.

[00:35:38] I wouldn't say that was disappointing. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Because there's always I think that hope there that something could be deeper.

[00:35:44] I found instead that it's developing more with one of my aunts than it is with my siblings on my father's side versus on my mother's side it's more with one of with my half brother on that side and my sister isn't around as much so

[00:36:04] I think they fulfill what I thought it would be like. No, but I did carry that fantasy into the first reunion for sure, and measured what was going on there that way. By the time the second one came around.

[00:36:18] Many years later, I think I was wiser and not doing that and just seeing what the reality was going to be from what they were reflecting back to me.

[00:36:30] Yeah, and thank you for your vulnerability and just sharing the intensity of that first reunion the disappointment and, and even the toll that it took on you.

[00:36:44] You know, as you were talking it was really giving me some clarity because connection has been something I sought after. And I had, I was adopted in the middle to biological siblings.

[00:36:57] So they're my adoptive parents daughters and I was in the middle and I always thought that they felt something that I didn't. And I longed for the connection that I imagined they had and I think there is is a fantasy version of connection.

[00:37:13] And I think that I was in my felt sense, imagining connection to be what I, what is a trauma bond. Right. And that's very intense and what I have found coming out and finding wholeness is that connection isn't that, you know it's it's it's really different

[00:37:34] And it is something we develop and we protect. And so it was really interesting that, you know, I think there's that fantasy and there is a moment or many moments of acceptance of what is, you know, and coming into acceptance.

[00:37:55] You and I had a talk maybe a couple weeks ago that I wanted to share a little here about it. It goes back to that elusiveness and maybe a little bit our own spirituality, but you were, we were talking about home and finding home and really finding that felt sense of home and

[00:38:22] our own sense of identity. Right. Because in this lived life, our human body is our is our home. It is where our soul our consciousness lives and

[00:38:34] You know, you were talking about the promised land like you kind of were equating the journey with that. Do you mind sharing. I felt like it was really beautiful and poignant Do you mind sharing some of your thoughts around that.

[00:38:49] Sure. And that was coming part of out of partly from Judeo Christian roots of What was St. Augustine trying to call the city of God.

[00:39:04] But let's say you see some of these this language in the New Testament about Abraham looking for the promise and I'm not trying to get theological here. But the idea was that there was something I can use this word transcendent again that that human beings are looking for seeking for and wanting to feel

[00:39:23] And it can go a couple ways, though, if you're in the religious tradition I was in the idea was you won't find it here for sure. So it became something otherworldly became

[00:39:36] Something to look forward to. And this world is not my home and it's all passing away. And that was what I was immersed in for for decades.

[00:39:45] And then that's sometimes called high in the sky or thinking my reward isn't here. I'm never going to feel it here. So all I'm going to have is travail and tears and suffering here. And so I better get used to it.

[00:40:00] And that could be really daunting to think about if it's really that that elusive to the point where you don't even have a chance for anything like that in this life.

[00:40:11] So if I were to say demythologize that by that I mean take out some of the elements that are that are otherworldly and saying what happens in the world here. What happens in my life here.

[00:40:23] There seems to be, I think, as I mentioned, more of a universal human experience that I believe is part of our human faculties part of our makeup.

[00:40:33] To want that belonging to want that connection and to have some degree of it to be able to be realized here. Not because we're compromisers and worldly people that don't set our minds on spiritual things, but because this is after all the theater, the theater of our existence.

[00:40:52] This is where we live out our lives as a body persons. And so it makes a lot of sense that the time we spend here would have some some connection to the level of fulfillment we might be able to achieve.

[00:41:07] And maybe there is something beyond that that comes for a greater fulfillment at a certain time beyond, say, beyond the veil or beyond what's on earth here. But it doesn't mean that the things we find here can't be really, really supportive and edifying for us.

[00:41:28] So that was, I think, what I was trying to aim at there was that I didn't want it to be the case that I had.

[00:41:35] So the past I've been that way thinking you tend to view the world as kind of a danger zone and stay away from this. Don't do this. Don't do that. Don't don't have expectations of anything to go well or good because this is for a fallen world.

[00:41:51] Once I was I was cleared of that, you can see that there were beautiful things here and good things here that were worthy of of feeling satisfied over just in their own terms and had nothing to do with me being less spiritual or caught up in worldly things.

[00:42:10] It was just this is where we where we exist right now. So what can we find here that that satisfies us? Yeah, and not to leave, not to be like, like, yes, too spiritual or or I'm not.

[00:42:30] But what comes to mind, so I'm going to share it like Jesus said that the kingdom of heaven is inside of you.

[00:42:38] And we can bring it forth to this earth and and no matter who we think he is, I do like that saying that there is beauty within us. Right. We can create home, which is my my terminology, but we can create a beauty.

[00:42:56] We can create joy. We can create a loving connection. It is within us to do and we can bring it out. And in that essence, create a beautiful world, you know, that that what we do impacts the the quality of life that we're living.

[00:43:19] And I think that we can seek that quality. And I guess I as an adoptee, I just want to say like that doesn't have to hinder us. We deserve all that we have longed for and sought after in this life. Like, you know, we deserve that.

[00:43:41] And yeah, so what is your process if you have one? And we'll finish with this. I'm thinking we're coming up on that. But of creating home within yourself. Do you have one? What what what how are you navigating?

[00:44:07] Creating that for yourself. Yeah, I think that I will say that being as as regulated emotionally as I can be is a big part of that. If everything feels like a war zone, sorry, that's the thing there.

[00:44:27] If everything feels like a war zone emotionally and psychologically, I'm not able to to find that that source of again contentment or equanimity, peacefulness of mind.

[00:44:41] So. Trying to maintain, to the greatest degree I can, a calm demeanor, calm, peacefulness about me and not getting caught up in a lot of things that I do struggle with anxieties. I think so many of us do. Trying to make sure that.

[00:45:03] Inwardly as a person who has had obsessions and had a lot of a lot of inner turmoil, I found that at least lately some of that's fallen away and allowed me to say that I'm enjoying much more calm inwardly. And I think that's a big part of it.

[00:45:22] It's just in their exercises for that. You are a great practitioner of that and somebody I've learned from, right? So you know it's connected to our body and not just our minds, right? The Greeks said a healthy mind and healthy body that and beyond the Greeks, right?

[00:45:38] In Eastern thought, et cetera, that there's this continual loop between the mind and the body and what we can do to take care of them. I wish I took better care of my body. I need to do that.

[00:45:50] So that's something I will say that might actually help me because what we're perceiving somatically, we can emotionally too, right? So when I don't feel good emotionally, sometimes it's because I haven't been taking good care of myself.

[00:46:06] Yeah, that's really good, right? Because they say mind body, but often it's body and mind, right? There really is no separation. And so like I said, you know, our body is our home for this lifetime. So probably care self-care, I know can be a challenge for us.

[00:46:29] You know, we're learning to love ourselves or practice to love ourselves, but taking care of this body definitely when I am in those practices, I feel so much better. And yeah, so I really appreciate you sharing that.

[00:46:45] And then you intentionally and you reference this, but you intentionally call where you live a house and or where I live instead of home. So what is the difference for you between a house and a home?

[00:47:02] Yeah, I call it where I stay. It's almost like you would call it a domicile or a tent or something. I don't mean I physically imminent a tent. I mean, place with walls and I'm actually about to get out of there today or tomorrow.

[00:47:17] In fact, something more permanent. It's the fact that there was a great existential restlessness in me to say I can't settle for where I am physically right now. So I had adapted that sense of talking as though I was staying somewhere versus I was living somewhere.

[00:47:43] And I apply that across a lot of conversations and people noticed it, that I always kept saying that. And they said, what happens if you accepted that you live there?

[00:47:54] I said, no, I'm not. I'm not ready to accept that I live here because that's that's an abiding sense that I will not have in my current physical location. I need to be somewhere that's healthier for me, better for me, that's more settled, more permanent.

[00:48:12] And that's what I mean. I'm actually literally within hours of being having in place. So this is kind of an exciting time for the conversation because you're finding home. Yeah. So it's I am prepared to say, do you think that will be what home feels like?

[00:48:30] And I have said you was the avoided saying that before. So what a timely conversation. Say that I think it's an impermanence feeling. I think it's a restlessness feeling, why I couldn't say I was living somewhere. But I had to talk about staying there.

[00:48:47] I just I didn't want I didn't want to get comfortable with where I was not be not be in a driven sense that I can do better. I can achieve more. I just knew it wasn't the place for me where I was going to feel finally settled.

[00:49:00] What what I hear and it's actually quite beautiful is such a you're really tender friend and soul. And you have such a nice awareness of yourself. And so what I'm hearing is that even when you moved into this place,

[00:49:26] I feel that you had the understanding, whether you were conscious of it or not, that you were in a transformative time. You know, and so it's been this arc of transformation.

[00:49:37] And so you knew it wasn't where you were settling and that your language was lining up with what was inside of you in the realms that I work with in within energy.

[00:49:50] That helps with that growth. That helps with that creating in your outer world what's inside our inner world, because we have to build the inner capacity to hold it. You know, too. We talk about up leveling or, you know, higher states of being.

[00:50:12] But we don't go, you know, adoptees with a root wound. We don't go from these lower frequency feelings to home like boom, boom. It is this journey home. We walk each other home and it is incremental.

[00:50:26] And we have to build the capacity to hold those higher frequency feelings. And so, you know, I'm summing it up because you've shared with us in this talk, this little peaks of your journey, this transformative journey that got you to today.

[00:50:42] I feel really excited. I feel like it is timely. And I just thank you for coming and sharing it with us. I really appreciate you. I think it's a really unique conversation and I really appreciate how you've guided it.

[00:50:57] And Simon's input as well. I'll be really interested to hear what other people are, how it's playing out in their lives too. But thank you for pulling this together. Yeah, thank you. Wow. Fantastic. What can I say? What can I say to that? The building capacity thing.

[00:51:29] What's the opposite? If we are not building capacity, then often, and there is no judgment or shame, but often it just, I think often we are, it's just smaller amounts and kind of like working muscles, you know.

[00:51:54] And we have to, we were in the fog for as long as we need to be in the fog. And when we had the capacity to hold the truth of coming out of the fog, then we came out with the fog, right?

[00:52:09] I guess I'm saying I would never want to judge where someone else is at in their journey or how long they need to circle around a narrative, because every time we circle around it, we're seeing different perspectives. And when we're ready for that to fall away, it does.

[00:52:29] And so we're always building capacity and our pacing may be different. Right. So we can never put our pace on someone else. It's all good. Yeah. The thing that came to me was, are we building capacity or are we getting rid of the stuff that's blocking? It's both.

[00:52:56] It's both. And I think when we begin to consciously build capacity, it goes quicker. Yeah. Like Greg, I'd be delighted to hear what people make of this. Thank you very much, guys. Yeah. And thank you listeners.

[00:53:22] We will speak to you very soon unless there's anything else you want to share. Thanks for the opportunity. Thank you. Thank you. We're good. Thanks listeners. Speak to you very soon. Take care. Bye bye.