Transformational Integration: Mindfulness, Healing & Presence with Greg Lawrence with The Healers Café with Manon Bolliger

what often happens to people. They say, Well, I took them when I was younger. I was having a good time and partying, and now it’s like I’m dealing with all these things from my life. That’s because before you were looking out, and now you’re looking in. And that night, I saw a lot of the patterns in my life, what I wanted to be doing as opposed to what I was doing, what I didn’t want to be doing opposed what I wasn’t doing. All of those things became clear. And I thought, now that I’ve seen all that, of course, everything’s going to be different. And within a couple of weeks, everything was pretty much the same. So rinse, repeat a couple of times. I couldn’t figure out why I was seeing all of these things that made sense to me, having these epiphanies and insights. Yet my life wasn’t changing. And I started researching and found out that there was this thing I’d never heard of called psychedelic integration, taking those insights and doing something with them in some way, shape or form. And I went and I found something called an integration circle to save space where people talk about their experiences and build community and lend support to each other. And I started attending those a lot, and I learned, first of all, that what most people called integration didn’t work for me. I learned what did work for me. And after being around the integration circles for a long time, you know, they said, you know, you’re here all the time, why don’t you take over one of these circles? You’ll, you’ll do it like every two weeks or something. And pretty soon, I was leading integration circles to a month, and people would come to me for counseling because I was a facilitator, and I seemed to know what I was talking about, and I thought I should probably know more what I’m talking about. So I went and I got certified as a psychedelic integration coach and as a life coach, and I owned a small business at the time, and I kept getting people coming to me for coaching. And I kept thinking, I have this business to run. I can’t keep doing this coaching all the time. And it finally occurred to me that that could be. What I did. So I think of myself as someone who has a lot of modalities and a way of operating that would have been very helpful to me at the time that I was looking for help, and I’ve never loved something I do as much as I do coaching.

Manon Bolliger  05:14

Wow, that’s a It’s a beauty, beautiful, like integrated story, right? Literally, I’ve got to share something funny with you, just and then we’ll go back to you. But it’s have to say it, because I’ve been very fascinated by sort of the integration of people’s so as a naturopath, right? I’m not one now, I’m not a practicing one, but I’ve still done it for like, 30 years. You really get to meet people because you spend time with them. And most of the time our suffering is either unconscious because we don’t know the stories we believe, or we believe the stories that we tell ourselves, and we don’t understand the roots anyway, and we create most of our suffering. So I’m like, okay, and there’s this guy, I’m sure you’ve known, you know about him, Dr Gabor Mate, and he did an integration circle, and I followed his work. I loved I love him. He’s great person. And I’m in Vancouver, right? So it’s easy to bump into him. And what was so funny is I thought, Oh, he’s giving a three day lecture. What an honor to I am signing up. I’m doing this right now. I had done psychedelics when I was quite young. I have a joke. I say I gave it up when I was 17. So but here I came to this thing, and I’m there to listen, and I realized that it’s a circle, and there’s, you know, substances to, you know, that are part of the beginning part of this integration. I’m like, wow, I didn’t know this, and I was terrified to do it because I hadn’t done it for so long, right? And anyway, but it’s kind of funny, I walk in and it’s, it’s actually to help addiction. And, you know, it’s like, what’s your addiction? And it’s like, oh, I don’t know of one, but it’s like, let’s, let’s just be there, you know, and join it and anyway that it’s so wonderful to see that type of work integrated at a whole other level. It really, really inspired me, so I’ve been interested ever since. So yeah, you’re speaking to me,

Greg Lawrence  07:39

unlike any integration circle I was ever at, because we actually didn’t allow any substances in our so,

Manon Bolliger  07:45

oh, I see. Okay, yeah, no, because I think it’s with the plant medicines, you know. So anyway, but it was very interesting, the integration part, right? Like, it was just fabulous. What can come up. So let’s talk about what you do. But I just thought I’d share that with you.

Greg Lawrence  08:05

Appreciate that.

Manon Bolliger  08:07

 So what is this? First of all, what is different than when you say integration, it’s different than what most people mean. What could you clarify what you mean by that?

Greg Lawrence  08:18

Yeah, I don’t think so much that Well, I think my integration is probably different from what a lot of people do. But what my remark in the beginning was that a lot of the things people consider to be integration didn’t work for me. A lot of the things people suggested were activities that you might already be doing, like doing yoga or meditating or, you know, grounding somehow in the earth, and if you’re already doing those things before the experience and you’re doing them afterwards, it may help some but it’s not doing anything to break the conditioning and patterns that you have in your life. And the struggle that we have as humans is that we are spiritual beings, but we’re placed in a body that has a brain. We have a nervous system that’s very predictable and does certain things. And one thing it does is it’s autopilot, on autopilot. And people often come to me because they’re doing something they don’t want to do, not doing something they want to do, feeling something they don’t want to feel, or not feeling something they want to feel, because our nervous system has automated things for us. You know, when you step to the edge of a cliff and you look over, you not have a natural reaction in your body that doesn’t feel good, that says, ooh, get back from there. Well, everything that we don’t like in our life, no matter how minor, has some small element of that to it. There is a discomfort to something that happens automatically when we look over a cliff, we don’t think that’s a cliff, so I’m going to be careful we just before our conscious mind has any chance to intervene, get this feeling in our body, those things are happening in an unconscious level. So all day long, we walk around making predictions with our brains and sort of being disappointed because that prediction didn’t come true. So we have little disappointments and unhappiness is happening all through the day, and unless you enjoy. Rest of those automatic reactions that you have at an unconscious level, when I don’t like something, I don’t feel good, then things may continue to be the same. That’s what was happening to me. I was having the same reactions to things that I had before. So it felt like my life was the same. I was really the same inside. It didn’t matter what changed outside, unless people stop doing certain things, and I have no control over that. So you said something about transformation. The beginning transformation, to me means personal transformation, and that basically means in some way, shape or form, transforming my experience of life for the better,

Manon Bolliger  10:38

right.

Greg Lawrence  10:39

So when you start down a path of personal or spiritual growth, you’ll often you might say you have 97 problems, and after a while you might just have 42 problems, but nothing outside of you has changed. It’s just that less things feel like problems, right? You might still have 97 problems, but that’s not as big a problem for you as it was before, right? So sometimes there’s just an element of changing our relationship to problems, sometimes of changing our relationship to something so that it’s not a problem or as much of a problem. And sometimes there’s an element of changing our relationship to problems.

Manon Bolliger  11:15

Okay, let’s, let’s repeat that. Sometimes it’s changing the perception that it’s a problem. So we have a relationship where we believe that trigger is the problem, yes, to the second one, or, I’m not sure that’s the right order, but the second one is the trigger is still there, but now you’ve modulated it in a way. You go, okay, that’s that’s just a trigger. But I’m okay. I’m fine. I I’ve proven that I It doesn’t trigger me anymore. It’s more like a a memory. Sometimes, sometimes

Greg Lawrence  11:49

it may still trigger me. So, uh, the trigger, as you said, is actually the problem, not so much the thing, but generally, I think that the thing is the problem. My reaction to the thing is the problem, right? Yes, and that’s what you can define as a problem. My reaction to something could be a memory. It could be a thing that’s happening, and whatever it’s my reaction to it, unless I have to change something externally for there to no longer be a problem, obviously, if I’m in danger and you do something else, but when it’s just a matter of I don’t like that, or I don’t like the way I feel when I see or think about that, then it’s my reaction the second instance. We still might have the trigger, but we’ve taken away what Buddhist would call the second arrow. That is me having a problem, and then saying, oh my god, I have this problem. You know, basically making another problem out of the fact that I have a problem, correct? Yeah, because I’m always going to have problems. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. It doesn’t always help to make another problem out of the fact that I do,

Manon Bolliger  12:44

Yep,

Manon Bolliger  12:46

absolutely, you know. And I see that in health a lot, right? It’s like you get, I mean, it goes much deeper, as far as you know. But you get a diagnosis, which you you happen to believe, but then you make the diagnosis almost a second layer of a problem to the problem. It’s almost like that has its own speed and total, you know, life of its own right, but you’re still have the same symptoms, and you’re still the same otherwise, you know. So I don’t know if that, if is that a little bit what you’re meaning?

Greg Lawrence  13:22

Yeah, you brought up in a very interesting point you’re familiar with Ellen Langer.

Manon Bolliger  13:26

I’m terrible with names unless I’m putting in a total context.

Greg Lawrence  13:31

Ellen Langer is a psychology professor at Harvard. She’s been writing on the subject of mindfulness since 1970 Oh, yeah. Okay, brilliant. So in one study that she did, they looked at people who were pre diabetic who had a certain level of a 1c I think the number is like 5.6 at 5.6 you’re considered pre diabetic. At 5.7 you’re considered diabetic. Now, right? People who were given a diagnosis of pre diabetic with a level of 5.6 were far more likely to be to become diabetic than people who were diagnosed at a level of 5.5 because they weren’t considered pre diabetic. It was the label of being pre diabetic that did something, whether that was what’s the use I’m already pre diabetic, or just the stress of it causing people more physical problems. But yeah, being labeled with a diagnosis is often something that people can take and make into a worse problem internally, not intentionally. Of course, we’ve done is, in Western culture, as a society, we take these things very seriously, right? You know, even when it comes to cancer, yeah, sometimes the person looking at the cell have to make it, sometimes very obvious that that’s a cancerous cell. Sometimes that’s a judgment call to say, Yeah, I think that’s cancerous. And when they say that, the doctor gives you a diagnosis of it, but being cancerous now you have cancer. But then what’s judgment call?

Manon Bolliger  14:53

Right? And it’s far more complicated than just the what you see on the slide, what’s the story? Of the immune system of that person, because if they have a very good immune system, they will get rid of cancerous cells. We all do. But if their immune system is, you know, hampered in any way, then there’s more problem with that cell. So even that is relative, but No, exactly. I totally agree with your your point. Yeah,

Greg Lawrence  15:19

I think it’s Doctor Bruce Lipton that says that he will tell people, you know, you’re going to take this medication, and 30% of people have this reaction to it. However, when you dig down below, you look underneath that 25% of those people aren’t exercising, and 75% of them don’t have this kind of diet. So there’s a lot more nuance even to those kind of subcategories that we get that can help people feel better, the more information they have, sometimes, the better they can feel, the better they can deal with it. Yeah, even, even when people get a diagnosis of saying, saying this, this operation is successful 95% of the time, or this operation results in Fatality 5% of the time. Those two are the same things, but you act very differently to those things. You know. This is what got me fascinated in neurolinguistic programming.

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Greg Lawrence  17:19

words have an effect on our psyche? Absolutely,

Manon Bolliger  17:21

yeah, yeah, that’s it’s very important in the in the interaction between two people, right? Absolutely, absolutely. So what was the third one? Then we got two of them. I think you said there was three ways. I called it trigger, but one was it thinking it’s the problem the other one is noticing but being able to deal with it much more calmly?

Greg Lawrence  17:51

Well, it’s basically not making a problem out of the fact that I have a problem, right? Yes, okay, that’s something very basic. That’s that’s actually something you can see in real time. When someone says, someone feels anxious. You can note that you can feel anxious, but you say, if you say, Oh no, I feel anxious. Now we have what we call meta problem. If I’m dealing with the fact the problem of the fact that I’m anxious, then I’m never getting to the fact that I’m anxious. Yeah. So you just compound the problem by, you know, being alarmed that you have a problem, basically,

Manon Bolliger  18:24

yeah, that’s true. Well, I mean, I see it too. When people ask, you know, how How is your day? I mean, in Canada, we say, Great, or how are you fine? So we don’t give a lot of information, right? But, you know, I’m, I am Canadian, but I I actually say what I’m feeling right, which puts people at a little bit in shock. But so I’ll say how I feel. Oh, I’ve had a tiring day. Well, suddenly I’m focusing on the tiredness of the day, whereas actually, if nobody asked me, it’s almost like, well, whatever I keep going, which could can go both ways, but it’s almost like I’ve dealt with it on some other level. I haven’t compounded it, you know? And that’s what these circles when people get together, you know, I was diagnosed with MS, and, you know, people would get together and they would talk about all the issues. I mean, it’s like, Oh no, I am not participating in these support groups. Like, I’m going to find another way here. But it’s just like, you can’t just sit in it. It’s it’s very detrimental, at least, that’s what I found. You know, not, not support. Support is, is really nice, but it’s gotta be the right support, not complain. Support, you know,

Greg Lawrence  19:52

well, you know what you’re paying attention to at any particular time directly impacts how you feel. And, um. I’m sorry. What else? Whatever else I was going to say just left my brain. So it’ll come back eventually. It always does. Oh, I know what I was going to say. To your point about being tired, and this is just a point of interest once again. This is Ellen Langer. She did a study with people who were doing some kind of physical exertion and found that if people were, for instance, running for 30 minutes, that they got tired at about 20 minutes, they got tired about two thirds of the way in. If people were running for an hour, they got tired after about 45 minutes. Yeah, interesting. We have a mental point at which we think, Oh, we’ve been doing this for a long time, and now I’m going to get tired, but it depends on how long we’re doing it for,

Manon Bolliger  20:44

right? So is that like a sort of survival override? It’s like, I gotta do it, so I’m gonna make them just gonna it’s gonna happen? Yeah,

Greg Lawrence  20:53

I’m not sure. But, you know, people do strange things. You know, there’s, there’s a highway where I live to go to a certain area. There’s a small highway that you take, it’s two lanes, and the speed limit there 60 miles an hour, and it goes down a significant Hill. And there are days when people might be in the left lane going 40 miles an hour. I’d like to at least go the speed limit, and I get frustrated. And one day, I noticed at that line of cars that was in front of me going down the hill. I could look, and I could see, oh, there was a police car in front. So I can see the people are slowing down because there’s police car, and the pressure instantly went down inside of me. And then I realized, well, wait a minute, Nothing’s different except for what I think is going on. Right, right, whatever I can. If that’s happening to me, I try to imagine that there’s a police car at the front of the line. And when I can manage to do that, sometimes the pressure goes down. Yeah? So these are all things that we create internally throughout the day, correct? Yeah, yeah. Sort of the kind of things that you deal with in personal transformation. You find the things that you’re creating yourself, and how you can make things so that they help you operate in a way that feels better to you.

Manon Bolliger  22:08

Yeah, I was thinking your example there was, like, if people are, you know, like driving like crazy, and, you know, a passenger says in the car, oh, my God, they’re crazy. They’re nuts. They’re whatever. It’s like, oh, they’re going to the hospital because their wife is giving birth in the car. You know, it’s like, it’s just another way of, you know, of, yeah, and do you think the basis of that is, I mean, people have said, I’m an optimistic person. I can’t help but make excuses for people to find the positive aspect. And I feel like my world is fantastic. Is that, are we? Are we built this way? Or can a person who tends to see the glass half empty, transform? With, kind of with help to start to see the glass three quarters full, or, you know, half full, maybe just the flip.

Greg Lawrence  23:12

Well, both are true actually this way. And yes, we can use, actually, like in some of the work I do, we use the natural tendencies of the nervous system to try to override or compensate for those things. So when you ask, Are we built this way? Yes, because many years ago, you know, if you think about where we are as a society, just 100 years ago, vastly different. 200 years ago, even more 500 1000 years we were much, much different as a species. Then our brains, however, evolve much more slowly than we do as a civilization. Our brains are basically wired for 15,000 years ago, when there were very little resources and a lot of competition, and we had, you know, our brain need to be fighting for every calorie. One of the reasons it’s so hard to change is because your brain has gone through a lot of trouble to automate things that happen to you, and it thinks it would be a very bad idea for you to change so it doesn’t want you to be less annoyed at something someone says any more than it wants you to be less careful when you’re at the end of a cliff and when you’re at the edge of a cliff, that’s how it sees things. So I go here, I find berries. I need to have a good feeling about this place, because this is where I’m going to find food to survive. So I need to remember it, and I need to feel good about it. Then I go back and there’s a bear there. Well, now I need to have a bad feeling about this place, so I stay away so that I survive. Our brains are largely built, built to help us avoid dangers of everyday life, and the kind of dangers our brain was wired for don’t exist in most parts of the world, certainly not in Western culture. So our brains are finding things to look out for. It’s doing the thing it’s always done. And but it’s doing that when I’m driving down the highway on the way to a dentist appointment, not when I’m looking for berries before the end of winter. We are wired that way, but there are things that we can do to make this experience more pleasurable by having less unpleasant experiences. Makes sense?

Manon Bolliger  25:19

Yeah so maybe our time is coming, not not yet finished, but close. Maybe is there a story of something, of someone that you’ve really helped a lot, that has, you know, without names, obviously, but you know something so people know what type of things you know before and after are we is possible?

Greg Lawrence  25:45

Well, I’ll give you an example, and this is a pretty typical example of someone who had kind of crippling social anxiety. This was a young man who was very outgoing and very fit, and he had trouble walking into a room with more than five people. If that happened, there was a good chance he would panic. He was also a competitive surfer, which at first seemed counterintuitive to me, and he said, No, when you’re out there, you’re all by yourself. It’s you and the ocean and the board, and there’s people over there, but you don’t have to interact with them. Well, at one point, we discovered that the feeling he had when he opened the door and saw five people inside, and the feeling he had when he was at the top of a big wave and was about to take off were biologically very similar in nature. It was the context. But there are some tools that you can use within NLP, H and LP and hypnosis that when you find something like that, you can help when help someone sort of tap into that feeling in a different way. You know, when you see a young child, if they get smacked from behind, they’re going to turn around and look because if their mother looks angry, they’re probably going to cry, and if their mother’s laughing, they’re playing, and they’re probably going to laugh. It was the same experience, but the context is different, right? So you can help people contextually reframe things in their minds. You can help people to discover, in many instances, that the words they’re using with themselves and others are leading them to think in a certain way. There are certain ways that we think about things within an LP. We know that we see different pictures and hear different things and have different memories, and all those things influence the way that we feel. Unlike you, I’m pretty good. My wife says I’m very good at mood. I have the internal life that I’ve been looking for for about 10 years now, because most of the time, throughout the day, I feel pretty good. I’m the way that I want to be. I get knocked off center, just like everyone else, and I’ll spin up for a while and I get upset, but I know how to bring myself back. So there are tools you can use to help someone be more present. So there’s not so much in their mind. You can help people look at what is happening inside of them. And once again, you know, changing that feeling of panic to one of anticipation is also a matter of changing your relationship to the reaction that you’re having. Once again, it’s what you’re doing transformational coaching

Manon Bolliger  28:06

and to get people more present. What do you find is the is there? I mean, there’s several ways, but what do you find that you like.

Greg Lawrence  28:16

Well, I’ll go back to two sources. I’ll go back once again, to Ellen Langer, she’s been writing about mindfulness since the 1970s and she says, I agree with her, mindfulness has been over complicated and is highly underrated. And mindfulness is the process of noticing things, actively noticing novelty. So I can look around right now, and I’ve had like, six pieces of art here on my wall, and there are parts of those pieces of art that I have never noticed. And if I take the time to notice those right now, I’m not on autopilot. I am automatically. So there are two parts of the brain. One is the default mode network that a lot of people know about. That’s what you’re that’s the area you’re in when you’re really anxious or chattery or critical, that’s the part that’s on when you’re on autopilot. And if you’re paying attention, as I just was, there’s the attention positive network. Those two things turn off and on. So if I’m paying attention, it’s very hard to be on autopilot. Enough on autopilot, it’s hard to pay attention. So actively noticing something around you that you hadn’t noticed before actually brings you to the present. And I’ll give you another example. There are two researchers named Siegel and Farb, who, in the early 2000s met, discovered that they had a mutual interest in proving scientifically that mindfulness helped people tolerate stress better. Now there was a ton of anecdotal evidence to that effect. Obviously, it’s been around for decades now, but it hadn’t been proven scientifically. So they got together, they put a bunch of people through MRIs, and saw how they handled certain situations and baseline their stress levels, and then they broke them in two groups and one they had trained in a kind of a. Mindfulness Meditation, an eight week course. The others, they said, you’ll take this course later. When they were done with the course, they tested them all again, and sure enough, the people who knew how to practice mindfulness now handled stress better. They said, I can’t wait to put these people in MRIs to see how they’ve quieted down the default network. And, you know, gotten rid of all those thoughts that were making it anxious when they put them in the MRIs, there was no difference. Their MRIs looked the same, and they thought, something’s not right, we’re missing something. And spent nearly a year reevaluating their data and finally discovered something they’d missed, and that is in the mindfulness group, there was a part of the brain that was activated when they were in stressful situations, called the sensory motor cortex. That’s simply the part of your brain that becomes aware of what’s happening in your body. So if you want to be present at any time, you can simply notice what’s around you and notice that you have a body, and you don’t need to do body scans or kinds of breathing or anything. All you can do is notice that I can feel my butt on the seat. I can feel the temperature of the air. I might notice that’s a little different on one part of my body than the other. I can notice that I’m hearing something besides myself talking right now. And as soon as I do all that, I’m more in my body. I’m more present. So being present, being mindful, is a process that’s sort of like breathing correctly or, you know, having racing thoughts. It’s something that your brain doesn’t like you to do it like, should it go off into the future or past? So it’s there’s a constant process of bringing yourself back to the present that can be very helpful, because when you do that, you’re also strengthening that neural pathway right being present, just by exercising it over and over and over again.

Manon Bolliger  31:43

Great. Well, this has been very interesting discussion, and I think, yeah, people who don’t know about this type of integration, I think we’ve really discussed it quite thoroughly. Thank you very much for sharing your your insights and expertise, and any last how? Yeah, how do people get hold of you?

Greg Lawrence  32:05

Well, thanks for having me. First of all, thanks for doing this. I appreciate it. If people want to find me, I’m Greg Lawrence on Facebook, but you can always go to Greg Lawrence coach.com that’s my website that will tell you how to find me at various places.

Manon Bolliger  32:18

Great. Thank you. Just a couple thoughts that have come more to do with people who do body work, or what I teach Bowen therapy, which is also bodywork, and it’s really bringing consciousness to your body. It really helps in this whole mental process, because when people come often, there’s a huge disconnection. They have pain, but it’s almost like happening to their body. They’re not in their body in the same way as when a person is at the point of releasing that pain or allowing it to disappear, or whatever their process is, but bringing when you really connect to your body, and as this man also mentioned, the breath is another way of doing this. But just noticing that you’re actually there’s a head on top of body is a big step forward. So I just wanted to mention that, and that’s like a natural side effect of focusing a bit on bodywork, which, you know, we do, but we do it more mechanically. We don’t do it from a conscious perspective, very typically.

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