150: Why Success Doesn’t Make You Happy (Psychiatrist Explains) with Dr. Anna Yusim

And we think that if we have more achievement, status, money, power, fame, even love, whatever that is, that we're going to be whole, but actually the opposite happens, the more of it that we have, the emptier we feel. Yeah, when we think of addiction, we think of addictions more as, you know, addictions to a substance like to a food or a drug, alcohol, but very rarely do people think of psychological addictions, that you can actually be addicted to money, power, status, etc. If it's all easy peasy, you could do it on your own. Oftentimes, this is the hardest work that you will ever do. It's hard work to identify what needs to be seen and then to actually uproot it from your life in a sustained way. By listening to the Coherence Code podcast, you agree to not use this podcast as medical advice to treat any medical condition, either in yourself or others. Consult your own physician or healthcare provider for any medical issues that you may be having. This entire disclaimer also applies to any guests or contributors to the podcast. Welcome to the Coherence Code podcast, where we explore how the mind and body work together so you can move from stress and inter conflict to clarity, calm, and alignment. My name is Lauren Brown. I'm a doctor of traditional Chinese medicine and clinical therapist. And through my work, I've seen that healing happens when you remove what gets in the way and allow the body and the nervous system to do what they're designed to do to heal. Welcome to the Coherence Code podcast. Today's guest is Dr. Anna Yuzum. Now she is a board certified psychiatrist, executive coach, and a bestselling author of the book, "Fulfilled. How the Science of Spirituality can help you live a happier, more meaningful life." She's educated at Stanford, Ann Yale, and now a clinical assistant professor at Yale Medical School. She bridges neuroscience, psychiatry, and spiritual wisdom to help high performers from CEOs to Olympic athletes to the average show like me. And she helps us align purpose, potential, and inner peace. Dr. Anna, welcome to the Coherence Code podcast. Thank you so much, Dr. Lauren. It is such a pleasure to be here with you today. Now I've had an opportunity full transparency. I'm on like chapter nine of your book, because we just got connected really quickly, loving what I read so far and can't wait to even after our podcast to go back to read. Like I saw there's a chapter 10 unconsciousness. That's like my favorite theme and I haven't gotten there yet, but maybe we'll talk about it here today. But you're special to me in that you're trained Western medicine. So you're trained as a psychiatrist, psychiatrists are trained to give medications for symptoms, right? Mental health symptoms. But when I went to your website, by the way, everybody check out her website, Annausum.com. You're practicing integrated psychiatry, holistic psychiatry. I don't know if you're aware of this, but you talk about this mind-body approach and you can't just look at one little symptom. You have to look at it holistically. But when I was reading about you and how you approach it, this mind-body cannot be separated. I was thinking, I don't know if she knows this, but she's basically practicing like a Chinese medicine doctor. It's really interesting that you say that Dr. Lauren, because I often refer my patients for acupuncture and traditional Chinese medicine and many other healing modalities that are very mind-body spirit oriented. And so yes, on one hand, I do know that, and it's also been a future part of my life. I've been doing acupuncture for ages. One of my best friends, Dr. Catherine Souslov, we did residency training together at NYU for in psychiatry. But after the first year of psychiatry residency, she decided, you know what? I'm actually meant to be a traditional Chinese medicine practitioner. So she left psychiatry residency and became an acupuncturist. And so she got me very much into that like many, many years ago. And since then, I've been very interested in the thinking of traditional Chinese medicine. And one of the most interesting ideas of that is that any disease that exists in the physical body actually first begins at the energetic level. And at the energetic level in such a way that you could actually sense it and figure it out through the pulses in the meridians of the body. And fix the energetic imbalance and hopefully prevent the disease from taking place. So I'm super interested in the way in which you're and my professions overlap. And just your thinking of the mind and body can't be separated. Like, you know, stuff on the physical will affect the mental emotional and stuff on the mental emotional effect physical. That's Chinese medicine. They don't even call it mind and body. It's just mind body. It's one. And so when I was reading your book and learning more about you, I was like, oh, that is totally how you see this human organism. You know, you don't separate these parts out. You treat it holistically. Now, because you're training Western medicine, why I was excited and am excited to talk to you. Have you on here is it's the credibility factor. You know, we're going through what I think is a paradigm shift right now. And people, high achievers that I get to see my practice. I see a lot of lawyers and executives, entrepreneurs, women going through paramedics or in the menopause stage of their life. And they're struggling a bit. And they've done the things that they thought would make them happy. Maybe the relationship, you know, the income, the job that they always wanted. But yet, something's missing on the inside. And the reason I wanted you to be on here is there's shamans out there. There's yoga teachers out there talking about spirituality. But it kind of gets dismissed because you're like, well, who are you? Right? Like, how do you how do you have an authority to talk on this? But you're trained. You know, you went to you went to Yale, Yale school, you've gone to med school, Stanford. And so the fact that you're talking about spirituality, I think it allows people to open up and listen because oh, she's done the track that is on the material level, the Western level. You've done this stuff. You know this. And yet you're still gravitating to this other aspect, this Eastern understanding. And so that's one of the reasons why I wanted you to come and talk to our audience because you're kind of living in both worlds. And it seems like you've trained in both worlds. And that's what we need right now. I completely agree. And you know, as I was training to go to medical school, I had no idea that ever my first of all my life or certainly my professional career would move in this direction. I was trained as a hardcore bonafide psychiatrist. You know, did my undergraduate in biology and philosophy at Stanford went to Yale medical school and then did my psychiatry residency at NYU. And then interesting and unusual things started happening in my life that completely took my life in a different direction. And that was when in trying to make sense of those unusual things, which I'm happy to tell you about, that was when I started integrating these other ways of thinking and being in order to explain to myself what was really going on in my life. So for instance, an example. So towards the end of my residency, I remember I started becoming more interested in this concept of soul. Right? So, psychiatrist has the word psyche in it. Psychic can be translated as either mind or soul. But, you know, so technically I'm a doctor of the mind or a doctor of the soul depending on who you ask. Now, being a doctor of the soul, nobody, not once, in any of my residency or medical school trainings, taught me about this concept of soul. They never even mentioned it. And so I was towards the end of my residency thinking, I'm a doctor of soul, but I don't even know what the soul is. And I'm like, there's other cultures where people really focus more on the soul of healing. And I started going to lecture, started understanding this. And I remember going to electure at my synagogue and then coming back home and feeling pulled almost pulled to go into this ice cream shop. So I'm sitting and eating my ice cream. And this woman comes up to me and says, I'm a psychic. And she has this young child next to her. I'm a psychic and I have this message for you. Can I give you a message? And she looked relatively innocuous. I'm like, sure, give me your message. So this woman sits down and starts telling me all of these truths about my life that she has no possible way of knowing. Many things, you know, certainly aren't written, maybe written in my journal, maybe, but she, like all the way down to certain details, like the name of the guy who I had a crush on at the time, who she certainly, you know, had no way of knowing any of this. And after that experience, it just left me, you know, dumbfounded. What just happened? What was she tapping into? How did this woman know these things about me? And what does this say about this model of the mind that I was taught in medical school? So it's experiences like this that led me to think broader and deeper. Was that just an anomaly? Or does the mind work a little bit differently than I've been taught? Does information exist not just within the content of my, you know, neurons, but actually in another place that certain people can tap into in some way? And what is that place? So I went down that inquiry and it was those kinds of experiences of which I had many after that experience that led me to then think a little bit more broadly about healing and the mind. And being a medical doctor then, what does the science tell us? Because that's kind of your model, right? You know, it could have been a fluke. There could be reasons why she knew things that she should not know. And from your experience, no way, she knew things that she just could not know. And in the Western model then, can we repeat this? I believe, I mean, I know at the Noetic Institute of Science and IONs, I know the SSE, the Society of Science Exploration, they study this stuff. Are you familiar then with other research showing that people can do pre-cognition or people can read your thoughts? And where are these thoughts then if they're not in our mind? Because you know what I know about my listeners? They're open to this, but they may have a the conscious or unconscious. just program that you don't want to look foolish, naive or stupid, but they want to believe and they need somebody like you to give them some evidence so they can have some permission to be open to learning more about this. Absolutely. Absolutely. And so thank you for allowing me to speak about this. And I think that there's so many different questions in this regard, right? One is the question of what's really going on and two is the question of what's the mechanism underlying? What's going on? And three, what are the implications of human beings having certain capacities? And there's so many different directions in which I can take this question. But let's first start with saying that these are incredibly interesting, provocative questions that many people are seeking to answer in all sorts of ways, often quite scientifically through research studies. And you're exactly right that Dean Raiden and the folks at the Institute of Neuetic Sciences are doing amazing work with this. Dr. Julia Mossbridge there is doing incredible work with this. We at Yale have people like Dr. L. Powers. He's doing some very interesting work, which I'll tell you about. First let's take a step back. So what exactly, when this woman gave me these messages about my life, what exactly happened? Right. What's she reading my mind? What's she getting some sort of downloads from another far off place? Maybe this mysterious zero point field or what some people call the Akashic record? Are there, is there such a thing as the Akashic records? Is that Carl Jung's collective unconscious that we can all tap into? What are these arcane places that people can access information from? And in another way, was she tapping into a deep intuitive ability of her own that actually we all as human beings to some degree have? And if indeed it is a deep intuitive ability that she happened to be born with this gift, then how does that ability work? So oftentimes this intuitive ability that this particular woman has, and I got to know her, she was a psychic and she was trained from a very early age to develop these psychic abilities. She had no formal education, but she was a brilliant psychic and able to almost read other people's minds. So what was she tapping into? And the way that she would describe what she was tapping into is that she has a higher self and she has spirit guides and she would get messages. And she would get these messages in a number of different ways. Often these ways are called the clairs, all the ways of intuitive knowing. Clare voyants, when you get a message by seeing something in your mind's eye, you see a picture or a clair audience that you hear a voice telling you the answer to something or clair sentience that you know something by virtue of a strong emotional feeling or feeling it in your body or clair cognizance that you know just because you know you don't even know how you know, but you just know. So these are the channels that were open for this particular woman. And I mentioned Dr. Al Powers' research at Yale. So Dr. Powers studies the specific phenomena of clair audience or the hearing voices. Now in my profession, psychiatry, there's a disease where people hear voices and that psychosis or schizophrenia. It's a very devastating disease, the prepnosis of which can be very poor and often leads to a lifetime of medication. Though there are some people who have overcome, we never say that you can't get off medication, we never say that you can't heal, but nevertheless it's often known as a devastating disease. Dr. Powers was studying how hearing voices in that population of chronically ill schizophrenia is different from hearing voices and individuals who are self-proclaimed psychics and hear these voices for the greater good of themselves and perhaps their clients. So voices that are controllable and helpful as opposed to voices that are devastating and sometimes called command auditory hallucinations, telling people to harm themselves, harm others, etc. Right? What's the difference? What's the difference between the neural chemistry of one group versus the other? So these are the kinds of questions that are being asked at Yale to understand this particular intuitive capacity. And so at Yale, I'm a clinical assistant professor there and we're starting a mental health and spirituality program and eventually which will be a center. And what we're going to do with Dr. Powers is we're going to change the question. Rather than the control group being the voice hears, the psychics, we're going to make that experimental group to better understand how the processes of clear audience work in their mind and to really go as deep as we can into that. So this is one of one person doing such research. There are so many more and I'm so happy to talk about all of that. Well, I want to unpack this even more. You know, I've Dean Raiden by the way, a plug and Julie Mossbridge both I've had on the coherence podcast and Dean said the following because some of the questions we know, we know but we don't know why and he says because I had him on, we're talking about manifestation and consciousness and I would say and why and why and he would have an answer and answer. And then eventually says if you ask that enough, we currently will come to a place where we say we don't know. We know sometimes something will work before we can understand the mechanism. And so this is what my sense is from reading your book. This is the four clairs that you mentioned. It seems like science is accepting that this is something that exists and they're just trying to understand it better. But it is not my understanding like you believe that people have these abilities or some people can tap into this from your own experience and from what you've seen in the research. 100% and I believe that all of us can develop that ability and those abilities within ourselves. We won't necessarily be as talented as people with this inborn ability because I do believe there's a strong genetic basis and that there's also a certain vulnerable period early on in people like where if you develop those capacities, they can blossom whereas developing them later on. It's a little bit more challenging. But yes, I do believe that this is an inborn ability that can be understood and studied scientifically and we are developing the means but we do not yet have the means fully and the means could be within our Newtonian scientific universe in a more linear model of reality and it could be in a more quantum understanding of reality to which we're only now beginning to transition. Now, you said something about the voices that we're talking about schizophrenia, for example. So I would say I believe I've had my own experiences. So I'm a believer in that sense because of experience. Although parts of my brain constantly says you're sure. But one part is the harm part. Somebody once told me or shared with me that if you ever are getting messages and it tells you to go harm yourself, you're not tapping into source. So just want to check in with you because some people do hear those voices. I wanted to clearly stay because people may go, "Oh, I'm hearing this too. I'm being told to do this from your philosophy, from the science, from what you subscribe to your belief system." People can get messages but so far the messages are not about harming, either harming, self. Is that my understanding? Well, yeah. Okay. So this is a way in which that question is often asked is, how do you tell the difference between your intuition and your fear? How do you know if something's coming from a place that you're supposed to listen in Hebe guidance or a place that's your own, you know, darkness that we all as human beings have, our own ego consciousness, which could be any manifestation of ego, including fear, anger, hatred, jealousy, rage, all of those things. But your answer is a good one, meaning that if the end result of you acting on the guidance is going to be to contract you, to make you less, to make your world smaller, then it's probably not from a good place and not from a place of higher consciousness and your higher self. If however, the end result of the action that's being purported would actually expand you, enable you to go against your nature, to push against your boundaries, to become, you know, a better version of yourself than that's probably coming from your intuition. I want to know more about your influences like you've studied. So we know med school, right, medicine. I think I've heard like you've studied or familiar with course of miracles. I love a course of miracles and I study that for a while in Mary and Williamson's work with that. I think it's very powerful. And one of the most powerful concepts is that often a miracle is a shift in perception. It's one of my favorite concepts of the course of miracles. And let's say one more thing about course of miracles. The coolest thing I think about course of miracles is that the person who essentially downloaded or channeled the download for course in miracles was Helen Schickman, who was a professor at Columbia, who was a scientist, a psychologist, who got this download and then got out of the way, let the download come through. But this is how so much inspired information can come through in the most unexpected ways to the most unexpected people. Now she did that was that what year was that decade that she did that? Do you remember? I don't remember exactly, but it was within the last hundred years, I believe. Oh, yeah. I thought it was 70s, maybe late six. I can't remember. Seven ladies. Yeah, I think that that's right. I think that's right. And Rick and I are bringing up you got to check out this book. If it's still in print by Vernon Howard called the Mystics Path to Cosmic Power written in the 60s. So one thing I was pretty certain on, because when I when I learned the course of miracles, I had read in the 90s that book and they're the same. And his book is before the course of miracles, which I'm sharing that truth is truth exists for a while. But when I say the same, the principles are very like they're aligned. So anyways, this material has been around. And then when I was sharing some of my thought and process to a friend whose Buddhist says that's Buddhism, that's 2000 years. So truth is truth, truth is bit around. So Course Ameriacles, Eckert Tolly, that's his book, right? Course Ameriacles, that's where it got him. So those are principles there. I think you've done a Joe dispenser retreats. - I've done a lot of Joe dispenser retreats and that was amazing for me to experience the healing power of a collective field and how magic happens in that field for so many people. And I've known so many people who've had miraculous recovery in those retreats and including some of my patients. - Maybe we're at the same one. And then I studied Kabbalah in the late 90s and then I just did another course recently. And I understand Kabbalah, you've studied that as well. - I did. I did. That was actually my entry point into spirituality. And this was towards the end of my residency training. So right when my psychiatric training was coming to an end and my spiritual training was only about to begin. So it was very interesting how things happened in my life. In the right timing when the student is ready the teacher appears and the first teacher was Kabbalah. - Okay, so now I just, I always nice for the audience to know kind of your influence, right? Have you had your own personal experiences? So you have the ice cream shop where somebody came in and they read you and a quick tangent. Do you subscribe to the idea then that the brain is like a receiver and this information's there? That's why this person can pick up on this and other people. Is that kind of or? - Absolutely, absolutely, yeah. - Have you had other experiences besides the research that you get to read and be part of? But have you had other experiences than that has brought you into this, what I call inner work or conscious work? - Absolutely. And you mentioned that in my book that you're on chapter nine. It's in chapter nine, 10, 11, and 12, that I talk about all my personal experiences with spirituality, of which there happens so many including with my patients. So first and foremost with my patients and it's gone both ways where patients have had dreams about me of something they could have no way of knowing. And then the dreams are correct and accurate. And then I have dreams about patients also of things I have no way of knowing and the dreams are correct and accurate. And those are things that have happened prior to my writing the book. But I feel that continuing on a spiritual path, this becomes not anomalous experiences that are distinct parts of your life. This becomes your life. You have more and more synchronicities that start to define the way that you see the world and the way that your life shapes up. As far as the people who come in at a given time, the doors that open the doors that close. And I think that in our interaction with the divine and our guidance of the divine, there are two primary ways in which we can interact. One is through intuition, through the clairs, which is the internal way that we can connect to spirit. And I mentioned the concept before of soul. I believe that our intuition that's still quiet voice within that can only be heard when the other much louder voices of a reason and emotion temporarily quiet. So the intuition is the voice of the soul. And when we can tap into our intuition, we have the best, I guess, connection to divine guidance. And that's the internal way in which we can be divine the guidance. The external way is through synchronicity. Synchronicity is meaningful coincidences. This is a term coined by Carl Jung in response to or in our understanding to two situations that are temporally related, but not causally related. Such as, I think about somebody, and then they call me. My thinking about someone didn't make them call me, but yet the fact that they occurred close together makes them those things meaningful to me. Or I have a dream about somebody and then bump into that person on the street the next day. My dream didn't cause me to bump into that person, but to me it was a meaningful coincidence that those two things correspond in. And so synchronicity is the external way of getting divine guidance. Intuition is the internal way. And to be clear, in order to have good relationships with both intuition and synchronicity and divine guidance, you have to have a very grounded feet on the ground relationship with reality. If you are psychotic and you see all billboards it's talking to you and all voices and everything you hear is talking to you. Everything's a synchronicity. And then nothing's a synchronicity. And the same is if you are hearing voices of schizophrenia that's untreated, the same thing. Also not divine guidance, but an illness. And so I think that synchronicity and intuition can be very powerfully used for guidance, but coupled with a grounded and healthy mental state. - Thank you for that. And now I want to tap in for, I'm going to channel my listeners and I'm saying that jokingly, I'm not a child. So, you use that word, "virtually, not literally." So many of the people I see, all by the way, I was that person too. So I was making for myself. I have a friend, I was making for myself. Thinking of my high achievers and they have constantly overachieved and it's, we'll cut to the chase as in, they've overachieved many of them because there's such an emptiness inside. So they're looking for it externally. There's this void inside. Maybe I'll get it through a relationship, maybe I'll get it through more money, maybe I'll get it through more work. And it doesn't seem to fix it. To me, your book fulfilled is for this person where you're like, I did everything I thought I should do. I got a medical degree and a specialization. I have kids, I have the right, I have a partner. I'm doing everything, but something's not right, right? So your experience, please, because you're an overachieved or overachieved and your clients and then really tied into this work with fulfilled because my belief system is, you're not going to get it outside of you. It is something that's going to come from the inside. And I kind of wanted you to unpack that for I was snorers, please. And-- - 100%. - And so those are struggling. - Yeah, and just like you said, Dr. Lauren, that was my story as well, right? It's so many of our stories as overachievers that we continue to achieve and that achievement can be with achievement and accomplishments or it could be with money, status, power, or doing all the right things, milestones, whatever that is, whatever we believe society is telling us that we should do, we are doing it all. And then why don't we feel happier fulfilled inside? And then you ask yourself, what life am I really living? Is it my life? Am I living in authentic life? Or am I doing what I believe I'm supposed to do without ever really having checked in with myself? And so let's also be clear, we live in a society where we have the luxury to check in with ourselves. Not every society has that luxury. Not every society, are we able to look within and say, am I being authentic? And that we have the choice to make different decisions as to how we live our lives. And the professions that we move forward with, whether we have a profession or not, who we marry, not everybody has those choices. We have so much choice and with choice comes great responsibility. But when we continue to achieve without thinking about it, one of two things could happen. One of those things is that we continue to achieve and achieve and achieve. And the more that we achieve, be it money, power, status, fame, whatever else, the emptier we feel. And what I believe-- - Can you say that again? 'Cause that was my life and that's so many people listening, I think, that's an important point to highlight. Absolutely, absolutely. So what can happen oftentimes is that we continue to achieve because we're not sure how to feel better. And we think that if we have more achievement, status, money, power, fame, even love, whatever that is, that we're gonna be whole, but actually the opposite happens. The more of it that we have, the emptier we feel. And I think that what happens then is that we become victims of a psychological addiction, psychological addictions to money, power, status, fame, accomplishment, whatever else. It doesn't fulfill us. We think that it should, but it doesn't. And I'm also not saying that any of these are bad things. Of course, they're in moderation, and some people in even an access, money, power, status, all good things. Enjoy, pursue them. But when the more of it you have, the emptier you feel, that's when you start to question, is this perhaps a psychological addiction? Yeah, when we think of addiction, we think of addictions more as addictions to a substance, like to a food or drug, alcohol, or we think of behavioral addiction, like to exercise or serve video games, but very rarely do people think of psychological addictions that you can actually be addicted to money, power, status, etc. And in the same way, as drugs still avoid for people, so does money, power, status, etc. And so what is your relationship with that with you're looking to bring into your life? Does it make you feel whole? And does it make you feel whole in a sustained way? Or does it actually undermine you at some point? And do you need to change your relationship with that? And from your experience in the people you work with and coach as well, like not just your medical practice, but coaching, this turning inside, then is what we're asking people to do, right? It's an inside job doing the internal work. You have to be willing to feel uncomfortable when I'm looking through your book and your exercises, because you have to come alongside these uncomfortable feelings observe them and be with them. You come up against your shadow. So when you do this or when you work with people, is it all easy peasy? Or do people come up against resistance? and come up against these stones. So it does require some courage. It does require willingness to feel your uncomfortable feelings. Oftentimes this is the hardest work that you will ever do. And the people that often come to me for this work are brilliant, amazing people. Like this is hard work. This is often the hardest work that you will ever do. And it's also so interesting. So today is March 2nd, which is the full lunar eclipse, the blood moon, but also the Jewish holiday of porim. And both Dr. Lernenair fasting today. I'm fasting doing a coffee fast. You're doing I think a full fast. It's something that you do for this holiday. But this is a festival or holiday that is all about lifting your masks. And actually part of what you do for porim is you dress up. And so part of the work of doing and getting to the root of what you need and who you are is lifting the mask is being able to get into true authenticity. Honesty, the greatest form of honesty with others, but first and foremost with yourself. And that means embracing your shadow. And what is this shadow? Right? The shadow is that disavowed part of you that at some point in your life, you were told is unlovable and unacceptable. And so you disavow it and you often move it outside of your consciousness in such a way that you're not even aware and you're not even aware. And it comes back because what we don't own owns us and what we resist persists, it comes back in other parts of your life and ends up undermining you. So owning your shadow, integrating your shadow is a huge part of the work that I do with my clients. I wrote a whole blog post on this from the Star Wars show called Picard. I don't know if you ever watched the Star Wars, but the data and lore, the twin robots. One is dark, the shadow one is light. And there's a whole thing about it. He only became whole and complete when they stopped fighting and he actually became whole and complete when he fully accepted the shadow. So just a sidebar of integration here. Now when you talk about being authentic, right? Because it's that idea of accepting that aspect of yourself, right? Because when you reject it, you said, I'm going to use a few of the words, what you resist persists. Right? And what I've heard, you don't have a secret, a secret has you used to something about owning. What's the owning one? Yeah. What you don't own owns you. So I'll share with you through observation in my practice, the time of this recording, 26 years into practice. But early days, it became apparent to me that somewhere around age 40 with my clients, majority of them are women. I do a lot of reproductive health, paramedic, osmetic, but somewhere around 40 plus or minus five years, people had wake up calls as in whatever they were doing before to keep their symptoms and life at bay did not work. Like it would work for a week, a month, and then it'll show up again or show up somewhere else. My reasoning is that we have things that we come in intergenerational, which I'll ask you to say you agree or not through the science. So trauma, stuck energies, what we call in Chinese medicine, G stagnation is it comes into generationally or we got imprinted on you as a child, not by choice, but based on your gender, socioeconomic status, where you live, who your teachers were, gets imprinted on you. And as a survival mechanism, it gets stored because you just don't have the capacity to deal with it. So it just gets put away in the cells. 100% in such a deep way, Dr. Lauren, that resonates. And so whenever I think about causes of symptoms that patients come with, I always think about the biopsychosocial spiritual model that everything had biological causes, psychological causes, social causes, spiritual causes. And what you're talking about that the issues are in your tissues, those are the biological causes. And that is genetic propensities, those are environmental toxins that may be stored in our bodies and in our cells from our whole life. That's our exposure to EMS of which, you know, we're only beginning to understand the true effects of that. This is the diets that we eat. This is, you know, our exercise and, you know, then they're psychologically intergenerational transmission. And this is our epigenetics and also certain patterns of how we were raised and our unconscious defenses and the way in which we process emotions and the habits that we, you know, have. And then socially our support system, the important people, all of which gets imprinted in our cells and spiritually our relationship with the divine. That also has biological antices in at Yale, Dr. Mark Potenza, together with Dr. Lisa Miller at Columbia are doing these really interesting studies on trying to identify which brain region spiritual experiences reside in, right? If spiritual res, experiences reside in certain brain regions, they also reside within certain cells. And so it's super interesting. So I completely agree with what you're saying. And I think that that's part of the multifaceted nature of how we carry everything in our mind, body and spirit. So the second part then, because this is somatic work, like when this, when the issues are stuck in your tissues or in Chinese medicine, you know, the, the energy is stuck in there because E emotions, energy in motion. That's what emotions are. They get stuck in your body. The work to do it, my understanding is a lot of it's somatic and it's bidirectional. So there's talk therapy, like you can talk about it, but there's the body therapy. That's why breath work or acupuncture or EFT emotional freedom technique, the somatic work, I think it's very important to get it out of your tissues. And I'm curious your, your take on this because I always, I say to my patients, most of the time you can't think your way through this. So for people like, I want to have peace. Like I don't have peace and I want peace. I have this underlying anxiety. I feel empty, great. I want this. But this is not something you can just sit down and will it. There is a process and you have to trust the process. So when I was going through your book, the writing exercises, you talked about it. It's simple, right? It's simple, not easy. Psycha has this beautiful intention before we do psych case, another one of those energy psychology techniques. This work is simple, powerful, effective, and playful. And the simple part is anybody can do this, but it's not easy. Otherwise, everybody would do it. Like you said, sometimes you need support. So I want to hear a little bit more than again for myself and for our listeners is, this is not something you can just think your way through this. This is stuff that you have to get into. I talked about that noise. These old programs, these undigested emotions are stuck in your tissues. There are ancient techniques, which modern science, like yourself, are bringing into the clinic or through coaching sessions to help on a somatic level, body level have these released. And so can you touch a bit on that that it's a bite or action? Definitely. And so I also believe like this is one of my main criticisms of the current state of Western medical psychiatry, the majority of psychiatry, right? That the current psychiatric paradigm is twofold. Psychotherapy for the mind and psychopharmacology for the brain. What's missing in this paradigm is the body and the spirit. And the body is exactly what you're saying. The fact that the mind body are actually one that they're so connected and that so much pain, suffering, hardship, et cetera, exists in ourselves and in our bodies and actually working directly through the body enables ways to release certain things. And you know, I also want to be clear, everybody's very different to different degrees for different people. There's some people for whom the existing paradigm of psychiatry works beautifully, helps them to overcome and feel or helps them to do that to some degree. And I have certainly seen that for thousands and thousands of people. And then I also have seen where the current psychiatric paradigm is limited and insufficient for people despite their best efforts and doing everything that psychiatry says they should do. They still have symptoms and they're still stuck because there is other causes and other sequelae and other, you know, pathways that aren't being tapped. And you know, all of the somatic processes that you describe, whether emotional freedom, technique, somatic experiencing, anything and everything, you know, is a huge part, I believe, of psychiatric treatment. And when I think about the body intelligence that needs to be taken into a pound in order to have a full psychiatric paradigm, we should also focus on nutritional psychiatry, which is our diet. We should focus on exercise. We should focus on healthy sexuality and pleasure. We should focus on longevity and fertility and we should focus on metabolic psychiatry and we should focus on inflammation. All these other things that have been shown to have, and you know, the gut brain relationship that I've been shown to have a huge impact on mental health, but is it necessarily part of the primary dialogue? For me, in my world, this is how we're trained. I just keep smiling when I hear somebody like you that's trained like this. I call you doctor 2.0. And that's who I have on my podcast, you know, you mentioned Dean Raiden. I've had Lisa Miller, all these medically trained people that are practicing holistic. I just think it's nice how the East and West are coming together. It gives me so much hope for medicine and the health of our world. Well, you didn't talk about it, but you talked about the sexuality, having good sexuality and health and I was thinking relationships. I got to talk to Dr. Anna about relationships. Again, women I see come in either wanting to grow their families or wanting to be symptom free in their perimenopause phase. But what I have found interesting is majority of them end up having a hit on their partner as in this is a big stress point for them. So I want to hear a little bit about the spiritual work around relationships and what they serve, meaning, so relationships aren't here to make you happy. They're here to make you conscious. And we hear through Buddhism, through suffering, we can awaken. I've added to the quote that relationships aren't here to make you happy. And when you're conscious, you are happy. You just don't need the relationship. The relationship isn't your source of joy anymore. It's your spiritual connection. So you have joy. And the relationship is this pleasure. It's temporary, but whether the relationship is there or not, your happy quotient's high. You're good. And it just adds to it. It's not that you don't enjoy it, but it's not the source of your happiness. But if you would love to unpack that quote, as well as how relationships are your mirror and an opportunity for your growth, I would love for that coming from a psychiatrist who's also a coach who does spiritual work because you have an holistic view of this. Sure. Sure. And there's so much there. I feel like I can answer this question for the next 15 minutes, but I'll give a few thoughts on this. So in Kabbalah, they also said that if you're looking to grow because there's two ways that we can live life, right? There's the path of comfort and complacency and the path of growth and transformation. And if you're choosing the latter, you can only do so much of it on your own. Eventually, you're going to need a relationship partner to continue your growth. Now, that's one couple is to few. Some people may agree. Some people may not agree. And it's true that we think that we are drawing in what we want, but actually oftentimes the mirror principle says that we are drawing in not what we want, but who we are. So if you want to draw in the best possible partner, become the best possible partner, the qualities that you're looking to draw in, develop those and cultivate those in yourself. And as far as the relationships not necessarily making you happy, but making you conscious, I think that that's true. And also, you know, part of our purpose here is growth. And you can think of, you know, purpose according to Plato versus purpose according to Aristotle. Some people, Plato, believe that it was about happiness, but some people, like Aristotle, believe that it was actually more about purpose and meaning. And sometimes meaning, even if it doesn't make you happy, is deeply important for growth because we have to overcome in order to truly have meaningful, purposeful lives. And that's the case with relationships. Hopefully, you know, there are certain places where people will draw the line with respect to relationships. So the only time I will tell someone you have to leave is if there's actually clear abuse, sometimes neglect, but usually abuse. And that unfortunately happens. And that's not purposeful or meaningful. If you are being abused, you need to leave. And that's, you know, on you, and it's a very big responsibility. Now, for other situations, you oftentimes, when you meet somebody, are given a gift. And at the beginning, in the love and factuation phase, you're giving a lot of free energy with a lot of joy without you having to work very hard for it. And then afterwards, the relationship goes to become a normal relationship. And the person falls off the pedestal and becomes a normal person with imperfections and mistakes that they will make in the relationship. And then you have to work back to get to this space of ultimate, infinite love. And many people and sometimes the relationship makes it sometimes it doesn't. And it's really, you know, like you said, finding someone with whom you could do that conscious work, who's turned in the same direction as you as far as they're like goals and what they're looking for out of the relationship and who's willing to do the work with the same capacity as you. There's a lot of mismatches in all those ways. And we see all of those. I see that all those as a psychiatrist. I do a lot of couples therapy. But ultimately, a good relationship can be your greatest source of support and a bad relationship can be the greatest undermining thing in someone's life. Thank you for that. And it's an opportunity for growth. And nobody suggesting that your relationship is not supposed to make you unhappy. It was just that it's not here to make you happy. It's here for you to grow. Eckertoli has a quote that you can be at peace in an unhappy situation. Buddhism says pain is inevitable, suffering is optional. And so when I work with individuals and for myself, even, that's the whole idea is what not that is happening for me, that I are to me, that idea is happening for me, what's the opportunity? What's what's being mirrored to me? And as you you were sharing like what you're looking for in a partner, to me, it's like what I'm looking for a partner is what I'm missing inside of me. So how do I cultivate, what I heard, how do I cultivate that inside of me? Then you're not need. I don't need them to be a certain way for me to be happy because I have that love affair with myself. I have that acceptance and I am loving. I'm connected. You know, if I may, I'll share my metaphor and use it as you like, but I feel like we're all walking around like glass as a water with water in it. And as you bump into people and they give you water, you're like, oh, I really like them. It feels good because they're giving you water. But the person who keeps giving you water is like, oh my god, I feel so empty around this person. They're a drain, right? I don't feel so good. What we really want to do is turn on the faucet above our glass. We want to tap into our higher self, get tapped in. So our glass is constantly filling up and overflowing. So when somebody comes to take your water, you wouldn't even notice they're taking your water because as you're they're taking your water, yours is continually filling up and overflowing. Does that? I love that. Absolutely. I love what you're sharing. And I think that that is right on on so many levels. And I also, yeah, I agree. And I feel that ultimately in filling your own cup, you're doing a favor for the whole relationship. And it also makes me think of what Henry Grayson in his book Mindful Loving said in that one person through their own consciousness can change the whole relationship. And so often I will have one person come to me, not the couple. And the person's very distraught by the state of the relationship. And so I teach in the concept of holding space, being able to with their consciousness tap into the best version of what they see in their partner. And to give a few minutes a day to that, what does that person look like? What does that person sound like? What does that person smell like? And actually invoke their feeling? What does it feel like to be in the room with that person? And to give a little bit of time and space to the best version. Because oftentimes in our mind, our partner will be, you know, not what we want them to be. And then we'll devolve and not see the best, but see the worst. And then through our thoughts, we actually reduce the person. So we can through our thoughts uplift the person. And that's a very powerful concept of holding space. I want to add to the Stamir part. And again, my teacher really helped me with this. Agila go love. Yeah, I've had a judgment like doing the kind of the bar and Katie work going through the inquiry. And I would say like, if my partner's needy or my, you know, being manipulative, she go, who? And I go, my partner, who? And the whole idea is, okay, where am I rejecting the needy part in me that when I see in somebody else, it's triggered me. And so again, this idea of there, your mirror, there a chance for growth. And then adding to Eckertoli, he talks about relationships that when you do this conscious work, you either, like did you talk about the abusive relationship, you leave love in love, the pit, the relationship. So it's for your highest good. So you leave in love or you come together and the love expands, right? But love is still there either way. So you can, and Eckertoli says you can remove yourself from situation conscious that that would be leading an abusive relationship or you can draw or you can constantly change or improve the relationship, being a really good listener of doing your work. And if you can't do either, he says you can still be at peace in an unhappy situation. So I still think it comes back to your book, fulfilled that regardless of your job, regardless of the relationship that you feel fulfilled. And the key here is mentally you cannot let you can still not, you can have both. You cannot like the situation and be fulfilled. That's the message I'm getting from your book. If you do this in a work, the external world will do the thing. You may be able to manifest and do some influencing to it, but the world will do the world and you get to choose that your free will is you get to choose how you perceive and give it meaning, but you can be at peace even if the external world doesn't match up to your desires. That's kind of I'm getting from your book. Absolutely. 100% and this is the reality is that we're not always going to be happy. We're not always going to be happy with what comes into our life with the circumstances with other people, et cetera. And we want to get to a place within us that we can have peace no matter the circumstance that the circumstances don't have to be perfect for our inner peace to be underserved that we can, you know, have peace in our heart even when there's chaos in the outside. So you cannot like the situation and then I will add then the peace is that sole part you're tapping into because it's very nature's peace and joy. So when you're tuned into that, you experience the peace. When you tune into the external world and give your consciousness to that, you get to experience that and now you suffer. Absolutely. And it's very easy to do because right now there is so many things that we can give our consciousness to. There's so much polarization, there's so much discord. We're in the midst of a mental health crisis. You can point your finger to 80 million things that can take away your energy and reduce your vibrational frequency, reduce your joy or reduce your peace. And it's also completely rational and logical to, you know, people for whom this is happening are not irrational. They're not illogical, but there is another way. You could be doing something about those things and taking concrete action, advocating for you believe to be right and be very involved and to still have peace in your heart. It's very difficult when you're in the midst of a war, but it's possible. Yeah, that's the key. It's possible. And you have a book called "Fulfilled." And so for those that are looking to tap into that piece. And look, again, the book is simple. It just, you have to trust the process and do the practices. By the way, I was that guy that would read all the self-help books but didn't do the exercises. And so I will share with the listeners to save you a couple decades of time that knowing is not enough. The knowledge is not enough. You have to, it's the application of the knowledge that's going to give you the transformation. So I encourage you to pick up a copy of the field by Dr. Anna Yuzum. And not only read it, but at each chapter she gives you a tool and exercise to do to practice those. Dr. Anna Yuzum, thank you so much for joining me on the Coherence Code podcast. Everybody go to her website, AnnaYuzum.com. We'll put that in the show notes as well. She's all over social media. So we'll put that in the show notes. She has coaching. She has her clinical work. She, what's the program now that you're doing at Yale? That's pretty cool. That's just-- Mental Health and Spirituality Program at Yale. And there's that. We're going to put that all in the show notes. And if you go to her website, she's got blogs on there, interviews on there. There is a wealth of resources on her website. So I want to invite you to go check out her website as well. Anything else you want to share before we wrap up? Thank you so much, Lauren. That's wonderful. We are having a 20 person retreat in New York City on April 11th. And if people are interested to be a part of that, they can contact me directly. Excellent. I'll put April 11th, 2026, because I never know when somebody is listening to this. Thank you for spending this time with us on the Coherence Code podcast. I'm Dr. Lauren Brown. And I will see you next week for another conversation on Coherence and Healing. If this conversation resonated with you, please like, subscribe, or follow the show, and also share it with someone who might benefit from it as well. Remember to take a moment to breathe, reflect, and stay connected. Welcome to the Coherence Code podcast.