How To Reconnect With Your Intuition & Learn To Trust Yourself Again with Dr Tara Swart #604

31:12I said, hey, Bronnie, does everyone on their deathbed have those regrets?

31:16Dr Tara Swart:And she said, no, no, not at all. I said, oh, did you see any similarities in the people who you cared for who did not have those regrets on their deathbed? She said, yeah, I did. One of the things, there were three things that she noted, but one of the things was a belief in something greater than themselves. Isn't that interesting? Yeah. Because what is it we want out of life, right? Whether we can explain it or not, I think most of us want a sort of happy, meaningful life where at the end, we're not sitting there like wishing things were different, wishing we'd done something different. So tying that back to what you're talking about yeah if someone has a near-death experience and whether you believe it or not and they use that to live feeling that they're connected to something greater why does it matter if you believe and i'm to be just to be clear i'm not at all being skeptical here right no i'm just saying for the listener if you believe that actually you're able to get signs from your husband and it's helping you believe in something greater and helps you make sense of his death and your existence why does it matter that and also as you said that i was thinking for a lot of people that belief in something greater is god right yeah 85 percent of people in the world have a religious belief as you were speaking i was thinking what's the thing that I believe in that's greater it's not actually signs is it it's love and it's making me quite upset but you know if if that means that I believe that the love that my husband had for me never dies and I love the people who are in my life and I you know I've always said that I want to live a life that's guided by love and but you've really just made it land for me that all of this the thing that I believe in that's greater is love and that's beautiful yeah it is

33:28this um collective unconscious

33:36I think there's many ways that I think about it. So I love music. I've been a musician my entire life. I'm obsessed with music and songwriting and lyrics and all kinds of things. And some of the best songwriters of all time will tell you that these are not my songs. The songs came through me. The songs were out of air. I was just playing and it came through me. Even I'm pretty sure, I mean, you know, we just had the summer of Oasis in the UK and around the world, right? So Noel Gallagher is regarded by many people as one of Britain's greatest songwriters. Back in the late 90s, when Noel was writing hit after hit for Oasis, so much so that they would just shove out these amazing hits like Acquiesce and The Mass Plan on B-sides, because what we've released the album.

34:31He said in interviews that they were just falling out of the sky. I wasn't doing anything. The songs were just falling out of the sky. And look, I don't know Noel Gallagher. I don't know if he's spiritual or not. I guess a lot of people would perceive that perhaps he's not, but perhaps he is. Perhaps he never talks about it in those terms. But if you believe that actually these are not my songs. I'm just here playing my guitar. I'm showing up every day and there's stuff out there that's coming through me. It's pretty interesting, isn't it?

35:04Dr Tara Swart:Yeah, very, very. And I mean, this is really going out there now, but I have had some times, I'll give you a concrete example of watching myself on a podcast that I was on where I wasn't thinking about what I was saying. It was just, you know, I'm even cautious about using the word channeling, but that's what it felt like. So, yeah, and I just think that's because I've got an expanded openness to what, you know, what could be how the mind can work. So I'm more able to use that word or think about it in that way. But I can tell you for sure, there have been times on podcasts when what I was saying was happening without me thinking about it.

35:57Yeah. This idea that there are ideas out there in the ether, which suddenly I'll start talking about. A podcaster in Canada will start talking about. A podcaster in... It's like, we don't all read the same books. We don't all consume the same material. There's something going on. I don't know this podcast literally you've come in today talking about this stuff four days ago Mo Gowdart was here Mo I didn't plan to talk to Mo about this Mo ends up saying that you can prove with physics and maths that death is not the end

36:33Dr Tara Swart:I know I mean I was like well I actually don't believe death is the end but I don't know how to prove it with maths and physics and then literally a few weeks before that I spoke to the Zen master um henry shookman about non-duality for the very first time on the show i'm like so literally in the last few weeks i'm not saying this is the collective unconscious but something's happening when people are rocking up in the studio and we're talking about similar themes so i think there is a zeitgeist around this topic at the moment and my my publishers actually said that there are a few other books on similar themes that are coming out this autumn as well.

37:16Dr Tara Swart:And Laura Lynn Jackson, the medium who wrote the book Signs, I love her work and that book and have always felt it should have got much, you know, greater recognition than it did. Well, finally, after years, this summer, it reached a New York Times bestseller list. Wow. Yeah. I started off this conversation by asking you, or by stating that the modern world seems to have disconnected us in many ways from so many things that are truly important. One of those things, of course, being intuition. What is it do you think about the modern world in particular that has started to disconnect us from ourselves?

38:01Dr Tara Swart:Let me start by saying what I think some of those forms of connection are. I think of them as connection to yourself, which is your intuition, connection to others, which is community, and connection to the planet or the universe, which is, you know, something to do with understanding that the environment is very important and that we are, you know, contributors to that both positively and negatively. And then probably, you know, sort of newer thing for me to say is connection to something greater. And that could be God, it could be the universe, source, whatever, you know, lost loved ones, whatever, you know, people believe in.

38:38Dr Tara Swart:And so one of the things I believe is that nature is a really important way to connect back to all of those things, because humans have existed in the palette of nature for all time. And we see in some marginalized communities, like in the first Americans, that when they were displaced from their land and their food sources, like the kinds of plants and animals that roamed there, that broke them as people. And in the modern world, I think we've massively broken our own connection to nature. So like you said, the modern Western world, urbanized, rise of technology, obviously, but that's really second only to the rise of the importance of logic and rationality over everything else.

39:24Dr Tara Swart:When you spend a lot of time in nature and you experience wonder and awe, it gives you a connection to the environment the planet there's something greater you know when you spend time with people and you actually put your phone away and you actually look them in the eye and they care about you and you care about them that connects you to something you know and and then I think this loss of sense of purpose to me is connected to trusting yourself and your intuition so you know having a purpose feeling like you've got some kind of you know direction that you're aware of and for that purpose to be something that transcends just yourself as well they're all ways of reconnecting yeah reading that chapter on nature in your latest book you were describing how after robin had died you would go and walk in nature okay and i think from recollection you would build up the time that you spent initially it was you didn't want to do anything you don't want to do much but you started and then you built up and just to be clear I'm absolutely not comparing a spouse dying to a parent dying I think two completely different things but just as you were talking there and relating it to purpose I was drawn back to my own experience after my father died back in 2013 because until then I'd never really turned inwards everything was outwards in my life and I remember in the months after dad had died I would go walking really a lot in nature um I probably wasn't thinking about intuition or anything I was just trying to deal with something I was finding incredibly difficult at the time and what's really interesting is

41:18dad dying for me was the very first time I asked myself the question, whose life are you actually living? And I could give you a two hour sort of explanation or the simplistic explanation, which is, I'm pretty sure that what I do today in terms of this podcast, my books, what I try and advocate for in terms of health and happiness, I think you can directly relate, certainly with hindsight, back to those walks in nature I took after dad died, which gave me the clarity for me to start following my heart.

41:57Dr Tara Swart:Yeah. Yeah, I got goosebumps whilst you were saying that. And isn't it? So it's interesting. Obviously, our instincts were working because they do us both to nature. Yeah. What did it do for you, those walks in nature? Yeah. Well, like you said, at first I would do a 30 minute walk because I thought that's like good enough for your physical health. And then because I sort of thought, well, I don't really have that much else to do. I could walk for longer. I very quickly noticed that it made an impact on my mental health. And interestingly for me, because I was then living somewhere very remote.

42:35Dr Tara Swart:So generally, I would stick to paths that I knew because I've got a really, really bad sense of direction. And in that place, I could walk for an hour or more and not pass anyone that could help me, you know, point me in the right direction. But I started going down paths that I'd never been down before. And that felt like some kind of analogy for me in my brain of the neuroplasticity of navigating grief. And I remember thinking, I hope I don't get lost, but then just having this deep sense of knowing that either someone was guiding me or I had been in this place before, like in a spiritual sense, and that I would find my way.

43:19Dr Tara Swart:So I think that was really about me finding my way in life, not getting lost in the woods kind of thing. And just on that point, I wanted to say that I started just looking at trees and leaves and fields and views and just being gobsmacked by how stunning they were. So I think I started noticing more than sometimes you just go for a walk and you don't really, you know, you're a bit head down. So that would have been stimulating my senses in many ways. Yeah. Yeah. So there's a section in the book where you talk about the fact that humans have more than five senses. So obviously, because you and I have been to medical school, we knew that there were more than five senses, but I didn't know there were 34.

44:09Dr Tara Swart:When I started doing the research for the book, I first found a journal paper that said humans have 22 to 33 senses. And then I did a full literature review and have you know there's a table in the book of the 34 so for example taste is actually subdivided into five so sweet sour salty bitter and umami but umami was only discovered in the 1980s so it's it's our knowledge of them that's growing and evolving and the latest one that's actually been classified physiologically as a sense is the immune system so you know and there's appetite and waste senses, there's balance, all sorts of others, I'm sure absolutely make sense when people read them, but they're not things that we consciously go around, you know, thinking about, and therefore probably not tapping into.

45:00This idea that we have 34 senses, I guess, when I hear that, and I'm sure you would agree with this, it's like, what we're saying is that so far, we have words to describe 34. It may be that in 100 years, we've got words to describe 100 cents. So it's fascinating, isn't it?

45:20Dr Tara Swart:Yeah, yeah. And you're just the way that you put that made me think, taking umami, for example, in the 1980s, before that was discovered, does that mean it didn't exist? I mean, there's so much stuff like that. You were saying about being in LA with our mutual friend Drew. Well, I went in a driverless car with him. I mean, that was science fiction when we were growing up. So, you know, there's all sorts of things that we didn't know before, that we know now. So why can't we accept that things that we don't know yet might be true? Yeah, why do you think that is? Why do humans struggle to accept that?

46:00Dr Tara Swart:I've sort of started saying to a few people, have you ever thought about a day in the life of Homo Erectus or what he like, you know, thought or cared about or believed about how the world worked? I feel like we're so arrogant to think that we are the most evolved and the last type of human that's ever going to exist. We too are just going to be a blip in history at some point. I don't know if it's a survival mechanism. I'd love to hear your theory on it. I just think there's a level of just thinking that we're the latest and greatest and we know more than all other humans that have existed before.

46:37Yeah, I've been thinking a lot about this too, right? I'm currently just writing a new section for my, not my last, but the book before, happy mind happy life which is coming out in a new format in January so I'm just writing a new search for updating my views on it and one thing I've been writing about is you know in that book there are these three ingredients to happiness alignment contentment and control and I I think what you're talking about what we're talking about at the moment is to do with our need for a sense of control. So I think fundamentally the world is uncontrollable. Okay. So the world is going to do what the world is going to do, despite what you might want it to do.

47:21But I think humans tend to feel better when they have a sense of control. And it's interesting talking to a fellow doctor about this stuff, right? I know you don't practice anymore and you've moved to neuroscientists and coaching and writing and all that kind of stuff but you practice for many years right

47:42and i feel within our profession and frankly within the public you could say there's open-minded people and closed-minded people i would say much not all but much of our profession

47:54Dr Tara Swart:can come across as being closed-minded yeah i agree which is why so many patients get frustrated that they know something that they're feeling a certain way they come in and the doctor will often try and put them into a box that they learn to medically which which pigeonhole does this patient's symptoms fall into yeah and if they don't if you can't quite put that collection of symptoms into this diagnosis or that diagnosis i think a lot of doctors particularly if you people are junior they don't know what to do with that so they try and force it in yeah and the patient's thinking that doesn't make sense i don't have depression so i think some of it comes down to a human's need for certainty and a sense of control i agree and i think there's sort of an additional danger particularly in the medical profession of having to be right all the time yeah again when i was doing research for the book i was reading a little bit about the biopsychosocial model for healthcare.

49:01Dr Tara Swart:And interestingly, in the last 10 years or so, there has been some research talking about the biopsychosocial spiritual model, particularly for care of the elderly and end of life. And that obviously shows a more holistic view of someone's beliefs and, you know, life. So I'm glad to see that's theoretically happening, but I don't feel like it's actually happening in the healthcare system that spiritual element um yeah it's it's like I said I think it's quite dangerous when you feel like you have to be right all the time and that's that's actually what's driving your decisions well that that needs to be right whether it's in your profession or in your relationships it doesn't do you any good it's a very fragile place to be in you have written about near-death experiences quite a lot in the signs which is super fascinating I'm really interested what has the feedback been yes from the public but also from healthcare professionals yeah it's really interesting so I really I had no idea of how much this would help people um and interestingly I have received dms from doctors and clinical psychologists and psychotherapists as well saying that they have similar beliefs to me but they don't talk about it because it's not accepted you know in those sorts of communities yeah let's just give us intuition a minute right because we've sort of we started there we've gone down a few different paths which which is great how much do you think intuition plays a role in a doctor's ability to help their patients heal oh i think it's massive and like i said i've been intuitive for a long time but quite early on in my career i would have gut feelings that something wasn't what it looked like I'll give you one example I was in my second job so I'd done my surgery six months I was in medicine in London and a guy came in overnight and the A &E registrar said that he was having a heart attack and he should get treated for that.

51:34Dr Tara Swart:I had struggled so much to read ECGs that show that someone's having a pulmonary embolism. But I looked at this ECG and I was like, I don't think he's having a heart attack. I think he's having a PE. And so we should send him for a scan. And they said, if you ask for a scan at this time of night, you're going to wake up the consultant. So I thought, I think I have to. So I called my consultant and said, I want to send this guy for a chest CT. But the A &E registrar is saying that unless you give permission, they're not going to wake up the radiologist. So he said, yeah, go and send him for the scan.

52:13Dr Tara Swart:So I then went to bed. And when I woke up for Wardrand in the morning, I was like, what happened about that guy that, you know, I had to call you up about for the scan and my consultant went let me tell you the story of the junior doctor who correctly diagnosed a man that the A &E registrar had misdiagnosed yeah well done yeah and and actually after that I knew I wanted to do psychiatry um but my registrar sort of said please please consider staying in medicine because I you know well I he said something like because you know you're so good at it or something like that and I was like look I want to go and do psychiatry but I also want to know why why you're saying this to me and he said your judgment is is really really good and for me that's intuition it's it's of course it's everything that we learned and it's experience but I feel like I I've always had that radar for like something that might not make sense on paper yeah when you were relaying that story you said I think you said something like I'm really intuitive which got me thinking are we not all really intuitive if we don't allow other things to get in the way yes so i think the correct way to have said what i meant was i rely on my intuition very strongly and i trust it and so i've had you know that comment from my registrar but also my first husband my first husband really trusted my intuition too and we were the same age both doctors.

53:49Dr Tara Swart:So, you know, I don't know why, particularly if I said that's our destiny, he was fine with it, but that obviously gave me confidence as well. You know, a lot of my friends will say things like follow your heart, follow your gut, you know, so I think I've had a good experience of trusting that. And taking the chance when logic and intuition didn't match up and saying, I'm going to go with my intuition and see what happens. And, but for me also, you know, another part of that is saying whatever happens i will roll my sleeves up and i will make it work so that also helps you to trust your intuition because the the what if it goes wrong question is the reason that will hold a lot of people back from that yeah it's kind of interesting hearing that we're talking about intuition but there's also a inner confidence that's there you had the inner confidence to back yourself right when things around you were telling you not to so we've covered a lot of areas so far you know what intuition is why we're disconnected from it how it can be so helpful for us but it's all under this wider umbrella of the hidden wisdom that exists that we're not accessing yes so if someone was to phone you or come to see you as a coach Tara and say Dr.

55:10Swart listen I'm really struggling to trust myself I don't know how to I don't know how to access my intuition will you teach me how I can start what do you say to them

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58:59Dr Tara Swart:well what i do say to people because they do ask me this is to start keeping a journal particularly where you have a decision or a dilemma where your logic says one thing but your intuition says another and you know let's keep it safe and low risk at first but let's say actually you ignore your gut and you go with your logic we'll journal about how that panned out and try to demonstrate to yourself that you could have trusted your gut and then in the next low risk sort of situation go with your intuition even if your logic tells you not to and see what happens and journal about that and let that pan out keep doing that for at least six months I would say probably a year ideally and read over your entries to see where you're repeating patterns aren't serving you and to show yourself that sometimes when you take a risk it really works out for you.

59:52Dr Tara Swart:There's also an exercise in the book that I really love to help people try to align that sort of head, heart and gut. It's called the unfurling exercise. And it's basically you sort of, you know, you have a question in your mind or a decision to make. And you take five deep breaths, put your hands on your head and ask your logic to give you the answer. Then you take five deep breaths, put your hands on your heart and ask your emotions to give you your answer. And then you take five deep breaths, put your hands on your belly and ask your gut or your intuition to give you the answer. Now, if they're all aligned, that's great, isn't it?

1:00:27Dr Tara Swart:But if they're not, again, you know, journaling and learning from that. And then I think one of the reasons that people struggle with this is because when you're in your own situation emotionally, it's very hard to get perspective. So sometimes I say, you know, what would you say to your brother or your best friend. Because we're all great at giving advice to our friends, but, you know, I can't give it to ourselves. But one exercise I do that can, you know, feel very emotional, I've often cried when I've done it, and I've shared it with a few friends who've said they cried as well, is myself in seven years time.

1:01:05Dr Tara Swart:So, you know, I'd be sitting here and I'd say, I'm Tara, this is how old I am, this is what I'm wearing. This is the thing I'm struggling with, give me some advice and then I would stand up walk seven steps forward and turn around and say I'm now Tara seven years older than I am describe what I'm wearing and then ask that Tara the question and then just like go with the first thing that comes to your mind and the reason that that's quite an emotional thing is because that's actually come from you but you know if if you didn't step outside of yourself in that way you wouldn't trust that you actually know the answer.

1:01:41Yeah. Just a simple way of getting out of your head or putting you in a different, well, quite literally a different physical space. You're actually moving away from where you are. That's quite powerful, isn't it?

1:01:53Dr Tara Swart:There's another exercise that's similar that also works, which is, I think it's in the source and I called it creative mentoring, which is that you think of three people that you admire and trust. They could be people that you know, they could be historical characters or people that you know have passed on and you ask them each to answer your dilemma and you you know you go into a great deal of depth and say like you know you describe the person and their name and their age and what they're like and then you say okay I'm asking you like Winston Churchill or whatever and then then you you know you go through that process of describing the other person so that you're kind of you're more like in there yeah yeah so you've been a fan of journaling for years.

1:02:38And it's quite interesting when you're describing one of the ways in which we can start to figure out how to trust ourselves more is to basically, I guess, build up that evidence for ourselves, right? Just write down what you're doing in life, write down how it pans out, and then, you know, look back and go, oh, when I did it that way, this is what happened, when I did it that way, and over time, build up some sort of evidence that, oh, wow, when I trust my gut things go well or it might be the other way when i trust my guts maybe they don't go well right but at least you're starting to tune into that and take it out of your mind yeah and getting out onto paper yeah at the same time you did touch on this in the book actually which was the potential limitations of journaling in the sense that journaling is from the mind yeah okay yeah um it's quite interesting that this is what i've realized in my own practice over the last years that currently what i do is i will meditate first and then i'll journal because i sort of feel the meditation and sometimes some movement first brings things up that i can and those insights i can then crystallize in the journal yeah but Adjust the And just trying to help people start to tap into this inner wisdom.

1:04:02If, for example, they've been traumatized, right? Or they've had, I guess, you know, lots of adversity in their life that they haven't done anything with and their fascia is loaded with all these emotions and trauma and their posture might have changed or they're stuck a certain way. do you think doing it with the mind at that point can help or do you think this is where you know somatic practices yoga um hands-on therapy from osteopaths or whatever it might be like speak to that a little bit as well if you will thanks i wanted to go there because

1:04:39Dr Tara Swart:people are also so disembodied in the modern world in the western world and so what does that mean because a lot of people we hear that term i don't think everyone understands that's in what does disembodied mean like not connected to your body not receiving messages from your body not listening to your body because what we're on screens we're sat down we're sedentary we sit on the sofa we're not i don't know moving our bodies and you mentioned dancing rituals before from our ancestors you know different ways in which they would move yeah and so well because i mean they were obviously they lived in a very physicality was a big part of the way that they lived because they were like hunting and gathering and so they had to be in tune with their bodies yes they were very in tune with their bodies and but creative things like art and dance that you know was very and drumming and you know sort of creating that vibration in the body was part of that so what I say to people in the modern day when they kind of say I don't know what you mean by listening to my body I don't know how to listen to my body is I say have you ever had a visceral reaction to something.

1:05:45Dr Tara Swart:So have you heard a piece of news, good or bad, and had a chill go down your spine or your hair stand up on end? And so that's, that's the kind, most people will have had that. So that makes it, I think, understandable for people. And then you want to just notice that more. Like it's very common phrase in my friendship group to say that gave me goosebumps or that gave me chills. And it's, I think that's us affirming each other that we trust each other's intuition or we had a strong, you know, emotional agreement with whatever they've said. But that kind of, sorry, on the goosebumps thing, right?

1:06:24Like all of us can really tune into that. You know, we've all been in situations before where someone has said something or something has happened and we felt goosebumps, right? You can't really explain that easily with the rational mind, right? There's something happened. And on a deep level, your body reacted, right? That's, I mean, I don't know, that's quite awe inspiring as well to think about that.

1:06:51Dr Tara Swart:Exactly. And you know, why are there even phrases like a chill ran down my spine? Or, you know, I mean, because they're analogies to remind us that actually everything that we're experiencing is happening to us physically, not just mentally. I mean, as part of the research, I actually asked the question, is art what makes us human? And what I found out that I thought was so interesting is that generally we think that cave paintings were made about 40 ,000 years ago. And that was the beginning of art for humans. But actually, 20 ,000 years before that, in Southern Africa, people were making carvings into ostrich eggshells.

1:07:32Dr Tara Swart:50 ,000 years before that they were making necklaces out of shelves and wearing them and crumbling ochre and you know rubbing it on their face and their body to adorn themselves and 500 ,000 years ago we were making tools that were more beautiful and symmetrical than they had to be to do the job they were necessary for so this awe this appreciation of beauty this like you know really like inhabiting your body and understanding that it's a two-way thing what you feel and what you think is as well as the connection with nature which i talked about much earlier those are really important things for us to to reconnect to truly be human to be connected to ourselves as well as you know others and and the whole thing yeah it's thought that one of the reasons why exercise is so good for us as humans is because it helps enhance our interoceptive abilities it helps us tune into our sensations so we know suddenly you know if you run regularly you know what an elevated heart rate feels like because if you don't sometimes an elevated heart rate can make you feel like you're anxious right but you you so it's the same um signal but you know how to interpret it because you have that physicality it's kind of interesting i was actually this morning i was uh i saw this wonderful osteopath who i've been seeing for years and i told him you were coming in today and we were just talking about this idea of um trauma being stored in the body.

1:09:19And what he has found, you know, he's in his 60s now, he's been doing this for decades. You know, and what he can actually feel in people's bodies. And we were also talking about this idea that a lot of ancestral cultures, like you say,

1:09:38have all of these kind of, either they're physical anyway, in terms of how they live, but they have all these practices, like, you know, drum beating, or, you know, dancing in particular ways, but uninhibited dancing. Do you know what I mean? So if there was trauma sort of locked in somewhere, it's almost going to be released through those three-dimensional movements. and we were just hypothesizing this idea that perhaps one of the costs of civilization

1:10:15is that we have suppressed our emotions and trauma into our fascia because there are certain things that are acceptable to do in the world aren't there we're allowed to do this we're not allowed to do that yeah okay yeah oh you know i don't like that i'm not going to say anything that's not the right thing to do to say anything or whatever so you by not saying anything you suppress that you lock it in within you so i don't know it's quite an interesting thought maybe the cost of civilization is by not doing certain things in public it means that we've kind of suppressed those things down

1:10:52Dr Tara Swart:into our being does that make sense yeah and i'm just remembering that in march 2020 when we did the podcast remotely because it was during the pandemic I said to you I'm really concerned there's going to be a mental health crisis and I also said that it could be an opportunity for a spiritual revolution and the fact that we're having this kind of conversation now is it's been a really interesting journey with you doing these podcasts and seeing like how different the conversations have become. Yeah. And actually that theme, because I can see what a risk you have taken and write in this book or a perceived risk at least, because what you've written about in this book is not the sort of thing that neuroscientists and psychiatrists write about.

1:11:44Okay. but if we just all have a bit more humility and go we are living in an age that is literally

1:11:54Dr Tara Swart:unbelievable to people who were born 100 years ago literally i mean yeah planes exist but even the fact you know i still i'm in amaze what want to get in a plane like i still don't understand how the hell this works i don't i'm like we've got all these people the 300 people in here we've all got bags and suitcases. How has this thing got off? Right. I don't know you can explain it with physics, but part of me is an awe every time I'm on a plane. I'm like, this is nuts. Okay. But even if you think about smartphones, right, I imagine if when my mom was a kid, if someone said to her, look, later on in your life, there's going to be these things, right?

1:12:32It's going to be a tiny thing you can have in your pocket. And you're going to be able to communicate with anyone in the world, not just on text, which you probably wouldn't know what text is back then, but on video. Or you're going to carry something in your pocket where you can literally stream any film that's ever been made in the last 50 years. People would think you're mad 80 years ago. I think. Do you know what I mean? What does that teach us? It teaches us that there are things that we are living through right now that would have been deemed ridiculous for the vast majority of our revolution.

1:13:09But now we accept them as normal. It's kind of nuts, isn't it?

1:13:12Dr Tara Swart:It's nuts. And it makes me feel like, you know, when you said writing this book was a perceived risk, it makes me really realise, and again, thank you, because some things have really landed for me in this conversation, that the biggest risk of my life would have been not coming out with this story. For my life, for my soul, for my belief in love if i thought oh i better not do that because you know companies might not want to hire me that would have been like such a such a shame yeah it's so powerful that you would have been playing it safe rather than you know rather than being authentic right which is what so many of us do you know i want your take on something which i was getting to before mind and body okay and i'm really fascinated by your take on this because you've written about fascia in the book um and you know this idea that our emotions and a lot of our experiences are stored in our fascia which i also believe but i have this thing i always think about like how is it that we change and evolve so if we think about intuition and this ability to access our inner wisdom, let's say.

1:14:34But if we're stuck in certain patterns because of trauma, so our fascia's tight, our postures change, you know, you were a psychiatrist for years, there's a certain posture sometimes you will see in people who are struggling with their mental health, right? It's not open-hearted, open chest, standing up tall, right? It's a lot more enclosed and sort of maybe bent over, hunched over at the shoulders or whatever it might be, right? So, whilst I think a lot of my improvements personally have come from cognitive reframing, I've also worked on my body for 12, 13 years, you know, improving my movement patterns, seeing therapists to regularly sort of work on my body as well.

1:15:20So, I guess, I just wanted your take on that, you know, can you do it all from the mind? Can you do it all from the body? or do you need a bit of both?

1:15:30Dr Tara Swart:I think the both is like takes it to the next level. Yeah. I'm just trying to think of the two options. Like, can you do it just with your body? No, I think it's got to be like cognitively placed as well. And we know from all of Bessel van der Kolk's research that just talking therapy is no way as effective as yoga or art therapy and things for PTSD. because actually the part of the brain that's to do with speaking, the Broca's area, actually gets shut down by PTSD. And that's why people say things like I'm dumbfounded or I don't have words for this. And that's where the bodywork comes in. But the combination is that's where the magic is.

1:16:14Dr Tara Swart:Yeah. Yeah. I think you referenced a trial. Is it firefighters who use creativity as a way of helping them with trauma? Yeah, it's actually a charity called Ashes to Art, where firefighters that go into a really traumatic scene, as soon as they exit it, they immediately have to paint what they saw. And it shows a massive reduction in a number of people getting PTSD from these things. Wow. I'm a parent, Tara, okay? You've met my children on multiple occasions. if I would like them to grow up with as much access to this hidden wisdom as possible what are the kinds of things that you would recommend I do with them so I'm gonna actually start answering this with a bit of a counter so I think often the reason that people are not able to trust their intuition is because they were ridiculed as children so you know if they had like a feeling about something that they wanted and people like exactly what you're saying like don't say that no we don't do that you know that kind of thing it all gets schooled out of you and parented out of you and um so i would say using making sure you're saying like how do you feel about that as much as you say what do you think of that um yeah maybe using phrases like you know what does your heart say or what does your gut say you know just to like introduce that language but also obviously to do like physical stuff exercise with them um yeah just really demonstrating when you use your gut you know to to do something but just really getting them to tap into that like what do you feel is the right thing to do what you feel is the best thing to do what yeah what does your heart want to do yeah and then also teaching them to you know run that by logic you know i think you can then say does that make sense to do that sort of thing um and you know encouraging them to have those conversations with their friends as well and just see different perspectives yeah this idea of hidden wisdom you can you can even look at it really simply where if you go into a room where there has just been an argument, right, but you didn't witness the arguments, but there's tension between the two people in there, you can feel it.

1:18:37Dr Tara Swart:Yeah. That we all know that. Yeah. And that's kind of interesting, is it? Because sometimes it's easy to go, hidden wisdom, what are you talking about? You know, there's, you know, there's, there's the way things aren't, there's the way things aren't, right? But it's like, hold on a minute, if you, if you really start to ask yourself those questions, you go, yeah, we've all been in a where something fell off or we could feel that oh something's just gone down in here there's clearly we we do have an ability to pick up on something yeah you're a very private person yet over the past few months you've been doing a lot of interviews talking about robin how has that been for you um it's actually been such a relief um you know i I waited till I was ready to speak about it.

1:19:24Dr Tara Swart:And that's been almost four years. So it's a long time. So I kept things private whilst I needed to grieve. But as you as you mentioned, you know, I really like to be authentic, even like when I present on social media and podcasts. And so I think I didn't feel inauthentic because I've, you know, chose to protect my privacy. And that's my right, obviously. but I just yeah I feel relieved um that that you know that part of my life is now out there it probably explains like some of the decisions that I've made professionally in the last few years and yeah it just like feels like a massive weight off my shoulder um and also you know a big part of grieving as I'm sure you'll agree is that you want that person to be remembered um and And so, you know, I just, I feel like yesterday was his birthday because that date is written in the book.

1:20:25People messaged me and, you know, it's just so lovely. Yeah.

1:20:34It's interesting how our relationship with grief can change over time. it's you know 12 13 years since my dad died and it's kind of really interesting to for me on a personal level to kind of reflect on how my relationship with dad dying has changed because now when i think back to dads i just smile you know i i you know everyone's experience of grief is individual and they're entitled to it and they're entitled to frame it however they want yeah i now frame my dad's death as a gift to me oh like i really do and i asked myself you know it's easy to go yeah i wish dad was still here of course on many levels i do but do why because it's really interesting again i'll be thinking about this while screening your book in the lead up to you coming into the studio today i was thinking yeah but dad's gift to me was his death it was the lessons that i learned through his death if my dad was still alive i wouldn't be the person who i am today i wouldn't be doing what i am today i wouldn't know the things i wouldn't have that experience to draw upon yeah

1:22:05so how we relate to death changes over time doesn't it yeah yeah yeah and i think

1:22:11Dr Tara Swart:it's so beautiful that you could say that and I feel you know I understand it and maybe like not there yet I couldn't four years then um no um but that's what he would have wanted he wouldn't have wanted you to be you know bitter and feel like life treated you unfairly and not be the best version of yourself that you could be so that's a really beautiful choice and I think you're right it does take quite a lot of time but also i so i believe that the soul lives on okay that's always brought up but as i get older more and more and more and more as i tune into me and what i think i think yeah it doesn't make sense to me that that's it so the funny thing is

1:23:04so i don't think or maybe i've not been looking right i can't say honestly oh i've i've had signs from my dad's right i can't that that would not be true because i or certainly that's not the language i would have used or would use now like i don't think i've been looking for them i don't feel my dad's around. And even if it's just simplistically this idea that, well, I spent all those years with dads, like his ethos and who he is as a person is ingrained and infused within me. You know, people see so many similarities with me and my dad, you know, our manner, how we make jokes, right? Of course, you know, I would have learned a lot of that from dad just growing up and being around him, right?

1:23:55So you absorb that when you're a little kid, right? So whether I can go around and see my dad now and touch his skin or not, which I can't, the kind of weird thing is over the last few years, I feel more and more that dad is around, that he is a part of me in everything that I do. So I guess that's, I haven't looked at my dad's death through the lens of signs, yet I still feel my dad is around me. But you've, you are, your relationship with Robin has evolved, I guess in a different way, right? Yeah.

1:24:34Dr Tara Swart:So, well, I wanted to ask you, do you have conversations with him in your head? No, I don't think I do. Because that's part of my journey as well. And a lot of other people say they sense a presence. I have had that but it's not a big part of my journey a lot of people say that their loved ones visit them in their dreams I've had a couple but that's not a major thing for me and Robin although he often goes into a few of my close friends often say that they had a dream about him and tell me like what the message was and stuff so I think it's a bit of a spectrum or kaleidoscope if I don't know how to describe it of you know various ways in which you can experience that that person hasn't disappeared altogether yeah yeah yeah I guess we've all got the right to experience grief in the way that we want to and anything that we can individually do to make sense of that in our own lives has value yeah oh tara we've covered so many different areas um we haven't scratched the surface i don't think of what's in your book the signs which is a riveting read um is there something we haven't spoken about yet that is a key message that you would love to share with my audience yeah and it's a it's a bit of a challenge to you but also to the audience, which is, could you just try this little exercise?

1:26:09Dr Tara Swart:So think of a really fond memory of your dad or like you said about jokes, a joke that you two had that only like you two knew about or would get and then choose a symbol that represents that memory or that joke and ask for a sign and then tell me what happens. okay all right challenge accepted okay so let's let's see what happens if anything i mean i i have an open mind so um yeah okay i like that tara right at the end of this conversation um i'm sure that at various times throughout this people may have got light bulb moments in their own life um i certainly think that many people experience what you have experienced and i i've seen the comments i've spoken to you i can see how validating it is for so many people to hear someone like you with your prominence talk about this so i think you're doing a lot of people a huge service simply by talking about your experience and they can really resonate with you through that.

1:27:19For someone who's been listening and is kind of leaning in going,

1:27:26Dr Tara Swart:yeah, I'm totally disconnected from this inner wisdom. I don't know what I think. I've had a difficult life. Fear is what was behind all my decision making. I don't know if something's coming from my heart or from my trauma, but I want to move forward in my life. I want to start trusting myself again I want to start tuning in again but I don't know where to start what would you say to them I'm going to go right back to pretty much where we started this conversation and talk about that time in nature that we were both drawn to at difficult times you've made me realize even more today how not just crucial but sort of how much of a boost it gives people and and i really you know want to sort of obviously i love people to listen to podcasts but not doing anything else when you're you're doing that walking in nature that's that will give you the key to your inner wisdom spending time with yourself in nature yeah and you'll start to realize that about yourself you didn't know before yeah tara thank you for coming back on the show thank you for writing the signs i'm delighted to see what a positive reception it's getting and uh i look forward to the next time you come back thank you really hope you enjoyed that conversation do take a moment to think about one thing you can put into practice in your own life and one thing you could share or teach to someone else.

1:29:06Remember, when you teach somebody else, it not only helps them, it also helps you learn and retain the information. And of course, if you think this episode would be helpful for somebody in your life, please do consider sharing it with them. Now, before you go, just a quick reminder from me. As you may recall me chatting about with Tara, my fifth book, Happy Mind, Happy Life, is being re-released on January 1st, 2026 in a brand new format. It has been re-imagined with a brand new cover, a forward by Oliver Bergman and a new reflective chapter from me. It's smaller and lighter than the original version of the book, but it contains the same powerful message that happiness is a skill we can all get better at when we know what to work on.

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1:32:20Thank you.