#110: Rites of Passage & the Wisdom in Collapse - Linda Thai

0:00We as a human species are facing the very real likelihood of our own demise because we refuse to mature. In Indigenous cultures, they have many practices where an individual becomes initiated into the collective. There are three phases of a rite of passage. The first is that we are being asked to let go of our identity as we know it. The middle part of a rite of passage is where we go into the underground. We meet our fears, our shadows, our demons, so that we then can return to the commons and return back to the collective, one with our gifts, but also knowing our place amongst all things. We don't have that anymore.

1:02It's been taken from us. We are asked to reckon with these fundamental truths at the collective level, that we are inextricably, inescapably intertwined and that you cannot escape the consequences of your actions.

1:23Welcome back to Fit Mind. Today, we're exploring the profound territory where personal trauma meets collective healing with our guest, Linda Tai. Linda's story is one of radical resilience. A former child refugee and immigrant, she spent years navigating the complexities of cultural identity and the feeling of never being enough. Today, she's a leading voice in mindfulness and trauma therapy, helping others bridge the gap between their past experiences and their present well-being. In this episode, we move beyond surface level wellness to discuss the power of rites of passage, why modern life leaves us yearning for meaningful transitions, nature as medicine, how our environment dictates our capacity to heal, nourishment versus hustle, why community and intentionality are the ultimate antidotes to burnout.

2:16Linda reminds us that while life will always have ups and downs, Our ability to stay connected to ourselves, to nature and to each other is where the real transformation happens. Let's dive in with Linda Tai. Linda Tai, welcome to the podcast. Absolute pleasure to be here with you, Josh, as well as with all these wonderful listeners. We're very, very excited to have you. Linda, you've shared your journey as a former child refugee and the feeling of being an outsider. and how did these early experiences of displacement shape your worldview and your ability to see things others might miss? Well, there's something about being an outsider where I just have to learn to code switch or I have to figure out how others see me from a very early age, right?

3:08So that ability to put myself into someone else's shoes and see how they see me and to pause and suspend my own view of the world. And yet there was something very much about growing up in Australia where I felt like I'd never be Australian enough and I also felt like I'd never be Vietnamese enough. And it was when I went to Alaska in my late 20s that I actually discovered how Australian I actually am and how Vietnamese I actually am. And so, yes, it's about being a former child refugee and it's also about being an immigrant as an adult into Alaska, which is a part of the United States and yet very distinct from the United States.

3:54And in amongst all of that, I'm a person who's trying to figure out who I am and my place in the world and my path in life. and somewhere along the way in that journey there were there were there were there were many there were many revelations there were many awarenesses many insights that emerged from me uh that I and I didn't realize how much I carried I didn't realize how much um had been passed on to me I didn't realize how much of uh how much how much this world uh that the analogy I like to give is it's like I walked into a movie theater halfway through a movie and you're sitting there trying to figure out what's going on that that and at some point you actually um learn what happened in the movie prior to you turning up but you got to then sit and figure out the pieces and the order of things.

4:54And then when the movie isn't told in a chronological order, it's even more confusing. And that's, I think, a metaphor for life. And I don't think I'm actually alone in that. Yeah, that's interesting because I think it's so true of, I am now in Melbourne where I think you grew up or grew up close to. and where I was from originally it had like the lowest amount of I think um Afro-Caribbeans in the whole of the UK so it was just a very like uh it was a very wide area and there was actually surprisingly very little um like racism I think maybe because of that because of exposure I remember when I first came to Australia it was so like fascinating to me to see so many people with Australian accents with such an amazing array of backgrounds.

5:50My partner is from the Philippines and I just kind of have the expectation of a Filipino accent coming out. So, yeah, it's such an interesting thing. Like even I felt like I didn't fit in, but I think with the cultural aspects on top, it must be even more so. Yes, yes. I remember what it was like when I met an Asian-looking man who had a thick Cockney accent. And I was like, my head did the whiplash thing. And then I realized, hang on, that's how other people relate to me when I'm outside of Australia. Definitely, definitely. So you took quite an unconventional path through various careers before discovering the amazing Alaska.

6:36What was it about the landscape or that sort of time in your life that acted as a catalyst for you? Um, you know, growing up in Melbourne, it felt like it was death by a thousand cuts to my soul. I was trying to find the right pieces of the jigsaw puzzle so that I could be happy, you know, the right partner, the right job, the right career path, the right leisure activities, the right amount of money, the right social circle. And then dot, dot, dot, dot, dot equals happiness. and I couldn't figure out what that was. And somewhere in my late 20s, a few things happened. One, I discovered Alaska and secondly, I discovered Buddhism and meditation.

7:26And I discovered the ways in which I was using the world to try and satiate an inner emptiness, which then resulted in my happiness being conditional upon my circumstances. right and here I am trying to rearrange my circumstances so that I could be happy but then it becomes like a house of cards because I'm always then dependent upon external conditions my happiness and so I'm learning about that and then I discover Alaska about that same amount at same point in time in my life and I met people who lived outside of modernity to a larger degree and when I went to Mentone Girls Grammar on a scholarship,

8:12being a redneck hippie was not on the career outsourced list of things that it is possible for one to do with one's life. And so here I was being invited into communities to learn how to fish and how to hunt and how to pick wild berries and make jam and dehydrate and dry and pickle and ferment and take care of each other and take care of the land and we were outside breathing fresh air and moving our bodies and sitting in the dirt and time didn't mean anything other than the rhythms and cycles of the seasons And that's when I started to get connected to a deeper experience of connection to the earth, like to the earth.

9:09and a deeper connection as a result to myself and recognizing how much I was living in avoidance and control and perfectionism and striving and approval seeking and disdain for myself for all my striving and approval seeking, which has added further to the sense of shame and powerlessness and helplessness and despair that I was trying so damn hard to hide from myself, let alone express to other people around me. And so it was a slow process over a number of years where Alaska really opened me up to another way of relating to life herself right the cycles of creation and maintenance and the fecundity of decay whereas the city it was it's about creation and maintenance and consumption and we're living outside of the the natural cycles of things And somewhere within this natural cycle of things, I actually then stumbled upon interdependent happiness and some fundamental truths that, yes, I learnt through Buddhism, and I got to experience it, that we're all inextricably, inescapably intertwined, and that you cannot escape the consequences of your actions.

10:52yeah and that you can be cold and wet or you can be cold or you can be cold and wet and miserable right and there's there's some choice in that and yet a wise person does the best they can to avoid future suffering knowing that unpleasantness is a part of life it's so it's so true i mean often many people won't even walk in the rain and these days though it might be cold wet and miserable but we'll just stay inside and i think it's such a wonderful time to uh to walk not always but often it often is the air smells so fresh and clean after a good rain, but also during the rain. Yeah, and it's the time of nourishment.

11:48It's what's, you know, it's the other side of the equation that's given this amazing life to, particularly in a rainforest or something. So you started to touch upon it then, but you eventually found your way to meditation, yoga, and trauma therapy. Was there like a specific turning point where you realized this wasn't just a practice for you, but perhaps more of a vocation.

12:18You know, there's that thing where in hindsight you can try and create a really nicely crafted, sellable narrative that capitalism absolutely loves when you look at your life backwards. And yet the reality of it as I was living my life is that I was doing what we do in addiction recovery, which is I was just doing the next right thing. And the next right thing was a series of fortunate happenstances. So I actually stumbled upon meditation and yoga at a point in my life where I was done with modernity. And I still do. I live without running water by choice and still live in a small cabin in the woods that my partner and I built ourselves and still live very much a lifestyle as close to the land as possible.

13:11I was being asked to be uncomfortable. I was flexing my capacity for discomfort and inconvenience and uncertainty. And I saw all the ways in which my mind was just latching on to certainty and comfort and convenience and wanting to know everything about everything before I started anything. And just to come back to measure twice, cut once. In feet and inches. Measure twice, cut once. And, and I got to learn how I learn. And when you learn how you learn, you can learn how to do anything. And so I was learning how to run chainsaw and how to run a circular saw and all manner of power tools and hand tools.

13:56And I had to ask for help, which in the city I, I, I avoided like the plague. and you know because no really for me like for trauma survivors there's the there's the overlay of shame but then there's the the wounding of incompetence because the shame happens during tasks of daily life as a child so we internalize incompetence and then we strive to be hyper competent yeah and so asking for help is it was it was so uncomfortable and yet it was It was decontextualized because I was in a whole other context. And of course, I don't know how to use these tools. And here I am wanting to learn, right?

14:38So it didn't become a stain on my identity that I had to ask. And so I'm actually practicing mindfulness as a living embodied experience and as a relational experience. at the same time that I discovered mindfulness as a practice and at the same time that I discovered yoga as a practice. And on the yoga mat, I was learning that how you do one thing is how you do everything. So if you can change the way you do one thing, you might change the way in which you do other things. So it became like this whole intense period of growth. And the byproduct of that was I was asked to teach yoga and meditation in addiction recovery, in residential treatment settings, in intensive outpatient settings, out in the community.

15:33And it was such a gift. And yet the way things work in Alaska is that you get invited into community. You don't go around saying, hey, I can do this, like someone hire me, right? It's like, it just doesn't work like that. You wait till you get invited in. And I was getting invited in. And so I was doing the next right thing. And then somewhere along that path, I got invited to teach yoga after 12-step meetings, after addiction recovery meetings. And I didn't think I had any issues with addiction, right? And so here I am. And somewhere after the sixth addiction recovery meeting, during that meeting, I said to the group, I really resonate with the things that you've all been talking about right you've been sharing about addiction to control and feeling powerless over not being able to not and you've been talking about perfectionism and the harsh inner critic and um i really relate to all of these however i don't really relate to substance addiction right and I came back to class, came back the next week and someone handed me the patterns and characteristics of Codependence Anonymous.

16:51And I just looked at it and I went, oh my, that's me. And since then I've participated in other 12-step fellowships and recognised that the ways in which we seek to avoid feelings that we would do anything to not feel is actually ubiquitous across the human condition. And I was so fortunate, like so fortunate to have stumbled upon 12-step meetings at the same period of time as discovering the Dharma, meditation, yoga, and living a lifestyle that was wildly, vastly different to the one that I had previously had and yet really, really wanted for myself to the point that I was willing to be uncomfortable.

17:46Thank you for sharing. And yeah, we discussed it briefly after, but I also had a journey with the 12 steps and substance abuse in the past. And I agree, reading into codependency. And if you just look around in the world, I mean, you walk into any city and nobody can really stand still unless they have a coffee or a suite in front of them or something like that. there are variations of this kind of inability to sit with ourselves and to put it in the buddhist context that would lead to craving or aversion which i do strongly relate to and really these tools this meditation and yoga can allow us to to sit with that discomfort like a lot of the kind of training that I got in the like substance abuse training was in relation to just sitting with discomfort which is I actually realized afterwards I was using meditation in some ways to kind of spiritually bypass and perhaps wasn't sitting with those uncomfortable feelings for long enough because I think there is some one of my old teachers Bante Vindlaramsi would say that the hindrances are your teachers.

19:08So these are really the opportunity to learn and to grow, which I think starts to take us into what you would cite or call a rite of passage. So, yeah, could you share how confronting your own shadows and fears has helped transform your understanding of what it means to be human? yes you know that which we use to avoid our pain will end up becoming the source of our pain yeah that which we use to avoid our pain will end up becoming the source of our pain and what we are actually doing is we're colluding with our immaturation you know we're actually saying i don't want to grow yeah and i will use anything outside of myself in order to not grow, in order to not feel, in order to not experience what I don't want to experience.

20:11Irvin Yalom says that the goal of therapy is to confront that which we would rather avoid. And we don't confront. We conquer or we avoid or we try to rescue or be rescued. and with a rite of passage, a rite of passage is an initiation and in Indigenous cultures they have many practices where an individual becomes initiated into the collective and there are three phases of a rite of passage. The first is that we are being asked to let go of our identity as we know it. We're being asked to let go of how we see the world and see ourselves. And the middle part of a rite of passage is where we go into the underground.

21:13We meet our fears, our shadows, our demons. we become stripped of all that which is superfluous so that we then can return to the commons and return back to the collective, one with our gifts but also knowing our place amongst all things, knowing our place amongst all things.

21:45we are we don't have that anymore it's it's it's been taken from us right uh we we these rites of passage have been taken away from our cultures um we have that become replaced by graduations or bachelor parties or, I don't know, other forms, like weddings are also another passage, but other traditional cultures really weave into it that descent, that descent into the underworld. And for many of us, we experience what Francis Weller calls a rough initiation, meaning by beckoning or by reckoning, we have been faced with something so monumental that we either face it or we collude with our immaturation, yeah, and we wither as an individual.

22:49And that rough initiation can be a cancer diagnosis, it can be a series of consequences as a result of addictive behaviors. It could be a loss of someone very dear or close to you. It could be a natural disaster. It could be a series of events that really shreds away at who we know ourselves to be and our place in the world and what we know about the world. And that descent then, we're facing that which we have spent our entire lives not confronting. Our mortality, our insignificance, our aging, our limitations. And the descent can render us feeling quite helpless. And part of this descent is that we actually learn to surrender the ego.

24:06right there's a humility that then arises as a result of being rendered powerless and when you're a trauma survivor humility and surrender is sorry surrender surrender doesn't equate with humility surrender equates with humiliation yeah and and so it can it can feel humiliating, if required to let go of everything that you know about yourself and about the world around you. And yet this radical decay is compost and fertile ground for renewal. so humility has the same root derivation as the word human and the word humus humus right that fecund layer of life just above the earth's surface where there is decay and fecundity yeah so we're returning that which uh we no longer need yeah and it feels like there's choice in it However, we are really being stripped bare of all that which is superfluous.

25:28And just like I can't see myself from behind, however, I can recognize all my friends from behind, I also can't see my own shadows. I can't see my own gifts. And part of not seeing my own shadows means I can't see all the ways in which I'm the one who is screwing myself up over and over and over again. One of the things I talk about quite often is how in my 20s I had the same relationship over and over again. It was serial monogamy with bouts of promiscuity in between another monogamous serial. It was just a pattern. And I was, in essence, dating the same person over and over again. You know what every single one of my exes had in common?

26:13It was me. Yeah. And I was wanting them to collude with my immaturation. Like, if you love me, you wouldn't trigger me. If you love me, you wouldn't make me feel inadequate. Instead of me actually turning around and being responsible for doing my own work around that which is actually mine to bear and to carry and to heal. hmm and so we then come back right we come back through the through the underground back to the commons and and the person that you are now josh right is unfathomable and inconceivable and unimaginable and unbelievable to previous versions of you and yeah and i see you nodding right so this this means that you have been through various rites of passage in your own lifetime and yet when held within indigenous traditions this return to the commons is more than the commons of the village right it's a return to our place amongst all things, among all things.

27:38And so our rabid anthropocentrism also gets chipped away at with every rite of passage. And as a collective, we as a human species are facing the very real likelihood of our own demise because we refuse to mature.

28:11And so we at a collective level, we are facing the descent, D-E-S-C-E-N-T. and we are being asked to reckon with these fundamental truths at the collective level, that we are inextricably, inescapably intertwined and that you cannot escape the consequences of your actions.

28:47it's so funny as you as you were saying that there was a bird knocking at the window just to emphasize the point just knocking

29:01i'm not sure to make it that way thank you so much for listening so far i just wanted to take a quick moment to jump in and give you an update from the FitMind team. So we recently launched an incredible new course, which is free in the app, which is the preferred approach and also on YouTube. It's called 30 Days of Meditation, Science and Bliss. And this has combined what we feel is the most effective contemplative practices with what we feel is the most important of the science. Honestly, I can't believe the course is free. It's genuinely incredible and has changed my life. also fit mine recently transitioned to an NGO so if there is any way that you can help us at all we now survive entirely off donations and even if you can't afford to help out financially if you could just give us a like or share this podcast or the course with anyone that might help our goal here is simply just to help as many people as we can we thank you so much now back to the episode yeah it's it's so true and i feel like in my own life there is a movement towards this and it's it's so interesting when you point out the current rites of passage in in in our culture particularly um to speak of the west just what i know but yeah if like um stag do's and hen do's have become the new rites of passage it's yeah you can see how we might have moved away from the more natural or healing rites of passage that i think yeah many of us are starting to move back towards which is probably a collective sigh of relief hopefully and we've still got a long way to go but yeah it's interesting to see like the growth of of health retreats meditation retreats and yoga retreats i know that there's two sides of that as well but um would you consider that as a rite of passage the answer is it depends i mean it depends on the intention of the retreat holders the intention of the individual.

31:20As a therapist, I find that many of my clients come to therapy because they have a cover story and the cover story isn't working anymore. And they want help to patch up their cover story so that they can carry on with life as usual. And this also translates at the collective level. And then eventually we might actually start working at that which is beneath the surface and they're like, okay, let me do my own deep work. Like I'm ready to go feel my feelings and reckon with all of that and do the grief work. But there's still this holding on to my life going back to how it was before. Yeah. And then at some point there's a letting go.

32:07There's this realization of, I can't, I can't, the more I do this work, the more I realize I can't go back to life the way it was. I can't actually do that anymore. I need to do the grief work and let go of the life that I had because I can't do it. I can't do it. Yeah. And that also then means I'm reckoning with that, the fact that my relationships and the people in my life are a byproduct of the person that I was. And I would also hope for them to engage in their own healing journeys as well. And yet that's from my frame as an individual therapist. Many of these healing retreats offer the potential for that.

32:58I have sat eight Vipassnas, the 10-day silent meditation retreats in the tradition of Esenka Winka. And in many ways, they were definitely rites of passage for me because I was being asked to be with myself. I was being asked to be with myself. And it was so painful and I couldn't escape. And at some point, at some point along the way, I remember my very first Vipassana, At some point along the way, I was able to just stay with the breath and notice the thoughts instead of being my thoughts. and then in the noticing of my thoughts I was able to recognize that I carry with myself a perpetual, incessant, automatic, relentless drive to compare the past against the present against the future and I'm pre-doing and pre-feeling and pre-thinking and redoing and re-feeling and rethinking my life from this place of of constant comparison yeah and that's suffering and that which you use to avoid your pain ends up becoming the source of your pain and so I was avoiding my own internal suffering by using the external world to try and satiate my inner emptiness and I had the experience of it in that moment and I came back I just quit smoking tobacco products after that it was one of the hardest yeah it was probably yeah I think it was probably the hardest addiction for me to give up was actually tobacco yeah

35:14yeah it's yeah it's a very socially acceptable addiction I think my sugar

35:26one of my teachers says the final addiction is thinking actually which the more the more i look at it the more i see truth in it so i mean it's essentially a drug isn't it you think about certain things and there's a certain particular response on neurochemistry and whether that be fear or you know love oxytocin serotonin, dopamine, all of it. So, yeah. So we're facing a polycrisis, environmental, social, political, existential. And you see parallels between this and personal crisis. So what can the collapse of a single individual teach us about the collapse of systems?

36:22there is wisdom in collapse there is wisdom in decay there is a fecundity in decay

36:38and yet we I wouldn't wish I wouldn't like the things that I've been through, the things you've been through, the things that all of us have been through, we wouldn't wish it upon anyone, right? And yet after having been through it, I can attest to the fact that it was fundamentally necessary for my own growth as a person.