OVERVIEW
In Atlas of the Heart, Brené Brown examines the “places we go” as we navigate our emotional responses in our relationships. Watch this Sunday service with Rev Linda Jackson as we continue this exploration to create deeper and more meaningful connections – with others and ourselves.
TRANSCRIPTION
Let’s give them one more round of applause. We are so blessed, so blessed. So here we are in September. Where is summer going? I threatened that I was going to do a little challenge to see who in the room thinks it’s okay to wear white after labor day. All right? I could wear my white pants next week. So anyway, it has been a whirlwind of travel and events for me the last few months. I don’t know if that’s true for everyone. I think after many of us were sort of sequestered for a while, things are coming back to activity. And I’ve had three trips in the past two months including an event in Virginia, the C S L retreat in California, then back here for the Parliament of World’s Religions. And now I just came back from Cartia Columbia where I was officiating the wedding of one of my good friend’s daughters.
I had friends there from northern California, Virginia, DC area and the groom’s family from Columbia. It was really lovely. Lots of wonderful connecting experiences. And these opportunities give us these trips, these events give us the opportunity to see new places, meet new people, have quality time with friends and family. And it’s times like this that we have that heightened sense of emotion where we are reminded what an amazing world we live in. But it doesn’t always feel that way, right? And this inspires my talk, oh, the places you’ll go, which has sort of a triple meaning about our journeys, where we go physically and where we go in our personal growth, which is what Brene Brown is talking about in our month, our book of the month, and then the Dr. Seuss book of the same name. Oh, the Places you Go. Most of you are familiar with it.
It’s a children’s book. It’s often shared at the graduations or transitions. And he’s encouraging readers to embrace where you go externally and internally. However, he’s just signed to telling you to keep on going. Just keep going. So I kind of went back and forth on this whether I wanted to take the time because we only get this little bit of time to speak up here and it’s going to take a little chunk of my talk, but I’m going to read the Dr. Seuss poem. So in the spirit of not taking myself too seriously or you taking yourselves too seriously, I invite you to just open your heart and see what’s here for you. And I did change the male pronouns where I could, but there’s one spot where it would mess up the rhyme. So I left. It just wanted you to know I was being intentional.
So just take this in. Oh, the places you go. Congratulations. Today is your day. You’re off to great places. You’re off and away. You have brains in your head, you have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose. You’re on your own and you know what you know and you are the one who will decide where to go. You’ll look up and down streets, look ’em over with care about some. You’ll say, I don’t choose to go there with your head full of brains and your shoes full of feet. You’re too smart to go down any not so good street and you may not find any. You’ll want to go down in that case, of course, you’ll head straight out of town. It’s opener there in the wide open air out there. Things can happen and frequently do to people as brainy and footsie as you.
And when things start to happen, don’t worry, don’t stew, just go right along. You’ll start happening too. Oh, the places you’ll go, you’ll be on your way up. You’ll be seeing great sights. You’ll join the high flyers who soar to high heights. You won’t lag behind because you’ll have the speed. You’ll pass the whole gang and you’ll soon take the lead. Wherever you fly, you’ll be best of the best. Wherever you go, you will top all the rest except when you don’t because sometimes you won’t. I’m sorry to say, but sadly, it’s true that bang up and hangups can happen to you. You can get all hung up in a prickly perch and your gang will fly on. You’ll be left in a lurch. You’ll come down from the lurch with an unpleasant bump and the chances are then that you’ll be in a slump.
And when you’re in a slump, you’re not in for much fun. Slumping yourself is not easily done. You’ll come to a place where the streets are not marked. Some windows are lighted, but mostly they’re dark. A place you could sprain both your elbow and chin. Do you dare to stay out? Do you dare to go in? How much can you lose? How much can you win? And if you go in, should you turn left or right or right in three quarters or maybe not quite or go around back and sneak in from behind. Simple. It’s not I’m afraid. You’ll find for a mind maker upper to make up their mind, you can get so confused that you’ll start interrace down long wiggled roads at a breaking neck pace and grinding on for miles across Weirdish wild space headed. I fear toward a most useless place.
The waiting place for people just waiting for a train to go or a bus to come or a plane to go or the mail to come or the rain to go or the phone to ring or the snow to snow or the waiting around for a yes or a no or waiting for their hair to grow. Everyone is just waiting for the fish to bite or waiting for the wind to fly a kite or waiting around for Friday night or waiting perhaps for their Uncle Jake or a pot to boil or a better break or a string of pearls or a pair of pants or a wig with curls or another chance. Everyone is just waiting. No, that’s not for you. Somehow you’ll escape all that waiting and staying. You’ll find the bright places where boom bands are playing with banners. Flip flapping once more.
You’ll ride high ready for anything under the sky ready because you’re that kind of a guy. Oh, the places you’ll go there is fun to be done. There are points to be scored, there are games to be won. And the magical things you can do with that ball will make you the winningest winner of all fame. You’ll be as famous, as famous can be with the whole wide world watching you win on tv, except when they don’t because sometimes they won’t. And I’m afraid that sometimes you’ll play lonely games too. Games you can’t win because you’ll play against you all alone. Whether you like it or not. Alone will be something you’ll be quite a lot. And when you’re alone, there’s a very good chance you’ll meet things that scare you right out of your pants. There are some down the road between hither and yawn that can scare you so much.
You won’t want to go on but on. You will go though the weather be foul on. You will go though your enemies powl on you will go though the hack and cracks howl onward up. Many a frightening creek though your arms may get sore and your sneakers may leak on an on you will hike and I know you’ll hike far and face up to your problems. Whatever they are, you’ll get mixed up. Of course, as you already know, you’ll get mixed up with many strange birds as you go. So be sure when you step, step with care and great tact. And remember that life’s a great balancing act and never forget to be dextrous and deft and never mix up your right foot with your left. And will you succeed? Yes, you will indeed, 98 and three quarter percent guaranteed kid. You’ll move mountains. So be your name, Buxbaum or Bigsby or Bray or Mordecai, olive and Ele Oche. You’re off to great places. Today is your day. Your mountain is waiting, so get one your way. So take a breath. I love how he builds us up and then kind of brings us back down, right? There’s that reality check and he tells us that we’re fabulous, but then things won’t always be so great and we’ll have lots of feelings and we won’t always know what to do. Mind you, this is a Dr. Seuss book and I appreciate the energy of it. And it was progressive as a children’s book from 30 years ago from when my kids were kids, right
When I grew up. It was more about just keep your head down and keep going. So I appreciate the beginning of this evolution into being aware that these challenges will occur and it’s okay. And then our kids were told, but you just keep going, right? My mom was my biggest cheerleader yet I remember her asking me once when I was young and I was upset about something and she said, why do you have to be sad? Why can’t you just be angry? Seriously? And I mean, notice the subtle shame under that, right? The hidden message that sadness is not okay, and some kind of weakness implied even. And that anger is better, anger is somehow more powerful. And that was how she moved through the world. Our September book, Atlas of the Heart by Brene Brown. It gives us the language of emotions and encourages us to connect with ourselves to be embodied, to remember our true selves, to connect with others and to create meaningful connection. So it’s meaningful connection with self and with other. And in the introduction of her book, she says her parents were doing the best they could. And likewise, there were a lot of wonderful things about my home life privileged. In fact,
Nonetheless, there were a lot of mixed messages and that can have an impact. I always like to remind us that trauma is not about what happened, it’s about the impact and it’s about what we make it mean about ourselves or about the world. So I’m just inviting us here to sort of see this evolution from our parents and their parents in that sort of act like it isn’t happening. Mindset to the Seuss and my kids’ generation of the acknowledging things will happen to where we are now, actually being given tools to address and to move through in healthier ways with what is happening in an Atlas of the heart. Brene Brown also uses the phrase, places we go. It’s really the whole theme of her book. She uses this phrase to sort of develop a map of our emotional responses. And she has 13 different places we go.
And the ones that I’m supposed to cover are places we go when things aren’t what they seem. Places we go when we’re hurting places we go with others and places we go when we fall short. And I just have to tell you, this book is so full of information. And I know we say that every month about our books, this book, we could spend months on this book. In fact, I feel like this is a lifetime of her work in this book. So we’re really just taking a skimm of this information. And I really encourage you, if you’re a geek about spiritual psychology and personal growth, it’s a good read. She really gets into the nuances and the subtleties of all these different emotions. So she has 13 of these places we go. And in each of these areas she maps out a number of emotional responses.
And then some of them aren’t actually emotions, but they’re still sort of states that evoke emotions. So in this chapter, five places we Go When things aren’t what they seem, she’s talking about when we feel two competing emotions at the same time, or when two contradicting thoughts are both true. And she walks us through the subtleties and the nuances. And some of the emotions she speaks about are bittersweetness, which is the mixed feeling of happiness and sadness. You’ve all experienced bittersweetness nostalgia, a yearning for the way things used to be, but it’s usually idealized. And then this cognitive dissonance, and this one really resonates with me, the holding two ideas that are incongruent. And she gives this example of a smoker, a woman who is smoking and she’s saying, smoking is bad, it will kill me. But she’s smoking two packs a day and it causes this mental discomfort. Now the invitation here is for you to map this onto your own experience. Where do you have this dissonance? It causes this mental discomfort. And she says, we can’t rest until we reduce the discomfort.
So the obvious choice would be for her to quit smoking and she tries and she can’t. Then the next step is that she has to convince herself it’s not so bad to try to alleviate that discomfort. So she says, oh, well, there’s benefits. It keeps my weight down, and oh, it helps me relax. She has to sort of delude herself to reduce the discomfort. So the bigger idea in this book is that once you are familiar with the map, the map, so to speak, all these places you go and the different emotions, you can better understand the feelings and responses and you have the language to describe it. And you then have the ability to connect with others about it and to understand others better. Instead of making an assumption when you see someone crying that you think you know what they’re crying about. Crying can be elicited from thousands of unlimited things.
So not to make assumptions to ask. The subtitle of Atlas of the Heart is mapping meaningful connection and the language of human experience. And John spoke about this last week that when we feel lost, our first instinct is to look out there. But what we are seeking is connection. And first it is within us. In order to form meaningful connection with others, we must first connect with ourselves. And according to Brene, to do either of those things, we need this common language of emotion and human experience. This is what she establishes in Atlas of the Heart with the 13 places to go and the 80 plus nuanced emotions and ways of being. I think there’s 87 different emotions that she identifies. And a couple of other modalities that I’ve worked with sort of go the opposite way, where they take all of these vast emotions and they funnel them down into a handful, fear, anger, sadness, joy. And it’s understandable because otherwise we can spend a lot of time trying to figure out which emotion it is. But if we can get to the crux of the emotion we’re feeling and then begin to feel it in our body, notice the impact it’s having on us. See what it’s doing with our thoughts, we develop this observer or witness consciousness, we become more aware. And when we are aware we have choice. So there’s nothing wrong with doing it either way.
And our culture, we have this tendency to sort of conflate how we feel as emotion, physical sensation or thoughts. So it’s very helpful to begin to have these tools to untangle that. When you ask someone how they feel and they say, hungry, it’s not wrong, but it’s not an emotion. Or when you ask how I feel and they say, I feel like you’re going to be upset. That’s a thought, right? So it’s really helpful for us to start to notice what is a thought, what is a physical sensation and what is an emotion? That’s the beginning of getting grounded, being embodied, being connected to our true selves. And it’s the value of this common language that she lays out in the book and the opportunity to describe our emotions, to be in our bodies and to not bypass what is happening.
So we’re being empowered to get related to our own emotions and then to really speak to others and to ask questions. And she uses the phrase to walk alongside them with real connection. And I want to share an experience that I had. I think it was back in like 20 15, 20 16. It was my first d e I training. And it was long enough ago that it wasn’t yet D e I and B, it was a D e I training. And we had brought this d e i training to C S L home office for this practitioner. It was an international practitioner retreat actually. And as part of the training, after we’d been learning some of these tools for connecting and listening and understanding, we had a breakout so that we could connect with someone in practice, diversity, equity, inclusion. And the newer term is diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging. Thank you for asking.
So the goal here is to really listen. And as Brene describes, she uses the phrase to not have a narrative tap out where you kind of just ignore the situation and to listen without trying to solve or save, which she calls a narrative takeover. So we listen and allow someone to be heard and seen. And there was this woman who identified, she self-identified as Latina, first generation. And I had worked directly with her for a few years and we were in this breakout group. And she shared this experience of having been mistreated by a supervisor at a previous workplace. I don’t remember the exact details, but she felt degraded with a racial undertone and to make things worse for her, not one of her coworkers even lifted their heads up from their computers to acknowledge what was happening. And I felt so much sadness for her when she was telling me this. And I was actually welling up with tears and I wasn’t sure what to say, but I did know not to make it about me and my emotions. That would’ve been a takeover.
And I kind of pulled myself together. And then my next reaction was I wanted to make it better. I wanted to fix it. I wanted to know how to make it go away for her. But that’s also not the solution, right? That’s another takeover. And Brene is reminding us we have to move through the discomfort from the reading. Our first instinct is to make the discomfort and vulnerability go away. And she says, we need to stay curious and resist choosing comfort over courage, reminding us it’s brave to invite new information to the table and to sit with it and to hear it out.
So I sort of understood why her coworkers would not have responded. It would be a difficult position if the supervisor or the boss is there interacting with a coworker. You’re not sure how to get involved in that, what to say. And it was a tough situation. Even in that moment. I wasn’t sure what to say, but somehow I found it within myself to ask her, I’m not sure that I would know what to do, and I’m wondering how you would’ve wanted me to support you if I had been there. That was what I came up with and it worked. It was that simple, right? Just asking how she would have wanted to be supported. Instead of me telling her the things that I thought should have happened, she said to me, if you don’t know what to say, just get up and come stand next to me. My is making me emotional right now. It was a powerful experience. If you don’t know what to say, just stand next to me. Let people know you’re with me. We don’t have to always know the words, but Brene is helping us learn the words, right? But that moment changed me. It changed our relationship, and I know it’s no longer okay for me to keep my head down and act like something’s not happening.
So Brene is inviting us to make meaningful connections by walking alongside other people, being and building narrative trust, really listening as folks share. And she says to look them in the eye no matter how much they’re hurting. And when you’re hurting to find people who can look you in the eye. I think that’s beautiful advice and the importance of embodiment being fully present in our bodies because we cannot feel connected without being in our bodies. She says empathy is a tool of compassion. We can respond empathically only if we are willing to be present to someone’s pain. If we’re not willing to do that. It’s not real empathy. And sometimes the mind has to be reeducated on how to feel our physical sensations. I know I have had to reeducate and I’m still working on it to find our way back to ourselves. We learn to ignore a lot of what is going on. So we have to do our work, continue to learn, develop self-awareness. She says, drop assumptions, ask questions. And through language and courage, we make connections. When you have access to the right words, new worlds are possible. And Dr. Seuss described the waiting place. Perhaps those points in life where we get complacent, where we don’t want to face the discomfort.
Maybe from there we muster up the courage to do the right thing. And maybe there’s a new kind of success. And Greg, if you want to come back, I’m going to be completing here in a moment. Brene gives us the tools to work through the discomfort. She begins by giving us the language. She offers detailed skill sets, including frameworks for building confidence, walking alongside story stewardship. But there’s so much more to cover, and I look forward to hearing what else is shared this month. So in closing, I ask Dr. Seuss and Brene to forgive me, and I ask all of you to indulge me again. I’ve written a new final couple stanzas to bridge us from ignoring, to acknowledging and moving into active participation in making meaningful connection. Oh, the places you’ll go. You’re on your way up with your colleagues in flow. Your truest success is when we all glow.
So whatever your feeling, fear, anger, or pride or the other 80 nuanced emotions inside you, stay curious, connected to yourself and embodied. You don’t lead from in front, you don’t push from behind. You found the courage to walk alongside. We’re in it together. And you’ve nothing to lose with self and other. It’s connection. You choose. You move through discomfort. You’re feeling it all. If it’s good for one, it’s good for all. You ask. You listen, you hold it with care. This path is exquisite, a gift. So rare. So I just, oh, I was going to say a prayer.
Thank you. I just want to invite us into just a moment of gratitude. With so much appreciation for the creativity and the brilliance of Dr. Seuss and the brilliance of Brene Brown and this community and our coming together to do our work, to create connection, to say yes, to deepening, to say yes to the evolution of moving from ignoring what was happening, to saying yes to what is happening, and to really deepening in how we connect with one another in true relationship. So I’m grateful for all the good that is occurring here. Grateful for each one’s yes to this work. I blessed. I let it all go. And so it is.