TA Ep. 167 Dr. Gay Hendricks – Are You Sabotaging Joy, Peace & Alignment with the Upper Limit Probelm?

Leigh Ann: [00:00:00] Well, Dr. Hendricks, welcome to the Accrescent Podcast. I’m so thrilled to have you on. Thank you for being here.

Dr. Gay Hendricks: well, thank you, Leigh Ann. It’s my pleasure.

Leigh Ann: We, we were chatting off air just briefly and you said, can you, you’d love to have a question no one’s ever asked before. And I’m hoping to bring one of one or two of those in, but for the audience that might be new to this topic of upper limiting the big leap, I do want to make sure we cover some of the basics there.

But actually before that. I have a little bit of a selfish question of my own, which is when it came to actually writing the book, you, I, I’ve read the book, obviously you had been in practice, you were starting to see these patterns within yourself, probably within some of your clients or patients, but when it actually came to that crossover between I’m seeing this and I’m going to write a book about this.

Were there any big [00:01:00] blocks, limiting beliefs, external or internal things you had to overcome to actually make that book a reality?

Dr. Gay Hendricks: Yes, but in a kind of a strange sort of a way. Um, excuse me. It’s allergy season here and the, uh, trees around here are pumping out all of the things that, uh, we Southern Californians are allergic to. Uh, so I’m going to take a swig off my big water bottle here.

Leigh Ann: Oh, please do. I’m in Dana Point. Not, not too far. Not too, too far. So I know, I know it.

Dr. Gay Hendricks: um, I’ve been writing books, uh, one a year, basically, since 1975. My first one came out in 1975, and I wrote it while I was in graduate school, and, uh, uh, on, on a [00:02:00] borrowed typewriter, and, uh, got paid 800 for writing it, and it turned out to be a big success, and so, Naturally, that led the publisher to invite me to write a second book and a third book, and I stayed with one publisher for about five years and produced five or six books for them, and then kind of hit the big time in a way, um, our agent, Sandra Dykstra, Had just had a big hit with, um, her, um, her client, Amy Tan with the Joy Luck Club.

And so Sandy was riding very high and took us on as clients and, um, sold us to Prentice Hall for a great deal of more advanced money than we’d ever. contemplated in our lives. And we were both university professors at the time. So, but we quickly changed our own upper limit, expanded it. And, uh, so, [00:03:00] uh, but the big leap was the result of many years of just writing one book after the other.

And the reason I, I hedged a little bit was because I put off writing The Big Leap for many, many years, uh, not for any other reason but timing. Uh, I would get, um, something juicier that I wanted to do and then I would need to finish that and then I’d get back to The Big Leap. Um, I probably spent 30 years thinking about that book.

Leigh Ann: Oh my gosh.

Dr. Gay Hendricks: Yeah, and, uh, one time I read in Einstein’s, uh, notebooks, that he spent 27 years wondering about the same question in physics. Every day for 27 years he wondered about it until finally he got it figured out. And that, so to me, thinking about [00:04:00] something for 30 years is, uh, is not that extreme. Um, but I really, it gets to how I write also because I sound things out in my head.

I, um, I write them out, of course, with a with a computer, but I’m always sounding the poetry of them and the sound of them in my mind. It’s, um, I don’t know if you call it a writer’s trick or what, I don’t know where I learned that from, but it just seems like the natural thing to do to make sure it sounds good as well as looking good on the page.

And so, um, that’s an important, so by the time, I’ll just give you an example. Because I kept track of this at the time. I rewrote the first paragraph of the proposal for one of our other books, Conscious Loving. Let’s see, I should have one here [00:05:00] somewhere. Oh yeah.

Leigh Ann: Oh, I see. Yeah, yeah.

Dr. Gay Hendricks: um, Katie and I wrote that book together in 1989, I think it was.

But I, I wrote the proposal for that Actually, I wrote the first line of the proposal something like 120 times to get it just the way I wanted it. And again, that’s not unusual for creative artists. Um, uh, one of my favorite Leonard Cohen songs, um, called, uh, Take This Waltz. It’s adapted from a poem by Lorca.

And he spent 150 hours working on the lyrics to that song. To me, that’s just mind boggling. But when [00:06:00] I think about it myself, I probably do the very similar kinds of things. It just depends on, you know, your particular obsession. But mine has to do a lot with sound as well as music. it looks on the page.

Yes.

Leigh Ann: it almost sounds like you’re tapping into some intuition there too. Like it’s a feeling and when you read it out loud and you get that feeling, you know you’ve got it right.

Dr. Gay Hendricks: And that’s finally what happened after that 120 different iterations of the first line of the proposal for conscious loving. I got it right. And the thing is that once I got that kind of voice right, the rest of the book was so much easier to write because all I had to do was Keep tuning into that original voice and, uh, that carried me right along through the whole thing.

I think voice is also an important thing to, if you’re a [00:07:00] writer, to pay attention to. It’s, uh, I don’t know, I think the way they defined it when I was in college was the attitude of the author toward the work. Uh, so the, the voice, it could be straightforward. It could be slightly detached or ironic. It could be, um, intricately detailed.

So there’s a number of ways you could do it. But, um, it, if you can, um, find that voice that’s perfect for this material, it would be different with every one. That’s what’s exciting about being a writer. Um, I recently had to calculate up how many books I’d written and it turned out to be 51.

Leigh Ann: Oh my God.

Dr. Gay Hendricks: It sounds like the works of a mad, obsessive, compulsive, uh, 19th century French, uh, comp you know, it was a guy, Marcel Proust, that wrote down [00:08:00] basically every experience he ever had. But mine are all slightly different. There was an education phase where I wrote books about how people could do things better in the classroom.

And then there was my kind of self esteem phase, which was like characterized by learning to love yourself. My book learning to love yourself, which were a lot about self esteem and how to feel better about yourself. And then I went into, as I worked with more and more executives, that’s when I went into the big leap territory because I kept seeing this thing called, I called it the upper limit problem, where people would have something great happen over here.

and then mess up over here to kind of knock themselves back down again. And I kept seeing this. I was still at Stanford at the time where Silicon Valley is. [00:09:00] And at that time in the 1970s, when I was finishing my PhD and, you know, Starting to work as a professor there at Stanford was around 1975, and it was the very heyday of when all those Silicon Valley companies were really going crazy, hiring people left and right.

So it was a creative cauldron. And we kept getting in my counseling center, we kept getting a lot of these extremely bright executives that were emotionally about not even eighth graders. you know, because they’ve been so praised for this all their life. And quite frankly, there are some of them still walking the seats of walking around the whole halls of power, with names you’d recognize who basically have eighth grade emotional development with, uh, unbelievably, uh, immense cognitive powers.[00:10:00]

Um, pause for water once again.

Leigh Ann: Sure. I’ll pause with you because I am always sipping on some water. Well, you’re giving me the perfect segue, which is I could talk your ear off about writing because I aspire to write and that’s been something since I was a child. child. I think that was the first thing I said I wanted to be was a writer. So that is always in the back of my mind. And even hearing you describe that you went through different phases of writing topics or genres is very expansive for me to hear.

Yeah, we don’t need to be boxed in with one thing. I think being very multifaceted, that is very, inspiring and expansive for me to hear. So I could spend the hour talking all about writing. I won’t because I don’t think the audience that will be as expansive for them. With that said, you already teased this idea of upper limiting.

So let’s jump right [00:11:00] into just what is upper limiting. Then we’re going to dissect this a little bit. And then I do promise that I’m going to hit you with some philosophical questions at the end, and that might, um, light you up a little bit more too.

Dr. Gay Hendricks: Well, now we’re doing this on video, so you can tell if I’m lit up at a glance here. Um, and remind me, what was the first question?

Leigh Ann: Just, what is

Dr. Gay Hendricks: Oh, what is the basics? Okay. Well, basically an upper limit is when you find some way to knock yourself back down after a period of feeling good, or it could be something you do out in the world that kind of messes up something that’s going on.

Let’s say, well, the classic example where I started really paying attention to it was [00:12:00] One of these super executives, the boss would come in on Friday afternoon and hand him a check for a hundred thousand dollars and say, here’s your bonus. Uh, things are going even better than we imagined they’d be going then.

And he says, take the rest of the afternoon off. So the guy skips across the parking lot, gets in his car, drives home, proceeds to have the worst argument he’s had in months with his wife and kids. Hmm. Why does that thing keep happening over and over again? And the thing I came up with is that human beings are basically allergic to feeling good for any period of time without messing it up in some way.

And the reason for that is very simple. If you look back millions of years in human evolution, human [00:13:00] beings got here By millions of years of dealing with adversity. I mean it was only

Leigh Ann: hmm. Mm

Dr. Gay Hendricks: years ago that people started living in cities and towns. You know, that is not a very long time ago. And I’ve been in countries today where a great many of the people walking on the street don’t have shoes.

So there are various levels of poverty, but that’s one of the basic ones to look for if you’re looking for how a society is doing. And so, um, human beings got here by having lots and lots of tools for dealing with adversity. And that leads us then in a time of when we start feeling good for any period of time to knock ourselves back down.

So we don’t get too wounded. We say, Oh, don’t feel too good. Or we stub our [00:14:00] toe or we start an argument or worry. Thoughts are one of the biggest upper limits. You’re going along feeling good. Like, Here’s me, even 50 years later after thinking about this stuff, I’m walking down the street in my beautiful little town of Ojai, California, which is a, I would call it an art, an artist’s colony.

And there’s lots of beautiful stores here with jewelry and things. And there’s this one store that I walk past often and I walk past and I paused to look in the window at these beautiful rings that were being displayed. And I just paused and sort of drank in the beauty of them. And then I started on down the street and 10 seconds later.

I found myself thinking about all the poverty in the world and going back to a time in India 50, 45 years ago, you know, watching these kids move rocks for a dime an hour, you know, it was just, [00:15:00] uh, uh, the terrors of poverty. Then I thought, wait a minute. How did I get from appreciating beauty to thinking about all the misery in the world in 10 seconds?

And I realized there it was, the upper limit problem again. I didn’t know how to continue to walk in beauty, you know, on down the street carrying with me the beauty that I just apprehended. I didn’t somehow felt afraid of that. And so I closed in and soonly my mind begins to think of. negative imagery.

And there we go. And so that’s the upper limit problem.

Leigh Ann: Yeah. To kind of paraphrase it back, it’s, we all have a tolerance for goodness or joy or peace. And once we’ve hit whatever that limit of our tolerance is. We start to sabotage in some of these different sort of consistent ways that you’ve seen, which are, you know, I wrote down kind of the four core ones you mentioned, which [00:16:00] is how do we upper limit ourselves most often?

Worry, criticism, deflecting, squabbling. These were your four core.

Dr. Gay Hendricks: Yes. And something to also remember and think about with the upper limit problem is what they’re based on. And all upper limit problems come out of fear. And there are only a few fundamental fears that I call limiting beliefs that sit down there in your unconscious and actually affect whether you’re going to have the upper limit problem or not.

One of the biggest limiting beliefs, Leigh Ann, is the belief that I’m, I’m fundamentally flawed in such a way that I don’t deserve the good things.

Leigh Ann: Mm

Dr. Gay Hendricks: So that’s one of the most powerful human, and here’s the thing, I’ve [00:17:00] worked with movie stars that their names are on the Hollywood Walk of Fame that had their own version of that, that even though their handprints were down there in cement, still they didn’t feel like they were entitled to have the good things of life, even though the world did.

And it’s because your self esteem is an inside job. It’s never going to be fixed by the things you have or the things you put in your mouth or any of that kind of thing. It’s. That feeling of fundamentally that you are loved and lovable. And so that feeling deep inside that you are loved and lovable.

Unless you have that, you have, like the most of us, to do some work on that. And that’s why I wrote my book, uh, Learning to Love Yourself. Because down at the fundamentals, is whether I feel [00:18:00] lovable and therefore entitled to the good things of life, or do I feel unlovable and therefore not entitled to it.

Leigh Ann: Mm hmm.

Dr. Gay Hendricks: focus on that place of expanding that place of not feeling entitled, like just being I’m entitled, but just feeling like you belong here in the great flow of creation, this universe, that I’m part of it. I’m not some separate, separate unwelcome entity that can never quite fit into the rest of the universe.

I am part of the universe and we all are. And the sooner we can hum in harmony with that, the more creative we’ll be, because the universe is a very creative place. And if you’re arguing with it all the time and saying, no, I’m not part of this world, then that’s a problem because you’re fighting with Like Frank Zappa once said, In the war between you and the universe, bet on the [00:19:00] universe.

Leigh Ann: Mm hmm. It, um, to give a little context, so I have, I have a practice and I work one on one with clients. I use a technology called EVOX, which is, we can measure the tones in their voice to see what emotions are imbalanced and then we output balancing frequencies, but I pair that with this. subconscious work.

And I’m actually starting a PhD in depth psychology in September over at Pacifica Graduate Institute in Santa Barbara. So the, the unconscious, the beliefs, this is kind of the world I, you know, the lake I swim in every single day. And what I’ve seen time and time again, even though People are coming in with all sorts of different areas of turbulence in their life and all sorts of different beliefs.

Ultimately, they all kind of go into one of two buckets, either I don’t deserve it or it’s not safe.

Dr. Gay Hendricks: Mm hmm. Mm hmm.

Leigh Ann: And, and I just love your book so much because I think it [00:20:00] condenses, it really condenses that information so clearly, which is, I tell clients and patients so much, I work with a lot of cancer patients, our subconscious is.

Both contributing to what we are attracting in and what we are repelling.

Dr. Gay Hendricks: Mm hmm.

Leigh Ann: And that is so profound and it almost gives us clues. What, what do you feel like? I tell people think about what is it that you’re attracting in that you seem to be experiencing a lot of that you don’t want that it’s like, it just keeps coming into my orbit, a type of person, a type of job, a type of experience.

And likewise, what are those things you are wanting? The relationships, the jobs, the lifestyle, the finances, et cetera, that you are wanting that seems sort of ever elusive. Now we need to go down and break, you know, kind of look at the subconscious and where some of that stuff is coming from.

Dr. Gay Hendricks: Yes, that’s beautiful. I really appreciate that because one, one thing that We [00:21:00] teach here is that there is a moment when life becomes very simple and easy to figure out. And that moment is the moment that you realize that the very things you’re complaining about are things that you’re requiring to have happen because they are unconscious intentions of yours. and that the very things you’re complaining about are the tickets to your enlightenment, because all you have to do is claim, Oh, I must have an unconscious intention to keep being rejected, instead of complaining about that, to just own it. And that’s a magical moment. Um, that, uh, to me, [00:22:00] it’s almost like the moment you don’t need any more therapy or transformational work if you just understand that one key point.

Leigh Ann: Yeah. I, and I do find a kind of Perry. Cause one of the questions I had, which it was just knowing this upper limit framework. is immense. I catch myself all the time ever since reading the book. Oh, I’m doing it. Oh, I’m doing it again. I’m doing it again. And so often that’s enough to get me to course correct or pivot my thoughts and let whatever that negativity was or that sabotage go.

But sometimes it’s really sticky. Sometimes my brain is like, no, no, no. We really need to stay in this place, which then in that case for me, and with clients and patients, it’s okay, let’s do the deeper digging. Why can’t my subconscious let go of this? I’ll give you a really clear example in my own personal life.

So I, I’ve had this podcast for three years and I started to see a trend where I would have a [00:23:00] month, literally in the statistics, the highest downloads and listeners ever the very next month, it would be the lowest ever. And then it would climb back up, climb back up. And then I’d have this like huge spike in listeners.

And then the next month it would completely drop back down. And I really did a lot of reflecting on that. And, um, ultimately, like when I really did that deep, deep work on it, I realized. What’s happening here is I’m afraid, ultimately, I’m afraid to be seen. Something in my subconscious is telling me that’s unsafe.

And when I track that back to its origins, for me, I think that really tracked back to some early childhood sexual abuse. And it was like, Ooh, when I was seen as a child, It wasn’t good. I didn’t like that. So being seen could be really dangerous. And so I, I want to avoid being seen. And at some point my subconscious was like, this, this amount of being seen is too much.

Whereas everything we had up to that point [00:24:00] was okay. Now it’s too much. And then having to do that inner, you know, conscious and subconscious work with myself of, hey, I know where this is coming from, that kind of inner child of, yeah, at one point it, it was, It really was dangerous to be seen, but the expansive work is one.

Can I start to believe that not everyone wants to treat me that way? And two, that even if there are some bad people, I attract for whatever reason, I have so much more power and autonomy to protect myself. And that is like the dismantling of some of those deeper beliefs for me that that contributed to that.

And so anyway, the point I’m making is sometimes just identifying the upper limit is enough for me. Other times, like when it keeps coming up and it keeps coming up, I got to actually listen to That deeper thing that’s being communicated and then hear it, release it, expand it.

Dr. Gay Hendricks: I really appreciate hearing it because, uh, hearing the way you described it, because [00:25:00] you did such a great job of what we all must do at some point, which is you caught yourself in the middle of an upper limit problem. You could actually see it in the data. Oh, wow. I get up to here and then something happens.

And the moment you begin to say, Oh, that may be something in here. inside me that’s tripping this upper limit swish rather than something that Apple is doing or, you know, something out there. Always start looking at the easiest place, which is in your own inner limitations. And I really appreciate the way you then saw what those limitations were and saw what they had to be based on some fear of being seen.

And, and then you went down through it and it was, was even lucky enough to kind of capture some early primal kinds of things, which not everybody can do. But I think that’s [00:26:00] really ideal when you can kind of see and feel the original primal thing of grabbing on to that old belief, even though it’s not true, it’s something that you grab on to at the time to get you

Leigh Ann: Yeah. Yeah. Cause when I was reading the book, so much of what I was thinking about is 100 percent there is this sort of evolutionary primal response. We’re kind of working against, which is the unknown is inherently dangerous. That’s kind of how our nervous system labels things. And that, that is that old, old primal piece that we’re working against a little bit.

Um, but then we do have life experiences, especially some of those early childhood life experiences that can create these beliefs that we don’t even realize are running so much of the show. But I feel like your book presented it in such a clear way, which is these beliefs are running the show. Here’s like that big picture of what it’s doing.

It’s, this is too [00:27:00] much goodness. So I need to bring it back down to a level of goodness I’m comfortable with.

Dr. Gay Hendricks: Yes, and that’s why I say to ultimately that the only problem we need to contend with is our ability to receive because it’s so much easier to put your attention on solving a simple problem, which is. My ability to feel good for longer and longer periods of time and my ability to get along well in my relationships for longer and longer periods of time to Remember that it’s not always about just solving problems or slapping mosquitoes kind of thing, but it’s about expanding our ability to feel good and to let ourselves participate in the big flow of life.

And it’s so exciting. the world of creativity and the world of being in touch with the universe and the world of [00:28:00] being always using yourself as a barometer for how much positive energy you can allow yourself to receive. It’s so easy because, I mean, it’s so easy then to keep track of life because then you’ve only got one thing to pay attention to, you know, how many hours or years did I spend feeling good compared to how many hours and years did I feel contracted.

Leigh Ann: mm hmm. You know the imagery that immediately popped into my mind as you were saying that is it’s almost like with the upper limit issue We’ve got one. I don’t know like 12 by 18 canvas and it’s sort of like that’s it This is all the room we have to paint a pretty picture But the expansive idea you’re presenting to us is like what if instead of one little tiny 12 by 18 canvas It’s this scroll that is Ever going like you can just keep unrolling it and unrolling it and unrolling it And painting that beautiful picture forever

Dr. Gay Hendricks: Yeah, and I remember my [00:29:00] first conversation with Ram Dass. I didn’t know who he was at the time, and it was in 1969. He would later become very famous for his books and being a spiritual leader. But the day I met him, he had just come back from India for the first time, and he’d fallen completely in love with his guru and with the whole Indian system and he was wearing a white robe and necklaces and he was surrounded by these beautiful young disciples and, but the thing I noticed, we sat down in a group of maybe 25 of us in a circle and he, Proceeded to talk for about three hours he would stop and just breathe and look at a picture of his guru and then catch another wave and he’d keep on going. And I was a 22 or three year old, maybe 24 year old. teacher of delinquent [00:30:00] boys at the time. And even though I rode herd on this group of 100 delinquent boys we had in this school I worked in. Um, I, I would never go into a class without prepared notes and everything was all, you know, my lesson plan and everything, uh, even though it would sometimes be wasted on these 15 young thugs that I just inherited.

Leigh Ann: Moo.

Dr. Gay Hendricks: was the challenge of it, you know, not to see them as young thugs, but to see them as brand new entities, um, and learning possibilities. So anyway, I, um, I got in this habit of always, you know, keeping everything filed and on notes and I asked Rondas, where are you getting this stuff? After his lecture, I went up to him and I said, where are you getting this stuff?

And he said, Oh, it’s there. You just have to [00:31:00] open up and kind of get on that wavelength. And it already exists. And to me that my Western mind that went, Oh, you know, I just didn’t understand that at all. And at the time I was, I had been an English major in college and I took one psychology class and I hated it.

And so I, um, this was a brand new field to me. But the thing about Ram Dass is later on, I found that space for myself. And, you know, I can talk for three hours myself without looking at notes because it is all there. And it’s an amazing thing that could be that there could always already be these tracks of knowledge and lines of knowledge in the world that run through humanity.

But I believe that [00:32:00] it’s really true. And if you look, I mean, it’s through nature, like the beautiful poem by Kathleen Rains called The Invisible Way. And she says, there’s an invisible way across the sky. The birds know it. Um, and she’s getting something deeper in the human being, but if you think about it just on the animal, how many times have you seen birds flying in a certain way?

You know, like here, we still see Canadian geese coming south sometimes, and, uh, because they make a particularly distinctive sound that’s unlike any other bird in our area. And so, um, how do they know it? And same thing with the turtles that live on the coast of Argentina, but every year they swim 1500 miles out to Ascension Island, which is only three miles, um, to lay their eggs.

[00:33:00] And then they swim back to shore. And so how do they find Ascension Islands? There are situations where aircraft couldn’t even find Ascension Island with their equipment. And so, um, there was an old saying during the Second World War, if you miss Ascension, your wife gets your pension. And so you really had to take care to land on Ascension because that’s where the fuel was that would get you the rest of the way to Africa.

Anyway, what I’m getting at is that if you can allow yourself to kind of slip free of the bonds of your ego and needing to be right and Those kinds of things are kind of addictions of life. If you can slip free from those and live for a little while in that field of pure consciousness, kind of a sublime kind of not knowing, uh, wonder is another great word for it.

If you can live in wonder for a while [00:34:00] and cultivate wonder in yourself, then what happens is you begin to kind of connect with these lines of energy that go through the world that I believe attract things to us. and attract us to things that we may have never been attracted before that don’t even look like anything we’ve ever done before.

And, um, who was it? One of the great, uh, writers of the, of, uh, success, Napoleon Hill says, the one thing that stands between us and success is our parents, our town, our history, our ancestors, that At some point, we have to take that and jump free of all of that. And many of us, of course, spend our lifetime batting up against our ancestry and, uh, picking fights with it.

And [00:35:00] sometimes you can get lucky enough or free enough to get free of all that. So you can exist in your own. that’s informed by your ancestry, but it doesn’t have to be captured by it. And in that kind of free space, then you find your way across the sky that Kathleen Rains is talking about.

Leigh Ann: Mm hmm. I, I think that poem is a perfect segue into a question that I think we, we both already know the answer to, but I want to ask it here for the audience sake, which is, so is there any limit then? Is there any cap to the amount of joy and peace and alignment that we can feel?

Dr. Gay Hendricks: Well, the things that come up into my mind are, I haven’t found a cap yet. And I’ve been at this for 50, when I first, I think it was about 50 years ago that I had the first little flicker of what an upper limit problem was. And so, and then in the 80s I started thinking about it a [00:36:00] lot, and then in the 90s I thought about it a lot.

And then I wrote the book in, whenever it was, 2008, and The Big Leap. And so, um,

it’s the perfection of something that I’ve been thinking about for 50 years. And here’s the thing, inside you, Lianne and Insight, every person that watches this and listens to it, they have that same thing that there’s something down in there that we and they need to be paying attention to that needs to be brought forth.

And if we bring that forth, then we get to have a happy, successful life. And if we don’t, we get lost in the infinite circuitries of our subconscious of things that are keeping us from being who we really are meant to be.

Leigh Ann: I, I being a business owner myself, I think about this often in terms of business specifically. And the other day I just was thinking, [00:37:00] I’m, you know, maybe a year ago, I was fully booked. I had gotten to a place that, you know, my business is only three years old. So two and a half years in, like fully booked out a couple months in advance.

And I had this moment of, Oh, this, This could be enough. This is where a lot of people stop where it’s just like, great. I have a full schedule. I show up. I do that every day. I don’t expand into anything else outside of that. And there’s nothing wrong with that. If that is what is kind of that ultimate fulfillment, but I, I always have that little nudge of like, Ooh, okay, here’s, here’s what I need.

It’s the next thing I want to bring into the world, the next thing I want to pursue. And it’s not, you know, at the expense of the thing I’ve built so far, but it just was an interesting thing because it became so clear to me that I have a choice. I can choose to go, great, this is it. This is enough. I’m going to stay right here with my full schedule for the next 50 years.

Or if I have some of these [00:38:00] nudges to move into other things. I can choose to follow those nudges and, and there’s not necessarily a right or wrong, but it’s more about that self attunement of, and if I have this inner nudge that there’s more I want to pursue, more I want to bring into this world, yeah, then that, that is where I can kind of clear that upper limit and just keep going.

Dr. Gay Hendricks: Yes, because I get email all the time from people who are going through their upper limits and nobody’s ever yet sent me one out of the thousands I get. Nobody’s ever said, I found the edge.

Leigh Ann: Yeah,

Dr. Gay Hendricks: You can’t go any further than here.

Leigh Ann: it’s scientifically proven. This is, this is it. You will explode if you have any more goodness.

Dr. Gay Hendricks: It’s like that learned article that appeared in the Harvard Medical Journal or whatever it was back in the 1830s and 40s. And they were, they had found some ways of [00:39:00] making a locomotive go faster. And there was this article that said, you’re never going to go faster than 30 or 40 miles an hour because the human body, as is well known, explodes at any speed past 30 miles an hour.

And so everybody kind of took this into consideration. And then said, wait a minute, you know, let’s, let’s experiment with this a little bit. And then we found that we did not indeed explode at 30 miles an hour.

Leigh Ann: Yes, yes, yes. Um, oh, I just had a question on the, on the tip of my tongue. Oh, but I, I also think, and tell me if this is what you’ve seen rather than maybe approaching it from great. I want to get to a point where I never experienced the upper limit again. Yeah. Maybe that’s possible, but I think it’s more realistic to go with each up level, with each new abundance that comes in, whether it’s through connection, love, finances, business, friends, family, et cetera, the [00:40:00] upper limit might get a little bit triggered.

And so then we kind of go, Oh yeah. Once we get comfortable with a certain amount of abundance or goodness, whenever we want to go to whatever that next level is, I feel like it almost is inherent that that upper limit is going to kick in a little bit. And so approaching it from that of like almost expecting it, like, Hey, I’m sure I am trying to go to the next level.

Some of this upper limit stuff might come in, versus if it’s this intention of like, Ooh, I got to get to a point where I never ever experienced that again. I don’t know how realistic that is. Hmm.

Dr. Gay Hendricks: unrealistic. In fact, I recommend that instead of thinking of it as a linear up and down thing, think it of your learning as a spiral, that your ascension into your genius is a spiral where as you come around, even at a higher place. you’ll see or experience some of the same thing you experienced here.

It’s just that you’re looking at it now from a higher place. [00:41:00] And so think of your mistakes like that. Um, in fact, I always recommend, I tell my students that the universe is totally happy to teach us with the tickling of a feather. or it’s totally happy to teach us with a sledgehammer if we’re not paying attention.

And I’ve had both kinds, and now I request that my, uh, lessons be largely in the form of a tickle feather, unless there’s something I absolutely need to experience that couldn’t be done any other way than a painful experience. And so, uh, I think if we can allow ourselves to experience our lessons in a gentle way, which may mean picking them up quicker.

I think what’s, you know, when I look back at my own life, I think of some sledgehammer learnings I’ve had. You know, like suddenly being out of money just about the time I was about to finish my PhD. Literally not having enough money [00:42:00] to buy the diploma cover with, you know. Moments I’ve been kind of feel like I’ve been flattened and come back from that.

If I think of the several times in my life when I’ve experienced that, it’s often because there was something I wasn’t paying attention to 18 times that I finally got to pay attention to through something unavoidable. I had to stop and pay attention to it.

Leigh Ann: Mm hmm. I think of so many of the cancer and chronic illness patients I work with and want to be careful with my words here because, of course, there also are physiological contributors that can lead to cancer and chronic illness. And also what I so often share with them is sometimes cancer is the body setting the boundary that you didn’t.

Or couldn’t or wouldn’t. And I, I fully believe there’s always lessons to be learned in [00:43:00] any kind of physical ailment, but so much of the work I’m doing with cancer patients is not just to get them to a place of peace, calm as they’re going through a diagnosis, but is really looking at what might be some of the emotional contributors to this, that we need to do that detective work around to figure out.

And thankfully the people I work with, they’re, they’re coming to me saying, okay. I do want to take some ownership of this. You know, on social media and some other places I’ve gotten comments that it’s, you’re victim shaming and it’s just genetics and there’s nothing, there’s nothing you can do about it.

Thankfully, I don’t actually tend to work with those people because the people coming to me are very much so, like, I do want to do that deeper digging.

Dr. Gay Hendricks: I imagine you’ve come across the work of Carl Simonton. He’s one of the original cancer doctors. He’s probably in his 70s now, but he was one of the first people to work a lot with emotions and cancer. And I remember talking to him, we were backstage at a conference one time, we were [00:44:00] both speaking at And when I’m around somebody that knows a lot and I have some time to spend, I often say, you know, what’s the most important thing you’ve learned in your work so far?

You know, if you could put it into a minute or 10 seconds or whatever. And he said something that made a huge impression on me. That at that time in his work, he would bring people in for a large conference when they started working with him, and he would say to them, uh, listen, you’re, you’re going to get the same medications and everything, but you’re also going to have to put in some work here because you’re going to need to meditate for a while.

20 minutes a day and you’re going to do some guided visualization and you’re going to need to do some relaxation exercises. And so he would lay out a program of what he wanted them to do as part of his program. And this is a program that, I mean, he didn’t just, uh, Find it one day whited in a place in a tree or something, you know He [00:45:00] did a lot of research for many years on coming up with this program.

And so But he told me that at that point he would ask them to take Responsibility for doing those things and he said that sometimes a half of them would drop out And, boy, there’s a really interesting statistic, isn’t it? Um, that, uh, and I’ve had that the same thing, not with cancer, but I’ve had that a lot with people who needed to go to a certain level in themselves that they hadn’t accessed yet, that they, You know, they weren’t ready to put away that last sip of whiskey a day, or they weren’t, you know, they weren’t ready to cut up that last credit card.

Something where they weren’t willing to give up the last little bits of an addiction. That’s sometimes, you know, like the last little bit of something is the hardest of all. you say no to something, Zero to something and [00:46:00] in the same way in relationships to, um, I found Katie and I have worked with thousands of people now in our seminars and here in our offices.

And one of the things that we’ve noticed is that commitment is really the key to everything that if you have. Both feet on the floor and both feet indoors and have closed the back doors and are making a genuine commitment. That’s a very different thing, but so many people make an incomplete commitment, you know, like one foot is out the back door and when they commit to the relationship.

And that one little thing becomes a huge thing that then prevents any other kind of intimacy from taking place. So, um, oftentimes when couples come here, the first thing we work on with them is commitment, even though they may have been married to each other for 30 years. You know, what, what’s, what’s missing in the commitment here?

Leigh Ann: Yeah. [00:47:00] Yeah. Oh, I love it. Okay. Quickly going to take you to, to the last question on my list, and then I do have another surprise question for you. So let’s discuss the purpose of life. And I have a theory, um, and it’s, and I think your book is sort of communicating a similar thing. Mm hmm. So to, to give you some context, I was raised in a very religious home and the messaging I received growing up was very much don’t live for yourself, live for everyone else, be selfless, in fact, the less you think of yourself, the better, in some ways, almost the worse off your life is because you are serving others so much.

the better person you are being. The better you are serving others. And so it was very much like, actually don’t listen to your heart. The heart is evil. The heart is deceitful. And I have recently started to ponder these bigger [00:48:00] questions, which it might get a little heavy for a second, but I’m, I’m, I wouldn’t necessarily categorize myself as a Christian or religious in that way.

I think I feel very much, very spiritual and connected, but don’t ascribe to a particular religion, but zooming out and going, okay. Let’s just say the world’s going to end one day. One day this planet is going to like, poof, go up in a ball of fire and asteroid hits us, it’s all over. Why, why does anything I’m doing right now then matter? In a sense, you could say it doesn’t. And then that could leave you feeling very hopeless. That’s like, well, then why do anything? Which ultimately always takes me back to this place of if, if, if there isn’t a bigger purpose, which in a lot of ways I still do feel like there is, I feel there Something other, and there’s a connectivity we all have to each other.

But if, if, if there isn’t, then I do really feel like our purpose is to live in our deepest authenticity and [00:49:00] fulfillment. And in fact, if that is the compass we’re following, there is so much positive ripple effect you’re going to have by living in what is most fulfilling to you. And for me, that was a big epiphany because it is the exact opposite.

That’s it. Of what I was taught. And by the way, when I say authenticity and fulfillment, I’m not necessarily talking about instant gratification where it’s like, Ooh, I just, okay, what will make me happy just eating ice cream all day? It’s not that it’s a deeper sense of joy, fulfillment, authenticity. So what are your thoughts?

Dr. Gay Hendricks: Okay. Well, first of all, congratulations on wending your way through all of that, given your, the background you started with and coming to the place you are now, which is very. Vibrant, curious human, you know, which is the top of the, top of the line human as far as I’m concerned. Um, well, I, I think [00:50:00] that you’re a perfect example of the work that every one of us must do. Because you were, you were born into a particular extreme version, let’s say, of whatever, uh, religion,

Leigh Ann: A belief system.

Dr. Gay Hendricks: belief system. And Then you did the hero’s journey of, of waking up and hearing another call, just like Joseph Campbell’s five stages or whatever it is of the hero’s journey, you know, you woke up, you heard a call one day, you said, Oh, Life could be different over there. Animal ethologists, people that study herd migrations, tell us that there’s always five to eleven percent or something like that, a very small percentage, five to ten percent of animals that like to stray away from the herd and go over on the horizon and the [00:51:00] value of them is that they call the attention to where the new grazing territory is.

The downside of them is they get eaten sometimes because they don’t have the protection of the herd to scare away predators. But we’re, if you’re in that 5 to 10 or 11 percent, you just have to keep looking all the time. You can’t stop looking for how to improve this moment or how to, if you’ve just invented the electric light bulb, you next, the next thought is not, oh wow, let me stop and.

Have a glass of shampoo and your next thought is, Oh, how can I get that to three buildings instead of just two buildings? You know, it’s that kind of thinking that I think characterizes the human being at our very best. Well, the purpose of life, I decided to make up my own based on what I most love to do.

And I thought, okay, why not make a, make up a, if [00:52:00] nobody’s come along and told me the meaning of life, if it makes any sense to me. You know, if you listen to religion, it’s the idea of, you know, you suffer and suffer and suffer and if then if you get good at suffering, you go to a better place where you don’t suffer later.

Okay. doesn’t appeal to me very much. You know, if you’re a Buddhist, you say life is suffering, the cause of suffering is wanting and so you go through that particular loop. That appealed to me a little bit more, but none of them ever appealed to me in the slightest because they didn’t feel organic to me, what the meaning of life is.

And one day it hit upon me that I should make up my own based on what I most love to do. And what I most love to do is expand the actual feeling of expansion in love, abundance, creativity. To expand in love, abundance, and creativity. And all the [00:53:00] things that go along with that, like success, but to expand every day in the fundamentals, like love, abundance, creativity.

While I explain to others how they can do it for themselves, or while I work with those who are interested to learn to do it for themselves. Um, the only joy, I mean, there’s an old saying about a fable about a king who found this great jewel that lit him up and made him feel, you know, connected to the universe.

And then he did it over and over again and it eventually became boring, but he realized that if he turned with his back to the sun and let the light light up everybody that was looking on, it burst into a billion fractals and, and was everybody’s stone. It wasn’t just his stone at [00:54:00] that point. So I think your, your meaning of life needs to have some expression toward the future or to other people.

Like with me. I express it in the way that I just did that I expand every day and love abundance and creativity because that’s what feels best to me. And then what feels best to me after that is not just to enjoy it for myself, but to watch it wake up other people and to talk about the same ideas with other people.

And, um, Nothing gives me more satisfaction. So until somebody comes up and whispers a better meaning of life in my ear, I’m going to stick with that one.

Leigh Ann: I, I love that. I’m smiling because the name of my, my podcast and my practice is The Accrescent, and Accrescent literally means ever growing, ever expanding. So it is kind of the foundation of my, my own, what I feel, life purpose as well, which is I, I always want to be a [00:55:00] little bit of a better version of myself.

And when I think about on my deathbed, what, what would be the only thing I could look back on and have regrets is if I looked back and said, Ooh, I had this idea to pursue this thing, but I didn’t out of fear. You know, if there’s no other reason that I didn’t pursue it, then just fear that I would have some serious regrets around.

Dr. Gay Hendricks: It’s worth having regrets around because they, you know, like one of my favorite quotes comes from the Gospel of Thomas, one of the apocryphal Gospels that’s not in the official Bible that they, um, stopped putting new things in way back there. Um, but the Gospel of Thomas says, if you bring forth what is within you, what is within you will save you.

But if you do not bring forth what is within you, what is within you will destroy you. And there’s a lot to be learned from that. Um,

Leigh Ann: Yeah, I just feel like the answer to that. And I am keeping an eye on the time. So, um, [00:56:00] do you have a hard stop at two 30?

Dr. Gay Hendricks: I do. People are going to start, uh, giving me negative sideways glances here in about 30 seconds. So, uh,

Leigh Ann: Okay. Okay. I’ll I’ll rein it in. Well, the question I was going to ask you at the end is, um, that I’ll leave you to just ponder that I, I think so often about is, um, The question I was going to ask is if you were sitting down with a friend right now and could talk to them about anything, whatever’s lighting you up most right now, what would that thing be?

So maybe one day I will, I will get the answer to that question,

Dr. Gay Hendricks: well, let’s do it. We could do a whole conversation on that because I know immediately what I do. And it’s very carefully laid out in my mind based on, uh, thousands of conversations I’ve had in the past. So, um, uh, we have a very elegant, quick way of getting to the heart of things like that, that I’d be happy to come on for another hour sometime and teach you.

Leigh Ann: I love it. I love it. Well, Dr. Hendricks, thank you so, so much being conscious of time. I’ll, I’ll let you go. This was such [00:57:00] a joy truly for me to just even kind of be in your, in your orbit, in your energy field for a little bit. I’m so grateful. Oh, I can’t wait for the audience to get to hear this.

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Dr. Gay Hendricks: Thank you. Great being with you too.