083 - Dr. Don St. John: Awakening Through the Heart
Welcome to Threshold Moments. Today I’m excited to be back in conversation with somatic relational psychotherapist and author of Healing the Wounds of Childhood and Culture, Dr. Don St. John.
I first spoke with Dr. Don St. John in episode 68 where we discussed healing trauma, breaking patterns, and the many thresholds of Don’s 82 years of life.
This week we’re reconnecting to dive deeper into the chapter of his book that centers on the heart and how to tend to our hearts as we move through thresholds in our lives.
Tune in to learn more about:
The intelligence of the heart and the blood it pumps through our bodies
Ways we can connect more deeply to our hearts on a day-to-day basis
How the state of our heart impacts those around us
Everyday practices we can put into place to feel more connected with our hearts
Connect with Sarah
Connect with Dr. Don St. John
Episode Transcript
Sarah Tacy [00:00:05]
Hello welcome, I'm Sarah Tacy and this is Threshold Moments, the podcast where guests and I share stories about the process of updating into truer versions of ourselves. The path is unknown and the pull feels real. Together we share our grief, laughter, love and life saving tools. Join us. Hey there, welcome to the Threshold moments.
Sarah Tacy [00:00:40]
And you may remember that I was very excited last time I finished up with Don Saint John and said, oh, there's so much more to hear from this man about the heart. In his book Healing the Wounds of Childhood and Culture and Adventure of a Lifetime, there is a full chapter dedicated to the heart, Reflections on the Heart, and I wanted to share some of the things from this chapter and then be able to hear the stories that he has to share with us about the heart. His chapter opens with a Helen Keller quote and it says the best and most beautiful thing in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with a heart. And he opens up by saying it is time to return our hearts to their rightful place, the center of human intelligence.
Sarah Tacy [00:01:37]
On page 98, he says there's a field of medical science called neurocardiology. It's the study of the nervous system, of the heart and its relationship to the brain and the autonomic nervous system. The ANS. So 2 physicians, Dr. Amor and Ardelli, wrote a text asserting that the complexity of the heart's own nervous system qualified the heart for consideration of the heart brain.
Sarah Tacy [00:02:04]
So I will go on just to say that it has over 40,000 sensory neurons and that it is more linked to the brain than any other organ is in and of itself. The heart processes information independently of the brain and the nervous system and it interacts with them all. He says that the heart, similar to the brain or in comparison to the brain, is the only other organ whose tentacles reach everywhere in the body. I could say that again, the only other organ whose tentacles reach everywhere in the body is the brain. So if you think of the heart as a brain and it has tentacles that reach all throughout the body and the brain has the brain as we know it that has a nervous system that reach all, reaches all throughout the body.
Sarah Tacy [00:02:58]
0We also have our fascial system. I just want to throw that in there. That touches every single part of our body. And you can't take out a square centimeter without also taking out fascia. How much do we consider our hearts when we go through our thresholds, when we go through hard moments in life and even in our day-to-day life?
Sarah Tacy [00:03:20]
And there is a woman that he quotes quite a few times in his book, and it is Doctor Meiwan Ho. She says that she has always found it odd for like all Chinese people, I was brought up on the idea that thoughts emanate from the heart. I have come to the conclusion that the more accurate account is that consciousness is delocalized throughout the liquid crystalline continuum of the body. I'm just going to add there, that has to do with fascia too, including the brain, rather than just being localized to our brain or to our hearts. So if you think of all of our blood going through our system and the heart being the central location it comes back up to, but then there's all this extra cellular fluid throughout our body as well.
Sarah Tacy [00:04:11]
Doctor Don Saint John says the intelligence of the heart is a way of knowing. It defies rational understanding. It rings clarity and recognition of what is important and what is not. The awakened heart can hear and see what the eyes cannot. It has a felt sense quality of knowing and tends to occur in meditative states.
Sarah Tacy [00:04:36]
He quotes Joseph Campbell as the goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match your nature with nature. Doctor Don Saint John says that the human heart is the most responsive organ in the body. It changes rate and quality of beat in response to ever changing environmental circumstances. If I were to not go out and read the whole chapter and then just say that between the Heart Math Institute as well as another book, took the Hearts Code, which looks at the research done by Russick and Schwartz, that there is also evidence that there's communication from one's heart to 1's head. Not just through the nervous system, but through the electromagnetics and from one's heart to somebody else's heart who is 2 feet away.
Sarah Tacy [00:05:34]
This is what was being studied and to that other person's brain. And you will hear more about this conversation or about this piece of the heart and our coherence in this conversation that's up ahead. I wanted to add these dynamics because these are things that I was thinking about. These are things that I'm feeling into. And I will also say that at the very end when I ask Doctor Don Saint John what he has changed since his heart attack or how he brings attention to his heart, he gave me one hint that IA 100% am taking with me and have already benefited from and I believe he will too.
Sarah Tacy [00:06:15]
This was a long intro on purpose. I hope you enjoy the upcoming conversation. Hello and welcome to Threshold Moments. Today I have the honor of having Doctor Don Saint John return to Threshold Moments. Doctor Don Saint John is a somatic relational psychotherapist who began his clinical training in 1967.
Sarah Tacy [00:06:50]
He helps those who intuitively know that to face past traumas and current life challenges, their bodies must be included. Doctor Don Saint John is the author of Healing the Wounds of Childhood and Culture. In episode 68 of Threshold Moments, he shares how healing from his traumatic childhood led him to a spiritual awakening that taught him to embrace oneness and connection and relational health and to harness the power of somatic practices. We spoke about breaking the pattern of figuring it all out on your own and choosing Co regulation. How the quality of our lives and our early childhood lives can create a template of expectations.
Sarah Tacy [00:07:35]
And that was a phrase that I really loved from last time. To describe how early childhood patterns can affect us later on in life, we talked about the profound benefits of aging with curiosity and why it's important to reclaim our wildness and increase our capacity for uncomfortable emotions. And so I thought we could do an entire episode around the heart. And I'm wondering if you would actually start us off by retelling your first story of the awakening you had through your heart.
Dr. Don St. John [00:08:12]
You know, I want to say first, Sarah, that I really enjoyed our first conversation, that it was just one of my most favorite experiences and being a podcast guest, I loved it so.
Sarah Tacy [00:08:31]
Thank you for.
Dr. Don St. John [00:08:32]
That we're going to a conference in Lisbon, Portugal in October that's all about the intelligence of water. As you know, the blood is primarily water and so the intelligence of that coursing through our bodies is a very interesting topic. But to start off with my experience, the first time I had any inkling personally of the spiritual nature of the heart, I was at a workshop. It was a residential 10 day workshop in the mountains near Los Angeles, and the topic was the heart, living from the heart, you know, as a spiritual awakening. And a friend of mine recommended it to me.
Dr. Don St. John [00:09:31]
Based on that recommendation, and knowing nothing else about what was going to take place, I signed up and attended. And on the second day of that conference, I received the call from my wife at the time, who told me that she wanted to have an open marriage, Thought that would be a great idea. And, oh, by the way, she'd already begun. As you can imagine, it was a brutal shock and you know, left me in pain and rage alternating between the two. The group leader and the group were very empathic that evening.
Dr. Don St. John [00:10:23]
And then the next morning, the leader's name was Brew Joy, a couple of books Joy's way. He was a medical doctor. And anyway, he comes in the next morning and says, OK folks, it's time that we leave behind the emotional level of engagement and shift to the heart. What does that even mean? And then you add it.
Dr. Don St. John [00:10:54]
If you can't, if you're not willing, I'll give you your money back. See me on the afternoon break and I'll refund your tuition fee and you can go home. And I went even crazier because how in the name of God could anyone being cuckled come out of that emotional state? You know, it was too intense. And I didn't want to go home because I kind of liked it there.
Dr. Don St. John [00:11:22]
It was a, it was a really classy operation. And I had a lot of friends in that group as well. I just didn't want to go home. But how could I, how could I possibly let go? And so I spent that afternoon break pretty much going crazy.
Dr. Don St. John [00:11:41]
You know, I was mad, I was sad. And then I was mad. And, and, you know, I was preparing to get my money back and go home when all of a sudden, late in that afternoon, it felt as if something just burst in my heart. And what I was feeling was love. Love.
Dr. Don St. John [00:12:09]
Not for any particular person, place or thing. Just love. It had boggled my mind It literally blew my mind. It didn't make any sense. I didn't understand it, but I sure welcomed it.
Dr. Don St. John [00:12:29]
So I stayed. And not that the emotions stopped, this is an important point because I would still have these moments of rage and moments of pain, but there was a qualitative difference. And that difference was that I was not feeling like a victim of her behavior.
Sarah Tacy [00:13:00]
Wow.
Dr. Don St. John [00:13:03]
It was like anger would come, rage would come, pain would come, tears would come. But they were just my responses. They were somehow not attributed to what she did to me. And I knew in those days, Sarah, that my life had changed. I was young.
Dr. Don St. John [00:13:29]
I was in my early 30s. I was trying to find my way as a therapist, trying to find my modality, where I fit. It was hard. In that week, I knew my life had changed and was going in a good direction. And it did.
Dr. Don St. John [00:13:53]
There were challenges. There were still relationship challenges, but I continue to be called to the spiritual quest. So that was that was the first major experience that led me to recognize that the heart was more than an elegant, sophisticated biological pump.
Sarah Tacy [00:14:27]
I am thinking about the idea of alchemy right now and that one element of alchemy is containment. And I'm thinking about the gift that probably did not seem like a gift of someone saying you have until this afternoon to move into your heart. And I can find that it could be confusing if someone said to leave the emotions behind and come into the heart because I often perhaps over couple the heart with an emotional center. So that wouldn't seem to make sense to me. I was like, oh, but that's where all my anger and rage is coming from.
Sarah Tacy [00:15:07]
And so with alchemy, when there's containment, like a time container of which everything has to process. So the rage, the sadness, madness, I feel like mad probably doesn't maybe even the sensation of like going mad for a moment of these emotions running wild. But there's a containment of time. And then this idea, as you say, break open, it reminds me a bit of like a chrysalis and a butterfly where like you turn to goo and then a butterfly appears. And it doesn't mean the butterfly doesn't still have to find a source of food and still deal with the weather.
Sarah Tacy [00:15:42]
But something's different. And when I hear what was different, what I hear is that there was a release from the story. And so the emotions were able to continue to flow without the story and with the aid of love.
Dr. Don St. John [00:15:58]
Beautifully said. If I could do that in the moment, realizing if I could have that experience, then what could stop me? What would be impossible because I just went through what I never could have imagined prior, that I'd be able to go through that and come out in the place that I came out and.
Sarah Tacy [00:16:30]
In the last episode, you said when you returned home that you were able to return with some love in your heart and speak from a place of your heart to decide to go separate ways.
Dr. Don St. John [00:16:46]
Absolutely. Just the way you put it is very amiable, very friendly, very caring. And we just knew that that time had arrived and we went off. And then within a year or two she found the course in Miracle and sent me a set, three books. And you know, they became my spiritual path for about 3 years. So yeah, it was quite a turning point.
Sarah Tacy [00:17:23]
There's a woman, Karen Kenny, who says it's the most purchased book that's not been read. Because I think a lot of people like the idea of the Course in Miracles, but to actually follow through and do the exercise every day and to implement it. And I am one of those people who have, I've bought the book. I've obviously read Marianne Williamson's book A Course, A Return to Love, where she's going over many of the main tenants and putting them into practical day-to-day. And I've started A Course in Miracles that I have not done the daily practice over three years.
Sarah Tacy [00:18:02]
When you did that, I do believe there's a lot of mental aspects to that. Were you able to continue integrating the heart?
Dr. Don St. John [00:18:13]
Yeah, you know, I, I did it. I did the workbook, I don't know how many years, probably around 2:00, but I did all 365 lessons. And if you were to ask what I got out of it, I'd say it cleaned the junk out of my head. The words you hear growing up, you know, every single day of your own life for 15/17/18 year, the, they, they stick and they become part of the chatter that you're hearing in your own head. And you know, in my case, the, it was supreme negativity.
Dr. Don St. John [00:19:09]
It was just, you know, cursing. I wouldn't repeat them here. But hardly ever, hardly ever anything positive about anyone, whether it was from my mother to my father, from my father to me or my brother, my mother to me or my brother. The, the words were almost always negative. And you know, some of the least negative were words like why don't you be like someone else?
Dr. Don St. John [00:19:54]
That's yeah, that's the least negative. So go from there. I can laugh about it now because, for example, three years doing the Course in Miracles really helped cleaning that out because in addition to doing the lesson, the instruction is to repeat the. The phrase, the mantra for the entire day and you know, to put something else like peace is, is my function or something along those lines. It is so much better than what was installed into the programming of my brain.
Sarah Tacy [00:20:40]
Yeah, I would imagine if I had a mantra around peace being my way, that every time I had a thought or an action in which that didn't feel true, it would really highlight that. So instead of it going unknown, I would have, oh, there are those thoughts again. I could imagine some self judgement, but then also a choice to focus again on peace. And so I can see that as I, I am kind of a visual person. And if the audience could see my hand, my hand is going in circles as if I'm wiping away grime from a window where first there's the dust and then there's the next layer.
Sarah Tacy [00:21:24]
And then you might need to spray a little helping agent on there and keep cleaning and keep wiping and get a new rag and just the layers and layers that I could use a little help. And I even found for myself as an athlete, when yoga really started helping me with my performance anxiety, how much repetition was needed so that even if I thought in one game that, OK, wow, I really got it. Like, my worth wasn't dependent on whether or not I got that goal. And I was able to stay centered. I would have just constant situations come up where I could practice that practice again.
Sarah Tacy [00:22:05]
And if I thought that I got it through sports and college, that 20 years later I might be like, oh, there's that pattern again. More time to practice. Keep cleaning the window.
Dr. Don St. John [00:22:16]
Often people are surprised how those patterns will re emerge when you least expect them, when you thought they had gone, when you thought you'd already handled that. And then you know, sometime later, there it is again. It does take repetition. It does take vigilance with one's awareness. It's not a hyper vigilance, it's an attentiveness.
Dr. Don St. John [00:22:45]
You know, we have to be attentive to where our minds start to go.
Sarah Tacy [00:22:52]
Yes. Then I feel like life will always give us opportunities to notice when we have been attentive or not attentive and we get to try again. When we look at your timeline, we know if you were to listen to episode one, that there was a lot of challenge in the household growing up. And from what you've insinuated here, given little hints at then that 20s, a lot of it were the patterns playing out. And you have this experience.
Sarah Tacy [00:23:21]
It's your second marriage and you are a psychologist at this time and you have this experience through the heart. You have a, what I would call a spiritual awakening. You recognize a heart as more than an organ. You start doing a Course in Miracles. I imagine it's one thing leads to the next, where the work continues.
Sarah Tacy [00:23:51]
In your book, there's a part where you talk about having a heart attack and how so many of the practices that you incorporated into your life before that probably helped you survive that instance. And I'm wondering what surprised you about it, what you learn from it, and if there's anything you changed in your life around that. So again, looking at the heart as an organ that has memory, that has intelligence, if there is any connection you see there.
Dr. Don St. John [00:24:27]
Yeah, that was about 20-3 years ago, and I think that was an inevitable result of the trajectory that I was on for the first, oh, I don't know, 28 to 30 years of my life. And because when you spoke about in my 20s, I acted out those patterns of my childhood and, you know, treated myself the same way I was treated, meaning terribly, you know, in terms of my habits, smoking, drinking, chronic negativity, just a lack of physical, emotional hair. And so that was an inevitable result. However, at about age 30, I shifted the trajectory and the result of that was that I actually survived a heart attack because it was severe. 3 vessels were down, the cardiologist virtually shut down.
Dr. Don St. John [00:25:44]
I had a blood clot. And it was three months before I received medical attention for that situation. After a month, I did go to a doctor, but I convinced him by the way I described it, that it was all in my abdomen. So we went on a 2 month, you know, medical journey to find what was going on in my abdomen. And when nothing was going on in my abdomen, you know, the = cardiology hypothesis rose to the top and I walked into a cardiologist office.
Dr. Don St. John [00:26:30]
Oh, they also told me that part of my heart was gone and gone forever. Three months later, he called me back and said we need another test because the one we did yesterday says that your heart's normal and that cannot be. And so he went in for the next test, and lo and behold, my heart was normal. The cardiologist said he wanted to write a paper about it because he's almost never seen anything like that. And then, you know, I felt pretty good about that.
Dr. Don St. John [00:27:01]
And it led me to really start paying more attention to my heart. And it's a practice that, you know, to this day, I believe that I can improve greatly now, just that bringing attention from what's going on in the head, just bringing the attention down to the heart. You mentioned Rudolf Steiner Sarin in your e-mail, and Rudolf Steiner believed that the heart was the most important organ. And establishing a deep connection to our heart is essential for our personal growth, our spiritual evolution. And so, you know, every time I think about it, I send my attention down there I'll breathe into it. I'll sense, feel it.
Sarah Tacy [00:28:08]
I want to give credit that my friend Jenny Gill, I, she left a voicemail. I said, is there anything that you want to know? We've both have been in this inquiry around the heart. Is there any question? And she was asking about if you were to live life in which you continue to check into your heart and that you live life with this idea that I'm here to serve love, Does that serve the evolution of oneself?
Sarah Tacy [00:28:38]
And would that affect the evolution of consciousness for community as a whole, which kind of also brings in this idea of how our heart health or heart connection or heart state might affect those around us? And I want to the reason why I brought Jenny up too was that she mentioned Rudolf Steiner and this idea of the 5th chamber, this esoteric chamber that we could develop. So I have two questions here In the first is if you could tell us a little bit more about what you said you breathe into your heart. I'm wondering if you put your hand on your heart, if there's any specific practice you do to bring your attention down to your heart and if there's anything you've noticed from that. So that'll be my first question.
Dr. Don St. John [00:29:23]
Yeah, I sometimes do. I want to do it more frequently. One of the things that people have great difficulty with is receiving compliments, love, you know, expressed affection and allowing that energy to touch them in their hearts. So putting one's hand on the heart when someone gives you a compliment, it's a good practice to sense and feel and allow it to come in.
Sarah Tacy [00:29:59]
When I've been tuning into my heart and I've been doing this practice, Mel Robbins talks about the Heart High 5. And so without Mel Robbins in my life, my hands definitely go to my heart. And it's part of how I feel like I can connect when somebody's sharing their story with me. It helps me go deeper. And there's this idea that our heart has.
Sarah Tacy [00:30:21]
It's not an idea. The heart has the vagus nerve running through it. And our hands are extrasensory. And when we press on it, we bring that awareness of the vagus nerve and start to tone the vagus nerve and go more into our parasympathetic. And I think of this connection of my hands, my heart, often in terms of myself and how I can regulate myself.
Sarah Tacy [00:30:49]
And I guess I also said when I was listening to somebody's story, but when you talked about receiving a compliment, I had never really thought about that on the level of the heart. And I had never thought about putting my hand on my heart for that purpose. Like I might do it without even thinking of it. But as you say that, and as I begin to even consider that receiving a compliment is a way that I open my heart to another and connect to another, it changes for me the idea of receiving a compliment as a way to change self talk or improve myself. And it deepens it in a way of expanding my heart and my connection with another.
Sarah Tacy [00:31:38]
So I really love that practice. I haven't heard of it quite like that before, so I appreciate that. And the question I asked was what practices you use to connect to your heart? And I think you now have now said, putting your hand on your heart when somebody gives you a compliment and breathing around your heart, breathing with your attention on your heart.
Dr. Don St. John [00:32:00]
Yes, that's the main one, breathing with the tension around your heart and noticing how spacious it feels, because when we're disturbed, when we're distressed, there's a titanium around the heart. You know, we can learn to feel the degree of or lack of spaciousness that's there. And you said you had a second question.
Sarah Tacy [00:32:31]
The second question was around some of the stuff that you wrote in your book Around the Heart Math Institute and this idea that as we are changing the state of our heart that we could affect people around us. That how our heart might speak to our brain and how our heart might also speak to others hearts and brains in these non verbal ways.
Dr. Don St. John [00:32:56]
Yes, I think the concept that's important to understand is heart rate variability. And what that refers to is this. There is a space between the heartbeats and that space is variable. In fact, the more even that beat is, the less variability the closer to Death 1 is. So it's important that there is that variability.
Sarah Tacy [00:33:37]
I don't know if it's worth doing for listeners, but if you were to take your pulse, if you were to take two fingers and put it on your wrist and find your pulse and take time to feel your pulse on an inhale and notice the speed of your pulse and then take a long slow exhale and notice the speed of your pulse. And I'm noticing actually, possibly because I'm on a podcast at the moment, that my variability doesn't feel as great. So it could be telling me that I'm in a state of slight activation. But I remember the first time I did this was with Tom Myers, maybe 10 or 15 years ago. He's the fascial specialist.
Dr. Don St. John [00:34:34]
Oh, I know, Tom.
Sarah Tacy [00:34:35]
You know, Tom, yeah. And it was surprising to me when he said just that, that when there's less variability, that's a bit concerning and that what we're looking for is that greater variability.
Dr. Don St. John [00:34:48]
What it's reflecting is the play of the autonomic nervous system. And the more rhythmic, the higher that quality, the better the feeling the person is having, which is a great reason to cultivate positive feelings, to cultivate gratitude, to cultivate appreciation, to cultivate love. And that rhythm, that quality is transmitted. We influence each other. So if you walk in or just sit down opposite a person who's feeling resentful and victimized and you start to feel uncomfortable because they're literally affecting your whole body with their rhythms.
Dr. Don St. John [00:35:49]
The electrical field of the heart is 50 times greater than the electrical fields of the brain, and the magnetic field of the heart is 5000 times greater than the magnetic field of the brain. So it's a very powerful organ, influencing our overall health, influencing our interactions and our wisdom and our knowing I'm.
Sarah Tacy [00:36:24]
Thinking about Amy Cuddy, who is a social scientist who presents at Harvard and she had a pretty famous Ted talk on how posture can affect our lives and how it can affect our hormones and how we would present in an interview. And so these power postures and powerless postures. And part of her job at Harvard Business School was to help students understand how much of our communication is non verbal. And so, you know, she is doing it through posture. But as you're describing here is that we are also reading each other's states.
Sarah Tacy [00:37:06]
And if we are in a place of love, our posture is going to also change to hold that and our facial structure is going to change. So it's not two different things, but that they're both happening at the same time. If we're in a place of compassion, if we're in a place of judgement, our eyes change, our, you know, the furrowing of our eyebrows change, and so does the energy we emit. So you're talking about the energetic field and the magnetic field. And I just appreciate that there's a possibility that these fields are communicating with each other beyond what our brain can comprehend.
Sarah Tacy [00:37:46]
And so if I were to come in contact with you, that it's possible that our hearts are telling each other whether or not we feel safe in each other's presence or how strong a signal is or not. And just again, looking at the way that the bodies are talking to us, but that they're talking to each other as well, through our presence, through our posture, and through the health of our organs or the state of our organs, I should say.
Dr. Don St. John [00:38:17]
I don't know if you noticed, Sarah, but I have a subchapter on posture in my book. When you were telling me about this woman teaching this at Harvard. It evokes a feeling of hope that people are beginning to realize that a human being is not merely a body that carries around a head. You know that it's all related. And I'll tell you the concept that I think puts it all together.
Dr. Don St. John [00:38:57]
And that concept is coherence. Sometimes integration is used synonymously, but I quote May Wan Ho several times in my book, A scientist who talks about coherence and defines it as when each element is doing its own thing in cohesion, in harmony with the whole system, that that is a state of coherence. Now when I read that, I said, Oh my God, that puts it all together because she talked about water, the molecular structure of water as being coherent and defined it the way I just defined it. And I thought when we look at the structure of the whole body. The posture of the whole body, that same model applies.
Dr. Don St. John [00:40:08]
Think about it ideally, don't you want every single joint to be free to do what it's designed to do, and yet in harmony with the whole? And that's ideal posture.
Sarah Tacy [00:40:26]
That's ideal society.
Dr. Don St. John [00:40:28]
That's ideal society, that's ideal marriage, that's ideal marriage. Two people free to do their own thing and yet completely together. And it's the heart. See, that's a contradiction or an apparent contradiction to be free and to be together with another person. And it's the heart that can hold that.
Dr. Don St. John [00:41:02]
The mind has trouble with that. The mind said, wait a minute, how can you be free? You can't, blah, blah, blah, blah. The heart can embrace that apparent contradiction and say, yeah, that is that's the ideal. We never reach it perfectly.
Dr. Don St. John [00:41:21]
It's always in motion. Sometimes we lean too heavily into the direction of cohesion and sometimes we lean too heavily in the direction of independence. They're both held in this knowing. And as you said, Sarah, it's the ideal for society too. Community, family.
Sarah Tacy [00:41:49]
I'm wondering you have now been in a marriage for over 40 years, Is that correct it?
Dr. Don St. John [00:41:55]
Will be 40 years in March.
Sarah Tacy [00:42:00]
Amazing. 40 years in March. I'm wondering if you could speak at all to what that has meant to live a life where you talked about having awareness. And I'm thinking of having that balance with the coherence of individual parts that work together. And last time you talked about honesty within a relationship and what that looks like, because I imagine it's not always beautiful and peaceful, but maybe it is. But I'm wondering if you could speak to us a little bit about that.
Dr. Don St. John [00:42:37]
I think it gets more peaceful as the years go on, but not always. No. There are disagreements there, fights. First of all, I think there's a deep trust that, you know, we've been honest enough with each other over the years that we've developed a trust that the other is going to be honest, that if something comes up, I'm going to let her know about it. You know that I'm not going to start keeping secrets.
Dr. Don St. John [00:43:14]
But I think more importantly, Sarah, there's a commitment to our individual evolution and an understanding that will each support that in the other. We have different growth edges and to understand them and to support them, it is important. And we also realize that there are aspects of self that we may not have yet learned about. OK, so for example, my wife, she takes care of people. She was born taking care of people and for her to just get lazy about it, not be searching for who needs what in her immediate world, you know, that's a big deal.
Dr. Don St. John [00:44:23]
I'm just the opposite. I could get very selfish easily. My edge is to, you know, to reach out and to give and connect and take care of other people. OK, so do you see how?
Sarah Tacy [00:44:41]
Yes.
Dr. Don St. John [00:44:42]
And that's been emerging for me over the years, as is the other for her. So different challenges and the understanding that new parts can emerge throughout a marriage that weren't there before.
Sarah Tacy [00:44:59]
Wow. I can see how that consolation can come together and fit really well at 1st. And then as each person is more and more finding their wholeness, how there could be conflict and saying like we won't play those parts just like that anymore as we find wholeness. And then who are we when we fulfill both of those roles a little bit more within ourselves? I can see in myself or in times where, say, I want to be the healer in my relationship with my husband.
Sarah Tacy [00:45:43]
And if I were to step back from that and let him do his work in his own way, which he has. And it's been really beautiful to still know that I'm valuable and worthy and that it's not dependent on that role. And I'm also honoring and maybe just highlighting one more time what you said that over 70 years that just like my grandparents, such a beautiful, loving couple, that things will still emerge at different phases where the two people's needs might seem opposite. And where will we meet while still honoring both people? And to be able to be bold enough to state one's needs or preferences while having a commitment to the relationship as a whole is the really beautiful and bold dance.
Dr. Don St. John [00:46:37]
It really is and very worthwhile. Then it's, it's for me, it's been a reward for all the work that I've done that she's done to be able to keep going and still feel alive and interested and, you know, appreciative, appreciative of life and all that it brings, you know.
Sarah Tacy [00:47:06]
Thank you so much. Thank you for sharing your wisdom and your life and taking time to tap a little bit more specifically into heart medicine. I appreciate you. Thank you.
Dr. Don St. John [00:47:22]
You're very, very welcome, I really enjoy talking to you.
Sarah Tacy [00:47:38]
Thank you for tuning in. It's been such a pleasure. If you're looking for added support, I'm offering a program that's totally free called 21 Days of Untapped Support. It's pretty awesome. It's very easy, it's very helpful.
Sarah Tacy [00:47:54]
You can find it at sarahtacy.com. And if you love this episode, please subscribe. And like, apparently it's wildly useful. So we could just explore what happens when you Scroll down to the bottom subscribe rate, maybe say a thing or two. If you're not feeling it, don't do it. It's totally fine. I look forward to gathering with you again. Thank you so much.