Join me as I talk about friendship. This is the first of a series of episodes focusing on friendship. We all need a little light in our lives, and friendship is our chosen light.
website: www.thevaultyogacommunitylove.com
email The Vault: thevault.y.l.c@gmail..com
email the Pod: WILIT@gmail.com
Hey, welcome back to what I learned in therapy with me, Jamie Lang. What I learned in therapy is a podcast about philosophy, storytelling, psychotherapy, Eastern wisdom, mindful wisdom, and healing. As a reminder, I am a licensed clinical professional counselor. I am a 500-hour registered yoga teacher. I own a private psychotherapy practice called Humble Warrior Counseling, and it lives inside of my healing center called The Vault. At The Vault, there's a small yoga studio attached to my psychotherapy office, and I do individual work with folks out in the yoga studio working with trauma, using breath, body, meditation, music, movement to help deepen healing. And I also do retreats at The Vault, where we study yoga philosophy and Buddhism through a curriculum that I've developed over the last ten years, and over the last three years, I've been hosting retreats wherein we study and work through the curriculum. It's life-changing, not just for the folks who come in, but for me too. I am one of the humans blessed to love what she does, because it both heals others as well as myself. Speaking of my curriculum, this year I'm so excited to be launching my first digital course, and it's a spin-off of what I've been teaching in person, and it's called Integrative Healing, the Synergy of Psychotherapy, Yoga Therapy, and Mindful Wisdom. It's a full and complete course studying the yamas and the niyamas in yoga philosophy that are like guides to help us live with less suffering and more honesty. I really encourage you to head over to the website that's located in the show notes. The course is for everyone, because everyone needs to heal. It is not dogmatic, it is not political, it is straightforward, and it is good, so go check it out. So as you may have noticed, there's a lot of tension in the world right now. And my way of coping and adapting to it is to find things to love. Not just the obvious things, like my family and friends, but the earth, the cold air, the quiet, resting, journaling, I'm surrounding myself with things to love, things to nurture. And I've been thinking how to translate that into the podcast, and so I'm going to talk about something that nurtures me, maybe more than anything else in my life outside of being a mother and a wife, which is being a friend. I'm not a person who has a ton of friends, rather I have a handful, maybe a big handful of really in-depth quality transformative friendships. So for the next few episodes, I'm going to talk about different friends of mine and what they've brought to my life while also weaving in some philosophy and wisdom that is much greater than what I have to give you. So if you need something to lift you up, come back and listen to a podcast about one of the best things that all of us have, friendship. One of my favorite books is called Seven Thousand Ways to Listen by Mark Nepo. I really recommend you go check out that book and also go check out his website. He has teachings and offerings that I myself would really love to attend and spend more time digging into. He wrote once, quote, "Honest friends are doorways to our soul and loving friends are the grasses that soften the world. It is no mistake that the German route of the word friendship means place of high safety." I think friendship is where we find refuge, where we can see ourselves reflected in another person that is not our family, where we are held in both joy and sorrow. Today we're talking about this kind of friendship, the kind that shapes us, that holds us in our hardest moments and reminds us of who we are by showing us who we are not. friendship is not just about shared experiences, it's about the recognition of the soul in another. Aristotle called True Friendship a single soul dwelling into bodies. Rumi, one of my most favorite philosophers, told us to be with those who help your being. And Bell Hooks said that friendship is the place where many of us get our first glimpse of redemptive love and caring community. I want to share a story about my friend Megan and the way our opposite nature's, our opposite personalities create a friendship where there is so much balance. How our friendship endures distance and time we've moved on with our careers and our families and how her daughter River unknowingly reminded us both of the invisible threads that hold our love together. The story of Megan I have titled The Friend Who Taught Me to Love What I Am Not. I met Megan in graduate school. It was my second go round and it was her first graduate program. The moment I saw her I knew we would fit together like puzzle pieces that shouldn't match but once placed together completes the picture. She was structure, organization, control. I was fluid, adaptive, letting life happen. She had color-coded folders and tabs. I had an intuitive sense of how things would unfold. And in the middle of these extremes, these binaries, these polarities, we found deep, unwavering love, not for who we were but for who we were not. For three years we spent more time with each other than anyone else in our lives. I'm not joking. We both chose a graduate program that intentionally withheld clarity so that we could learn to tolerate the unknown because in therapy certainty is an illusion. Certainty isn't something we search for and so we have to get used to it. Any question you asked program directors almost always was answered with maybe or what do you think? I was used to this. My trauma history alone had already trained me for ambiguity but Meghan, Meghan needed control, order and over time as the months went on I watched as she stretched, as she learned to let go in very small increments, very small painful increments and in return she gave me the grounding that I didn't even know I needed. And she kept teaching me because learning to be more like her was just as hard as it was for her to learn to be more like me. And then in our last year life happened as it does and Meghan was pregnant unexpectedly unplanned out of her control. She called me sobbing. I had never heard her cry like that and in these programs, these counseling programs, you cry with each other a lot. I heard her fear in her tears scared of what was coming next, what to do next. She didn't know how her partner would react. She didn't know how she would react and she didn't know how to make sense of something so out of her control so we sat in it together, so we sat in it together. She sat on her bathroom floor and sobbed and wept. And I think as I look back now, she was of course weeping for fear, starting but I think also maybe she was starting to grieve that she was going to have to let go. The agony in her tears was more "I don't want to let go" versus "I'm not sure I want this baby." And so we sat in the "I don't know" and what comes next and the space of not having any answers. And then river was born. Take pregnancy at around 24 weeks, the fetal auditory system develops to the point where external sounds can be heard and processed. There are many studies that show babies recognize their mother's voice at birth because they have been listening to her for months. But they don't just hear the mother, of course, they hear what the mother hears. They hear the voices that surround her, the music she listens to, the sounds of her city she lives in, her colleagues, her classmates, the laughter that fills the room and the tones of comfort and connection and the tones that are opposite that. I first met river right after she was born. I held her wrapped up in her tiny little hospital blanket and whispered "You're going to change the world." And after that life kept going and I started my private practice. I built another part of my career and Megan went home and raised a baby and also started her career. It was two years later when I met River again. I walked into Megan's house and it was as if no time had passed. We were immediately back into our deep belly laughter, our teasing each other because we're so different, a way to say I love you and I've missed you, I've missed the contrast. Megan and I sat down and just started talking and suddenly I hear little feet running down the hall toward the living room. It was River. She jumped into my lap. We had not met since the hospital but somehow she knew me. She snuggled right into me. She put her head on my chest. Megan and I locked eyes and we both knew. River had heard me before. She had lived in the reciprocity of my friendship with Megan. Moved inside of that love before she even entered the world. The voices of those we love become a part of us. Their presence, their laughter, their heartbreak, all of it lives in us imprinted before we even understand what love is. I mentioned Belle Hooks earlier. I really recommend you get her book All About Love. It is life-changing. She saw friendship not as a secondary to romantic love but as one of the most powerful and transformative relationships we can experience. She wrote, "Rarely, if ever, are any of us healed in isolation. Healing is an act of communion." She emphasized that friendship is a radical act of love, a space where we find safety, healing, and deep belonging. Unlike romantic love which is often tied to societal roles, societal expectations, friendship is love freely chosen, built on mutual respect, trust, and care. She also spoke about the importance of showing up in friendship. True friendship requires effort, attention, and presence. The love we cultivate in friendships is just as essential to our well-being as any other form of love. I think Megan and I embody this philosophy. Our friendship is not based on proximity or convenience at all, but on a deep, unshakable care for each other's growth and well-being. Simone Wheel wrote, "Nothing among human things has such power to keep our gaze fixed ever more intensely upon God than friendship. There can be no greater or simpler ambition than to be a friend." Megan and I have lived this truth. Our friendship has been a constant force since we met, anchoring us in love and laughter and the ability to both control and to surrender, certainty and uncertainty. friendship at its best reminds us that we are not alone. It lifts us, steadies us, and brings us back to what is sacred. This summer, Megan and her family came up to a ski mountain in my town where they do a lot of summer activities, and I teach yoga on the mountain. They came up to take my class, but I had mistakenly invited them on the wrong day. We all took the class together, and after River wanted me to go look at rocks with her and go watch her climb, the climbing wall, and we just have this connection. We still have it. It's still there, and we rarely see each other. I feel it deeply. As a 45-year-old woman, I feel it deeply. She asked me to take her to get something to drink in the lodge, so we climbed up. And she wanted to get a soda, so she started with, I think it was Coke, and then she added like Dr. Pepper. And she looked up at me and she said, "I've never done this before," and there it was. The combination of me and Megan, following the rules, and then finding a way to make them fluid. True friendship, real love. These things are not limited by time or distance. They exist in the unspoken spaces between words, in the tone of a laugh, in the breath between sentences. Every word matters. Every voice matters, even the ones we don't remember hearing. I think we like to think that love is something we give and take, but I think love is something we exist inside of. Megan and I existed inside of it, and so did River, and so did every moment where friendship and love met in the air, and settled into something permanent. To Megan, thank you for sharing River with me. To River, thank you for sharing Megan with me. And thank you to our friendship. For shaping us in ways we never expected. Thank you for listening. Go spray paint that big old world out there with all of your love and all of your integrity. Thank you. Thank you. the world. the world.
