The WellBeing Project Podcast
Ep 5: Is The Project Therapy?
[Music] Welcome to the Wellbeing Project Podcast. I'm Rachel Bokeley, and this is episode 5. Is the Project Therapy? I'm going to dive into the common reasons that people seek therapy and how the project may offer an alternative option that's accessible and affordable. I'm so psyched that you're listening right now. Thank you. Let's dive in. The Wellbeing Project is not therapy. As its founder, I'm not at all against clinical or therapeutic health care. I think of it this way. No one in their right mind would suggest that we need to do away with doctors or hospitals. But we can also agree that our health care system isn't creating a healthy society. So we have to adjust the mindset that health comes from professionals and institutions. We need fresh ways to educate, communicate, and motivate ourselves. The Wellbeing Project isn't offering health care services. It's establishing a new understanding of health as flourishing through practical insight and mutual support. According to my Google research, the main goals of therapy are to promote mental health, emotional well-being, personal growth, and improved quality of life for individuals seeking support and guidance. To be honest, the exact same thing could be said of the Wellbeing Project. Here are eight common goals of therapy. One, relief from symptoms. Two, increased self-awareness. Three, improved coping skills. Four, enhanced communication. Five, behavioral change. Six, healing past wounds. Seven, increased self-esteem and self-acceptance. And finally, eight, goal-setting and problem-solving. Let's take a look at each of these and how the project may provide support. First, relief from symptoms. Of course, how the project supports you depends on the precise symptoms you're wishing to address. But generally speaking, the seven concepts teach a holistic, practical approach to your daily life. Tending is about nourishing, resting, and exercising your body and your being. Tending your being is what's especially important because most of us know what's involved in nourishing, resting, and exercising our bodies. But that same kind of practical routine care for what's invisible, or being, can seem confusing. Concept five, there is a method to undo madness, gives us a new perspective on many of the symptoms we experience as poor mental health. For example, I'd never attempt to go to the gym and work out intensely if I hadn't eaten or slept in a few days. In fact, I wouldn't even expect to function beyond very minimally if I hadn't eaten or slept in a few days. But who we are isn't a body. If I lose my legs in a tragic accident, I've lost a significant portion of my body mass, but I remain a whole person. Therefore, who I am cannot be the shape of my body, who I am, is the invisible part of me that animates my body. We call that my being. We're turning to the analogy of working out without having eaten or slept. If I hadn't nourished and rested my being, it's no wonder I experienced all kinds of negative things when I try to perform the tasks and fulfill the responsibilities of daily life. In my own life, I used to experience days of absolute overwhelm, anxiety, anger, bitterness, frustration, obsessive thinking, and more. As someone who wanted to live a healthy life, I felt extra pressure to have a positive outlook and overcome negative experiences. To be honest, and this is anecdotal, I recommend exploring therapy if it's available to you and you want to. But for me, I often found therapy as a dedicated time to rehearse all the pain and suffering I was experiencing. And I usually laughed feeling worse than when I had arrived. But when we use attending approach, the perspective shift is obvious. I don't overcome hunger. I just eat. I don't overcome fatigue. I just rest or sleep. So many of the symptoms we suffer from are essentially existential low blood sugar, or existential malnourishment, or existential rest deprivation, or most likely all of the above. Rather than pause to rest or nourish ourselves, we often try to double down and squeeze more out of our failing stamina. We treat ourselves psychologically in ways we would never dream of treating ourselves physically. When I know what nourishes my being and what rests my being, things that we learn and conceptify by the way, I can begin to meal plan and schedule rest, so to speak. When I experience uncomfortable symptoms, it can be a reminder that I need to be nourished or rested. Symptoms tell us something is needed, not necessarily long. It's not very different from getting hungry or tired, but since we don't typically address these needs, we often experience them acutely. Existential starvation, or extreme fatigue. Next area, increased self-awareness. Tending to our needs automatically increases our self-awareness. Sticking with the food and eating metaphors, once we learn to feed ourselves, we begin to notice what we like to eat and when we need to eat it. We also know how we feel afterward. When I binge on candy, I feel terrible afterward. My ability to make better choices increases not because of willpower, but because of how I desire to feel. I like the way I feel when I'm well nourished, as opposed to feeling bloated and constipated and lethargic from highly processed, low nutrition foods. In my 20s, I obsessed over my weight. I have a small midsection and I'm pretty short. A few extra pounds doesn't go unnoticed. It doesn't distribute around my body, it shows up in one small area. Every time I got in my car and pulled the seat belt across my body, I raged. I hated the way the seat belt felt against the squishy rolls of my belly. I fantasized about slicing strips of flesh off of me. Gross, I know. The more I raged at myself, the more I felt helplessly stuck with the extra weight. Although I often worked out much harder and longer than I do these days, I also tended to eat until I felt physically full or stuffed. I was so out of touch with my body, apart from hating it. I don't struggle with my weight these days, not because I solved the eating or exercise issue, but in the course of caring for myself, I became more and more aware of my body and its needs. I no longer eat until I have to physically stop. I don't like feeling full and naturally feel more aware of what I'm satisfied. There are other factors too. Tending to my physical and psychological needs while I navigated years of crisis allowed me to shed many of the limitations I had. When crisis erupted, my world blew apart. It was a personal apocalypse. But when the dust settled, I had freedom to rebuild a life in any way I chose. Previously, I had used food for more than just nourishment. It was entertainment, comfort, distraction. But there were fresh options outside the narrow mindset of my former life. I never consciously overcame my weight loss struggles and body hatred. I just never went back to food for so many of my needs. As I learned to tend my physical and psychological needs, many of the specific problems I battled melted away. Tending my needs gave me a practical way to navigate the chaos of crisis. It also put me closer in touch with myself, deepening my self-awareness, and manifesting growth in unexpected ways. So many of us spend years battling specific problems, financial struggles, body issues, relationship dysfunction. We address these areas with problem-solving approaches, trying to eliminate the uncomfortable dynamics we don't want to experience anymore. But it never seems to work for long. Often, the reason for the dysfunction isn't an obvious connection. My weight struggles ceased not because I mastered my diet and exercise, but because I exposed deeper issues of a painful upbringing and the toxic relationship choices it shaped in my adulthood. Addressing those naturally untwisted the knots I had spent so long battling with. We could spend our whole life solving problems and never getting deep insight into ourselves. But by tending our needs, we grow more and more sensitive to them, and thus more self-aware. Next, improved coping skills. The last part coincides precisely with this next area, improved coping skills. I can't see a reason to learn special coping skills if you don't know how to tend your basic needs. To me, coping is about surviving difficulty. Tending is about thriving, even through difficulty. In fact, in concept to, humans are super nature, we look at how difficulty actually causes us to thrive when we view it realistically. So, does the project help with coping skills? Yeah, but mostly by eliminating or reducing the need for them, by helping you to thrive regardless of external circumstances. Next, enhanced communication. The next common area that people seek there before is enhanced communication. The project supports this in a few ways. First, you can't communicate your needs if you don't know what they are. The seven concepts are all about helping you deeply understand your needs and how to meet them. It uses language that applies to all humans too. So, not only can you understand your own needs, but you can use the concepts to get on the same page with anyone you need to communicate with. Next up, behavioral change. Everyone wants to change their own behavior. Most of the time, we rely on willpower. And most of the time, we fail. The project is unique in that it helps us approach things differently, as we've already heard, by tending. But one of the greatest motivations we can experience comes from our sense of connectedness with others. Having a common understanding and a consistent conversation with others creates the ideal conditions for making changes in our daily lives. Healthy habits are so much easier when we are sharing our experiences and celebrating our successes with others. Healing past wounds. Tending directly affects how we heal. Think about it in terms of the body. A malnourished, fatigued body won't heal anywhere near as easily as a well nourished, well rested, robust body will. So there's that aspect. Having your needs met well and consistently makes it much more possible to heal from previous pain and trauma. The other way the project helps is by reassessing the story we tell ourselves. Using a universal template like the hero's journey, let's us see the past from a different perspective. When we learn that enemies are never people, but beliefs we struggle against, our perspective of those who hurt us can alter immediately. When we understand the need for testing, we can appreciate prior challenges for what we gained, skill, incompetence, and life. Next up, increase self-awareness and self-acceptance. An essential element of the project's approach to tending is about identifying agency. A sense of agency is the awareness you and I have of what we are capable of initiating, executing, and controlling. When I taught the concepts to individuals who were incarcerated, what they were capable of initiating, executing, and controlling was a lot more limited. They couldn't walk into another room, let alone go shopping for healthier groceries. It's not how much you have control over, but identifying it and acting on the power or agency you do have. So, for example, they could focus on keeping themselves hydrated by calculating how many ounces a day they should drink and then scheduling their water intake accordingly, and their result was being well hydrated had a positive effect on their health. And they felt increased self-confidence and competence for focusing on what they could do rather than what they couldn't. When we focus on what we're able to control, our agency, it naturally grows. We feel more powerful the more we exercise our agency. When we focus on what we cannot control, media, politics, other people's behavior, etc., we feel increasingly helpless. The project is awesome for growing personal competence and confidence. AKA self-esteem and self-acceptance. Lastly, goal-setting and problem-solving. We've already covered it in some ways, but I'll take time to underline this area and how the project has a unique approach. When we embrace the concepts, we begin to treat ourselves as nature, because that's what we are. When we embrace our identity as a part of nature, we understand work, goals, and problems differently. Trees don't work hard, they produce fruit if their needs are met. That's all it takes. Similarly, we don't need to press hard towards goals when we focus on tending needs. We naturally express our potential when our needs are met. Similarly, problems don't attract our energy as much when we realize that stress and testing are necessary parts of development. They are unfortunate surprises as much as they are necessary ingredients for our growth. When we focus on tending, we outgrow the problems and obstacles that calm our way. So, the project is an alternate form of mental health support. Think of it like a nutritional supplement versus medical prescription. It's true that there are lots of poor quality nutritional supplements out there. It's true that the industry is famously poorly regulated. But that doesn't mean there aren't life-changing ingredients and protocols that are available without a prescription. The good news about the project's claims are, there's practically no risk. No one is charging exorbitant fees for secret knowledge. No one is promising to do the work for you. What the project offers can benefit anyone who uses it to understand themselves and take better care of their body and being. That's it for this episode. I hope it was valuable. If you'd like to talk to me, I'd love to hear what you have to say. You can find links to my calendar for booking 1-1 sessions in the show notes. In the next episode, why don't you charge more? I'm going to explain why something as profoundly valuable as what the project offers is so affordable. This is a specific episode in response to the many people who have tried to convince me that I should be charging more for the courses and conversations. Class registration is open. If you're listening after the classes have started, you can still register and get access to the replays. Until next time, Canned well. We need you around here. [Music]